Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What will our economic future look like?

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 422 posts

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#391

Post by mikewarot »

Nowhere in any of the scenarios they let you model, do they consider the cost of computation for inference, nor training of new models. It may be that after the subsidies can no longer be offered, most AI use becomes cost prohibitive.

This would lead to a much, much smaller "total addressable market", rendering the massive AI build out into a rapidly depreciating asset that can't even be operated without a loss.

Even if the hardware was effectively free following a market crash, and bankruptcy sale, the power required to run it might be more expensive than the compute it generates is worth.

At which point, unlike dark fiber after the .com crash, all the hardware becomes scrap metal.

Now factor in the macro picture, in which this AI bubble is holding up the stock market, and by proxy, the US economy. I think we're in for Global Depression II, worse than 1929.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#392

Post by lbreakjai »

slopinthebag wrote: post #212
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it means you can pocket the cost-saving Right up until a competing hospital that charges substantially less for "close enough it doesn't matter" quality of service opens up in the same area? Or right up until an equivalent specialist sets up shop in the strip mall across the street from you, brings the GP in house and can see people in one visit. Oh, those things don't happen you say? From do-gooders regulating righ…

healthcare is one of the most highly regulated and state-controlled industries on the planet. surely that has nothing to do with it though. must be those damn capitalists!

We should remove the red tape and let Joe down the street operate, that will surely fix everything.

It has to be the regulation, not the parasitic layer of health insurance racket in the middle.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#393

Post by Ekaros »

fhejfnenjdcn wrote: post #356
NickHirras wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the sections is: A profound economic transformation In the extreme scenario, AI is more productive than humans at the vast majority of knowledge-work tasks. It does nearly all of them autonomously, and it creates essentially no new knowledge tasks for people. This scenario would likely require recursively self-improving AI, adopted quickly for knowledge work. As AI diffuses, annual GDP growth rates reach 15% a…

Mass automation will be disastrous for GDP in service economies. Service economies exist to provide services to other people who also provide services. If the services themselves get automated, you don't need that massive inefficient system to support service-providing workers anymore. GDP goes to zero.

I believe lot of "service" jobs are fundamentally make up work. Or not actually productive. Just there because it can be afforded. Or someone decided that it is "needed". Some amount of it produces net negative value. Some neutral and lot probably value we could even manage without it. Actual productive value is probably not that big part.

Now replace all that and you still produce same overall. Not more actual physical stuff.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#394

Post by leonidasrup »

AuthAuth wrote: post #268
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

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.

"Capital stands as one of the most influential and controversial books ever written. Its legacy is multifaceted, shaping intellectual discourse, political movements, and the historical trajectory of the 20th and 21st centuries."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital#Legacy

My hypothesis is that if you go full socialism, you get stagnation, because no one is motivated to change anything. If you go full capitalism, you get Gilded Age, where wealth and political power is concentrated in the hands of few individuals, followed by Great Depression.

Healthy state is in the middle.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#395

Post by pezezin »

chessucation wrote: post #362
pezezin wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

these days, i think most tasks come with significant administrative overhead as insurance companies want everything documented (and hospitals need to itemize everything to bill it). i looked at very similar data as anthropic (was a bit amusing to look at these side by side) with physical tasks being part of the equation much more prominently (across all jobs). if you're interested: https://largelabormodel.com/mirror?…

Not every country is like the US. My country has a public healthcare system; I never needed private insurance and never had to pay for a visit to the doctor.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#396

Post by kqr »

dismalaf wrote: post #385
bmitc wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Making everyone poor never made the world better.

Aren't "not rich" and "poor" very different things?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#397

Post by nixon_why69 »

WalterBright wrote: post #384
nixon_why69 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard oil is the textbook example of an abusive monopoly and was broken up for that reason. They improved efficiency by cutting exclusive deals with railroads and transport companies due to their size which froze out every other company.

Cutting consumer prices by 70% is not "abusive". SO's market share never exceeded 90% and it declined during the years of the anti-trust trial. By cutting launch prices 90%, is SpaceX also an abusive monopoly?

Defending standard oil is an all-timer hot take. They only had 90% market share? In a commodity?

SpaceX isn't a monopoly because they have domestic and international competition. Before they showed up, ULA was a deliberately constructed monopoly because Boeing and Lockheed didn't want to compete.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#398

Post by dgellow »

WalterBright wrote: post #289
dgellow wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare is indeed the poster child for inelastic demand

Not true. For every medical condition, there are a very large number of treatment options, with a wide variety of efficacy, pain, and cost. For example, I bet you could enumerate plenty of weight loss options off the top of your head.

Let me know where I can find all that competition for surgery

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#399

Post by alok-g »

ggreer wrote: post #99
analog31 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raw material cost of labor is subsistence. Adam Smith pointed this out.

If you have machines that substitute for human labor, wages fall to the cost of manufacturing & running the machines, which is well below human subsistence level. Fortunately, you also get very high economic growth rates. So even people with small amounts of money invested will end up far richer than when they had a job. Then the question becomes, "What happens to people when machines are far more intelligent & power…

I would like to understand this more.

What leads to 'very high economic growth rates'?

Thanks.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#400

Post by bloppe »

bmitc wrote: post #378
nostrademons wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How about just abolish poverty, so everyone is rich
Post reply on HN