161–170 of 199 posts
Is not like Jane and John Doe are going to see any benefits from such an economic explosion. The wealth will trickle up, as always, the poor will be further exploited and discarded.
Economy is way too much growth, as inequality and inefficiency, pollution, and resource exaustion, being mainly based on finance and speculation and not on -real- economy, for the good of a very small part of humanity. Has to grow in this manner even more? And with the help of AI? If some rules are not changed and a more equality model is developed, there are no more world at all.
It's can't without an explosion of energy use. An explosion of economic activity will create an explosion of resource extraction and pollution. Since we are already going beyond many planetary boundaries we likely risk destroying organized human life because we destroyed our ecology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Suburbs Still the "American Dream" for a lot of people, and these copy/pasta McMansions are going up all over the place.
That's because they externalize their costs leading to high builder ROI.
The only thing that will happen under AI is jobs will continue to diminish, and eventually, society will hit a self-sustaining deflationary spiral, sometimes from a hyper-inflation whipsaw collapse, sometimes directly to deflation.
Economies can't move without purchasing power flowing from producer to consumer to producer.
I'd rather just have a world where people move a little slower, care less about efficiency, appreciate the smaller things in life, and stop forcing endless upgrades of every kind on everyone with new phones, new apps, soulless art, and new ways of doing things. But that's just me.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day. The reasons behind this are communication and training overheads. If AI leads to a world where people don't really have to know anything to do their jobs - just provide high-level judgements that LLMs seem farther away from than they are from…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14908283/hardest-wo...
Is not like Jane and John Doe are going to see any benefits from such an economic explosion. The wealth will trickle up, as always, the poor will be further exploited and discarded.
Innovation and efficiency gains also benefit consumers, provided there's any industry competition.
I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that. Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at…
My first reaction was, "But what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?" But then, without the AI, what if the bio people generate incorrect code and don't realize it? Can the AI be more accurate than a non-programmer? Probably; in fact arguably they already are. So I think I buy the parent's point. In fact, I think it's wider than biology. I bet there are a bunch of other fields wit…
"AI", and even robotics, are terrible at construction and maintenance. Most housing-related problems are in that category. It's not at all clear how LLM-type AI can help much. There are at least 18 humanoid robots on YouTube, but we don't see them doing much useful manipulation. That's the part that needs to scale up. That YC startup working on robotic construction equipment is a step in the right direction. But it's…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the capacity for the economy to create "bullshit work" (e.g. work which is engaged in zero sum "wealth defense") is unbounded. For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even let the bottom 50% retire early, society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital. This would probably only happen wi…
>This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market That's a seductive narrative, but not backed up by data. The share of GDP that goes to labor is has held relatively stable in the past few decades. It has admittedly fallen, but it's on the order of a few percentage points, whereas the GDP per capita more than tripled. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/…