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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?

#121

Post by watwut »

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…

Moreover, the nurse is frustrated, because she lost whatever agency and autonomy she had before. Her job is now obey whay AI said instead of making decisions by herself.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#122

Post by keybored »

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…

> and leading to class wars.

Aren’t we overdue for one anyway.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#124

Post by pembrook »

This could be the most cringe main-character-syndrome thing I've ever seen produced by a company in the history of silicon valley.

And the people treating this as serious economic forecasting rather than a marketing puff post are even more cringe.

If Anthropic truly believed LLMs were going to raise GDP growth to 8% permanently (or even just a few percent), instead of going public to raise capital they could just go massively leveraged long on the S&P 500 and get funding for eternity.

They are not doing that, because AI is largely only good at coding, their models barely have a 6-12 month lead over free ones, and software is only 1% of GDP.

And by making software cheaper and easier to produce, they might increase the amount of software in the world by 10X or even 100X, but it will become a smaller percentage of GDP as AI models become autonomously good at creating it. Things that are abundant and cheap don't raise GDP.

Hey Anthropic: before we worry about raising GDP growth to 20%, maybe we focus on making blog posts that don't crash your browser window if you try to resize it?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#125

Post by sheauwn »

Squarex wrote: post #114
alphawhisky wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Costs can continue to be a factor in something, it is in most things, without it being the "driver".

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#126

Post by dgellow »

Hansappreciator wrote: post #17
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…

These aren't genuine studies, but are instead marketing materials that resemble studies.

I’m aware, but we can still discuss them seriously

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#127

Post by [deleted] »

whobre wrote: post #47
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.

[deleted]

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#128

Post by dukeyukey »

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

Being able to fly at all is a much better passenger experience than not having that choice in the first place. And I'll bet that flying first class today is far better than 50 years ago.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#129

Post by anothermathbozo »

People get income from one of three places: capital income, labor income, or the welfare state. If this technology truly unlocks a holy panacea of productivity with a commensurate drop in employment then capital’s share of the national income can and should provide for a wider and deeper welfare state. Nothing new need be invented here. Anthropic’s elaborate scenario-building makes appropriate preparedness sound like a problem requiring heroic prognostication when a simple theory of distribution will suffice.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#130

Post by Dlemlo »

dgellow wrote: post #90
Dlemlo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

what i tried to ask you is, what you mean by this.

"“what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”."

What is the point you are trying to make which goes in this direction? Like is making AI jobs so cheap that the economy is collapsing or do you mean thatn AI will not bring any value.

These are two suggestions from my side which are complelty contrare to each other.

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