We are 81 years away from the end of World War II. The baby boomers born after are the ripest target of financial sharks aiming to get a chunk of their retirements. People will be liquidating to settle estates, to pay inheritance taxes in large numbers. The AI boom feels like a stealthy rug-pull from other assets that are likely to tank from retirement withdrawals and into something that may last a little past the boomer assets wave.
AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
61–70 of 228 posts
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#62Earlier 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…
We will find out how much of work is given to people just so that there's a person/company associated with a technical decision. I personally think this might be quite high.
we already know this, the term bullshit jobs exist for this reason.
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's correct. The best (short-term) case is that they become eternal parasites. If they fail to do that, they'll bring a lot down with them when they fall.
>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…
Your analogy would be less terrible if mechanized farming took the fruits of traditional farmers and repackaged it.
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
wouldn't take long for them to find out with the developer bragging about it. he one-shot vibe-coded a sass app (keyword: one-shot), that says alot about the quality.
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#65[dead]
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#66I'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 ou…
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Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Meanwhile AI has gotten so good it can just about one shot a SaaS app. There isn't a direct correlation between AI improvement or stagnation and whether or not the amount being spent by AI labs and the associated ecosystem will result in a financial crash. Look into the history of railroads and the internet itself to see how massive levels of investment can result in economic crashes even when the thing being inves…
difference this time is they have "fiat money" and money printer. Market and all inv. bankers knows that in major crash they will print unlimited amounts so back to same prices or near them. printer is still printing and it's only goes to selected investments
not at current inflation levels, no way to "print" if it means causing inflation to spike beyond unhealthy levels.
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#68Earlier 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.
All those automaton tools will eventually be initially one-shotted and then monitored by LLMs though. There probably won't be a "last mile" per se; just constant tweaking and optimizations throughout, within a feedback loop.
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#69Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#70There’s no question we’re in a massive AI bubble, the only question is how do we get out of it without wiping out the broader economy.
It's ether going to be one catastrophic crash or decades of stagnation and decline.