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

161–170 of 296 posts

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#161

Post by bpodgursky »

jackdaniel wrote: post #73
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.

Lowering prices or raising wages due to increased productivity is not a given, and often does not follow. There is more to pocket by shareholders though.

So it's OK to roll out AI to nurses in the NHS and Canada? Their hospitals don't have shareholders, so that's a minimum baseline that meets all of your goals.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#162

Post by nhecker »

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.

I agree with the root cause generally, but balk at the 'if we had' phrasing. We still can have these things, it just takes our own time and energy to get out and be with people face-to-face. Nothing about that is impossible. It is not as easy as sitting behind a keyboard though.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#163

Post by ggreer »

analog31 wrote: post #112
ggreer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I said that wages would fall below human subsistence level, not that income would fall below subsistence level. People would still get income from other sources such as investments, charity, and government (via taxes on others).

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#164

Post by cucumber3732842 »

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.

>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.

They'll fire the janitor and the secretary and make the nurses do that stuff too because "muh regulatory required staffing levels".

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#165

Post by intended »

AI productivity discussion go!

The model seems defensible, but for some reason it isn’t passing the sniff test. Maybe its that the extreme scenario seems wildly optimistic, or that the observed modest productivity gains are framed as either the trend or “just the start of something amazing !”.

The issues are that

1) The median AI use case isn’t increasing productivity but expanding capability and reducing the need to communicate across teams. Ex: if someone needs a dashboard or a ppt designed, now they don’t have to ask another team. AI is substituting for intern and early career workers in someone else’s firm.

This is also borne out in the hiring data.

2) The cases that show maximal productivity gains are when AI is leveraged by experts.

This is a problem, because the evidence for automation gains is poor. AI automation seems to be going to the same place ML projects went to die.

If augmentation is the primary lever that lifts up productivity, and it is dependent on AI being matched to experts, then the limiting factor is expertise.

This makes the fact that AI is both, taking out early career roles AND one shooting education, a divine irony.

Where exactly are those future experts supposed to come from? The ones with taste and the ability to deliver us this AI driven GDP growth?

AI is also setting up a conflict between liability, insurance and productivity, and thats a whole point in itself. However it will be expressed as a drag on productivity.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#166

Post by cucumber3732842 »

anothermathbozo wrote: post #129

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…

You say that like it's not bleak as everliving fuck.

Go look at a post-industrial town in the northeast but not within reasonable commuting distance of a wealthy urban area if you want to see what "put them on just enough welfare they don't hang us from the overpass for kicking out their way of making a living" looks like.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#167

Post by nobleach »

simianwords wrote: post #59
nobleach wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd call that "meaningful" in the sense of "trillions of dollars and datacenters built all over the place" meaningful. Yes, I can now tell Claude to build a feature and it often does an okay job. I can ship faster. I can't tell you that it's worth spending the true cost of AI for that however. What'll be nice is 5 years of data showing that companies are raking in more money because they shipped more fea…

there's a popular misconception that AI is so extremely costly that when the world finally comes to terms with it, we will stop using AI and things will die down. i'm sorry to burst your bubble: this won't happen. the inference cost of AI has been dropping ~5x over every 6 months. AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.

That doesn't cause the amount that's already been spent to simply disappear. To recoup, they're going to need to sell a LOT of subscriptions. In about 3 years, we'll need to upgrade the GPUs that we use - if we're still chasing frontier models. That cost remains to be seen. There's a ton of unknowns here.

I don't have a bubble to burst.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#168

Post by jplusequalt »

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.

>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.

Greater access at the expense of the number of people employed is not necessarily a net positive. In the case of healthcare, the data is fairly clear that higher nurse staffing ratios lead to better patient outcomes (read: decreased chance of death or serious complications). This is particularly true for ED and ICU nurses.

Also, in the case of healthcare, I'm fairly certain that hospitals in the US are legally not allowed to turn patients away. So "lack of access" is not currently a problem for serious medical emergencies.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#169

Post by keybored »

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…

Yup, caught me falling for the propaganda.

1. When the capitalists wage class war: bussiness as usual, some murmuring about widening wealth gap by progressive, diffuse threats to democracy

2. When workers complain about the system: all hands on deck, class war immiment, please think of the children and the stability of society

Post reply on HN