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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?

#301

Post by bluerooibos »

RigelKentaurus wrote: post #189
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…

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…

This. It's the exact same argument that was being made (maybe still is) against self driving cars.

To be honest, I'm looking forward to more AI in healthcare if it can increase diagnosis success rates and improve treatment outcomes etc.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#303

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#305

Post by ElProlactin »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #221
marssaxman wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And electricians!

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#306

Post by pessimizer »

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".

It will always be the driver. The question is always going to be whether we spend X amount of resources to get Y probability of restoring Z health to someone (or someone to Z level of health.)

Costs are just another way to say resources. If we only have $100, and it takes $100 to have a 33% chance to give Bob a 50% better life, but $50 to have a 15% chance to give either Sara or Rose a 100% better life, we need a rubric to make that decision.

We can't just do first come first serve (maybe the first person in line takes all the health care for a 1% chance of getting 1% better), or pick the person we like better (who is we?). We have to figure out how to manage and grow the limited resources we have. We manage them by coming up with algorithms on how to spend money, and we grow them by cutting costs and investing. This is better when it is done in public through democratic means than when it is done behind closed doors (to avoid the above problems.)

There will always be death panels. There are currently death panels. The reason for single-payer is not to avoid trying (imperfectly) to maximize these equations, it's to get rid of massive amounts of administration and graft (cutting costs.) If all that savings goes to the Pentagon, we wouldn't be any happier than before single-payer.

But it's not good to come up with some fuzzy way to determine who gets treated. Efficient spending is a way of minimizing injustice. To say a health system is not being driven by costs is just another way of saying that it's going to be driven by undeclared and unexamined biases.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#307

Post by vkou »

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…

Meanwhile, costs will somehow go up by 40%.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#308

Post by TheAlchemist »

ozgung wrote: post #44

Finding 4 is a must-read: > Finding 4: Labor vs. capital share: The pie will grow, but a larger share might go to capital > Today, of each dollar the economy produces, about 60¢ goes to workers and 40¢ go to capital. Modest scenario: 40.6% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 0.6 points) Substantial scenario: 43.9% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 3.9 points) Extreme scenario: 54.8% to capital in 2030 (labor shar…

How do we fight that ?

I'm thinking on this topic a lot lately - how do we change the system so that the bigger the company, the harder it becomes ? It's more of a political / societal issue. Similarly to housing - I believe it should be cheap to buy your first home, more expensive to buy a second one, and very expensive afterwards.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#309

Post by adam_arthur »

impossiblefork wrote: post #292
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.

Nominal wage doesn't really matter, just real wages+purchasing power.

Goods and services prices will fall far more than wages for most people.

Why?

Because there will be far more efficiency and competition than pre-AI. It's plainly evident from the nature of the technology.

If one business can do something cheaper, other businesses will do it cheaper too, and have to cut prices to compete.

But the shock will be sudden so it won't feel good for our gen. Future generations will benefit without the drama.

Don't get me wrong, there will be big losers in some fields, and the short term will be painful due to retraining and loss of purpose/emotional toll.

Many of us built careers doing things that may not be relevant anymore. Or relevant in a different, perhaps diminished way.

But the same has happened to many professions throughout history and it's always led to general improvement of the broader public's welfare.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#310

Post by deepwoods »

ElProlactin wrote: post #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-prop…

It's genius for Anthropic: data centers are their main expense. If they convince everyone to become an electrician, then the electrician labor supply swells, and the price of hiring electricians to service their data centers shrinks. 4-D chess at its finest.
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