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What will our economic future look like?

anthropic.com

261–270 of 396 posts

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

Human doctors and nurses are not accountable for outcomes, and they can not be accountable or our medical system (and any other medical system) would cease to function.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#262
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…

There was quite a long debate about "Hallucination Defense" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46815527

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#263

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 West…

Wait but then in your scenario wouldn’t the companies going out of business simply sell their data centers to the winning companies?

Not necessarily. Continued gains in compute efficiency and improved AI chips in your pocket doing more could reduce data center needs

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#264
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait but then in your scenario wouldn’t the companies going out of business simply sell their data centers to the winning companies?

Not necessarily. Continued gains in compute efficiency and improved AI chips in your pocket doing more could reduce data center needs

The person stated “ Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all.” The person stated this as a negative.

If those built data-centers are sold to other companies what is the negative? The gains you mention would happen even if those other companies stay in business.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

What did you ask it? It’s pretty clear that share of disposable income is more or less flat for handcrafted furniture which is cherry picked.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#266
> Only humans can do some tasks

> For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient.

Until there are robots. Or the AI gets creative in an attempt to find a solution to this "problem" and orders a fatal dose of morphine for the patient.

> And new tasks will appear

> Historically, new technologies have also created new tasks for workers. For a nurse, that might be checking how well an AI triages patients, or reviewing an AI-proposed care plan.

You can see where they're going with this.

> At the individual level, it means coders and call service center agents may have to switch to jobs like electrician and nurse, which are less exposed to AI.

It's weird they call nurses "less exposed to AI" when the earlier section discusses how AI could turn nurses into underlings for AI taskmasters.

> How might powerful AI change the economy?

Worth noting that this discussion is built around 2030, which is now less than 3.5 years away.

The hedges that make the Extreme scenario sound less bad fail to explain how anyone is going to pay electricians when the highest paid group (human knowledge workers) is being decimated. It sounds like the theory is that everyone is either going to become an electrician or a totally fair and efficient wealth redistribution scheme will magically appear.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#267

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".

It is possible to spend an infinite amount of money keeping a human being alive, and every year there are more ways to spend more money keeping someone alive a little longer. Once you're not spending an infinite amount of money for each person, you are in the territory of denied claims, "death panels", waiting lists, and all the other things people like to complain about depending on their political persuasion.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

" The central argument of Capital is that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labour, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value and profit. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

Marx's labour theory of value is only a theory of where profits come from and is largely rejected. Return on captial investment is not restricted to factory owners. All workers get a share of the surplus value and have the option to increase that by investing.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#269

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…

> 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…

I see that already in veterinary medicine with the non-DVM office/practice managers (or whatever title that guy lurking around in the office may have) - in the vet practices belonging to large networks the DVMs and nurses constantly looking at those managers for approval.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#270
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…

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