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The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

danielhomola.com

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Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#351

Post by vessenes »

bayeslaw wrote: post #345
vessenes wrote: post #247

Interesting points, made in florid style. I'd make the point a little differently, though -- in the next n years, you want to be on the side of capital. Labor is in for a really tough time. Missing from Daniel's analysis is total economic output, and I think this really matters -- when we think of Optimus launched and at scale, do we think of total GDP growing, shrinking, being stable? A lot of what someone thinks ab…

Hey thanks for reading and for leaving a considered comment. You might be right, we'll see. In my mind, GDP growing isn't really that reassuring: 1/ GDP has been growing steadily while people's happiness and overall satisfaction is flat lined or finishing (so even if this was true it won't lead to better lives lived at scale) 2/ it's more interesting to look at the ratio of labour wages / GDP. I actually make a predi…

Back at you! Writing's always work, especially with cool graphs.

1 - Agree this is true for real-earning-loss countries, recently. (as in last n decades)

2 - I agree this will keep shrinking. I moderately disagree with the 'comparative happiness' assessment.

It's that second bit that I think is an important prior for you to mention - there's an old (sexist, outdated, etc.) riddle: "A woman lives on Park Avenue and her husband makes $500k a year as a lawyer. She's miserable. Why?" Answer: "Her neighbour's husband makes $2mm."

I agree humans covet. On the other hand, there are real non-GDP type considerations for human happiness and comfort - for instance, I would guess nearly any French peasant in the 1820s would switch lives with 90% of western world residents. Maybe more. The peasantry in the early 19th century was, by population the vast majority. You can get at a lot of non-GDP quality of life benefits that genuinely impact people: anesthesia during surgery, GPS, air flight, ...

So, I propose generally humans want to be doing better than they used to, personally, and at least as well as their neighbors -- and if that's okay, they are historically totally fine with a ruling class, and susceptible to messaging that the ruling class is the ruling class for good reason. If they are doing less well than they used to, we have real problems.

To my mind if robots bring us bread and circuses, we'll have stability. (And super-wealth accumulation for capital). If robots bring us 40% unemployment, we'll have revolution. The funny thing is, those two outcomes are really just about social decisions by governments. So, I think we'll see a few different takes on this; over one hundred years, I think humans are going to figure this out. In the interim, we are likely going to see two early hot takes: US and China, and probably really different takes on how robots and AI can fill out the social contract.

Put another way - if we are headed to post-scarcity, what do we want to do with the excess?

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#352

Post by willis936 »

dahfizz wrote: post #310
willis936 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median is obviously flawed here. What should be looked at is wealth distribution. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and anyone with any power is doing their best to accelerate this trend. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

No, the poor are also getting richer: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107 You're looking at what percent of the total wealth pie do the poor get. But the pie itself is growing, and so is _everyones_ slice of the pie. Maybe you think its an inherent problem that some people get a bigger percent of the pie than others. But its objectively untrue to say that the poor are getting poorer.

That stat is not real income. The dollars don't matter if they buy less.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#353

Post by tren_hard »

pastel8739 wrote: post #121
sdenton4 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are ai and robots other than excess labor, waiting to be allocated? Why does the wealth have to come from the meat bags?

Who is going to buy the stuff that the AI and robots produce, then? What will the point be of producing all this stuff?

Why wouldn’t an advanced AGI robot, trained on human behavior, not want their own house and mode of transportation? Sure it’s basically kayfabe for them to ‘want’ the stuff we do but if we’re following the script of who will buy all the stuff, then the answer will be the robots I guess.

You think housing market are tough now, wait until you’re competing with 5 robot families who all have jobs you used to do.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#354

Post by willis936 »

bloppe wrote: post #331
willis936 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median is obviously flawed here. What should be looked at is wealth distribution. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and anyone with any power is doing their best to accelerate this trend. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

Actually, median is exactly what you want. It strips out outliers. It's the "middle of the pack" person. Mean is the one that would be skewed by outliers. And "the poor are getting poorer" is simply untrue for the last 10 years. They had a pretty bad time from 1980 - 2015, but in the last 10 years, their real income has risen faster than any other quintile: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wages-over-t…

Median says very little about distribution and says almost nothing about how the tails are doing (which are real people that are easily ignored).

That page breaks about a second after loading. It's enough time to see the graphic, but not enough to see the methodology for data collection. Can you share how that data is collected? Afaik government sources do not track real income distribution.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#355

Post by bayeslaw »

7777777phil wrote: post #55

The sims are really well done, the dynasty simulator especially. You can actually stress-test the argument instead of just nodding along. Appreciate the craft. I have issues with the economics though. The income model is calibrated from three separate literatures that were never estimated together. Different samples, different decades, different identification strategies. Then the big move, βIQ drops to 0.10, βW jump…

Thanks for the detailed reply, really appreciate it!

Re post agi world and coefficients: yupp totally agree. This isn't proper modelling. I just wanted something I can play around with to test my intuitions.

