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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?

#191

Post by tengbretson »

engeljohnb wrote: post #184
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…

I know this is just an example, but I'm going to say this every time the subject comes up: since human lives are the cost of making the wrong decisions, AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker of any kind in healthcare. If my blood pressure crashes because my nurse is caring for 15 patients at once and didn't notice that the AI decided to pause my norepinephrine, I won't consider "the AI did it" to be any acceptab…

> AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker of any kind in healthcare.

It will, except it will be snuck in through the back door. It won't be some kind of robo-doctor making care decisions, it will come in the form of insurance eligibility steering the approved care plans, which absolutely will be decided by AI. The doctors will remain to act as liability sinks, but functionally they will probably join the ranks of the meat proxies.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#192

Post by d3dd »

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…

It shows a complete lack of understanding of what these people actually do.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#193

Post by zahlman »

utilize1808 wrote: post #157

A thought experiment: robot bees can do everything biological bees do --- pollination for the crops and making honey, but they are tireless and cheaper to maintain. Would beekeepers and farm owners still want to keep biological bees?

> robot bees can do everything biological bees do

From the perspective of the beekeepers and farmers and their obligations, sure.

But beyond the pollination, they wouldn't be participating in the ecosystem.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#194

Post by brailsafe »

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…

They might own it, but at a certain point it only matters whether the concept of ownership means anything to the people who don't "own" it. Ownership only works for those with assets because they have police working for them to protect the concept of ownership to begin with, but that only works at a certain scale of disenfranchisement and lack of upheaval. There isn't that much in-practice stopping a sufficiently angry group from attacking most politicians or even every-day wealthy people in their home. Money talks, but if the amount everyone else earns isn't enough to meaningfully contribute to "owning" anything, then those people would reasonably stop agreeing to respect the idea of property or non-violence. People without assets, facing down a continual decline in living standards from 15 years ago, should evaluate whether the system they operate in does anything beneficial for them at all, or whether it mainly serves those who they serve.

We're starting to see it in discrete bursts with Mangione, the paper warehouse fire, and in other non-violent ways with farmer protests, trucker protests, etc.. which have varying levels of support from regular people depending on their wealth class, background, and inclination to agree with the government.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#195

Post by zahlman »

jongjong wrote: post #72

Before AI, my worldview was that our monetary system was concentrating wealth in a negative-sum game; essentially; every so often, taking wealth from 100 people, destroying half the underlying value and giving the remaining value with a 2x nominal markup to 1 rich person who is already spending more than they can physically spend and so they won't realize that the 2x amount of wealth they got on paper only buys them…

> In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.

Putting aside the numbers, how does your quality of life compare to decades ago?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#196

Post by zahlman »

jplusequalt wrote: post #150

I found myself interested in the papers analysis of wages, so I did some digging. The researchers model says the following about hourly wage growth in the substantial and extreme scenarios: - the hourly wage* in the knowledge workers group will fall (-1.1% and 11.5% respectively) - but the hourly wage* of labor across the rest of the labor force will grow (5.9% and 33.6% respectively) *Important to note, AFAIK this h…

I think you'd be better off expanding this into a blog post, where it can have proper formatting and you can take the time to come up with a main point and structure an argument around it.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#197

Post by a34729t »

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…

Well that and the people who make decisions largely don't fly peasant. Remember that the US air force is mostly executive transport.

The easiest way to make conditions get better is to make sure the people in charge have to use things, be it busses, bike lanes, trains, airports, public bathrooms, parks with bums, etc. Otherwise it always hits the middle and lower class to absorb it.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#198

Post by zahlman »

pembrook wrote: post #124

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…

> 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?

Have you tried disabling JavaScript? The simulations won't work of course, and there are some random large blank spaces; but the main content is completely readable and handles resizing without issue[0] even on my mid-range office PC from 2014.

[0]: Just like almost anything else would without JavaScript. Though maybe the people who enjoy proving the Turing-completeness of CSS could come up with something…

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#199

Post by d3dd »

psadauskas wrote: post #176
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.

During the industrial revolution, people thought that all these new machines and factories and electricity meant that everyone would only have to work 4 hours a week since it made everyone so much more productive. 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 producti…

"while the factory owners kept all profits from the gains in productivity."

Because this is what drives continual risk-capital.. very few countries are willing to upset this. Get over it man - I hate hardended capitalists but stop crying. This is the system we have. Wanna beat it? Go ahead and start a firm. Then you'll find out how tough it is.

The thing I cant get over is enough software engineering folks collectively hold immense power. Whats wrong with you lot (im not a software engineer)? Get your sht together.

P.s. Im starting a firm who's central mission is to attack capitalists (ofc I won't say it out loud in that way). I will find out for myself how much of a backbone software engineers etc have when I employ them.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#200

Post by ang_cire »

simianwords wrote: post #106
ang_cire wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how come productivity increase actually led to increase in quality in almost all cases? It doesn't, this is just plain false. Most productivity gains happen by cutting value-add complexity or material quality. See IKEA chairs versus Shaker ones, or lycra clothes versus silk. > internet/digitasion for doctors for example. I see the misconception. The internet was not created to serve productivity, it was a communica…

> It doesn't, this is just plain false. Most productivity gains happen by cutting value-add complexity or material quality. See IKEA chairs versus Shaker ones, or lycra clothes versus silk. this is a popular misconception. IKEA made bad furniture more accessible. good quality furniture still exists and is more affordable (share of disposable income) now than in the past. its the same deal for watches, dryers, compute…

You think handcrafted furniture is more readily accessible to the average person now than say 30 years ago? When people are struggling to buy gas, nevermind homes?

And I asked Claude (Fable 5), and they said you're wrong. I'd paste it here, but it literally dumped a 10 paragraph rant about "Baumol's Cost Disease".

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