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Global Intelligence Crisis

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Re: Global Intelligence Crisis

#191

Post by rfv6723 »

imtringued wrote: post #156
rfv6723 wrote: post #125

This scenario echoes the fatal flaw of 19th-century Marxist theory by assuming that surging productivity leads to a permanent reserve army of the unemployed and systemic collapse. Marx failed to foresee how the 20th-century economy would elastically adapt through the birth of a massive service sector that absorbed labor displaced by industrial automation. While this Global Intelligence Crisis assumes a rigid endgame…

>it ignores the historical reality that human desires are infinite This is factually false. Human desires are only infinite for things that have positive utility and cost nothing and by nothing I mean nothing. The moment you have to spend even a single second thinking whether you want to buy or not, demand collapses from infinite to finite by definition. This means people will accumulate infinite quantities of money,…

Reality might stop a transaction, but it cannot kill a drive. Sublimation reroutes our infinite hunger into the scientist’s obsession or the artist’s lifelong pursuit of beauty. These are not finite market choices. They are the redirection of a psychic energy that no physical object can ever satisfy.

This redirection is precisely what fuels the expansion of the global economy into realms far beyond basic survival. When a primal drive is blocked by the cost of a physical object, it sublimates into the high-end art market, the pursuit of scientific breakthroughs, or the infinite scroll of digital entertainment. Entire industries exist solely to harvest this redirected energy.

Re: Global Intelligence Crisis

#192

Post by davedx »

the__prestige wrote: post #135

Where do I even begin? Speed is unrealistic. It compresses a decade of enterprise adoption into 18 months. Organizations don't restructure at the speed of a demo. And if it were true, companies would also stop buying AI once their customers are broke and revenue is falling. The "rational firm" logic cuts both ways. "No new jobs" is asserted, not argued. It dismisses 200 years of counter-evidence in two sentences and…

Some slightly more structural-technical critique I thought of too--

Assumptions that I think warrant closer inspection:

- agents will always win vs antibot firewalls: highly doubtful given my experience with openclaw. Antibot measures are everywhere, they're advanced, and the more agents threaten legacy business models the harder they'll fight to protect them. Think e.g. Uber investing more in anti-bot tech to stop agents turning them into a whitelabel API. Think CloudFlare's recent moves in this area. Think Salesforce reducing access to Slack API. Data moats will be guarded more strongly.

- total cost of inference will be cheaper than the margin destruction caused by agents: inference is currently heavily subsidized. I have serious doubts "on device" inference will ever be reliable and competitive enough to be viable for running high capability agents (will they even be online enough?). What's the real cost of inference? Does Claude Code really cost $200/month at maximum utilization?

It indeed assumes steady state responses from all incumbents and governments while AI agents move at the speed of innovation. Not sure about that.

Re: Global Intelligence Crisis

#193

Post by nozzlegear »

jonwinstanley wrote: post #164
GeoAtreides wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AI makes everything cheaper, the purchasing power of remaining income rises hahaha, hilarious, imagine thinking prices will go down instead of companies just pocketing the difference >People don't optimize purchases like machines correct, machine optimize purchases like machines. that was the author point >Regulation would arrive fast. what regulation? "Stop using AI or you will get fined?" "Extra tax on AI companie…

Presumably price would reduce due to the ease of which people can spin up competitors?

I stan the spirit of the free market as much as any red-blooded American patriot, but we've seen time and again throughout history that competitors just get bought up or regulated out of existence by the established players. They don't actually compete.

Re: Global Intelligence Crisis

#194

Post by harambae »

malshe wrote: post #179

> A competent developer working with Claude Code or Codex could now replicate the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS product in weeks. Not perfectly or with every edge case handled, but well enough that the CIO reviewing a $500k annual renewal started asking the question “what if we just built this ourselves?” This has been repeated ad nauseam in the media without any bearing to reality. I'm not a software devel…

There’s also all sorts of audit logs and legal compliance and iso/nist/etc certifications required when setting that up for use in a large company.

Not sure about a startup, though, maybe they’d roll the dice.

Re: Global Intelligence Crisis

#195

Post by [deleted] »

vmg12 wrote: post #35
krackers wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to choose to buy your protein bar online from mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings, or just pick it up as part of your local grocery trip? > I still remember when people were scared to buy things on the internet People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body.

> mysteryBargainBar[.]com for a $1 savings The AI could also research which stores are reputable. > People still /are/ scared to buy things from Amazon for things that go on or in their body. Sure, there are also people scared of flying in airplanes, those must be a dud too going by your logic.

[deleted]

Re: Global Intelligence Crisis

#196

Post by ongytenes »

Reminds me of the story of Henry Ford, then an elderly man proudly showing off the first two robots on the assembly line to the representative of the automotive union.

To which the representative asked how many cars the robots will buy.

Re: Global Intelligence Crisis

#197

Post by triceratops »

lm28469 wrote: post #84
jstummbillig wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who actually stands to benefit from the massive devaluation of services in an economy that is buoyed by service-based roles? Everyone, if it comes with productivity gains. We will need good tools to distribute the gains.

None of the productivity increase of the last 50 years have benefited the workers, there is absolutely no reason for that to change Is everyone on this website 20 years old? They pulled the same shit with automation, with computers, with internet, with cryptos, and now with ai,... And people keep falling for the same bs over and over again. "the three day workweek", "we'll retire at 45", &c. https://www.epi.org/produ…

That's not strictly true. Lots of things got cheaper because of productivity increases - food, clothing, consumer goods to name a few. Housing, medical care, and education went in exactly the opposite direction.

Re: Global Intelligence Crisis

#199

Post by D-Coder »

lossyalgo wrote: post #124
joshuaheard wrote: post #117

Every time I read one of these doom and gloom pieces on AI/robotics, I think they are only describing the transition. After that, I think society will align with Musk's vision of AI/robotics freeing humans from work and scarcity. Then, humans will be able to focus on exploring the universe, scientific discovery, and artistic expression.

> freeing humans from work and scarcity How will that be possible if all wealth is held by a small group of ultra-rich individuals? Or do you think they will all simultaneously opt to distribute their wealth to everyone in some form of UBI?

All it takes is one ultra-rich individual to say, "I'm having my bots build a bot-building factory and giving them to everyone who wants a bot. For free (after all, bots are doing all the work!) Or a hundred bots, who cares. They're free, bots are doing all the work anyway."

Re: Global Intelligence Crisis

#200

Post by flux3125 »

stego-tech wrote: post #57
7777777phil wrote: post #36

If I understand this correctly, the whole chain depends on Phase 1 being right, that agentic coding makes SaaS replicable in weeks. We got a live test of that in February when Claude Cowork plugins wiped ~$2T off enterprise software. As I see it the market made a category error though, pricing Salesforce and ServiceNow the same when systems of record and systems of engagement have very different exposure: https://phi…

> but historical evidence Okay, I get that. Nobody is disputing historical evidence . What we're asking is, does the current pattern also fit historical evidence ? The answer a growing number of us seemingly reach is, no it does not, because generalized artificial intelligence is by definition able to replace general labor, and that includes future roles as well as current and prior ones . That's what I'm shaking, sc…

>(not some human labor, but all human labor)

I mean... I wouldn't exactly pay to have sex with Claude Code

Other than that, good points.

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