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The dead economy theory

owenmcgrann.com

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Re: The dead economy theory

#41

Post by yyyk »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #15

this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money we can do…

The problem is that he relies on a dubious Acemoglu estimate, without realizing that at best it's temporary. AI will be better than humans in doing tasks (the qualifiers don't matter in the aggregate). Any jobs then would be bullshit jobs, and everyone will know it.

Re: The dead economy theory

#42

Post by pixl97 »

ismaelyws wrote: post #18
Miner49er wrote: post #3

> 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. For some companies yeah, but this is why companies are switching to consumption based pricing - so they can charge AI.…

Yep, if AI gutters the middleclass and small budinesses who you gonna sell to?

Why do economies need people? We look at the past and say 'People are labor', but what happens when people are no longer labor? Effectively people live on handouts from people that own AI, or the AI itself.

All those Greed is Good people are going to look kind of silly when a hand full of greedy people fight over everything and leave the rest of us for dead.

Re: The dead economy theory

#43

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

pacifi30 wrote: post #12

I think this is where government steps in for each country, go on the path of exploration that has no profit per se in it like space exploration, human body understanding. I am drawing parallel to 1930s or 40s where great depression was smoothen because America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects. Lastly, OpenAI and Anthropic or any other frontier labs needs to be nationalized because they become a…

> America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects

There was a certain other undertaking in those years that went a little beyond infrastructure.

Re: The dead economy theory

#44

Post by mrtesthah »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #15

this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money we can do…

https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...

Re: The dead economy theory

#45

Post by lurk2 »

foltik wrote: post #35
hexator wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not only is the premise wrong The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?

A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy. If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.

I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.

Re: The dead economy theory

#46

Post by fmbb »

rectang wrote: post #40
spongebobstoes wrote: post #15

this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs" not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money we can do…

> people need jobs to be happy The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.

Solution: take turns every other year.

Re: The dead economy theory

#47

Post by seizethecheese »

foltik wrote: post #35
hexator wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not only is the premise wrong The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?

A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy. If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.

We have a word for imagining a society with different sources of happiness: utopian. We generally don’t regard utopian musings as evidence of anything.

Re: The dead economy theory

#48

Post by wiseowise »

jmyeet wrote: post #36

Great piece. Just to pick out a few of many good points. > There is only one market that large: the global labor market. YEPPP. This has been my point. It is the only product for these AI companies: displacing labor and, by extension, suppressing wages. Profits over time tend to decrease (somebody should write a book about that) but we demand ever-increasing profits and growth so the only way to achieve that, ultimat…

> I couldn't agree more. We are on the verge of complete societal breakdown. And historically that's always ended violently (eg French revolution, Russian revolution) as a form of redistribution.

Don’t threaten with good time.

Re: The dead economy theory

#49

Post by pacifi30 »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #43
pacifi30 wrote: post #12

I think this is where government steps in for each country, go on the path of exploration that has no profit per se in it like space exploration, human body understanding. I am drawing parallel to 1930s or 40s where great depression was smoothen because America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects. Lastly, OpenAI and Anthropic or any other frontier labs needs to be nationalized because they become a…

> America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects There was a certain other undertaking in those years that went a little beyond infrastructure.

World war I and II in general?

Re: The dead economy theory

#50

Post by 3fff »

yyyk wrote: post #33

There are several good points there, but there are also several points where I must disagree. First, Acemoglu may have a Noble Prize (occasionally dubious data selection aside[0]), but even he does not pretend to have the information of a central planner nor does he think that central planning is good idea. If actual businesses, which have local information, believe AI helps them, I'll bet the actual businesses are m…

"Ultimately, we'll reach an economy which objectively does not need humans and everyone will know it. He needs to face that reality and overcome it, and not hide behind temporary and dubious estimates."

Who are you projecting your views with such force on others?

What have you achieved?

I bet you are nobody of substance.

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