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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?

#291

Post by pembrook »

zahlman wrote: post #198
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 l…

"We're confident our technology will 10X GDP growth, we just need you to disable javascript first. That one we couldn't figure out."

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#292

Post by impossiblefork »

adam_arthur wrote: post #274

It seems obvious that labor displacement due to AI will create labor surpluses in existing fields. Which will feel quite bad for many of us in the present, but net-net be good for society in the long run. Wages will go down, but cost of goods and services will decline even more. Markets will be more competitive than ever, which limits the moat/margin capability of many businesses. It's only really particularly bad fo…

Why do you think it will be net-good for society in the long run?

If wages go down, worker power goes down; and if dependence on labour goes down, you literally move closer to the situation of the extraction economies in things like petro-states, leading to oligarchy instead of democracy.

It could be the end of ordinary people's power over society rather than anything even slightly good.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#293

Post by pessimizer »

RigelKentaurus wrote: post #253
engeljohnb wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since AI can't be held liable for mistakes, it's immaterial whether the AI makes fewer mistakes than humans.

Not true. The company deploying or using the AI (not the frontier AI lab building it) needs to make sure that the AI works. Just like anything else. Not sure why this is complicated.

> The company deploying or using the AI (not the frontier AI lab building it) needs to make sure that the AI works.

Ah, they need to. Thanks for clearing this up.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#294

Post by ummonk »

pembrook wrote: post #280
ummonk wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because the market is forward-looking, and brings all future cashflows to the present. If it became clear by 2027 that GDP growth would permanently reach 15% (I didn't make that absurdly stupid chart, they did), S&P 500 valuations would immediately 100X or more. They could take out a credit line against those gains and have unlimited money. Wait...are you suggesting those predictions might be so unrealistic that its…

Are you saying that instead of investing in training right now they'll get higher ROI by pausing training for a year, and investing their money into taking out long positions on the stock market, all on the hope that what they label the "Extreme scenario" comes to pass?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#295

Post by pessimizer »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #271
engeljohnb wrote: post #184

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…

Excuse for who? The nurse? The hospital administration? The hospital owners? The insurance company?

Your comment is how blame dissolving into the ether looks.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#296

Post by smetannik »

simianwords wrote: post #59
nobleach wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd call that "meaningful" in the sense of "trillions of dollars and datacenters built all over the place" meaningful. Yes, I can now tell Claude to build a feature and it often does an okay job. I can ship faster. I can't tell you that it's worth spending the true cost of AI for that however. What'll be nice is 5 years of data showing that companies are raking in more money because they shipped more fea…

there's a popular misconception that AI is so extremely costly that when the world finally comes to terms with it, we will stop using AI and things will die down. i'm sorry to burst your bubble: this won't happen. the inference cost of AI has been dropping ~5x over every 6 months. AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.

> AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.

2 y.o model is probably 100x cheaper, but model size and requirements are also growing proportionally.

2 years ago, thinking was an optional, nowadays people use Opus with high effort almost by default.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#297

Post by bitwize »

WalterBright wrote: post #287
leonidasrup wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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

Old soviet joke: Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's the other way around! Myself, I always exploited my employers by extracting money from them.

I learned to hate corpo jobs less by thinking of them as "farming gold out of a megacorp". Of course I'm losing my ability to do even that, as sloppotrons beat half-century-old grognards every damn time.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#299

Post by pembrook »

ummonk wrote: post #294
pembrook wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the market is forward-looking, and brings all future cashflows to the present. If it became clear by 2027 that GDP growth would permanently reach 15% (I didn't make that absurdly stupid chart, they did), S&P 500 valuations would immediately 100X or more. They could take out a credit line against those gains and have unlimited money. Wait...are you suggesting those predictions might be so unrealistic that its…

Are you saying that instead of investing in training right now they'll get higher ROI by pausing training for a year, and investing their money into taking out long positions on the stock market, all on the hope that what they label the "Extreme scenario" comes to pass?

If even their modest scenario becomes consensus by next year, the market will 2X or more. They could easily leverage that to 10X returns.

Their business is not going to 10X cash flows next year, so yes, that would be the smart move if they thought even the short term modest scenario was happening.

They don't think that though. Hence why this blog post is stupid to even publish.

It's like me publishing a "What will our future look like?" blog post where I think I'm the center of the universe and draw a chart that says:

Modest scenario: I take a bowel movement so big it opens a wormhole and destroys humanity

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#300

Post by throwaway13337 »

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…

Replace AI with 'company' and you realize that we're living in that world already.

There's a reason it's called a Limited Liability Company. The whole point is to separate the company's liability from the individual that participates in it. For example, corporate financial liabilities of a company that is bankrupt.

You would not sue the nurse that makes a mistake. You would sue the company she works for. And if that company is bankrupt, well, that's it. There are rare instances where this isn't true, but generally it is.

Whether this is ethical or not, it's the system that we already have.

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