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What will our economic future look like?

anthropic.com

371–380 of 395 posts

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#371

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…

It is systemic due to baumol

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#372

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…

Altman, Amodei, Pinchai etc can get together and just put a self imposed ban on themselves and ask the us government to sanction any entity/state attempting to use/release a Recursive Self improving model until the risks are well understood. This does not mean they can't keep developing it. But it would mean they do not release them to the general public or the public domain. The US government can continue to use and…

No worries. The US can totally just sanction China into giving up on AI research.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I think the apprehension can be summed with “good luck with that”

I could've sworn that malpractice insurance cost is viewed as one of the driver's of high health care costs, and that it's expensive precisely because medical lawsuit payouts are large...

Insurance and HMO CEOs salaries come from somewhere, and it’s not malpractice judgments.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#374
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how will this manifest itself!? like you envision a future where there will be say a hospital, ran by anthropic which is AI powered fully, no company behind it, just plain Claude running everything from the moment you walk in till you walk out? I am having a hard time imagining a future where “AI” isn’t just a tool that a given establishment decided to use much like anything else they use

> you envision a future where there will be say a hospital, ran by anthropic which is AI powered fully, no company behind it, just plain Claude running everything from the moment you walk in till you walk out Everything as much as possible, yes, and the company behind it will be an AI driven autonomous corporation as well. Although I suspect that by then there will be some industry specific AI model being used by hos…

You can bet that every major company CEO on the planet is creaming his jeans at the thought of AI doing every task (except their own) that they currently pay humans to do. Their ideal end state is that the company is themself, thousands of AIs and thousands of robots, zero payroll. Every one of them is dreaming of this.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> human lives are the cost of making the wrong decisions ... True. > ... AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker Non sequitur. Part 2 only follows from the Part 1 if you can demonstrate that AI makes more errors, or more severe errors, than humans in the identical situation. And for those situations, I agree with you. But there are already many situations where the AI is making fewer errors than humans, and for th…

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

Surely the only rational reason to care about liability is you get paid in the bad outcome.

Let's assume you get paid 0$ for AI mistakes -- no liability at all. Then your EV is roughly:

(AI accuracy - human accuracy) * (cost of accident) - (1 - human accuracy) * (human payout)

Now I don't know about you, but even with pretty big numbers on the human payout scale and relatively small differences, I would not accept 10 million (presumably paid to my next of kin) to die. Does lead to weird situations where I may prefer humans for minor medical procedures where I can take the risk -- but only in edge cases.

Or is there some weird punishment thing going on here?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think they meant the nurse would be responsible. The LLC would and should be fucked in that case.

Whether the company employs a human nurse or an AI, the company and not a human is indeed considered the responsible party.

The LLC might be fucked but it is not a flesh-and-blood person. There is no person responsible. Just a legal entity.

So nothing is changed. I think we're in agreement?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#377
post #243

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.

We won’t need teachers in ten years when the messiah’s of AI eliminate the need for real humans and their pesky needs for stupid things like..labor rights and human decency.

But we must continue because we’ll lose some sort of ideological Cold War with a country better positioned to win anyway. It’s all in the name of capitalism so the ends justify the needs.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#378
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…

Nurses do actually end up spending more time with patients, it's just that they spend more time with rich patients. The actual, tangible form this is taking right now is concierge medicine, home health aids, private practice, etc. My wife's (very good) ob-gyn had enough of working in institutionalized medicine where she's paid about what a L4 FANG engineer makes and pretty much has to follow the script that the healt…

This has a surprisingly easy solution: get rid of the rich. It's never, in the history of the world, been in anyone's favor, except the oligarchy, to privatize everything.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people who drive a car have no idea how an engine works. I know and agree it's a scary future, but I wonder if it's really _essential_ to understand things on a deeper level. Most people are quite capable of understanding higher-order ideas without fully grasping the underlying details too.

It is essential that _someone_ knows how that car works.

Maybe less than we might hope. Not only is the knowledge distributed over the hundreds of people involved in designing a car, there may be conventions/habits of design and manufacture whose purpose has become hazy but are nevertheless important, or details of a design iterated upon whose original motivation is less understood.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That tends to be true now as well for a variety of reasons. I'd be more interested in the cost then between both modes of travel.

Yes, in the USA Amtrak tends to be quite a bit more expensive than the equivalent trip by air. And far slower. Maybe excluding some of the east coast commuter routes.

Very different experience though. Fast and deeply uncomfortable vs long and chill. I'd prefer the latter when feasible but it obviously isn't always.
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