What will our economic future look like? • Hacker News Board

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#51

Post by KoolKat23 » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

skinfaxi wrote: post #35

KoolKat23 wrote: post #23

Definitely a bit of positive framing. My big take aways, either stagnant wages or significant paycuts for knowledge workers and overall decreases in employment rates on all scenarios. Worst of all... That's only forecasting out to 2030.

In the US at least deaths will outpace births by 2030 so maybe a declining employment rate isn't as bad as it might seem in the long-term.

Good point, perhaps it may be a saving grace. I note they don't comment much on the allocation of said capital. Might be too bitter a pill for most to swallow.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#52

Post by simianwords » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

JacobiX wrote: post #20

> 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. This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "grea…

> This feels economically naïve..

not really. almost all technological processes have increased the quality of the service.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#53

Post by Dlemlo » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

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…

How?

Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow.

The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks.

You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#54

Post by meindnoch » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

grantpitt wrote: post #25

Feels like we're going to read a blog soon enough that mirrors Wendell Berry's opening to The Unsettling of America: The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers: “. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm inc…

Btw, Wendell Berry died 10 days ago.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#55

Post by lbreakjai » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

28304283409234 wrote: post #33

> Think of a day in the life of a nurse You can think of any job as a bundle of tasks that someone does. She does rounds to check on a sick patient. She draws blood. Why is the nurse a she?

About 90% of nurses are women.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#56

Post by leto_ii » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

detectivestory wrote: post #45

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...

Wdym? self-checkout definitely lead to fewer supermarket workers being employed.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#57

Post by vxxzy » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

It would be interesting to know what percentage of global inference is spent on projects/problems that would otherwise "wait"/"decay" (if generative ai wasn't a thing). Or maybe the question is: What percentage of global inference is spent on cleaning up and migrating old systems? "New" vs "Old". The decisions I make today can now incorporate what I once termed as "nice to have" when developing a sytem.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#58

Post by kakacik » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

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…

Thats the big question, its doing a lot of good and a lot of harm in the same time.

So, is it 2 steps ahead and 1 step back, or 1 step ahead and 2 steps back (or any numerical variant of those)?

People with actual power in this are too involved and greedy to care about objective answer and TBH I don't trust them to put some higher good before their personal wealth and power and ego trip, capitalism ain't built on long term responsibility towards greater topics like future and wellbeing of mankind.

Plus we know from WWII atomic bomb development how utterly clueless, naive and out of touch with reality geeks doing something powerful can be. I see exactly same scenario being played out right now with llms.

Anyway, I am over-tired with all llm topics and frenzy folks (especially here), I'll better spend rest of the day preparing for a serious challenge in form of big multipitch climb in western Switzerland (Mirroir d'Argentine for anybody in same craft). Thats life I care about and makes me happy and fulfilled.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#59

Post by simianwords » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

nobleach wrote: post #50

Squarex wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fea…

there's a popular misconception that AI is so extremely costly that when the world finally comes to terms with it, we will stop using AI and things will die down. i'm sorry to burst your bubble: this won't happen.

the inference cost of AI has been dropping ~5x over every 6 months. AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#60

Post by Dlemlo » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

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…

Based on the current quality of AI/LLMs, this a very weird take tbh?

What are your points?

The value of AI is real and AI already is responsible for people getting fired or no additional jobs.

Ask basic graphics designers, website developers and co. Ask educational book writers or developer advocates.