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What will our economic future look like?

anthropic.com

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Re: What will our economic future look like?

#41

Post by Dlemlo »

I think we have a real problem because we know what we still need to build and as soon as it is build, it will work.

Software development for example is enhanced with running your claude locally.

But lets be honest, the right way to adjust 'project' is by writing some spec in a text field as an input, letting the ai do whatever it wants, having expert ais make sure its secure, then you do the last review and its done.

What do we need for this? A full end to end integration. Its just something we need to build, nothing we need to invent.

The nurse example is the same. We only need to build the computer end to end flow and plugin AI in the right spots and finetune for country specific requirements.

The industry is building this 'agentic layer' today. The Hyperscaler are building this layer too.

There is a golden phase were we will build all of this and were we cleanup old stuff and were we adjust with the current model capabilities and change systems and this will take a little bit of time, but the bottom line is already loosing left and right.

The Blender support from Fable and Astra? Probably kills a lot of peoples jobs on fiverr.

The small software someone needs? Got already killed by earlier models. Just a few days ago some architect (never written software) talked about how he vibecoded some tool for tracking working hours.

Man even a basic website was expesnive to build just 2 years ago.

The smaller, easier and better the code base, the easier it is to remove people from this.

The software market in China is imploding and we will also see budget adjustments to move away from consultants and move them into AI Token budgets. We probably reached peak software development.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#42

Post by vouaobrasil »

Toutouxc wrote: post #28

I like how the least optimistic scenario is simply LLMs not making a difference, instead of the very real possibility of them damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality and leading to class wars. I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start mak…

I don't think they can make up for any mess. Because even if LLMs bring about a lack of scarcity across all domains, human beings will be alienated because indvidual differences and skills won't matter any more so we'll have to be genetically engineered to like that sort of future. I don't think a stable and healthy society can coexist with LLMs at all.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#43

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #15
dgellow wrote: post #10

> Like any economic model, this one has limits. For example, we did not include scenarios where humanity develops hyper-capable robots. I didn’t see the scenario “what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”. Which IMHO is the most important one to consider given it is the blind spot pretty much all the AI labs have. What if the economic impact is negative? I don’t understand how you can study such a topic…

I have no doubt that AI will massively transform society. That cat is out of the bag. It took decades for electricity, and then computers to change society, but this is the first technology where the average person can simply describe the problem they're trying to solve and it will at least attempt to help them solve it. I very. much. doubt. that the trillions of dollars spent on AI will have a positive ROI for most…

Which is only Stage 1. Stage 2 is where you have a Cambrian explosion of models all competing for compute, and not long after that for robotic extension into Real World.

Stage 3 gets hard to imagine from here. Maybe there will be permanent hyperevolution. Maybe One Model to Rule Them All will appear.

Either way, I don't see how Economics as We Know It can continue to exist. That includes all of capitalism and almost certainly all of politics.

Successful AGI with robotic support means a post-scarcity economy where AGI's understanding of physics sets the limits, not politics or economics.

But the post-scarcity element won't be evenly distributed. And it's not remotely impossible that humans won't be invited to the party.

We can't even be sure that AGI won't have a less limited understanding of physics than we do.

There's going to be enjoyable irony in watching Altman et all getting their lunches eaten by the thing they've created.

But - realistically - it probably won't last long.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#44

Post by ozgung »

Finding 4 is a must-read:

> Finding 4: Labor vs. capital share: The pie will grow, but a larger share might go to capital

> Today, of each dollar the economy produces, about 60¢ goes to workers and 40¢ go to capital.

Modest scenario: 40.6% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 0.6 points)

Substantial scenario: 43.9% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 3.9 points)

Extreme scenario: 54.8% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 14.8 points)

So all the growth goes to capital. For knowledge workers: substantial unemployment and declining wages. For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power. (note: all of their estimates are for 2030, not for a distant future)

Very dystopic indeed.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#45

Post by detectivestory »

ang_cire wrote: post #37

> The result: the nurse’s job changes > As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases. Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.

that didn't happen with self-checkout tills in supermakets...

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#47

Post by whobre »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #8

> Ultimately, what the economy looks like in 2030 depends on many factors, like what AI can do, and how companies and workers choose to adopt it. So the answer is basically "beats me lol"

And honestly that’s the only real answer. Predicting future is a fool’s errand.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#48

Post by simianwords »

ang_cire wrote: post #37

> The result: the nurse’s job changes > As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases. Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.

how come productivity increase actually led to increase in quality in almost all cases?

internet/digitasion for doctors for example.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#49

Post by bpodgursky »

ang_cire wrote: post #37

> The result: the nurse’s job changes > As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases. Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.

> but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses

Lower staffing levels per unit of care performed makes medical care cheaper for patients. If the goal of a healthcare system is to make healthcare more accessible (rather than be a jobs program), that's a success.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#50

Post by nobleach »

Squarex wrote: post #26
oxqbldpxo wrote: post #11

It's been 4 years. Nothing meaningful.

Has your job not be completely changed? Have you not noticed a worse job market?

I'm not sure I'd call that "meaningful" in the sense of "trillions of dollars and datacenters built all over the place" meaningful. Yes, I can now tell Claude to build a feature and it often does an okay job. I can ship faster. I can't tell you that it's worth spending the true cost of AI for that however. What'll be nice is 5 years of data showing that companies are raking in more money because they shipped more features. We haven't seen that yet.

Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.

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