Re Jevons: ok let's say that latent demand is freed up. It's bounded by human purchasing power and the rate at which humans can actually consume the output.

Re programmer jobs, point taken, thanks for the clarification, I'll actually look this up properly. However there is other evidence suggesting that not all is well either https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...

Thanks again for reading!

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#356

Post by tunesmith »

The article says it's from first principles and looks pretty deep, and I didn't have the time to exhaustively read it myself, so I used my side project concludia to try and analyze and graph the argument... you can see the argument graph here if you're interested in that kind of thing.

https://concludia.org/step/6f3cbaa2-65d4-3c44-8c1f-23f6ddf2b...

Reading the thread below, I'm always curious where in the argument the various counterpoints would attach. Like if a counterpoint is fatal or just an offshoot. I didn't have the system try and semantically analyze it for flaws/counterpoints yet, I just tried to get it to depict the article's reasoning. Not sure yet how good a job it did.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#357

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bix6 wrote: post #347
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how much the American health care system sucks. But I have looked into a high deductible health care plan on the exchange for myself and my wife - both over 50 to calculate how much we would need to survive a month of unemployment. It was around $1000/mo with no subsidies for a bronze plan.

You think regular Americans have the money to afford high deductible plans? One ER visit bankrupts people.

High deductible plans max out at around $10K deductible. But it’s the same cost in my experience low deductible vs high deductible + HSA contribution.

The difference being that if you don’t need to use your HSA in a year you keep it - unlike low deductible plans.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#358

Post by OkayPhysicist »

monknomo wrote: post #251
Nevermark wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn’t an alternative to allocating resources with money because money is a just measure of value. Things will get valued, relative to each other. Because different things are harder to make, or needed more. And it’s a whole lot better to measure that and make decisions informed than to not measure properly, or ignore those measurements, and watch resources get misdirected in a way that shrinks the economy. You…

I think this is a good way of thinking, and it suggests that breaking up large clumps of money and resources is a reasonable way forward

The problem is currency is inherently clumpy. While value is always judged and assigned to things, the existence of a static, cumulative ledger of it is not a requirement.

It doesn't take a lot to recreate the capitalism to feudalism pipeline. If you have currency, small imbalances in resources and needs compound over time, creating imbalances in wealth. Imbalances in wealth provide the opportunity to leverage that imbalance for further wealth by way of rentseeking. Wealth provides power which provides more wealth and more power. Eventually your landlords drop the "land" prefix and simply become nobility.

Prior to the invention of currency, we had reputation economies. One might be tempted to model such economies as just money economies with implicit ledgers, but that isn't how reputation works in the real world. Being implicit, reputation captures a lot of activity that doesn't warrant an overt exchange of currency. Think of all the things that you appreciate, and make you value a relationship with someone more, that would be terribly inappropriate to pay them for: the friendly guy at the pub who tells you stories of questionable accuracy, a fellow parent watching your kid during a playdate, anything in the romantic sphere at all. Reputation also doesn't add up in anything close to a linear way: The guy who did something really big once and the guy who did something small with extreme regularly over a long period of time both likely have stronger ties with others in their community than the one who sporadically provided middling value. Reputation also isn't particularly inheritable: I might feel some obligation to someone's kid because of my relationship with their father, but that obligation fades rapidly as they entire adulthood, and nobody owes you shit for who your grandfather was. Likewise, gifts from someone who has an embarrassment of excess are valued much less than the same thing offered by someone who has barely enough.

All told, reputation economies act as a damping function on wealth and power accumulation, whereas currency economies provide positive feedback on the same.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#359

Post by MattGrommes »

bspammer wrote: post #33
dankai wrote: post #2

I resubmitted this because somebody flagged the original submission for unclear reasons and it had quite a lot of upvotes in a short time. Perhaps some people are offended by this argument, but it's definitely worthy of a discussion instead of censorship.

It's because it's AI written with all the usual over-the-top grandeur and a ridiculous number of negative parallelisms. > No regression. No noise. Just compounding. > the transition is measured in years, not decades. > not by decree, but by ruthless compounding. I'm not interested in what an LLM thinks about the social implications of LLMs.

This isn't really on you but the problem I have with comments like this is that I think most people write poorly so I can't tell if those are LLM artifacts or LinkedIn-speak artifacts. I need better heuristics for these things.

Re: The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

#360

Post by dag100 »

9rx wrote: post #291
anigbrowl wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, they have effectively given away $50 billion dollars worth of stuff away for free and have shown no signs of wanting to stop. What are you talking about? Is this some dramatic way of saying you think some of their products are underpriced relative to their specifications?

I am, of course, referring to the IOUs (a.k.a. cash) they famously are sitting on, and have been sitting on for decades. Technically they can call the debt at any time, but what does average Joe have to give that Apple would want? If there was something appealing they'd have done it already. In reality there is nothing and it will sit there forevermore and the consumers on the other side of the transaction ultimately…

By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide).

And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.

Apple is not giving away something for free; rather, they are losing possible future gains from immediately putting the cash to work.

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