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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?

#311

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #300
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#312

Post by pezezin »

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…

My dad is a retired nurse. Most of his work was giving shots, treating wounds, extracting blood, putting IV catheters, etc. In other words, physical tasks. How is an "AI agent" or LLM going to take care of that?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#313

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

This presupposes that the practice of exchanging things for dollars will remain stable and merely the number of those dollars will go up.

But that model is showing its age. I'd be supprised if, equipped with a heightened ability to develop and evaluate alternatives, we decided that it was worth preserving.

Money is a lousy proxy for consent, yet that's what were using for. Surely we can do better.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#314

Post by SoftTalker »

OroPla wrote: post #260
SoftTalker wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because the 1950s were seventy years ago, not fifty, which only brings you back to the 1970s.

Ah, I responded to "tries to recreate the entire experience of flying in the 1950s" and not the "50 years ago" yes in the 1970s it could certainly have been a 747.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#315

Post by geysersam »

00ze wrote: post #263
ViktorRay wrote: post #256

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

That sounds like a marvelous scenario for economic growth, because we will have tons of capacity to deploy ai models everywhere.

The bad scenario is compute efficiently not increasing much, and hardware prices staying high, while AI is too expensive for most tasks, and 50% of all investments in the economy over the last X years have gone into AI.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#316

Post by jiggawatts »

josefritzishere wrote: post #39

So far LLMs seem to be a dead end technology. The work product is so poor that it can't effectively replace workers as advertised. If it was priced to margin it'd be more expensive than humans as well. It's objectively a failure.

OpenAI just solved a Millennium Prize Problem in a week.

The AIs are already beyond human capability in some areas, and will be beyond human in all areas within single-digit years.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#317

Post by ElProlactin »

deepwoods wrote: post #310
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.

I know you're joking/being facetious but they don't even need that many electricians for the ongoing maintenance. The major electrical work is front-loaded.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#318

Post by jongjong »

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 appreciate the question.

It kept getting slightly worse every year since I joined the workforce. My salary is 2x when I started 14 years ago but it buys less than half what it could back then. Most of it goes into rent. It's almost impossible to save. I was never given a salary increase even with excellent reviews of my work as a software developer. I even built a popular open source project with 6k stars on GitHub which was a lot back then but it didn't yield any good opportunities.

I only got increases by changing companies which I did at least 10 times over the last 14 years (a lot of contract jobs). I also changed countries several times. I only worked for one company which grew pretty well and got some shares as early employee but they're not liquid currently and maybe worth $150k USD tops but who knows where it will end up with AI disruption. Anyway I can't cash out.

I work non-stop, still working side projects nights and weekends. Feels like there are no opportunities at all and all media channels are full of bots so I can't promote my product. When I tried social media ads years ago, it felt like it was only shown to bots so I've been skeptical of this approach since (especially now with LLMs around). Also, the internet is full of fake products which claim to have similar features as my product but they don't actually deliver so my target customer grew distrusting of all small projects like mine, making it impossible to gain trust.

So yeah my work life sucks. I struggle to save. Can rarely go on holidays. Can't even take leave without raising eyebrows at work. Day job is more demanding, less fulfilling. I don't have much personal life because I work weekends. If I started talking about my career in detail, it just gets awful and Kafkaesque.

So it's pretty bad. I regret having hustled so hard. While others were out partying, I was working and improving myself through open source, now my open source work was scraped by AI and sold for a profit while I get zero opportunities from it and copyright laws which I based much of my career strategy around are being dismantled.

Also, there is another terrible thing that happened to me in my personal life but it's just bad luck. So I can't blame that on "the system." I appreciate improvements to medicine like another commenter also said but that's essentially the only improvement.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#319

Post by SoftTalker »

WalterBright wrote: post #279
SoftTalker wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I flew in piston airliners long ago. They fly low and slow, and barf bags are supplied for a reason (low altitude means lots of turbulence). Today's airliners fly high where the air is smooth, they've gotten very good at avoiding turbulent weather, and there are automated damping systems. The barf bags are still there, but I've never seen anyone use one. The cool thing about piston airliners, though, is the the engin…

I have flown in turboprops, which start just like a jet engine. Yes I bet the startup of a big Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp or Wright Cyclone, belching smoke and fire would have been something to see.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#320

Post by bdangubic »

ryandrake wrote: post #239
jurgenburgen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You would take those odds? 100x more deaths? I agree that AI _companies_ should be accountable for the software they produce but I’m not convinced you would go for a 90% chance of survival if you can choose 99.9%.

I guess if you're dead, then it ultimately doesn't matter if someone can be held accountable, although it might matter to your next-of-kin. But, yea, in general, it would take a huge (1000X or 10,000X) difference in expected outcome for me to trust something that is unaccountable . If the AI company was actually held accountable for its AI's mistakes, I'd definitely change my statement.

AI is a tool just like any other tool. Holding “AI” accountable is like holding JetBrains accountable for the bugs I wrote with their tool than endangered lives of people
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