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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

#391

Post by underlipton »

scottyah wrote: post #311
underlipton wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm. And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; eve…

Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.

2 or 3 degrees of separation

If money is trickling down to you from FAANG, you're benefiting from their largesse - or, rather, being exploited by the control they have over your source of income, as both an individual and an business owner. FAANG throwing their weight around to force-underpay suppliers becomes the problem of the retail worker whose wages are paid by underpaid consumers. And so on.

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

#392

Post by repelsteeltje »

dag100 wrote: post #368
repelsteeltje wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Marc-Uwe Kling's Quality Land novel [1], the absence of purchasing power resulting from AIs having taken over, is mitigated by shopping robots buying random useless stuff. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Qualityland-Marc-Uwe-Kling/dp/1538732...

I feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.

You are right.

The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.

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

#393

Post by Balgair »

bloppe wrote: post #30

Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate sufficiently to be able to charge the kinds of premiums they need just to pay back their investors. Maybe, instead, we'll see something akin to the FOSS revolution, where large, high-quality, open training sets are developed to make sure there's always a fair…

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

#394

Post by ankaz »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #179
snikeris wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to read the whole thing to upvote it.

Does the first 1/5th or 1/4th of the article provide such a compelling case that one wants to stop reading it and return to upvote it? I certainly didn't think so.

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

#395

Post by mft_ »

IAmBroom wrote: post #350
mft_ wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ‘cost of living crisis’ that most people refer to is about food, clothing, fuel, electricity, gas. Much of this is driven by feudal corporate lords, and their gouging business choices. Some is driven by geopolitics. Issues with the affordability of for-profit healthcare is mostly an issue in the US, as far as first-world countries go. And the root cause there is decades of allowing money and big business to direc…

The current pricing crises with food, fuel, electricity, and gas are currently being driven 100% by America's Caligula and his party of elected senatorial horses. And specifically his tariffs, but more generally his inability to comprehend anything beyond self-gratification.

There's been a 'cost of living crisis' discussed in many countries --not just the US-- since roughly the end of the pandemic. For obvious reasons, there are other factors responsible for this - not just Trump.

Trump's recent foray into Iran has indeed hit fuel/gas prices, the supply chain of some regional goods, and will have a knock-on impact on other goods subsequently due to rising fuel costs. The impact of tariffs on consumers is largely confined to the US.

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

#396

Post by tunesmith »

swed420 wrote: post #389
tunesmith wrote: post #356

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 th…

Cool concept. Have you considered submitting a Show HN post?

haha. Nervous to. :)

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

#397

Post by jen20 »

paganel wrote: post #285
jen20 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That didn't really answer the question... However, using your phone does not make you terminally online. That is more of a mental state, and while some Europeans may be in it, my experience is that most are not.

> my experience is that most are not. As I said, my experience is totally the opposite, but I've started seeing that, i.e. the middle-classes trying to distance themselves from the internet (as present on their mobile phones), such as seeing that, i.e. being terminally online via one's mobile phone, as a "mental state". It wasn't a "mental state" when it was only the middle-classes who were doing it, back in the late…

"Terminally online" does not mean "uses the internet a lot".

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

#398

Post by manofmanysmiles »

pibaker wrote: post #225
CalRobert wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they're referring to the inability of small scale agriculture to produce as many calories per acre as our current food system, which also relies heavily on fossil-fuel based imports. Of course, we also have a lot of unnecessary (but tasty!) excess in our current food system too. I think the problem really becomes - what do you do when the current system becomes untenable? If the costs of a "basic" modern lif…

I appreciate the nuanced reply and yes, I do mean that you will not be able to produce as much food as you currently can nor will you be able to do so as reliably as we currently can. And while you might be able to do it in Ireland — one of the only countries in the world with less people than two hundred years ago — it will likely be impossible to the billions living in far more densely populated countries.

I think maybe there is a "frontier living" fantasy that is resting on the hidden assumption that you can bring your modern tech stack with you, minus the civilization that it relies on.

If I squint my eyes and imagine really hard, I can see living off the land, supported by small fusion reactors powering powerful AGI computer clusters, highly advanced 3D printers capable of producing all the physical support structure of life.

AGI + Power + Magic 3D printing and maybe one can live "off the land" with "civilization and all of human knowledge" hiding inside this portable tech stack.

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

#399

Post by bloppe »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #372
bloppe wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue…

My example is representative of EVERY person I grew up with that didn't come from generational wealth. I guess if their parents died when they were young of a fluke you would consider them lucky, but what's the average lifespan for someone in the area? Everyone I knew would rather have had the option to live/raise a family in their home town than inherit a million dollar home in their 50s after they had to start a ne…

A functioning economy is full of these tensions between people with divergent "desired end goals". Everybody wants high home prices when they want to sell but low home prices when their kids want to buy. Everybody wants low prices for things but high wages for people, even though those things are inversely correlated. I'd bet many of the parents you're talking about voted for NIMBY policies and cheered the tech industry's rise. Of course they would. If I'd owned a house in the bay, I'd have been pretty jazzed about it too.

I'm not pro-displacement. I'm pro-housing, which we need much more of in SF.

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

#400

Post by Timon3 »

TGower wrote: post #164
bluefirebrand wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems likely the path will be gradual and prosperous enough that we can handle the transition in a way that provides for everyone What are you talking about man, we don't even provide for everyone right now even though we actually could

Right now it is difficult for the average person to put themselves in the shoes of a homeless person. There are a litany of ready made excuses not to do so: "Oh it's the drugs", "They aren't even going to the shelter", "They must have mental illness", a variety of ways to say "I could never end up like that, if it was me I'd do better and pull myself out". These excuses evaporate in the face of a real automation wave…

One scary thought however is: once automation has progressed this far and there are enough mostly autonomous humanoid and/or military robots, what power does the suddenly jobless general population have against those who own and operate them, which will mostly be rich people - and the government, which is in many places made up of other rich people?

I'm not saying this is a likely scenario. But as far as I can tell, we will objectively be mostly at their mercy. And how merciful have they been over the last few decades?

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