171–180 of 386 posts
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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.
> 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…
Serious solutions to this would look like nationalizing tech companies, mandating shorter work weeks, seizing the assets of the oligarchs and redistributing them.
Not... letting the invisible hand of the market sort it all out.
> 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.
AI leaves humans as the limbs of the machine, with less and less thinking or comprehension required on their part.
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seems like a worse customer experience though. longer lines at checkouts and the self checkout process is unnecessarily slow to deter theft.
Some supermarkets let customers scan their items as they go through the store with a handheld device
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...
That's good news! The worse students perform, the less competition AI will have in the future and the less effective any resistance will be. The ultimate goal should be to abolish education except for the elite, but we can't get there in one step.
The ideal future we should be shooting for is cross between Idocracy and Elysium: a paradise for tech oligarchy and masses so stupid and dependent that can't possible challenge them.
> 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.
That's not what happened, though. Everyone worked the same amount for the same pay, just in more miserable repetitive working conditions, while the factory owners kept all profits from the gains in productivity.
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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.
Marshall Brain really nailed it back in 2003 with Manna. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 AI leaves humans as the limbs of the machine, with less and less thinking or comprehension required on their part.
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.
According to data in the site and paper [0] labor income is estimated $20T for all four scenarios (including no AI) in 2030. Which means capital takes ALL of the new pie coming from AI.
Also, I am not an economist but I assume if you are not growing as much as GDP, it basically means you’re shrinking. Relatively shrinking, but since everything is relative in an economy you are actually shrinking. Table 4 in paper gives the numbers.
[0] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/cf58f84...
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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 p…
I'm sorry, what?
I'll put it to you again, you sound like me after playing around with gpt 3.5. It was interesting, but it wasn't good. There were still questions as to whether scaling would persist. My doubts were pretty much obliterated. LLMs haven't been mere text completion for a while now. Heck, even a model small enough to fit on my 3090 is now shockingly competent and useful. Does claude sometimes go off on weird tangents making me reel it in? Yeah, but it's genuinely great in present form, and it's the worst it'll ever be.
You're welcome to your opinion. It used to be mine too, but I disagree now. I find pretty much every AI benchmark has shown forward progress, some with non public datasets, and some things have gotten scarily better.
> 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…