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Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

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Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#291

Post by Quekid5 »

intended wrote: post #250
rogerrogerr wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency. My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome. Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t…

IMO - Money will NEVER stops making sense. Money is a cheap way to translate unlike objects. Cows to art, labor to goods. Green to triangle. Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.

In a word: it's fungible[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#292

Post by culi »

nemomarx wrote: post #157
MountDoom wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos is a 0.0001-percenter. Most of people on HN are probably in the top 1% to 5%. You're in the top 10% in the US if you make $170k/yr.

are most people on HN making 170? I feel a bit less privileged now.

It's extremely regional. I was at 160 after less than 5 years in the industry. In the Bay Area, that still put me in the bottom 10% for tech workers

https://www.levels.fyi/heatmap/

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#293

Post by smj-edison »

robotresearcher wrote: post #76
baobun wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writing is a mandatory part of the learning process. Outsourcing it to tools is skipping and cheating. Nothing new here. It was the same when the tool was your buddy or upwork before LLMs. Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools", either.

The sad difference that makes a difference is that banning graphing calculators from proctored exams is enforceable in practice. Appealing to honor is a partial solution at best. Cheating is a problem at West Point, let alone the majority of places with a less disciplined culture. It's sad, but true. The fact that you and I would never cheat on exams simply does not generalize. https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-arm…

Time to crack out the faraday cage!

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#294

Post by padjo »

blast wrote: post #29

He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.

And what were the societal benefits of the internet?

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#295

Post by gyomu »

brookst wrote: post #121
akagusu wrote: post #97

The big question is what "society" he is talking about? Is it the "society" that includes all people, or the "society" that includes only rich people?

Which of those did the Internet benefit?

Would you rather be a 22 year old starting in life in 2025 or 1995? Unless you pick one of the few countries that underwent a drastic change of regime in that time, the answer’s pretty clear to me.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#296

Post by jaggederest »

intended wrote: post #290
jaggederest wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> partially piped to consumers, and partially piped to owners. Or, the returns on capital exceed the rate of economic growth (r > g), if you like Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century . One of the central points is about how productivity and growth gains increasingly accrue to capital rather than labor, leading to capital accumulation and asset inflation.

Yep, that’s the source of the point. The effort is in finding a way to make it easy to convey. Communication of an idea is almost as critical as its verification now.

I just need to read it one of these days. I keep reading parts of it but never sitting down with it.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#297

Post by scotty79 »

intended wrote: post #250
rogerrogerr wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency. My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome. Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t…

IMO - Money will NEVER stops making sense. Money is a cheap way to translate unlike objects. Cows to art, labor to goods. Green to triangle. Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.

> Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a needed lubricant for transactions.

So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for transactions.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#298

Post by padjo »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #164
mxschumacher wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have to say I'm a little disgusted by these statements. LLMs are useful for many problems, but is there really a conceivable path of them making progress into fighting the countless cancers tormenting humanity?

My framing device: if you had LLMs in the 1500s, how would that help Copernicus determine the orbits of the planets? Maybe through dumb chance, but creating a well reasoned model of the universe required new observations and the ability to interpret the data from a different point of view.

More likely the LLM would condescendingly tell him that he was wrong and that the earth was clearly at the centre of the universe.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#299

Post by scotty79 »

majormajor wrote: post #217
rogerrogerr wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency. My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome. Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t…

What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency? People would still want to be able to trade with lower friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having the current money around the whole time? -- The general limiting factor with the "one person controls the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they would rapidly los…

> What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of money as currency?

Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for something else will be used to make some amount of bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for their energy so that they give you their energy, instead of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.

Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits

#300

Post by delusional »

lukan wrote: post #277
delusional wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poor will always have the only thing the rich want. Labor. Without labor Trump cannot slather the white house in gold. Without labor Zuck cannot smoke meats. Without labor Musk cannot troll people on X. The rich do not want anything you have, they want you. Body and soul.

Robots can take most of the jobs, but the feeling of power over other humans they likely cannot replace.

> Robots can take most of the jobs

Not in our lifetimes and certainly not in our form of society. Robots will only drive down the price of labor. People will always be able to supply labor at costs below the price of materials for robots.

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