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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#371

Post by 5701652400 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #304

The former head of sales at Google once told me “we only focus on growth because you can only cut down 100% but you can grow 10,000%.” This always stuck with me and baffles me why we aren’t listening to that now. There is this bizarre math now where it’s for every person we cut the remaining with 5-10x with AI but I’m not seeing anything like that yet at all.

because in reality pie can grow only so much.

virtually all the resources from oil, food and land, IP and tech (semiconductors), even human capital, and advanced IT. everything is captured already. from free laisure entertainment minutes, to internet search, to social. every single resource is captured and you are stepping on somebody toes. worse, most industries are monopolies/or-close, meaning couple whales dominate everything, and nobody else really matters.

whatever "new" pie comes out, it is usually at expense of something else.

this "creation of pie" is such an illusion. go and try to "create a pie". it is such an illusion.

just go and try to even grow food out of earth with sunlight and water (which all should be free), yet farmers notoriously unprofitable and would not survive without government subsidies.

Re: The dead economy theory

#372

Post by manytimesaway »

Galanwe wrote: post #300
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…

I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money? 1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500. 2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game. 3) So you ha…

> You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game.

I don't understand the logic behind this.

Re: The dead economy theory

#373

Post by c-smile »

idiotsecant wrote: post #168
coffeemug wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future you're describing doesn't seem likely to me because in this event the public will force redistribution through political action.

No they won't, not if they have just enough bread and circuses and someone below them to hate. Boil the frog slowly enough and it'll work out just fine for the capital class.

Yep. Evolutionary way to get to communism where "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" [1]

[1] "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...", circa 1875

Re: The dead economy theory

#374

Post by riazrizvi »

There are two problems in the line of thinking being criticized here that weren't touched on. 1) When machines automate a previously human endeavor, we recalibrate our concept of what is granted by nature, and that stuff becomes commoditized and less interesting, focus moves to where automation is lacking. So all the stuff the AI takes over will just become a far smaller part of the economy which will reorient itself into wherever humans remain. Humanity is the constant unit of the economy, not amounts of work as we conceive of them today. That was always shifting. 2) There is no path to AGI (autonomous creative work) from LLMs today. LLMs are the result of the transformers paper solving the computational problem of applying RNNS to language. That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine. It was done on civilization's entire body of work. The next step, getting all the proprietary knowledge that ppl have that gives them an edge, a way to make a living, into some data form, and then creating a new computational architecture to assimilate that. How is that going to happen. You've got these efforts in China and Meta to get ppl to train machines replacements for ppl, but that's like starting at the dawn of the printing press or writing and saying, let's write down what we know. Not only is it going to take a looong time, it's a process that is at odds with itself. No-one is rewarding these ppl enough to put themselves out of a livelihood. So it's going to take a long time, and it's going to be filled with garbage, think a million Galen Ersos baking in flaws to the Death Star.

Re: The dead economy theory

#375

Post by hunterpayne »

Zigurd wrote: post #261
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…

DEC filled The Mill in Maynard and multiple huge office buildings along 495. How many people did it take to write code for the next version of VAX VMS?

An Operating System is far larger and more complex than Messenger.

Re: The dead economy theory

#376

Post by 5701652400 »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #83
alecco wrote: post #78

> Every investor presentation of an AI agent “doing the work of ten analysts” is telling you the same thing: the product is labor replacement. I have a solution for that. Let's use AI to replace all these corporations who just lost their big moats. Conveniently, they just laid off a bunch of people with all the critical know-how and I bet they are very willing to just give it up out of spite.

I’m not sure this is so true. Anthropic and OpenAI are both heavily hiring for humans in enterprise roles. Safe to say they are using AI as much as possible and they need humans too.

hiring people to eliminate people, literally

Re: The dead economy theory

#377

Post by 5701652400 »

beachWholesaleS wrote: post #217

Can someone point me to credible evidence/examples of productivity increases from AI spending, among non-ai providers? And if you'd bear with me, I'm asking for productivity in the sense of "accelerating the businesses pursuit of its existing goals" rather than quantity. I think that in most sane business's, output quantity bereft of output quality is utterly useless in said pursuit.

replace "AI" with automation, and look at any factory floor. or fields in agriculture. you do not need "study", just open your eyes and look around.

Re: The dead economy theory

#378

Post by TimByte »

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…

One difference though is that the agriculture transitions had somewhere for labor to go: factories, construction, urban services, export manufacturing, etc

Re: The dead economy theory

#379

Post by ako »

dangus wrote: post #188
daxfohl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and assuming local open AI models start catching up, which they seem to be doing, the foundation models' hold on society gets a lot slipperier. If there's a "what to do about all this" from an engineer's standpoint, pushing the needle toward local models, whether in research, agents, or just using them, understanding how they work, and advocating for them when it makes sense (which is more often than they get…

While I agree with you on open models getting better, I have been starting to see how the value, the reason you pay for Claude, isn’t in the models. For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was. A local model can’t do that for me…

OpenAI may be better positioned than you think with Codex being able to drive your applications without an API according to Nate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d9ZmA-4QzU&t=1093s

Re: The dead economy theory

#380

Post by 5701652400 »

ofcourseyoudo wrote: post #281

I think missing from the turns is when companies do AI layoffs, then realize they aren't as productive as they thought and have to rehire 70% of the people they let go.

layoffs.fyi does not show there is any significant rehiring. it is full-steam firing for years.
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