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Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

mattsclancy.github.io

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Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#41

Post by arexxbifs »

The interesting thing here, I think, is what actually drives the growth of industrialization: cheap energy, an exploitable labor force and increased automation.

Every industrial economy seems to reach a plateau of diminishing returns, and it actually seems to be reached faster the faster industrialization is implemented. We see it in Europe, in the US, in Japan, in South Korea and it seems China is well on their way there, too: Cheap energy is diminishing (shale oil fracking, increased cost of building nuclear, etc) and exploitable labor has mostly been pushed as far as it can (dwindling fertility rates across the globe). Thus, we place our hope in automation, which has also been taken incredibly far already.

LLMs really must be some magic special sauce if they're to automate us into a new era of explosive growth. So far I don't think they're living up to that promise.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#42

Post by delusional »

jose-incandenza wrote: post #11
blfr wrote: post #2

Will we see any growth acceleration? The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. AI may turn out to nothing in terms of gdp growth or even be hugely deflationary.

Internet is the foundation of the global almost automated distribution networks and has brought the ability to target your consumers in a way that's cheap and effective. Usa exports tons of digital services that balance the trade ledger. I don't understand this stance.

> Usa exports tons of digital services that balance the trade ledger.

In the accepted framework of global trade, where exchange value is either confounded or accepted as a use value, this is a correct stance. I think where we'd end up disagreeing is on that equality. I don't believe that just because you can sell targeted advertising for millions of dollar, that it's actually millions of dollars worth of social use value. We'd have to bicker about the definition of use value, obviously, but I find it hard to imagine an argument for why writing adware at Google is worth the money people are getting paid for it, relative to useful manual labour. In much the same way I don't believe the CEO's labour is worth 100x what the employee is paid, I don't believe the Google Engineer is worth 5x the gardener maintaining a park.

This spoken separation of use value and exchange value is missing from most internet opinions on the economy.

I hope that somewhat helps you understand how the stance can exist, even if I haven't explained it deeply enough for you to actually accept it.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#43

Post by micromacrofoot »

chii wrote: post #39
bluegatty wrote: post #30

No - the growth today is capital expenditures, not productivity. To be fair, the industrial revolution was a 100 year period or so, computers, web, cloud, mobile and AI will likely be perceived in the same historical framework. AI will take some time to pan out in terms of productivity, but it will. A better comparison might be railroads.

Why is railroad a better comparison?

labor exploitation

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#44

Post by Findecanor »

Growth is unrealistic. During the industrial revolution, people were still exploring the world and expanding their reach, establishing new colonies for raw materials.

We are living in a global economy now. There is no growth into unexplored territories left to do.

The amount of carbon we're spewing into the atmosphere is unsustainable, and will lead to more worldwide instability. The first effects have already been seen. Remember that the "Arab Spring" (rise to IS, wars and refugee crisis) had been triggered by rising food prices.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#46

Post by dimbletimbers »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #18
blfr wrote: post #2

Will we see any growth acceleration? The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. AI may turn out to nothing in terms of gdp growth or even be hugely deflationary.

I don't know if its something that we will be able to measure precisely or at least in aggregate at first since the positives will only come about in the long term. Anecdotally, all my recent trips to the doctor have basically been as follows: 1) Give some (frontier) model my symptoms, circumstances, etc. 2) Model outputs a list of possible causes, some more urgent than others 3) If its not something benign, I go to…

I’m sorry but this is a bad take. We’re suffering from a healthcare crisis, globally. We don’t have nearly enough doctors. Even in the US where wait times are relatively low, it sometimes takes months to get an appointment with my PCP, let alone a specialist. And while I do sometimes feel when I see an NP at an urgent care like I could have used an LLM for all the time and attention they paid to my concerns, that’s not a compliment to the LLM.

Besides that 60-70% is not an acceptable hit rate and there’s already early evidence of skill atrophy in AI saturated fields like radiology. We need way more people offering more personalized care, using more judgement and offering more compassion, not a chat interface that says “you’re totally right to push back, the post nasal drip was the smoking gun.”

Maybe some forms of ML, even LLMs, become part of the solution to that shortfall, but we’re a long way from proving that’s a net positive let alone a big leap forward.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#47

Post by yorwba »

jose-incandenza wrote: post #11
blfr wrote: post #2

Will we see any growth acceleration? The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. AI may turn out to nothing in terms of gdp growth or even be hugely deflationary.

Internet is the foundation of the global almost automated distribution networks and has brought the ability to target your consumers in a way that's cheap and effective. Usa exports tons of digital services that balance the trade ledger. I don't understand this stance.

The internet has certainly changed the composition of the economy a lot, so that a lot of services that used to be in-person are now available online. But GDP growth is about the difference in value production over time. Especially digital services that can be provided at high volume, because they're so cheap, don't add up to as much value when you multiply it out, and then you have to subtract the past value of the replaced services, so the GDP contribution is less than you'd naïvely expect from the growth in units sold.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#48

Post by zurfer »

blfr wrote: post #2

Will we see any growth acceleration? The Internet doesn't seem to have had this effect. AI may turn out to nothing in terms of gdp growth or even be hugely deflationary.

Well, we can't have the counterfactual world but could it be that without computers, Internet or AI, there might be no/less growth?

I somehow doubt that AI will accelerate growth constantly as the world has inertia and I'm not sure AI is sustainably increasing our ability to change. On the other side, if there is a technology that can do that it could be intelligence.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#49

Post by cherryteastain »

hamper653 wrote: post #14

Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism. When capitalism expands (be it by replacing older modes of production, or through rebuilding after a world war), it always has steady growth. When there’s nowhere left to expand to, the machine always grips. Technical progress doesn’t prevent this outcome, it accelerates it. More productivit…

> Early capitalism didn’t have steady growth because of technical advances. It had steady growth because it was early capitalism.

The same technical advances created rapid growth in non industrialized non capitalist societies once they were introduced like the USSR or China. It's silly to say that orders of magnitude reductions in human labour needed to produce food, provide clean water, build sanitation and sewer systems do not result in steady growth regardless of economic system. Producing the food easily is more fundamental than deciding who gets what amount of easily produced food allocated to them.

Re: Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?

#50

Post by kfarr »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #43
chii wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is railroad a better comparison?

labor exploitation

And government subsidies/handouts, over building / over capitalizing relative to market demand, natural resource (over) extraction, concentration of capital
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