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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#531

Post by phillipcarter »

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…

> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?

Over 1 billion monthly users and over 100 billion messages a day, much of which is multimedia. Plus ads, payments, business integrations, a developer platform...

...you need quite a lot of devs for that, even if you freeze all feature development forever.

> Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

It has panned out for Musk to have a radical right-wing echo chamber for him and his supporters. It has not panned out in terms of revenue growth, user growth, or site stability metrics. The President (another terminally online man), who he even helped elect, still posts on Truth Social instead.

Re: The dead economy theory

#532

Post by ian_j_butler »

ranyume wrote: post #492
hax0ron3 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future? I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theor…

What does outcompete economically mean and why would it matter? Or do you mean society A dominates in some form society B? This has already happened in history and is the essence of capitalism. If you want to overcome this situation you need to replace capitalism globally.

> If you want to overcome this situation you need to replace capitalism globally.

Not true.. you just need to replace late-stage capitalism locally. There's a very reasonable concept of circular economy that's relevant here. It breaks down only in that sometimes you need things that you can't make and must go outside the circle. Especially if you intentionally work to mitigate the main stuff requiring you to go outside, it's not some law of nature that it must continue, or even a law of capitalism. Some protectionism / local-first is part of it, but the bigger part is just being rational.

The bad kind of globalism, enshittification, dead-economy theory, and basically ALL of the really ugly stuff we could talk about here are characteristic of late-stage capitalism and the associated short-term thinking, and it's totally consistent for a real capitalist to reject it. Why? Because getting as rich as possible isn't incompatible with sustainability.. particularly from the perspective of corporations/countries that plan to last longer than a single human CEO or exist beyond a single generation of shareholders/citizens.

Re: The dead economy theory

#533

Post by modriano »

crote wrote: post #351
deepsun wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.

Name one country which is fully self-sustaining. Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.

> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,

That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.

If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.

Re: The dead economy theory

#534

Post by fwip »

fragmede wrote: post #429
throwaway27448 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics of a service economy really just don't make sense. We pay way too much for software (which should trend towards zero-cost to distribute), we pay too much for ads. The value of it is inherently downstream of the real economy, which is about making and distributing goods and stuff people actually need to live. Especially a company like facebook only provides a glorified forum, which should be free or coll…

Start by understanding how to price a product. Say a chair. From first principles, you'd take however much wood it takes, plus however many hours it took you to turn that wood into a simple chair, then add in whatever you consider a reasonable profit margin, and that's how much you should sell the chair at. Which is totally and utterly wrong. You throw away that number, and look at how much other chairs are selling f…

You gotta do both. Ideally, the bottom-up price (the price you want to charge) is less than the the top-down price (what people will pay). If it's not, you gotta go back to the drawing board.

Re: The dead economy theory

#535

Post by AmazingEveryDay »

oezi wrote: post #524
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…

Are tokens fungible? (not referring to NFT's!)

Re: The dead economy theory

#536

Post by jmyeet »

tadfisher wrote: post #478
wiseowise wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unfortunately, while I'd love to finance the Glorious Revolution, I don't think my money will be of much use. And SWE skills aren't very useful in a collapse scenario. Is there a term for "reverse Roko's Basilisk"? That you are convinced society will trade your freedom and opportunity in pursuit of an AI superintelligence, so you learn bow-hunting and how to dress a deer carcass while prepping your Quonset hut in nor…

Even the revolution will need to update to the latest Javascript framework.

So I don't see this going back to subsistence or primitive accumulation. If it does, some very bad things have happened. No, I see a likely future as what many, myself included, call "neo-feudalism" where the only jobs and housing are on massive estates of likely trillionaires where you don't own anything. And there's no land to and live on primitively. It's all owned. I guess another job will be rounding up such "rebels".

There's likely an in-between state of fascism where states will largely be apartheid states with an ever-shrinking in-group. It's a bleak future.

Some people really want to bring on the revolution. We tend to call them "accelerationists". I'm not in that camp. Revolutions and the resulting upheaval tends to be incredibly violent. Many millions will die. That may well happen anyway as climate change makes parts of the Earth uninhabitable and we have massive climate-caused migration.

But what really is the difference between having $200 billion and $300 billion? You already had more wealth than you can possibly ever spend, need or want. All you're doing is hoarding, well, everything.

The only way to stave off this outcome is to mildly share so normal people have something, have security and have hope. Whatever you say about the robber barons, at least there were some public works with their unimaginable wealth.

Re: The dead economy theory

#538

Post by blix »

Shalomboy wrote: post #179
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…

There is absolutely zero will in the United States to invest money in unprofitable exploration or scientific research. There used to be such will generations ago, but today's wannabee-autocrats couldn't care less. Look at how they gleefully cut scientific research funding, undermine academic sovereignty, and strip-mine the public sector performing that work in favor of private enterprises. When the shit hits the fan…

Patronage programs for people with advanced degrees is a woefully inadequate solution to the current economic pressures. Large segments of the first-world working and middle classes hollowed out by globalization had already turned against it before AI even came on to the scene. People are generally hostile to patronage directed towards people above them on the ladder.

Re: The dead economy theory

#539

Post by cgh »

agumonkey wrote: post #508
ekidd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is this time different? If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts. The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock,…

Has anybody written about this ? in fiction or as report even. It seems obvious the current techbros are only thinking about a radical shift where labour changes meaning and human societies are irrelevant for those who owns datacenter and have pocket deep enough to buy the rest when people can't sustain their own lives.

I suppose Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive are a good start.

Re: The dead economy theory

#540

Post by andai »

5701652400 wrote: post #335
andai wrote: post #298

UBI was always the endgame. The incentives are aligned. Nobody wants the results that are coming in the absence of UBI. But the culture cannot stomach it yet. It will likely need to live through several waves of horrors first. It can stomach a fake jobs program though, so there's a good chance we get that instead.

hard to imagine most megalomanic egoistic psychopaths, people at top of government, will decide to redistribute wealth equially / UBI.

Well, they are the ones promoting it. At least, they're incentivized to reduce the amount of firebombing attempts.
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