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AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#51

Post by felix-the-cat »

byzantinegene wrote: post #14
samrus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the investments arent aiming for churning out SaaS apps. Its to automate large swathes of intellectual labour. Of which only SWE has been cracked yet. There is a question mark as to if the others will crack. If they arent then these investments will collapse from speculation down to reality. That possibility is what is being discussed here As to whether that will happen, I think that risk is real. Because cl…

you mentioned a very good point about scalability. we're seeing alot of productivity gains, but only from SWEs, which are but a very small segment of the global economy. all other economic use cases require thorough last-mile development and iteration that is not too different with current automation tools.

A friend who is a psychologist was telling me he thinks in another year or two insurance companies will insist people see an AI therapist first before being willing to pay for a real person.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#53

Post by davidw »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #43
thelastgallon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not this time. This time, we'll bail out them out because they are too big to fail and they need the money and assets. Next time we'll definitely get them. Pinky promise.

> we'll bail out them out If it’s after the midterms, I’m doubtful. The AI leaders—apart from Dario—have gone particularly partisan. We also have a lot more post-crisis tooling that lets us wipe equity even when bailing out. See, for example, the ‘23 bank failures.

People are already sour on the economy. They are going to be in a whole mood if we get a real, serious recession.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#54

Post by felix-the-cat »

byzantinegene wrote: post #10
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, that's not been my company's experience. Error reports are down. Performance is up clients are happy. Pretty soon we're going to have to reckon with the fact that AI writes better code than us.

so your company runs on a vibe-coded saas app, that sure is a confidence booster for your would-be customers.

How will the customers know? And if it does what they need it to do, then why would they even care?

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#56

Post by jeffalyanak »

thelastgallon wrote: post #37
thot_experiment wrote: post #23

Surely this time we'll learn our lesson and disempower the parasites that create these situations, right? Right guys?

Not this time. This time, we'll bail out them out because they are too big to fail and they need the money and assets. Next time we'll definitely get them. Pinky promise.

Even if one thinks we need to bail out the _companies_ to prevent more severe economic collapse, we could still arrest plenty of those who were in charge of these organizations.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#58

Post by overgard »

I'm not usually for arguments of "this money could have been better spent elsewhere", but here's a thought experiment. Lets say instead of injecting $2 trillion and counting into a few AI companies, we instead injected $2 trillion dollars into things like infrastructure (real infrastructure, not GPU warehouses), education, helping out communities ravaged by globalization (I doubt most people on Hacker News venture outside of coastal areas, but if you want to make a REAL difference as an entrepreneur why not look at parts of the country that are struggling and figure out how you could make a difference there? You know, instead of trying to just ruin the economy for the sake of the already-obscenely-wealthy). I'm not saying all those ventures would succeed, but I think that amount of money put towards boring-but-real problems would make a much bigger positive impact for everyone.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#59

Post by gruez »

skulk wrote: post #48
gruez wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The best (short-term) case is that they become eternal parasites. Producing a product that delivers value and people are willing to pay for makes you a "parasite"? Sure, it might cause massive disruptions to the labor market, but that's mostly orthogonal to whether it's a "parasite" or not. Mechanized farming has almost wiped out agricultural employment (compared to pre-industrial levels), but that doesn't make trac…

tractor manufacturers or fertilizer companies didn't suck down the work of generations of predecessors in a questionably-legal fashion only to turn around and sell a heavily discounted version of that back to them. I'm not sure where "parasite" becomes appropriate, but your analogy is poor.

>in a questionably-legal fashion

Maybe in the eyes of seething artists/programmers seeing their jobs getting automated, but courts have so far ruled that AI training falls under fair use.

Moreover it's not hard to think of vaguely similar objections to fertilizers. They're often produced at some harm to society, as well as their use. They're also in some sense, a "heavily discounted" versions of that they replaced, bird guano or whatever.

Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

#60

Post by mlhpdx »

whall6 wrote: post #32
loeg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you putting the $XX,XXX-50 under your mattress or investing it in something else productive?

This is the right question. Every company has a list of >WACC IRR projects that it can spend saved money on. If not, it’s a cash cow company that wasn’t growing in the first place and will allow shareholders to use the saved cash for other economically expanding projects.

What companies can expand if the income of consumers is shrinking. This is the scary bit to me — AI crashes and takes the economy with it, or; AI succeeds as promised and people go unemployed and crash the economy.

The only path that isn’t disastrous is threading the needle of “just right” productivity gains. The people in charge aren’t smart enough to give me warm fuzzy feelings on that.

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