311–320 of 1001 posts
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>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? What makes you think it's a simple system to develop at scale?
Cause it's developed. It's been a stable product for a decade. It's like having 10,000 construction workers on a completed building.
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The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work.
The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death .
I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle). What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. M…
Multiply those floors by number of Facebook campuses and generous remuneration, and Messenger was probably very profitable. Being a global 800-pound gorilla is a sweet gig, having tubes sucking money from most countries on earth and depositing it to dozens of campuses makes a lot of sense.
From Making Money (2007) by Terry Pratchett
> “Well, the problem is that, considered as a labor force, the golems are capable of doing the work per day of one hundred and twenty thousand men.”
> “Think of what they could do for the city!” said Mr. Cowslick of the Artificers’ Guild.
> “Well, yes. To begin with, they would put one hundred and twenty thousand men out of work,” said Hubert, “but that would only be the start. They do not require food, clothing or shelter. Most people spend their money on food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and, not least, taxes. What would these golems spend it on? The demand for many things would drop and further unemployment would result. You see, circulation is everything. The money goes around, creating wealth as it goes.”
AI slop article complaining about AI slop. 364 comments and 269 points. Are the comments here all bots, too?
Am I a bot?
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Does every business scale that way? Sure video games for example have only required more people and resources to develop games as the ability to create larger scale games have increased. But does that really apply to accounting? Not a rhetorical question.
Does it need to? 99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't. Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing... Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing... We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and…
Maybe like work in space tourism industry to Earth-Moon 5 Lagrange points.
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> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand. IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop.…
> It is possible to have excess productivity. The most productive places in the world are also those with the highest incomes and wealth generation. "Excess productivity" is either temporary or a sector-specific phenomenon, it doesn't apply to society as a whole.
> “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
The redundant professionals will need to find other ways of generating wealth from their productivity, and that may not be possible in a reasonable amount of time. Not in the scope of their remaining lifetime.
Absolutely slamming that upvote arrow. Someone finally put into an in-depth, well-read essay what I've been trying to argue on my blog, in HN comments, in-person for several years now. What they call the "Dead Economy Theory" I've taken to calling the "Anti-Human Economy", but it's basically the same thing: half-assed, milquetoast automations displacing human labor such that capital can continue to accrue upwards and…
Technological innovation is perhaps enhanced by capitalism**, but is not dependent on it or a result of it. Development would have happened anyway given current technological levels, just in a different form, and the race between states would have led to deployment, even if possibly slower deployment.
** There's an argument that Google hindered AI deployment for awhile because the CEO was worried about its effects.
If human labor becomes 'uneconomical', what will happen? Obviously a great deal of social upheaval. But human labor does not actually need to be as expensive as it is. How cheaply could you house, feed, and clothe people? There are parts of the world where people get by on very little income. Of course we could aspire to better living conditions than the world's poorest, but that's what the robot revolution promises:…