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What will our economic future look like?

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Re: What will our economic future look like?

#231

Post by SirYandi »

Droobfest wrote: post #153
treespace8 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like all automations it's not 100% perfect, and they all require a human to monitor them. Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves. Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.

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.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#232

Post by GlacierFox »

engeljohnb wrote: post #219
panarky wrote: post #216

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.

This isn't going to compute with the AI evangelists on here.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#233

Post by jurgenburgen »

ryandrake wrote: post #224
RigelKentaurus wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to say that I don't agree with you to an extent, but you should see AI-delivered healthcare numbers to human-delivered and make it a fair comparison. From Google: "Annual Deaths: Over 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medical errors made by healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses. Ranking: This figure positions medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, f…

The difference is that humans are at least supposed to be accountable for those 250,000 errors. Those humans can naturally care about doing a good job, or they can be motivated to care. They can fear consequences and take pride in avoiding mistakes. AI can do none of this, and cannot be held accountable for mistakes. I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1%…

> I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1% mistake rate that is totally unaccountable for its mistakes.

You would take those odds? 100x more deaths?

I agree that AI _companies_ should be accountable for the software they produce but I’m not convinced you would go for a 90% chance of survival if you can choose 99.9%.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#234

Post by ndarray »

Gud wrote: post #227
arrowleaf wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? Prices are market-driven in our society, not necessarily a function of labor costs. In the very long-term best case scenario, the increased profits going to the company from these efficiency gains may encourage more competitors to pop up, and either drive prices down or offer more for what you pay.

What do you mean, “our society”? How do you know we live in the same place. Perhaps where I live, efficiencies are to the benefits of everyone?

You live on Mars?

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#235

Post by greedo »

arrowleaf wrote: post #185
Gud wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will bring down the prices for nursing and allow more people who previously couldn't afford health care to afford it, theoretically.

No? Prices are market-driven in our society, not necessarily a function of labor costs. In the very long-term best case scenario, the increased profits going to the company from these efficiency gains may encourage more competitors to pop up, and either drive prices down or offer more for what you pay.

Healthcare costs (what I assume you mean by prices) are the least market-driven items in the US economy. And as much as the medical community would have you believe, the primary driver of costs are labor costs. If we had twice the number of doctors, PRNs, PAs, and nurses, their annual income would drop dramatically. But since they're constrained by a guild system, it's not going to happen.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#236

Post by boogieknite »

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…

have one coworker whose clearly lost some ability to think critically because of their overreliance, near obsession, with llm chats. slightly worried they might lose their job

another coworker seems to be early on a similar path but has made some comments about the former coworkers ability that makes me hopeful they dont end up the same way

feels like im talking about old high school friends on a drug path or something. its only anecdotes and i imagine the "perceived damage" is reversible. point is: i think youre onto something about the net effect and were going to have popular definitions for the negative encounters were anecdotally sharing

im a "user" but make Claude interact in an educational format and require sources on assertions. looking back, ive unintentionally cast it as The Librarian from Snow Crash, except if Hiro challenged it frequently. must have been natural after reading Snow Crash a few times. maybe im kidding myself but it feels like i havent lost a step. if im not deluding myself then i could see a world where elementary schools teach responsible llm use of to preserve cognition the same way we had to learn Google boolean search

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#237

Post by evenhash »

ozgung wrote: post #178
cman1444 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power. This is not necessarily a conclusion you can draw from that statement. It's possible that as the economic pie grows, workers' purchasing power increases compared to the counterfactual (a non-AI world), but their purchasing power does not increase as much as the capital owners' does.

Correct. But… According to data in the site and paper [0] labor income is estimated $20T for all four scenarios (including no AI) in 2030. Which means capital takes ALL of the new pie coming from AI. Also, I am not an economist but I assume if you are not growing as much as GDP, it basically means you’re shrinking. Relatively shrinking, but since everything is relative in an economy you are actually shrinking. Table…

I think that would only follow if the rest of the world’s purchasing power also grows at the same rate (unlikely), or if you were to cease all international trade (uhh…).

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#238

Post by utilize1808 »

zahlman wrote: post #193
utilize1808 wrote: post #157

A thought experiment: robot bees can do everything biological bees do --- pollination for the crops and making honey, but they are tireless and cheaper to maintain. Would beekeepers and farm owners still want to keep biological bees?

> robot bees can do everything biological bees do From the perspective of the beekeepers and farmers and their obligations, sure. But beyond the pollination, they wouldn't be participating in the ecosystem.

Now substitute bees with human workers. The problem is that the ecosystem, whatever that is, doesn't seem to need the extra human beings.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#239

Post by ryandrake »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #233
ryandrake wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that humans are at least supposed to be accountable for those 250,000 errors. Those humans can naturally care about doing a good job, or they can be motivated to care. They can fear consequences and take pride in avoiding mistakes. AI can do none of this, and cannot be held accountable for mistakes. I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1%…

> I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1% mistake rate that is totally unaccountable for its mistakes. You would take those odds? 100x more deaths? I agree that AI _companies_ should be accountable for the software they produce but I’m not convinced you would go for a 90% chance of survival if you can choose 99.9%.

I guess if you're dead, then it ultimately doesn't matter if someone can be held accountable, although it might matter to your next-of-kin.

But, yea, in general, it would take a huge (1000X or 10,000X) difference in expected outcome for me to trust something that is unaccountable. If the AI company was actually held accountable for its AI's mistakes, I'd definitely change my statement.

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