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

241–250 of 395 posts

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#241

Post by sublinear »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #179
sublinear wrote: post #151

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…

You're also welcome to put your two cents in, but your replies sound identical to the bots and throwaways of last year and the year before that.

Every time it's the same agenda: trying to keep up appearances of meaningful engagement. In reality, I'm the only idiot willing to engage anymore and the opinion has always been majority negative on practical applications of LLMs from day one. It's not like anyone who frequents HN was blindsided by the initial release of ChatGPT like the rest of the public. The negativity has only grown since then.

There are important niches for LLMs, but they don't really make money without bigger ideas. I am very happy with the results for the broader topics of natural language processing and accessibility. Software is now easier to use and write. People have more agency over technology in general.

These are massive leaps. They are still tiny hops compared to what people's expectations were. That's only a failure of marketing, and a testament to its power even when botched. The end result is the same: the public yawns big and takes the almost invisible results for granted. Talking to a computer finally works like they expected over 20 years ago. Talking to a computer still sucks though. It's an entirely new genre of computer error.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#242

Post by imglorp »

jdiff wrote: post #173
watwut wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"meat proxy"

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#243

Post by pvab3 »

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…

I can't imagine trying to be a teacher in 2026. I would have never written a single paper or problem set myself in HS and college.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#244

Post by SoftTalker »

Squarex wrote: post #26
oxqbldpxo wrote: post #11

It's been 4 years. Nothing meaningful.

Has your job not be completely changed? Have you not noticed a worse job market?

I started my professional career in tech in the early 1990s. At that time, I sat in a chair with a keyboard and a screen to do my work. In 2026, I still work that way. So fundamentally how I work has not changed. Well, now I have two screens.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#245

Post by jdiff »

chrisjj wrote: post #210
jdiff wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

URL not responding here.

Hm, also not responding here. I don't think this thread is well-trafficked enough to have hugged it to death, but here's a PDF alternative link: https://milweesci.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/4/13247648/mannap...

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#246

Post by conception »

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…

Incorrect - https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/

That was the moment that business/wealth/rich decided to turn their resources towards directly influencing and controlling government. Reagan and his made up “welfare queens” came shortly after and wealth inequality has sharply risen since. Wildly successful coup.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#247

Post by aennassiri »

It's funny that this is missing the negative effects or the possibility of an economic crisis scenario. Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all. This is why XAI is already renting compute to Anthropic. This goes as well without saying that in few years, compute pricing will drop heavily.

Another effect is increased inequality in the US and other Western countries as software/AI/hardware companies are able to do more with less.

The increase in manual labor wages is not systemic. It affects only the labor used to build data centers.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#248

Post by teamonkey »

zahlman wrote: post #195
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?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.

It’s difficult to measure objectively, due to being physically younger and in an earlier stage of my career and so worser-paid, but adjusting for that, I think quality of life 20 years ago was pretty much the same as now, slightly better in some regards, slightly worse in others.

Of course there are fun new gadgets and gizmos and TV on demand and social media and such, but honestly they’re just toys, and in some cases have made my quality of life worse.

The biggest tangible improvement I can think of is one particular medical advancement, which has allowed a family member to survive a disease when they absolutely would not have 20 years ago. That’s incredible.

But otherwise the quality of life change over the last 20 years is minimal by most important metrics I can think of. Which makes one wonder what the dogged pursuit of GDP growth has achieved for the last decade or two.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#249

Post by lotsofpulp »

sheauwn wrote: post #125
Squarex wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will always be until we have unlimited resources.

Costs can continue to be a factor in something, it is in most things, without it being the "driver".

What does cost driven system and driver even mean? The cost of something is the ratio of demand to supply.

If something is not costing a lot, then it means there is sufficient supply that obtaining it is not going to require sacrifices elsewhere.

If something does cost a lot, then it means there isn't sufficient supply, and obtaining it is going to require sacrifices elsewhere.

Healthcare is obviously one of those things, especially with a top heavy population age histogram, where supply is not going to be sufficient so costs will remain high. And if costs are high, then obviously they will decide how resources get allocated, that is the very nature of something that is high cost.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#250

Post by npilk »

I think (hope?) the fundamental fallacy in arguments like these is assuming that individual task-level productivity improvement will ladder up to economy-wide transformation.

IMO knowledge work productivity has gone up a massive amount since 1990, and companies could in fact fire most of their knowledge workers while still getting their most critical work done. (These are the bullshit jobs/email jobs.) But companies mostly haven't done this, which implies other reasons for employing so many knowledge workers.

Even if AI becomes capable of doing everything, I would predict there will be a period of many years/decades where companies still employ a similar number of people to sit around and babysit/watch what the AI does.

Post reply on HN