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After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

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Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#341

Post by selimthegrim »

nebula8804 wrote: post #272
ares623 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is assuming 300M people will take it willingly. Though to be honest with Trump at the helm they're already ~50% there.

>Though to be honest with Trump at the helm they're already ~50% there. Those people have never felt real pain. They may say they have but they haven't. If this article is real and the whole shitbox falls apart, I don't think even loyalty to Trump will stop these people from finally reckoning with reality.

This is written by somebody who’s never been to Louisiana and Mississippi. The saying in Russian that they never had it any good in the first place comes to mind. Where’s thriftwy when you need them?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#342

Post by [deleted] »

voidfunc wrote: post #302
CuriouslyC wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gavin Newsom has shown himself to be a savvy operator, I think he has a legitimate shot in 28 if there are free and fair elections. That caveat is pulling way too much weight here though.

While I'd support a Newsom run, I feel like he's never going to get strong support from the Progressive side of the party and they'll sink one of the few viable candidates. Also thats 2028.. 2026 midterms look grim.

[deleted]

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#343

Post by coderenegade »

mrcwinn wrote: post #316
coderenegade wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in capitalism suggests that consumers have to be human. In fact, the whole enshittification trend suggests that traditional consumers are less economically relevant than they've ever been.

So, okay, that’s interesting. Let’s play it out. Unilever buys a Facebook ad in hopes a robot will buy a razor and shave? And even if a robot needed to shave, what reason would a company have to pay it a wage where before it was only a capex?

More likely businesses than robots, but robots will consume on behalf of the business that owns them, same as currently happens with procurement.

If people don't have the money to pay for shavers, shavers either won't be made, or they'll be purchased and owned by businesses, and leased for some kind of servitude. I'm not sure what kind of repayment would work if AI and machines can replace humans for most labor. Maybe we're still in the equation, just heavily devalued because AI is faster and produces higher quality output.

Alternatively, government might have to provide those things, funded by taxes from businesses that own machines. I think, realistically, this is just a return to slavery by another name; it's illegal to own people as part of the means of production, but if you have a person analog that is just as good, the point becomes moot.

I think it gets scary if the government decides it no longer has a mandate to look after citizens. If we don't pay taxes, do we get representation?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#344

Post by rich_sasha »

WalterSear wrote: post #127
rjh29 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's going to pay to run those models? They are currently running at a huge loss.

Anthropic said their inference is cash positive. I would be very surprised if this isn't the norm.

I believe that, equally it's so unverifiable that it's a point of faith.

I'm not suggesting it's an outright lie, but rather it's easy to massage the costs to make it look true even if it isnt. Eg does GPU cost go into inference cost or not?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#345

Post by gsf_emergency_4 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #335
taurath wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this reads like someone's been inside the echo chamber too long. > For you AI skeptics, this is going to be rough to hear, but given the suffering that will occur if AI fails, I believe we have a moral imperative to make sure it succeeds. What if, and hear me out here, the prediction is that it will fail because it can't succeed. It hasn't proven it is capable of producing the results that would justify itself.…

I'm actually from a science, government and defense background, I've never worked in the valley. It might be possible that it can't succeed, but we don't know that and the evidence in terms of what happens if it fails is pretty compelling, so I think morality dictates we have to at least try, at least until we have more information or another path emerges.

The funny thing about disembodied superintelligence-- what if a collection of normal intelligences are fundamentally unable to extract net value from it?

The first example that comes to mind is OpenAI's Sebastian Bubeck (& others) giving underwhelming examples to illustrate that GPT has surpassed human mathematicians. Or earlier, when SamA says that he has seen things you wouldn't believe, whereas the top replicant in a proper sci-fi will at least be specific about the I-Beams.

Another parallel which you would be familiar with is nuclear power. Humans can plainly see it's an unworldly tech, but I'd say the value extracted so far has been a net negative-- mainly because our collective engineering chops are just too.. profane. And SamA/Musk/Thiel/Luckey just don't seem as wise as Rickover (who is the Rickover of our age? I think the Rickover pipeline is broken, tbh)

From my vantage point, I agree with you: China sees AI as less important as solar, so charitably, I'd say that Thiel's contrarian strategy is actually to get the Chinese so riled up they zuzwang themselves into providing the progress but keeping the whirlwind for themselves (so proving he has learnt the post-mimetic game from the atomics opening)

There could be another interesting post-mimetic line exploring how a hybrid chabuduo-"festina-lente" culture is required for developing supertech.. which.. only a Rickover can play

