Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What will our economic future look like?

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 307 posts

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#111

Post by dgellow »

lbreakjai wrote: post #96
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Healthcare is indeed the poster child for inelastic demand

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#112

Post by analog31 »

ggreer wrote: post #99
analog31 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 & power…

Falling below subsistence means people starve and cease to exist until supply and demand equalize or “something else” happens. That’s what Smith was getting at. Thus subsistence is a price floor for human labor.

Something else could mean developing a new concept of ownership or a new form of redistribution.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#113

Post by willis936 »

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.

Those are ubiquitous things. It makes cheap and common things cheaper, not expensive and niche things. It's not mixing in large amounts of context and nuance with good judgment right now. At a minimum that requires an expensive context window but even frontier models aren't beating experts. Maybe they'll get there one day and maybe soon, but that would require hardware getting cheaper. Dennard scaling is over. Either bet on optical computing lighting the world on fire or be suspicious of the alchemists overpromising.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#114

Post by Squarex »

alphawhisky wrote: post #36
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…

Call me crazy, but maybe our healthcare shouldn't be a "cost driven system". Maybe that was the issue before AI. But hell, what do I know?

It will always be until we have unlimited resources.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#115

Post by submain »

lbreakjai wrote: post #63
bpodgursky wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If, and that's a huge if, the savings are actually passed on to the customers rather than the capital owners.

Which is why we need competition. Which is almost non-existent in US healthcare as comparing prices is near impossible.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#116

Post by dgellow »

lbreakjai wrote: post #63
bpodgursky wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If, and that's a huge if, the savings are actually passed on to the customers rather than the capital owners.

Or any of the middlemen

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#117

Post by sparklingmango »

fg137 wrote: post #102
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…

I didn't read the article but headed straight to comments because I cannot trust a single word Anthropic says about economy. They have an incentive to play dumb and talk as if AI is net positive for the world.

It feels like propoganda.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#118

Post by skyberrys »

At least they are thinking about this. The possibilities still seem to limited though. A coder and a designer will 'retrain' to electrician or nurse, because we are busy having a construction boom. But do all of the individuals in this system get to choose the construction boom? Or are we swept up in the desires of the capital deploying owners?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#119

Post by glaslong »

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.

Self-checkout will free up cashiers to focus on high-quality customer service!

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#120

Post by sublinear »

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…

Do a few bad grades really harm economic outcomes, though? Educators took a hard stance against AI rather quickly.

Outside of delusional grifty startups, the broader corporate world is only using copilot for taking meeting notes and (sort of) entertaining the notion of non-devs writing (and not maintaining) their own experimental janky apps where impact is low.

Outside of all the shit-stirrers on HN and clueless bubble social media, I don't see LLMs making a difference. In fact, the fearmongering is at this point insulting to the intelligence of the people who are supposedly helpless against big bad AI.

Post reply on HN