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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#321

Post by ambicapter »

graemep wrote: post #265
Animats wrote: post #248

India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily. This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots…

The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work.

What's the point of this comment? It's just a basic fact that everyone agrees with that wasn't put into contention by parent comment.

Re: The dead economy theory

#322

Post by Terr_ »

analog31 wrote: post #238
rootusrootus wrote: post #226

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…

If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.

There is certainly room to add developers to a "simple" project if one is ensuring everything works with screen readers for the blind, that it had worldwide I18N support, meets every law around privacy and data jurisdiction, has systems for requesting personal copies/deletion, etc...

But instead it was probably for Messenger's portion of telemetry and marketing and ads and hacking out of your phones security model to spy on you. [0]

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas...

Re: The dead economy theory

#323

Post by gip »

ecommerceguy wrote: post #232

My 2 cents is in 3 years the inference products will be a commodity, extremely competitive with diminishing returns, seeing that the open weight models are getting so good and nearing par with sota. I feel 90% of sota for 10% of cost / compute is good enough for 80% of workloads. Question is, do we need all of this hardware? Are build outs going to get canceled. 4300 new data centers seems excessive. I personally hav…

Yes and this is in line with the idea that 99%+ of the value created by AI will be captured by the broader economy, not OpenAI and friends.

That being said, even local AI will still be displacing humans fast and it's not clear new jobs will be created fast enough. Regulations and policies will be needed imo.

Re: The dead economy theory

#327

Post by deepsun »

Animats wrote: post #248

India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily. This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots…

Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.

Re: The dead economy theory

#328

Post by rambojohnson »

wcfrobert wrote: post #299

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…

human dignity is not profitable.

Re: The dead economy theory

#329

Post by overfeed »

unreal37 wrote: post #307
bauerd wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> Cause it's developed

You can napkin-math this. How many different team-sized components do you think go into it? If the code were on GitHub, and all they had to do was just update dependencies below them in the stack, and bump the version number for components above them,how many Dependabot PRs would be opened per week for software that's "done"

Re: The dead economy theory

#330

Post by rambojohnson »

tomrod wrote: post #302
wcfrobert wrote: post #299

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…

Don't request for human dignity. Demand it!

But apparently the only acceptable way to demand basic human dignity and freedom is to stand politely in line with a ballot. I think we’ve reached a phase in society where the real call to action makes people uncomfortable. Nobody wants rubber bullets to the face.
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