(I don't know if you're army or navy but there's this millenniums old cultural divide between a conservative army engineering culture -- that develops atomics -- and a progressive naval engineering culture -- that makes headway harnessing it. AI bulls smell like they are more aligned with land-forces

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#346

Post by [deleted] »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #201
grafmax wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not convinced the geopolitical rivalry between US and China is a given. To a large degree it’s been manufactured - Friday’s antics a case in point. The US indeed seems destined to fall behind due to decades of economic mismanagement under neoliberalism while China’s public investment has proved to be the wise choice. Yet this fact wounds the pride of many in the US, particularly its leaders, so it now lashes out i…

I think prior to Trump, Europe could have been mediator to a benevolent China. Now the hawks are ascendant in Beijing. Trump has shown that his ego pushes him to escalate to try and show others who the "big man" is, this will not end well with China, and I'm not sure he's wise enough to accept that. Do you really prefer brutal serfdom to the AI supremacy scenario? From where I sit, people have mixed (trending positiv…

[deleted]

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#347

Post by qgin »

qgin wrote: post #59
rjh29 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's going to pay to run those models? They are currently running at a huge loss.

The models get more efficient every year and consumer chips get more capable every year. A GPT-5 level model will be on every phone running locally in 5 years.

Why such a reaction to this statement? Is this not the track we're on?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#348

Post by coderenegade »

mrcwinn wrote: post #320
coderenegade wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in capitalism suggests that consumers have to be human. In fact, the whole enshittification trend suggests that traditional consumers are less economically relevant than they've ever been.

Actually you made me think of a fun scenario. A robot, who I will name Robort, over time becomes, say, 1/10th the price of human labor. But they do 10x the work quality and work 10x longer. In that scenario, you could pay them the same wage but produce significantly more economic value. The robot, who won’t care about material possessions or luxuries, could make purchases on behalf of a human - and that human, overwo…

Yeah, I meant more in the sense of businesses being the primary consumers for everything, but maybe you're right. In the same way that everyone owns a car today, maybe everyone will own one or more robots that do what they otherwise would have done, and get paid on their behalf. I think it's unlikely because machines are a lot more fungible than people, and I don't see businesses offloading ownership of the means of production in that way unless you're also covering hardware and running costs. You would also have to compete with very large corps that will almost certainly own vast worker capacity in the form of frontier ai and robots.

But that kind of gets back to my original point, which was that I think the vast majority of economic interaction will be business to business, not just in value (the way it is today) but also in volume. I.e. in the same way that everyone has a license, maybe every family also has a registered household business, for managing whatever assets they own. The time it takes for self hosted models to approach frontier model performance isn't huge, and maybe we see that filter in to households that are able to do decent work at a cheaper rate.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#349

Post by maxglute »

tim333 wrote: post #256
maxglute wrote: post #54

AI chips and bespoke data centers are closer to tulips than rail or fiber in terms of deprecated assets. They're not fungible stranded assets with long shelf life or room for improvment. Bubble bursting also points to current model towards AI is inherently not economically viable, i.e. we'll still be inferencing off existing models but won't be pouring 100billions into improving them. TLDR much more all or nothing ga…

The Dutch tulip industry is doing fine.

Not tulip mania fine.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#350

Post by throw234234234 »

mrcwinn wrote: post #34

Without moralizing or assuming the worst intentions of oligarchs, globalists, evil capitalists, and so on, I still don’t understand how a consumption based economy continues to fund the build out (oil->Saudi Arabia->LPs->OpenAI) when the technology likely removes the income of its consumers. Help me understand.

This one is easy. The new consumers will be capital holders, not wage holders as the bottleneck to production becomes energy, resources, land, capital, etc rather than labor. Capitalism rewards scarcity and inefficiency/bottlenecks via a higher price per unit (i.e. higher profits), the efficient at a macro level get optimized away -> value delivered can be negative correlated to price as supply overwhelms demand. You can see it already happening in economic statistics and if you think hard in general experience comparing to previous decades (e.g. previously it was the personal computer that was seen as the big market, now it is SaaS, B2B and high net work individuals). There are whole reports, and market commentary on this trend - it is a result of wealth inequality and firms trying to sell to the people that are left with capital and scarce required desired resources - this has been happening outside of the AI space as well. Rich people as a market size compared to others has only been growing, and AI should accelerate this trend.

Its a big reason why there is a decent possibility that AI is dystopian for the majority of poor to upper middle class people. There will still be a market for things that are scarce (i.e. not labor) but the other factors of productions such as land, resources, capital, etc. People derive more income/wealth from these will win in an AI world, people who rely on their skills/intelligence/etc will lose. Even with abundance; there's no reason to think you will have a share of that.

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