Live data from Hacker News

What will our economic future look like?

anthropic.com

221–230 of 381 posts

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why wouldn't they just blame the nurse anyway? The law always puts somebody on the hook. The nurse's job will be to do what the AI says and take the blame when it fails.

At least there will be more nurses to take the blame.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

If you want to know what flying first-class 50 years ago was like (and you live in southern California, and you have money to burn) you can try the Panam Experience ( https://panamexperience.com/ ). It's a replica of a Panam 747, together with a "crew" in period-correct costumes, that tries to recreate the entire experience of flying in the 1950s. (Bearing in mind that the plane is a replica, located on a soundstage.…

That sounds a bit weird, the 747 didn't enter commercial service until 1970.

A 1950s flight experience would have been on something with piston engines and propellors, like a DC-6 or a Super Constellation. Noisy, turbulent, and not particularly safe by modern standards.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not to say that I don't agree with you to an extent, but you should see AI-delivered healthcare numbers to human-delivered and make it a fair comparison. From Google: "Annual Deaths: Over 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medical errors made by healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses. Ranking: This figure positions medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, f…

The difference is that humans are at least supposed to be accountable for those 250,000 errors. Those humans can naturally care about doing a good job, or they can be motivated to care. They can fear consequences and take pride in avoiding mistakes.

AI can do none of this, and cannot be held accountable for mistakes.

I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1% mistake rate that is totally unaccountable for its mistakes.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#225

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…

How would going leveraged on the S&P 500 because they expect long term rapid GDP growth help them with short term cash flow to invest in AI training that will enable that rapid GDP growth?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#227
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will bring down the prices for nursing and allow more people who previously couldn't afford health care to afford it, theoretically.

No? Prices are market-driven in our society, not necessarily a function of labor costs. In the very long-term best case scenario, the increased profits going to the company from these efficiency gains may encourage more competitors to pop up, and either drive prices down or offer more for what you pay.

What do you mean, “our society”?

How do you know we live in the same place.

Perhaps where I live, efficiencies are to the benefits of everyone?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics. 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, e…

For me, at least, despite being obviously powerful, I just can’t find anything useful to do with it beyond toys.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt that AI will massively transform society. That cat is out of the bag. It took decades for electricity, and then computers to change society, but this is the first technology where the average person can simply describe the problem they're trying to solve and it will at least attempt to help them solve it. I very. much. doubt. that the trillions of dollars spent on AI will have a positive ROI for most…

Which is only Stage 1. Stage 2 is where you have a Cambrian explosion of models all competing for compute, and not long after that for robotic extension into Real World. Stage 3 gets hard to imagine from here. Maybe there will be permanent hyperevolution. Maybe One Model to Rule Them All will appear. Either way, I don't see how Economics as We Know It can continue to exist. That includes all of capitalism and almost…

According to history, there will be a period of intense warfare.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#230
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Where are the taxes coming from?

If people’s wages are below subsistence levels they’ll sell their investments to survive. There can be no possibility of upward class mobility in this scenario.

Post reply on HN