Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI boom risks global financial crash, warn central bankers

telegraph.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 228 posts

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

#191

Post by thelastgallon »

scoofy wrote: post #159
thelastgallon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100 manhattan projects. Lots and lots and lots of things that can be done. Reminds me of the quote "water water everywhere not a drop to drink" ==> Money, money everywhere, not a cent goes towards something remotely useful. 1) Could've added nifty features to roads (rf beacons?) and make it super easy to build autonomous vehicles. This would've solved so many problems, but most importantly 45,000 lives every…

You are describing altruistic gifts, not investment meant to generate a return. All this money is being deployed to try and turn a dime into a dollar. The biggest area I can see where money could be deployed into building something useful -- while generating a positive return -- is real estate development in cities with massive housing shortages. That's basically not allowed in the same cities. In large part, because…

> All this money is being deployed to try and turn a dime into a dollar.

Probably not. Its better explained here: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies

One of the examples from the article: Xavier owns an apartment that he rents out at a loss of $1 billion/month. Seeing this success, he decides to make financial commitments to construct $850 billion in new apartments in places nobody wants them. He convinces Ted to leverage everything he owns to help him build the apartments, telling him that once they are built, every human being on Earth will live in them. Ted contributes $100 billion, part of which immediately goes toward paying off Xavier’s $1 billion/month loss. Forbes gives Xavier and Ted a cover feature, likening their building project to God creating the Heavens and the Earth. Many Fortune 500 CEOs take this comparison literally and establish a new religion around Ted and Xavier, with themselves as high priests. Soon, they start a Holy War with the pope, declaring “Ted and Xavier the One True Gods on Earth” and promising to “purge the nonbelievers” in an official press release. They annex, then subsequently demolish, Vatican City, committing another $900 billion dollars to build new apartments in its place. Forbes hails this as “disruptive,” though it’s not clear how Ted and Xavier plan to finance the project.

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

#193

Post by senordevnyc »

chowells wrote: post #30
senordevnyc wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extract rents? I don’t think you’re using the term rent correctly here.

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.

I understand you hate the big AI companies, but that simply has nothing to do with the concept of economic rents.

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

#194

Post by rootusrootus »

felix-the-cat wrote: post #183
rootusrootus wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, the same AI that has landed companies in court defending themselves against wrongful death lawsuits for helping someone convince themselves suicide is the right answer, and even encouraging them? That AI? I am unclear that any insurance company is going to want a piece of that action anytime soon. What you've just told me is that psychologists, just like SWEs, are prone to thinking they know how business works b…

I'm not sure - like I said, it's just a friend's speculation, but when you consider how far AI has come in the past four years it's not hard to believe that it will simply continue to improve. It seems to already be having a significant impact on the whole software engineering field.

But software engineering is almost certainly the best possible application for LLMs, because there is an immense amount of training data. What training does it have for therapy? Reddit? Egads ;-)

Personally I think we are at the top of the S-curve for this technology. And I suspect a lot of what we see as major recent advances are attributable to improved harnesses as much as any improvement in the abilities of the models. My guess is we will see only minor improvements going forward in the frontier models (barring a major new discovery) and major improvements in smaller models. IMO that is where the real impact will be felt day-to-day, when we can run fairly powerful LLMs in all sorts of places without having to make API calls to huge GPU clusters in the cloud.

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

#195

Post by throwaway2056 »

expedition32 wrote: post #163
thelastgallon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100 manhattan projects. Lots and lots and lots of things that can be done. Reminds me of the quote "water water everywhere not a drop to drink" ==> Money, money everywhere, not a cent goes towards something remotely useful. 1) Could've added nifty features to roads (rf beacons?) and make it super easy to build autonomous vehicles. This would've solved so many problems, but most importantly 45,000 lives every…

It's private money. At least in my country the government isn't giving a single cent to AI outside of fundamental research projects. If companies want to bet all their money at roulette they are free to do so.

Does your govt not buy memory, chips, computers? They pay premium for that. In addition, so middle manager in govt will say - I will work only if I have Premium AI Claude subscription. 100s of companies are doing that. They will fire workers - cause unemployment - affects economy- health etc for common citizen.

This bet includes you.

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

#196

Post by rightbyte »

simianwords wrote: post #151
thot_experiment wrote: post #23

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

Increasingly more prominent is this new genre of activist hacker who thinks all big tech guys are bad parasites and if only they didn’t exist and we would have world peace and prosperity. That’s about the biggest virtue they know to signal. The took the antithesis of the “great man” theory and ended up believing in a nonsensical version of it - every great thing in the world was done by normal people working 9-5. Thi…

I think you might have constructed a straw man. Not working FTE to ruin society is not "activism" and many big tech companies are more or less profiteering of good will and trust and spitting out money and misery.

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

#197

Post by Freedumbs »

bakies wrote: post #185
Freedumbs wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we assume the play is the same as MAGA 1, the economic fallout happens post-2028. They'll keep inflating the bubble until MAGA cedes power. If that occurs.

COVID throws a wrench into any kind of analysis in that time period

I don't think so. Covid just provided more cover and justification for the looting programs.

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

#198

Post by kingleopold »

byzantinegene wrote: post #67
kingleopold wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is why they hide it and still print it, it will just not reach to avg. folks

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

#199

Post by henryaj »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #176
scoofy wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are describing altruistic gifts, not investment meant to generate a return. All this money is being deployed to try and turn a dime into a dollar. The biggest area I can see where money could be deployed into building something useful -- while generating a positive return -- is real estate development in cities with massive housing shortages. That's basically not allowed in the same cities. In large part, because…

Typically the best return on investment is to build proper separated active travel infrastructure (e.g. cycle lanes). From https://www.cyclinguk.org/briefing/case-cycling-economy : > For every £1 invested, walking and cycling return an average of around £5-6. A ‘benefit to cost ratio’ (BCR) greater than or equal to 4 is considered to be ‘very high’ value for money. Putting this in some context, the predicted BCR for…

The 'return' in these cases is social return, not profit.

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

#200

Post by rawgabbit »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #9
AmazingEveryDay wrote: post #2

Is there any comprehensive list of historical warnings from central bankers?

I just checked 2007 and 1999 reports [1] a a bit and doesn't seem like they made such obvious warnings at those times. I don't know much about economy and I just did some ctrl + f skimming, but this new 2026 warning is obviously more clear to me. [1] https://www.bis.org/annualeconomicreports/index.htm?annualec...

The BIS report actually compares the AI boom to the dot Com bubble and earlier manias.

"Historical episodes of investment booms offer instructive parallels (Graph 11.C). The canal mania of the 1830s, the British railway mania in the 1840s, the electrification exuberance of the late 1920s (roaring 20s) and the dotcom boom of the late 90s all shared one common trait: a genuine technological breakthrough that attracted capital in excess of what commercial returns could ultimately justify. These episodes ended with an eventual reversal in investment, inducing economy-wide recessions. The scale and pace of the current AI investment boom accompanied by expectations of large productivity payoffs bear resemblance to these precedents, highlighting potential downside risks in the near term."

Post reply on HN