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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?

#131

Post by wing-_-nuts »

sublinear wrote: post #120
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 bubb…

Oh hey, it's my point of view from a year ago...

It's definitely changed in that time

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#132

Post by Dlemlo »

somenameforme wrote: post #101
Dlemlo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're describing the end of the digital world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Yeah to a certain degree me too tbh. But the biggest growth from the last 20-30 years was digital.

It allowed a lot of people around the planet to change things.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#133

Post by Dlemlo »

treespace8 wrote: post #97
Dlemlo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you look at certain documentations, we lost already how we d othings.

USA forgot how to produce things.

This will not prevent us from doing it.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#134

Post by jmathai »

airstrike wrote: post #85
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...

I don't even need to read a Bloomberg report to know this. I've personally experienced noticeable mental decline as my AI usage at work has gone up.

I can only imagine what it does to children whose brains are still developing.

I'm not anti AI and I don't know how to quantify the pros and cons but we need to be honest about what they are.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#135

Post by randusername »

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…

The whole idea that AI will usher in this utopia where workers in healthcare are able to realign their primary job functions with obvious value creation by sweeping all the paperwork under the rug is just silly.

It will just fester out of sight and out of mind: audit bots and compliance bots and malpractice bots and insurance bots will arms race creating such a mess it will become unfixable.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#136

Post by Dlemlo »

willis936 wrote: post #113
Dlemlo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doing 3D Modeling was not cheap and not niche.

And we have not seen what the industry will put out on a hardware level. Optical computing is coming, onchip models too.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#137

Post by Dlemlo »

barbazoo wrote: post #98
Dlemlo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah capitalism.

If the AI transofmration takes too long, we might never overthrow capitalism

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#138

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

dukeyukey wrote: post #128
JacobiX wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>And I'll bet that flying first class today is far better than 50 years ago.

I wasn't flying first class 50 years ago, but everything I can see now leads me to believe that this isn't even slightly true. There might be a high def flatscreen in front of me in first class today, but I'm not getting more attention than someone would've gotten back then, I'm not in a less crowded airport while I'm boarding, and the security mess is more demeaning than ever.

The only reason that people aren't rioting for all the changes is that no one even remembers how good it used to be.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#139

Post by nonameiguess »

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.

I think the core of this issue that makes discussion so difficult is people are not talking about "value" in the same sense here. Anything you can sell has value to the sellers, and by basic economic theory assuming mostly rational actors and revealed preference, more value to the buyers than whatever they're exchanging it for. That doesn't automatically mean it's providing value to larger society, improving the general welfare. Figuring out how to purify cocaine from coca leaves was great for the leading narcotraficantes, and satisfied some immediate need for cheap gratification that was perceived to be more valuable over the subsequent 30 minutes or so to the buyers than continuing to hold onto spare cash. That doesn't mean it was good for humanity, good for any specific society, good for the major exporting countries at the country level, or even good for the buyers' and sellers' immediate families and communities.

I have no doubt that life has gotten more lucrative for some bounded set of people whose main goal is to churn out the largest number of websites with cheap graphics as fast as possible at minimum cost, but a lot more doubt about whether that's going to make the median life better for the median person over any grouping of humans large enough for me to care about.

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