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What will our economic future look like?

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Re: What will our economic future look like?

#151

Post by sublinear »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #131
sublinear wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've been hearing this retort every year. The only difference this time is you're not a green account.

If things have actually changed, you wouldn't be begging the question. LLMs, as popularly used, are still just a new kind of search engine for natural language answers to natural language questions. They're portable in a way, too. That's really cool tech, but not a revolution. It's pretty underwhelming compared to previous decades of change. It's a lot more error prone too, since it's a mudball of stats.

If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics. At that point, we're not even talking about AI anymore.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#153

Post by Droobfest »

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.

Most people who drive a car have no idea how an engine works. I know and agree it's a scary future, but I wonder if it's really _essential_ to understand things on a deeper level.

Most people are quite capable of understanding higher-order ideas without fully grasping the underlying details too.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#154

Post by cman1444 »

ang_cire wrote: post #108
cman1444 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, so far, this isn't actually what happens. I listened to Moody's "Inside Economics" podcast with Ramp's Chief Economist, and they observe that companies who adopt AI intensively actually hire 10% more people. Also, this article from The Economist suggests that evidence is mixed-to-positive for long term employment, while short term data center buildout is extremely positive for jobs. Paywalled unfortunately. h…

This is like asking your drug dealer if being high will help you forget your problems.

No. As I said, the long-term gains are mixed-to-positive. And, all else being equal, you would rather have more short term job gains than none at all.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#155

Post by inanothertime »

timacles wrote: post #145
keybored wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and leading to class wars. Aren’t we overdue for one anyway.

Class war started about 15 years ago post 2007 financial crisis. The banks and those who control them all knew where we are headed, so they got a little head start destabilizing democracy. Once us working class get a grasp of the actual situation, we are going to be so deep in the hole, fighting back is going to be quite difficult when the "asset owners" own and control the majority of the worlds resources, all media…

Bravo!!!

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#156

Post by cucumber3732842 »

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.

>it means you can pocket the cost-saving

Right up until a competing hospital that charges substantially less for "close enough it doesn't matter" quality of service opens up in the same area?

Or right up until an equivalent specialist sets up shop in the strip mall across the street from you, brings the GP in house and can see people in one visit.

Oh, those things don't happen you say?

From do-gooders regulating right into the hands of waiting industry lobbyists to inelastic demand healthcare is an absolute poster child for perversion of the free market.

High finance will put solar panels on your roof and structure it so you pay nothing. The degree to which administrative overhead is washed away by technology would have been unfathomable in 1990.

A sketchy concrete crew that doesn't even speak english will show up wearing matching company attire and execute a job planned and timed to a degree of precision that was reserved for huge corporations 40yr ago.

Yet healthcare has resisted all of the advances of the past 40yr. In fact we pay more for it. Every advancement is absorbed by the system.

Why is that?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#158

Post by triceratops »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #138
dukeyukey wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 secur…

> no one even remembers how good it used to be.

Because not that many people even used to fly. Because it cost a lot more.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#159

Post by ghm2199 »

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…

Altman, Amodei, Pinchai etc can get together and just put a self imposed ban on themselves and ask the us government to sanction any entity/state attempting to use/release a Recursive Self improving model until the risks are well understood.

This does not mean they can't keep developing it. But it would mean they do not release them to the general public or the public domain. The US government can continue to use and fund these models that are more powerful and use them in situations they understand and a restricted setting. The pentagon has a larger budget than any VC.

Remove the profit motive on self improving recursive models gained from retail/commercial use!

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#160

Post by cman1444 »

ozgung wrote: post #44

Finding 4 is a must-read: > Finding 4: Labor vs. capital share: The pie will grow, but a larger share might go to capital > Today, of each dollar the economy produces, about 60¢ goes to workers and 40¢ go to capital. Modest scenario: 40.6% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 0.6 points) Substantial scenario: 43.9% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 3.9 points) Extreme scenario: 54.8% to capital in 2030 (labor shar…

>For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power.

This is not necessarily a conclusion you can draw from that statement. It's possible that as the economic pie grows, workers' purchasing power increases compared to the counterfactual (a non-AI world), but their purchasing power does not increase as much as the capital owners' does.

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