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What will our economic future look like?

anthropic.com

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Re: What will our economic future look like?

#451

Post by xg15 »

JacobiX wrote: post #20

> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases. This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "grea…

Yeah, this whole blog was repeating the old fairy tale narrative of automation "if we automate the work then workers will have sooo much more time!"

I'm surprised they expect people to still believe that stuff.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#452

Post by bmitc »

dismalaf wrote: post #385
bmitc wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has a surprisingly easy solution: get rid of the rich. It's never, in the history of the world, been in anyone's favor, except the oligarchy, to privatize everything.

Making everyone poor never made the world better.

Getting rid of the rich by taxing them and getting rid of legal and financial loopholes that allows them to operate outside of the system with absolutely no contributions back does not make everyone poor. In fact, it's the complete opposite.

Reducing wealth inequality is not the same thing as making everyone poor. And you know that.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#453

Post by beepbopboopp »

Toutouxc wrote: post #28

I like how the least optimistic scenario is simply LLMs not making a difference, instead of the very real possibility of them damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality and leading to class wars. I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start mak…

I mean, this clearly a technology change. Would you have stopped the printing press because young people got worse at verbally telling the ancient stories? Or when kids stopped understanding what a card catologe was?

We are in the middle of a major change and it very well could be net negative, but for the most part history just keeps marching and its fine, just different.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#454

Post by bmitc »

goodpoint wrote: post #421
bmitc wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has a surprisingly easy solution: get rid of the rich. It's never, in the history of the world, been in anyone's favor, except the oligarchy, to privatize everything.

It happens in cycles throughout history: inequality increases until it reaches a breaking point.

That is indeed the concern, to avoid that breaking point by preemptively taking care of business.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#456

Post by rozap »

dgellow wrote: post #126
Hansappreciator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren't genuine studies, but are instead marketing materials that resemble studies.

I’m aware, but we can still discuss them seriously

It's hard to discuss things seriously when the arguments are comically bad. This whole marketing piece leaves out anything beyond the first order effects, no mention of any sort of class upheaval, no black swan events. All the projections are up and to the right, there isn't even a low confidence scenario where things go poorly. It's hard to discuss an such a deeply unserious thing seriously.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#457

Post by ggreer »

alok-g wrote: post #399
ggreer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have machines that substitute for human labor, wages fall to the cost of manufacturing & running the machines, which is well below human subsistence level. Fortunately, you also get very high economic growth rates. So even people with small amounts of money invested will end up far richer than when they had a job. Then the question becomes, "What happens to people when machines are far more intelligent & power…

I would like to understand this more. What leads to 'very high economic growth rates'? Thanks.

An economy needs people and stuff. Productive people take a long time to make. We can make stuff in factories really quickly, but most stuff quickly hits diminishing returns. For example, a worker with two laptops won't be twice as productive as a worker with one laptop. Right now, developed economies mostly grow through innovation. We make better stuff. But if there are substitutes for people that can be mass produced in factories, then you can grow the economy very quickly without increasing the number of people.

Average wealth per person would skyrocket in such a scenario, though of course individuals will vary greatly in how much wealth they accumulate in this sort of takeoff. But if the economy doubles every year, even a small investment (of one year's wages) would be enough to live off of indefinitely. Likewise, governments will vary greatly in how much they tax & redistribute the wealth of their citizens.

After a decade of such doublings, it's hard to say what the world would look like. A 1024x increase in wealth would be more than the difference between us and hunter-gatherer tribes. And all of this assumes that AI will be benevolent.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#459

Post by jurgenburgen »

krapp wrote: post #438
bdangubic wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not disagree but I also do not see how, without liability for its action, would a business have customers. Surely there are idiots but if someone put up a sign in front of the hospital like "we are not liable for anything that happens inside these walls" I will venture a guess that business will suffer. This will also open up business opportunities for other businesses to jump in with "we stand by what we do, yo…

I'm not pitching it per se, I'm just claiming that's what I think the endgame for AI is. Corporations (especially in the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance fields) are already masters at avoiding legal liability. What are you [royal] going to do, bleed to death in the streets? Not get your insulin or heart medication? What decisions are you going to make when every company does the same thing? Get your chemo from…

You’re painting a pretty dystopian picture of a hyper capitalist society where the rich have shaped the law in a way that the poor have no recourse. I think it could happen but it’s completely unrelated to anything AI and more to do with your government.

Re: What will our economic future look like?

#460

Post by thatguy0900 »

goodpoint wrote: post #421
bmitc wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has a surprisingly easy solution: get rid of the rich. It's never, in the history of the world, been in anyone's favor, except the oligarchy, to privatize everything.

It happens in cycles throughout history: inequality increases until it reaches a breaking point.

It reaches a breaking point because ultimately, the rich are outgunned and outnumbered once the poor realize they have had enough. We are not too far off from a time with ai and robotics and automated factories that the rich are no longer outgunned or outnumbered by things capable of disobeying them.
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