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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#991

Post by Angelore »

close04 wrote: post #802
peonicles wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can take your train of thought further still. If AI ever becomes super good at lawyering, why would we even need law firms and lawyers at all? We could feed legislation and constitution into the model and have it argue against other lawyer bots in court in front of a judge bot.

Not buying the judge not part. A human being judged by a non-human will be very far in the future. Bots can’t be held accountable. It’s also an “us vs. them”, for some people it’s hard to accept being judged by a different gender, ethnicity, etc. A bot telling you to go to prison? Tough sell.

>Bots can’t be held accountable

Without being too much of a downer, neither can judges in most places. Source: personal experience in a country with "telephone law".

Re: The dead economy theory

#992

Post by kipchak »

dnnddidiej wrote: post #578
kipchak wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are ma…

That sounds off intuitively. The lowest earners are the base making higher earner possible both through their labour and consumption.

This is the normal economist understanding for how things should or aught to work (Ford paying his workers so they can buy his cars), but it is not necessarily how they must work in practice.

Colonial economies did not require the lowest earners to contribute to demand nor Rome when it transitioned from small farmholders to consolidated farms and slaves, or modern gulf states. The examples are arguably unhealthy as economies long term, but practically they may persist for fairly long periods of time.

Re: The dead economy theory

#993

Post by xp84 »

xp84 wrote: post #566

A couple of disorganized thoughts in case anyone reads far enough to see them. The article posits that people don't want a check, they want a job. It's interesting because I think that varies widely from person to person and from job to job. The guy standing on the corner in the 95º heat with the "NEW HOMES >" sign isn't doing it for the love of the craft. Ditto for people picking tomatoes. People walking door to doo…

I made a footnote "[1]" and forgot to write the explanation.

[1] By this, I meant, if UBI just results in inflation that makes the total cost of basic survival go up by approximately $UBI_AMOUNT, we have completely failed and UBI is just a much more unmanageable version of our current welfare state.

Re: The dead economy theory

#994

Post by empathy_m »

gammarator wrote: post #687
empathy_m wrote: post #684

Hrm. I plugged in the first 4000 words of this essay into my free Pangram account and it says "59% AI generated", "We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, AI-assisted, and human-written content". Who is the customer for this stuff?

> the text of this piece is entirely human-generated, including the infelicitous phrasings and penchant for two-dollar words.

Huh, that's a remarkable miss for Pangram then. Interesting.

Re: The dead economy theory

#995

Post by jsrcout »

velik_m wrote: post #829
close04 wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not buying the judge not part. A human being judged by a non-human will be very far in the future. Bots can’t be held accountable. It’s also an “us vs. them”, for some people it’s hard to accept being judged by a different gender, ethnicity, etc. A bot telling you to go to prison? Tough sell.

I can easily see a two tiered justice: a human judge for those who can afford it, and AI judge for rest of us plebs.

Dammit, another horrifying yet entirely realistic near-future scenario to keep me up at night.

Re: The dead economy theory

#996

Post by baddash »

aleqs wrote: post #81
spongebobstoes wrote: post #15

this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money we can do…

Yeah, people need a creative output, not just for creativity sake but something that feels productive/constructive and beneficial to them and their society/community. Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined). We should focus on expan…

[flagged]

Re: The dead economy theory

#997

Post by importantbrian »

iliaxj wrote: post #457

The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…

I recently had a similar discussion with my BIL who owns a construction business. He was saying he was glad he didn't have to worry about AI, because even if it automated everything about the business he'd still own it. I was like not so fast. In that situation access to capitol to pay for compute is going to be how businesses compete. Are you confident you're going to be able to have enough capitol to out compete the other businesses in your industry? Not to mention if AI and robotics get good enough why would I need to hire any construction company, let alone yours?

Re: The dead economy theory

#998

Post by Shalomboy »

hunterpayne wrote: post #588
Shalomboy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely zero will in the United States to invest money in unprofitable exploration or scientific research. There used to be such will generations ago, but today's wannabee-autocrats couldn't care less. Look at how they gleefully cut scientific research funding, undermine academic sovereignty, and strip-mine the public sector performing that work in favor of private enterprises. When the shit hits the fan…

Look into how much of that research money actually goes to research and how much goes to administration. And since that administration has a reputation for being to the left of Mao, perhaps then you can understand the unwillingness to put money there. It isn't that people don't want to invest in research, they have lost faith that the money allocated will actually get to the researchers.

... so now the money explicitly does not go to research, on purpose.

Re: The dead economy theory

#999

Post by matrix87 »

autaut wrote: post #830
matrix87 wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out? I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically o…

Musk cutting the headcount and everything working fine is a myth he perpetrated. In reality things started to go badly almost immediately, big advertisers left. He then wrapped x in xAI where effectively they are developing new features in x. So that now we effectively don’t really know what the head count is.

Yeah, he cut headcount, zuck saw an opening, now threads took a bunch of market share (and probably has a better monetization system in place).

Once a company gets bloated, it's pretty much impossible for upper management to actually know (or have time to know) where the bloat is

Re: The dead economy theory

#1000

Post by kajaktum »

jp_sc wrote: post #966
kajaktum wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that the limit of this is that the only people worth existing is the people with capital? > I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving. Why do I need to buy products/services from this startups when I can just reverse engineer their product and use all my…

Why you would anyone eats at a restaurant when they can buy the ingredients at the supermarket and download recipes from the Internet? Why software companies pay for software instead of making it themselves? Same reason

Uhh i wouldn't go to 99% of restaurant if i have a robot at home to make it for me.
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