Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The dead economy theory

owenmcgrann.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 1001 posts

Re: The dead economy theory

#521

Post by orthoxerox »

kipchak wrote: post #174
spondelkryp wrote: post #91

>The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent. I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you…

This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are ma…

How many of these top 10% of households will have their breadwinners be replaced with AI? The LLM boom is aimed at them, professionals, knowledge workers, not at landscapers and plumbers.

Re: The dead economy theory

#522

Post by hunterpayne »

stratos123 wrote: post #120
kqp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in theory, but this is so extremely far from the US political and social system that I think no nation has ever changed so much without being overthrown. So unless you’re talking about plans for a post-US world, this idea will always be theoretical and not how “the world” works.

I'm not sure it's that far out of the Overton window. US already managed to do some small-scale UBI trials, after all. Maybe one day it can do a countrywide trial.

No it hasn't. To actually try it requires giving to a large enough population that it can impact prices and inflation.

Also, every time this has ever been tried it ended in atrocity. Lookup "War communism" to see what happened. Money literally predates civilization. The first writing we have are sales invoices.

Re: The dead economy theory

#523

Post by hunterpayne »

yyyk wrote: post #41
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.

LMs are literally trained on Reddit. The idea they are "super-intelligent" is anthropomorphism and marketing. So far no independent research has seen AI be better at anything than humans. And that's unlikely to change with larger NNs.

Re: The dead economy theory

#524

Post by oezi »

wonkyfruit wrote: post #203

The fact that this could happen is widely known and has been talked about for years now. What to do about it is the real issue. I've seen David Shapiro and many others tangentially talk about UBI and similar "post AI economics". The dream was that the machines could do the housework whilst we all painted, wrote music and built beautiful wood furniture in our sheds. It still could be that way, but we need to sort out…

> What to do about it is the real issue.

Yes, it is and the article isn't going there enough what options we have as societies. I think this is because the article is still trying to convince you that the white collar job losses are indeed coming rather than taking this as a given.

If we take it as a given but don't consider a Terminator/SkyNet scenario within the next 10 years, then we do have some options:

- Taxing token usage

- Requiring local data centers - Requiring AI oversight

- Nationalizing the AI companies

- We probably need Chinese-style national firewalls to prevent companies moving their AI compute abroad

- Charging companies per displaced worker

- Requiring human worker to token consumption ratios in companies

A lot of these could help soften the blow of the rapid changes so labor markets can adapt.

Re: The dead economy theory

#525

Post by oezi »

pdonis wrote: post #479
cmiles74 wrote: post #71

> The people writing the checks are not in the habit of lighting trillions of dollars on fire for a better autocomplete and an endless proliferation of longer and longer memos that nobody reads. Aren’t they though? What about that whole crypto thing.

That comment struck me as well. One other thing it gets wrong is that the "trillions of dollars" are just numbers in a cap table based on a paper valuation. They're not money that anyone has actually forked over; those numbers are quite a bit smaller.

The article gives the number as well 300bn invested so far vs 10 trillion paid in salaries for white collar/knowledge work labor.

Re: The dead economy theory

#526

Post by forgetfulness »

interstice wrote: post #100
treis wrote: post #4

This isn't how the economy works at all. We're not all unemployed because farms mechanized. We're not all unemployed because factories automated. We won't all be unemployed if AI takes over white collar work.

Each time people found something else to do that someone would pay them for. This doesn't automatically mean there is an infinite supply of that - unless you believe in it as some kind of fundamental law.

I simply don't believe that there is an infinite demand for the kinds of things that can be done by generating text.

How many insurance policies does anyone need to contract, how much legal advice does anyone need to hear, how many movies does anyone need to watch, and how much software does must support that demand, so that everyone can stay employed in an AI accelerated service sector?

The new opportunities could well be that labor costs go down so much that the minimum wage is lowered and sweatshops return to developed countries.

I'm sure some aspiring sweatshop owners could be excited by that possibility, I don't think a lot of software developers or TV show writers are eager to be sewing sneakers for a pittance.

Re: The dead economy theory

#527

Post by waldothedog »

fsckboy wrote: post #347
graemep wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work.

> The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc. if you look at the growth industry before that…

Seems like this and parent are referring to two different waves of improvement. Pre-IR improvements in plowing and cultivation (still draft and human traction), followed by post-IR mechanization for harvesting and transport?

Re: The dead economy theory

#528

Post by godelski »

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…

  > Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent.
I'd reframe this. There's still bugs and many features missing that would make things better. So I don't think there's a shortage of talent but hands are being tied.

Signal is also a good example, probably better than Twitter as Signal has done a lot with very few engineers since the beginning

Re: The dead economy theory

#530

Post by lenerdenator »

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…

> Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.

There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.

The idea of the GenAI bet that most companies are making is that you just don't have people doing work anymore. There aren't any jobs for the laborers to do anymore, at least not ones that are likely to fit their skillset and provide a standard of living that they're used to. If you're a software engineer - one of the higher-paying fields of the last half-century - and get laid off because the c-suite thinks AI can do your job for less, you're going to contract your spending.

The article mentions this, but it doesn't take into account that there will be some work (mainly manual labor) that will face at least some resistance to automation for the next decade. These people will try to get into those jobs, because they have bills to pay. It won't pay six figures. It very well might pay less than it is now due to the glut of candidates who are desperate to make any income at all.

The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry. In a society like the United States, it's the kind of angry that you can't solve with an internal passport system. It's going to mean violence.

Eventually, they'll figure out how to do more manual labor with automated systems. That means that there will be even fewer opportunities.

This is nothing like anything we've seen before, and no one wants to acknowledge that.

Post reply on HN