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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?

#81

Post by stego-tech »

Man I wanted to dunk on this, but it’s honestly not terrible. Their predictions - while still firmly rooting for the extreme results - feel more grounded. I also appreciate the little simulator where I could plugin my own predictions (echoing many here, that AI won’t amplify productivity/lift standards so much as replace workers by shitty bosses), and that it seems to caution that, yep, most of these gains will trickle up given current incentives.

Where I remain resoundingly annoyed is how useless this is. It’s pure ass-covering by Anthropic ahead of an IPO, victim-blaming the populace for the outcomes of decisions made by Anthropic leadership and the investor class. Forgive the grisly analogy, but it’s akin to a mugger telling you “only you can stop this” mid-violence: Anthropic could have chosen to allocate more of its capital to reforms that benefit the populace, but they’ve chosen to focus on personal wealth instead via this IPO and for-profit rented access schemes.

It’s nauseating. Their actions still paint a picture of greed and exploitation rather than building a better tomorrow for everyone with AI, and the fact their PR puff pieces keep getting wallpapered up here is gross.

EDIT: I guess another way to look at this is Anthropic making it unequivocally clear that they will not stop of their own accord, and thus it falls to others to stop them. Which if that’s their position, then at least they’re honest about the challenge.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#82

Post by buellerbueller »

simianwords wrote: post #52
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.

True, but you ignore the financialization and enshittification that typically follows the technological advances. The tech processes you cite don't inherently make money for the people who developed the technology.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#83

Post by okaleniuk »

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…

Um. Damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality, - all of that has already been done. Long before LLMs. And the only reason there is no class war is... exactly that. Uneducated people with short attention spans and no means beyond basic level are exemplary bad at modern warfare.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#84

Post by breezk0 »

I dont think in the future people will run these overpriced frontier models and instead have their specialized local models.

Even then, assuming the difference is that huge between frontier and open-source, a specialized „human worker“ _should_ be able to fix the gap.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#85

Post by airstrike »

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…

Exactly. Bloomberg reports students who use AI perform worse

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/school-st...

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#86

Post by idiotsecant »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #42
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.

Individual skills and differences don't matter any less if the system of assigning value to human lives is divorced from how useful that human is to the collective.

If I am not graded on how many widgets I make in a shift and instead can focus on making the most beautiful widget, or the most novel widget, or simply the widget that is most useful to my particular life am I less satisfied?

We've somehow built a worldview based on our whole value as humans being equivalent to how good of a worker bee we are. Let's fix that part.

This is of course a much harder problem than achieving AGI, since it's a messy human problem.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#87

Post by _doctor_love »

Like others in the thread have pointed out, the nurse example is interesting.

From my point of view, the point about the nurse is especially relevant because, in the future, dealing with an aging population is going to become a major undertaking and a major burden.

Demographically, we simply don't have the number of people we need to give elders the care that they'll probably have to have near the end of their life, so we have to rely on AI to help us get through it.

Probably, we will see this happen in Japan and South Korea before it hits the United States.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#88

Post by triceratops »

JacobiX wrote: post #67
simianwords wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This feels economically naïve.. not really. almost all technological processes have increased the quality of the service.

Air travel is a good counterexample here: technology made airlines far more productive, but much of the gain went into lower staffing, higher throughput, and cost cutting not a better passenger experience

To be fair it is a better passenger experience at that price point.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#89

Post by dgellow »

throw10920 wrote: post #18
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…

Wrong in the sense that it has less of an impact than they are claiming (e.g. "AI is in an overvalued hype bubble") or less (AI is going to be even more transformative than the hypers say)? In the former case, isn't it just business as usual? (well, with a huge, nasty recession - but the economy at least continues on in some recognizable form) It makes sense to me to focus on weird possible futures if we already have…

The “less valuable than expected but with a positive economical impact” is represented in the post I believe, with the “moderate” path, that’s what I meant by “wrong in magnitude”. What is missing is the other side, what if AI has a negative impact. Not no impact, a negative one. If we are talking about a global recession that’s not really business as usual I would say

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#90

Post by dgellow »

Dlemlo wrote: post #60
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.

It’s perfectly reasonable to consider positive and negative outcome when you’re seriously thinking about a topic… Extrapolating to the whole economy trends in some sub sectors that aren’t well understood or measured is a recipe for disaster (ie what you’re doing by recommending to rely on anecdotes)
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