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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?

#91

Post by nemomarx »

rootusrootus wrote: post #80
leto_ii wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The data seems to contradict that, if Freakonomics is to be believed (and some people don't like them, I get that). Apparently overall headcount actually increased as a result of self-checkout. E.g. cashiers did drop a little but loss prevention more than made up for it.

seems like a worse customer experience though. longer lines at checkouts and the self checkout process is unnecessarily slow to deter theft.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#92

Post by thiago_fm »

How about we instead make Earth be a planet good for humans and living beings?

We can slow down AI development and make it a companion for us, not a replacement.

We don't need to automate ourselves out of it. Or take the risk of extinction.

Just like with nukes, we decided to not blow up the planet. We can too change this.

GDP is a terrible measure. I bet we will see a huge drop on HDI with so many suicides and people going through hell because their job got automated or they no longer see meaning in life, feeling powerless.

Instead they should run an estimate on how many would suicide until 2030 if the 'extreme scenario' happens.

Big GDP growth and a lot of people no longer finding purpose in their lives, going bankrupt, losing their homes and family etc.

For Anthropic, you are just clearly a number. They only care about output.

They have long forgotten the human being.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#94

Post by ang_cire »

simianwords wrote: post #48
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.

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

It doesn't, this is just plain false. Most productivity gains happen by cutting value-add complexity or material quality. See IKEA chairs versus Shaker ones, or lycra clothes versus silk.

> internet/digitasion for doctors for example.

I see the misconception. The internet was not created to serve productivity, it was a communication medium. That it can be used to increase productivity is orthogonal to its existence or purpose, and whether it has been used to actually increase quality of something is entirely dependent of the specifics of what you're discussing. For instance, in gaming right now there's a huge discussion going on about whether digital distribution has actually trapped us with crappier goods which we can't resell or transfer.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#95

Post by nemomarx »

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…

This is what the Luddites were primarily upset about, fwiw. That economic value and power would move away from their threatened minority group and towards landowners. It'll keep happening, and the new "opportunities" might be no better.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#96

Post by lbreakjai »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #76
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…

>great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses" And outside of industries with government enforced perversions of simple "supply and demand" forces (we're not talking Nth level effects here) this means more access to the service or lower prices or both. Edit: Which is to say you won't see any benefit in healthcare but you will in a ton of other industries.

In a market with perfect competition, perhaps. Healthcare is far closer to a monopoly. Since people can't decide not to be sick, it means you can pocket the cost-saving.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#97

Post by treespace8 »

Dlemlo wrote: post #53
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.

Like all automations it's not 100% perfect, and they all require a human to monitor them.

Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves.

Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#98

Post by barbazoo »

Dlemlo wrote: post #53
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.

I think the root cause is people not having enough human connection. If we had families, friends, neighborhoods, communities where people know each other and care about each other it wouldn't make a difference what new tool someone brings to group. It's just a tool.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#99

Post by ggreer »

analog31 wrote: post #24
mentos wrote: post #14

Prices will fall to their raw material costs?

Raw material cost of labor is subsistence. Adam Smith pointed this out.

If you have machines that substitute for human labor, wages fall to the cost of manufacturing & running the machines, which is well below human subsistence level. Fortunately, you also get very high economic growth rates. So even people with small amounts of money invested will end up far richer than when they had a job. Then the question becomes, "What happens to people when machines are far more intelligent & powerful and are doubling every few months?"

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#100

Post by dgellow »

api wrote: post #71
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…

There's not nearly enough mention in these discussions of the real villain behind most of the negative cultural, social, and cognitive effects of things like social media: addiction engineering. AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics . Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but th…

I assumed it was a given in such discussions that companies will optimizing for the worst outcomes for their users. It’s a fairly straightforward incentive from our capitalist system, which is why capitalism needs regulation to re-align the incentives with humans needs
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