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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#541

Post by noitpmeder »

what wrote: post #520
Galanwe wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money? 1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500. 2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game. 3) So you ha…

> Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500. That’s not how it works? The company doesn’t make money every time someone buys SP500 or a share.

Isn't it to some degree? My understanding was with index funds was that the index is required to be backed by some in-kind holding of the component index products by whomever minted the index share. If more people buy the index then more of those in-kind backing products must be held e.g. as collateral. If you're REQUIRED to buy this stock because of your index/etf positions, necessarily the demand goes up, and necessarily the price goes up too. Companies _definitely_ materially benefit from stock price increases.

Re: The dead economy theory

#542

Post by pdonis »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #495
pdonis wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money In a world where all of the necessities of life were free--not as in "not having to pay any money for because of some social policy" but as in "not costing any resources to produce"--i.e., the way air is free now--then this would be the case, yes. But we're not there yet. And I think a big part of why we're not there is…

What do tech giants have to do with food production, clothing, medicine, housing?

Nothing. That's the problem. The people running these companies say they're among the smartest, most driven people on the planet, the movers and shakers, the ones who are determining the future course of society. So why aren't they figuring out how to make things like food, clothing, medicine, and housing cheap, so cheap that everyone on the planet can have them easily? Why is it more important to figure out how to get people to click on more ads, or ask more questions to AIs that hallucinate wrong answers?

Re: The dead economy theory

#543

Post by twoodfin »

crabbone wrote: post #178
alex_young wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The small town constraint is a bit artificial to this problem isn't it? If you operate a machine shop in a large urban area, have competitors, and access to much improved low cost tooling, would you: a) lay off a bunch of workers, or b) lower your prices and capture more orders? Same thing with accounting firms or marketers or business consultants.

Well, it's the same problem with all sorts of free-market capitalism and derivatives. They all believe there's infinite "somewhere else" that resources can come from, or the customers, or the funding etc. But reality is very much finite. And so instead of the theoretical equilibrium we get monopolies and collusion to manipulate markets. The article, actually, addresses your claims: > The optimists will tell you this…

Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced.

I can’t imagine what claim this sentence is intending to describe.

Obviously individual workers can’t “recover” their wages: 70 years later they’re no longer working.

It also can’t make sense as a recovery of labor in displaced industries, since those are largely gone once they’re supplanted by labor-saving technology.

Re: The dead economy theory

#544

Post by agumonkey »

cgh wrote: post #539
agumonkey wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

thanks

Re: The dead economy theory

#545

Post by iambateman »

If you’re going to go through the effort to write 5,000 words—-spend a bit more thought on what to do.

I am aware that the sky is falling and I am aware that there are foxes who would gladly replace 10%+ of global knowledge work in the next few years. I understand that there are cultural ramifications.

But what do we do?

Re: The dead economy theory

#546

Post by checker »

AmazingEveryDay wrote: post #535
oezi wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!)

Tokens are not fungible for hosted models but there are resellers like Github Copilot and OpenRouter. These allow you to purchase capacity and choose which hosted models to burn your tokens on. Obviously there is some margin being taken in order to provide this flexibility, but there's probably some offset with volume contracts.

Re: The dead economy theory

#548

Post by jijijijij »

bluGill wrote: post #519
jijijijij wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 43% of workers still work in agriculture. For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily. Don't you have to contrast these figures with import and export of produce, and environmental/ecological factors? Technology is one thing, but increasing yields by wasting resources (e.g. water, phosphorous, soil erosion, ...) may increase nominal productivity, but not efficiency. Not sa…

In the US case the large industrial farms are the ones more concerned with things like soil erosion and fertilizer runoff. Both are things we measure and put a number on what is washing away. Smaller farmers know it can be measured but either are stuck in their ways, or just see that they are making money so they don't care.

My point was the possible disconnect of productivity/yield, and efficiency. A small potato and a large potato likely need the same amount of harvesting work. Now, if you dig up finite reservoirs of phosphorous in Morocco to increase yield in the US, you are not increasing efficiency. That's just planetary debt for a wasteful sprint. I think, in the US this is most evident with water usage, where now many aquifers and reservoirs are spent. Hardly indicative of desirable outcome. Sustainable farming usually has much lower yields inherently. And of course, soil quality and erosion dynamics naturally differ greatly across the globe.

Re: The dead economy theory

#550

Post by c0rruptbytes »

dangus wrote: post #188
daxfohl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and assuming local open AI models start catching up, which they seem to be doing, the foundation models' hold on society gets a lot slipperier. If there's a "what to do about all this" from an engineer's standpoint, pushing the needle toward local models, whether in research, agents, or just using them, understanding how they work, and advocating for them when it makes sense (which is more often than they get…

While I agree with you on open models getting better, I have been starting to see how the value, the reason you pay for Claude, isn’t in the models. For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was. A local model can’t do that for me…

this is also possible with local models, MCP is an open standard

if you already have claude, you can even get it to set it all up for you too

the issue with local models is just the compute required, it's hard to compete with 100t/s cloud models

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