Surely this time we'll learn our lesson and disempower the parasites that create these situations, right? Right guys?
Yes, and then you'll build a communist paradise. It's just one purge away.
AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
121–130 of 228 posts
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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, b…
re: questionable legality https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o... > Moreover it's not hard to think of vaguely similar objections to fertilizers. It's completely different. If LLM companies pulled this out of thin air it would be also different, but no; they've effectively plundered the commons and locked up all the profit for themselves. If intellectual labor goes the way of agricultural labo…
If we actually do meaningfully automate intellectual labor, we create a world where we have real technical solutions for our toughest problems. Maybe we can get carbon capture and fusion energy working. There’s a theoretical world of abundance for us to explore.
That’s the steel man argument.
FWIW I mostly don’t believe that LLMs are the answer, I don’t think they’re going to reach a high enough level of capability to do this, and I think the current AI companies are problematic in a lot of ways.
I also think LLM use is bad for us and probably harms our thinking abilities. And using it takes away a lot of what it means to be human.
Personally I like both physical and mental difficulty. I like gardening even if I could just buy mass produced flowers. I like riding a bike even though cars are “easier”. I like playing ukulele with my family even though I can barely make a chord, much better than listening to some other real musician, or Suno ai generated songs. I like eating my wife’s sourdough bagels even if they take several hours more than just buying some.
And I think having those regular challenges and achievements make life worth living! And I worry that the AI future that some envision will make much of what we get value from feel meaningless in the same way that writing code by hand is starting to.
Maybe we’ll still be fine in the same way I find meaning in all of those things that I listed above. But damn what a gamble
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#123Earlier 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…
No, that's actually more destructive in the short term. That was the OP's point. If they actually become something effective, they will utterly destroy the economy. If they fail, they will drag the economy down around them as they go. The least destructive possible outcome is becoming eternal parasites.
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#124I'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…
> ...instead of injecting $2 trillion and counting into a few AI companies...
Similar to the "why we spend money exploring space when there are hungry people on Earth?" question, I don't think this is a This Or That argument.
People and companies have different interests, some don't/can't care about education etc so they don't invest in those fields. Forcing these people/companies to invest in areas they don't interested in usually results in bad outcomes that is way worse than just let them be.
But some, do invest in education or civil infrastructure projects. It's not as hot, because... well, usually it makes less money from those things.
The core problem is still that, it is hard to figure out how to invest in such way that it could help the disadvantaged people, while at the same time maintaining a 10 or even 100x growth in the next 5 years.
From the company's perspective, there's no dilemma here, it's 100x growth potential ahead of everything else.
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#125Well assuming it's successful, there will be a large number of companies who's value will be reassessed as the token cost to replicate and run the business. Multi-million dollar companies will be reduced into multi thousand dollar companies. The CEOs will be replaced with teenagers in garages with their parent's credit cards. If it stalls, then China will undercut the whole AI market with cheap electricity and crash…
It's obvious to more people every day that "AI" has never delivered on what it promised. Until now nobody cared because the costs were cheap and it pays to appear cutting edge. Now the price is rising, and the delayed cost of AI-addiction and broken outputs are starting to sting. Not that employers care about the individual harms of course, but a workforce so deep in collective delusion that they can't see the train coming is only useful when the market is delusional too.
Once this snaps, and it will snap suddenly, companies will be climbing over each other to rip out AI as fast as possible. They won't call it that, of course, you're not going to get a CEO on the news talking about how they made a mistake and it was wrong to invest so much in AI tech. But they'll mean it.
The win scenario is that the crash reduces "AI" use to near zero. Spat out into the graveyard of VC hype like blockchain and metaverse before it. Banished to an eternal unlife of scammers running call centre scams, deepfake porn producers, and the occasional "we made AI safe!" startup trying to reignite the bubble again. While companies with their business on the line clamber to announce that they don't use it.
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#126Surely this time we'll learn our lesson and disempower the parasites that create these situations, right? Right guys?
Always loved this from The Big Short (movie):
"In the years that followed, hundreds of bankers and rating agency's executives went to jail. The SEC was completely overhauled, and Congress had no choice but to break up the big banks and regulate the mortgage and derivatives industries.
Just kidding.
Banks took the money the American people gave them, and they used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, and lobby the Congress to kill big reform. And then they blamed immigrants and poor people, and this time even teachers. And when all was said and done, only one single banker went to jail."
Edit: I see I'm not the first to quote The Big Short in reply - such a good movie (and book)!
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Tracks. This is that same speculation that AI will be good enough. Wonder what a crash in that isecase will look like? Increased suicide rates? More instances of psychosis? It might not wven be directly measurable or easily traceable to AI therapists. Would suck
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We aren't seeing productivity gains in software either. What we are seeing is a lot of people who claim to be more productive, but in fact are building piles of tech debt that will fall over before long. But hey, they're building that tech debt really fast!
> but in fact are building piles of tech debt that will fall over before long
This is speculation as well. Its well founded but speculation nonetheless. Youre speculating things will stay the way they have till now.
I do see your point but what makes me consoder the other side is that ive been building an app that reaches ~10k LOC, purely with opus, no code review at all, and it hasnt hit any tech debt issues that i havent easily been able to address. Setting up good context management meant that claude could just figure things out itself.
And for reference this is an app that manages an ethernet camera, runs vehicle detection on the stream, and surfaces the detections on an ipad for operators to inspect and annotate for cellphone usage, so not trivial. Needed good architechtong and design from my end, but it was honestly scarily easy. So idk what the threshold for tech debt crash is but it wasnt there
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yes, you have to spend the money wisely. How could we construct a system so that we have 2x as many teachers (thereby halving the classroom size)? That would have a lot of good second-order effects beyond test scores.
So why has per-capita student spending doubled since 1990 (adjusted for inflation) without any increase in test scores? Why haven’t we been spending the money wisely? Student to teacher ratios have continuously decreased and are about half of what they were in 1960. Data on the results is mixed: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/class-size-what-research-...
Honestly curious, but don’t tests also adjust for “inflation”? Aren’t tests today be harder than they were in 1990?
Re: AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers
#130Earlier 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…
There’s argument to be made that SWE hasn’t been cracked either. The latest models are great at coding medium sized applications, but figuring out the requirements and consolidation of domain knowledge is something still lacking
Yeah. I think LLMs wont be able to do that on their own or with hueristics. We'll need to bake game theory into the base model for that