511–520 of 663 posts
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Margins require a competitive edge. If productivity gains are spread throughout a competitive industry, margins will not get bigger; prices will go down.
That feels optimistic. This kind of naive free market ideology seems to rarely manifest in lower prices.
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If you want another side data point, most people I know both in Japan and Canada use some sort of an AI as a replacement for any kind of query. Almost nobody in my circles are in tech or tech-adjacent circles. So yeah, it’s just everyone collectively devaluing human interaction.
I love AI, but I'm exasperated by the extent to which my fiancee uses Claude instead of search, and for everything ...
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I think by the time the wealthy realize they're setting themselves up for the local equivalent of the French Revolution it will be a bit late. It's a really bad idea to create a large number of people with absolutely nothing to lose.
I suspect the wealthy think they can shield themselves by exerting control over mass media, news outlets, the press, and domestic surveillance, all amplified by AI. If all that fails, they have their underground bunkers on faraway islands and/or backup citizenships.
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> I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity [...] Who do they think will make their ventures profitable? Who do they think will take their dollars and provide goods and services in exchange? If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.
> If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing. I don't think that's right. The owners will still own everything . If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners." There's an old Isaac Asimov book with something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_uni…
I think you might be a little behind on economic news, because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and middle classes out of the narrative.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp50...
An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of change in LLMs slowed down, and those exci…
I think a lot about how much we altered our environment to suit cars. They're not a perfect solution to transport, but they've been so useful we've built tons more road to accommodate them. So, while I don't think AGI will happen any time soon, I wonder what 'roads' we'll build to squeeze the most out of our current AI. Probably tons of power generation.
Cities, towns, and villages (and there were far more of the latter then) weren't walkable out of choice, but necessity. At most, by the late 19th century, urban geography was walkable-from-the-streetcar, and suburbs walkable-from-railway-station. And that only in the comparatively few metros and metro regions which had well-developed streetcar and commuter-rail lines.
With automobiles, housing spread out, became single-family, nuclear-family, often single-storey, and frequently on large lots. That's not viable when your only options to get someplace are by foot, or perhaps bicycle. Shopping moved from dense downtowns and city-centres (or perhaps shopping districts in larger cities) to strips and boulevards. Supermarkets and hypermarkets replaced corner grocery stores (which you could walk to and from with your groceries in hand, or perhaps in a cart). Eventually shopping malls were created (virtually always well away from any transit service, whether bus or rail), commercial islands in shopping-lot lakes. Big-box stores dittos.
It's not just roads and car parks, it's the entire urban landscape.
AI, should this current fad continue and succeed, will likely have similarly profound secondary effects.
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> If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing. I don't think that's right. The owners will still own everything . If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners." There's an old Isaac Asimov book with something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_uni…
> If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners." I think you might be a little behind on economic news, because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and middle classes out of the narrative. https://www.wsj.com/livecove…
> I think you might be a little behind on economic news, because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and middle classes out of the narrative.
No, that doesn't surprise me at all. I'm basically just applying the logic of capitalism and automation to a new technology, and the same thing has played out a thousand times before. The only difference with AI is that; unlike previous, more limited automation; it's likely there will be no roles for displaced workers to move into (just like when engines got good enough there were no roles for horses to move into).
It's important to remember that capitalism isn't about providing for people. It's about providing for people with wealth to exchange. That works OK when you have full employment and wealth gets spread around by paying workers, but if most jobs disappear due to automation there's no mechanism to spread wealth to the vast majority of people, so under capitalism they'll eventually die of want.
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Margins require a competitive edge. If productivity gains are spread throughout a competitive industry, margins will not get bigger; prices will go down.
That feels optimistic. This kind of naive free market ideology seems to rarely manifest in lower prices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish the author had had the courage of their convictions to extend the analogy all the way to the glue factory. It’s what we are all thinking.
Sending all the useless horses to glue factories in that time was so prevalent it was a cartoon trope. The other trope being men living in flop houses, and towns having entire sections for unemployable people called skid row. The AI people point to post 1950s style employment and say 'people recovered after industrial advance' and ignore the 1880s through the 1940s. We actually have zero idea if the buggy whip manufa…
I did a deep research into the decline of horses and it was consistent with fewer births, not mass slaughter. The US Department of Agriculture has great records during this time, though they’re not fully digitized.
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> If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing. I don't think that's right. The owners will still own everything . If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners." There's an old Isaac Asimov book with something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_uni…
What would they get from the plebs? Suppose we went through The Phools and so the plebs were exterminated, then what? Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics, but only for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner", then.
I think the right question is: what would they want from the plebs? And the answer will be nothing.
Right now they want the plebs' labor, which is why things work the way they do.
> The Phools and so the plebs were exterminated, then what?
Is that a reference to this? https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691168319/ph...
> Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics, but only for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner", then.
I don't think we'll have Star Trek economics, because that would be fundamentally fair and egalitarian and plentiful. There will still be resource constraints like energy production and raw materials. I think it will be more like B2B economics, international trade, with a small number relevant owners each controlling vast amounts of resources and productive capacity and occasionally trading basics amongst themselves. It could also end up like empires-at-war (which actually may be more likely, since war would give the owners something seemingly important to do, vs just building monuments to themselves and other types of jerking off).