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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?

#431

Post by fhejfnenjdcn »

Ekaros wrote: post #393
fhejfnenjdcn wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 physi…

I agree, but as long as we're measuring GDP, it's catastrophic.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#432

Post by hawski »

nickpp wrote: post #409
kqr wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most people's definition of rich is "one dollar more than I have". Just look at laptop class's hate on the 1 percenters - which actually includes them.

What is "laptop class"?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#433

Post by munksbeer »

tancop wrote: post #425
Toutouxc wrote: post #28

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…

- Attention spans are overrated. I know that because I have a pretty short one to the point it's annoying for others. It measures how much you're willing to focus on something you don't want more than the ability to focus on something you do want, like writing this reply. Losing that is a sign that people are tired of boring jobs and badly designed school work and old forms of entertainment that are only alive becaus…

> If tests are hard enough and have unlimited retakes, kids will learn that practice is worth it and do it with way more focus than if it was forced.

Wow, I haven't thought deeply since seeing this comment, but on the surface this is actually a really nice idea.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#434

Post by pvab3 »

bradfa wrote: post #344
pvab3 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hand written exams are coming back into fashion. You get a pencil and the exam book. Nothing else. Show your work. Catching cheaters is still hard but it will keep honest people more honest.

But if I were struggling with an assignment, stuck on a problem, I would have turned to AI after a few minutes of trying to figure it out, and thus lost out on the actual character-forming and memory-building aspects of college assignments.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#436

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

WalterBright wrote: post #275
JeremyNT wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If their productivity fantasies are real, the precarious (and already very anti-worker) balance between capital and labor immediately disintegrates. Serious solutions to this would look like nationalizing tech companies, mandating shorter work weeks, seizing the assets of the oligarchs and redistributing them. Not... letting the invisible hand of the market sort it all out.

The industries with the highest costs - health care, housing, education - are the industries most heavily interfered with by the government. The industry with an absence of government interference, software, has seen prices drop to zero.

Apples and oranges. You cannot allow certain vital services to be run profit driven, when you care about the quality of that service. Thats a nobrainer to me, because nobrain makes purchase descisions too.

The IT sector in general doesnt deal with comparably vital services and is due to its immaterial nature much more competive. Driving costs to zero/minimum is a logical outcome of healthy free markets, which is a direct contradiction to profit driven enterprise. That is why Peter Tiel hates competition and my profit margins for eg, grocerie stores (healthy localized market) are quite low. The only way to satisfy the fiscal pressure, baked into the system and upheld by propaganda, of "get more or loose", is to cut spending/quality in such a market. And the only way to prevent that are institutions above the free markets slowly failing to deliver.

This "slowly failing to deliver" is imo a key characteristic of late stage capitalism and i can see it everywhere (you too?). BC. in financialized economies, the incentive is elsewhere, than maintaining rural infra, "health care, housing, education".

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#437

Post by bradishungry »

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…

What is obvious about that? What jobs are being created long term that can be filled by those displaced? To me it seems like even jobs that are not knowledge jobs are going to utilize ai to cut hiring, not grow it

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#438

Post by krapp »

bdangubic wrote: post #428
krapp wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I do not disagree but I also do not see how, without liability for its action, would a business have customers. Surely there are idiots but if someone put up a sign in front of the hospital like "we are not liable for anything that happens inside these walls" I will venture a guess that business will suffer. This will also open up business opportunities for other businesses to jump in with "we stand by what we do, yo…

I'm not pitching it per se, I'm just claiming that's what I think the endgame for AI is. Corporations (especially in the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance fields) are already masters at avoiding legal liability. What are you [royal] going to do, bleed to death in the streets? Not get your insulin or heart medication? What decisions are you going to make when every company does the same thing? Get your chemo from a shaman? People already put up with massive cruelty and corruption from the medical industry, they would roll over for this as well.

I can even see it being sold as part of healthcare reform. After all, we don't trust doctors anymore, we don't trust science, surely AI would be more fair, more rational and ethical. AI can't be paid off by big pharma to push pills you don't need. AI doesn't care what race or gender you are. AI doesn't get exhausted after a 24 hour rotation. Costs would go down, quality would go up. That would be the pitch anyway. The rest would be in the fine print, not a sign in front of the hospital.

I don't want to live in that world, but I can see a path to it from where we are now. I think some kind of legal personhood for AI as a pretense to apply legal liability to AI is inevitable.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#439

Post by d3dd »

WalterBright wrote: post #288
d3dd wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"while the factory owners kept all profits from the gains in productivity." Because this is what drives continual risk-capital.. very few countries are willing to upset this. Get over it man - I hate hardended capitalists but stop crying. This is the system we have. Wanna beat it? Go ahead and start a firm. Then you'll find out how tough it is. The thing I cant get over is enough software engineering folks collective…

> I will find out for myself how much of a backbone software engineers etc have when I employ them. You're in for a rude awakening.

Am I?

I’ve worked with them and did a comp sci degree years ago. I’ve got enough exposure.

However I want to see given what is happening in the world now - are they still weak and feeble?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#440

Post by juvvel »

jryan49 wrote: post #368
jiggawatts wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's probably a good idea to note that it cost them 10-15 million dollars in tokens to do so.

Imagine what human researchers could have done with 10 millions... Maybe it wouldn't have been as fast, but I'm sure it would have created more usable knowledge because the work done by humans is usually more digestible to other humans.
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