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Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

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Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#601

Post by bossyTeacher »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #574
bossyTeacher wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world where AI automates jobs, arguably any business services you could offer would likely have no customers because those potential customers can automate the services you offer themselves just like AI automates the employment skills employees offer. Not sure why people keep bringing up entrepreneurship as if that couldn't be automated.

> In a world where AI automates jobs, arguably any business services you could offer would likely have no customers because those potential customers can automate the services you offer themselves just like AI automates the employment skills employees offer Take the POS market for example. It's relatively trivial to setup your POS system in dbase/foxpro/MS-access. Yet almost every shop uses lightspeed/toast/square be…

> With AI I think what's happening is that more competitors are challenging these incumbents leading to downward pressure on pricing. Which is great for customers!

If AI automates jobs, POS system vendor is using an AI to run the business. You can do that yourself and remove the middle man.

re: "Ah, how would you automate entrepreneurship?"

I meant that every non-physical business need that would be filled by a local business can now be filled by the same AI you have already use to automate half the jobs away.

There is this fantasy where employers can replace workers with AI but businesses cannot replace their software vendors with AI

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#602

Post by gorgoiler »

cedws wrote: post #137
OptionOfT wrote: post #114

Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either. And the sentiment that goes around is more: reduce the amount of people needed to do the same amount of work: https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat... > McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work…

I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains. S…

Why was it possible for a man in the 1960s to have an ordinary job, a family, and a house? Was there some hidden sector of society that suffered considerably more then now? Is there some sector of society now that prospers proportionally more at the expense of others?

The answer that immediately springs to mind is that women, ethnic minorities, and the urban poor all did relatively badly in the 1960s. With the latter two categories, for every apple pie home with a sedan and two kids there were umpteen other drafty tenement flats with malnourished families sharing a bedroom:

British tenements

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/feb/02...

NYC tenements

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/06/07/tenement-homes-new-york...

It’s not one thing or another — many factors have contributed to what feels like change this way or that over the years — but I try to never forget just how abominably crap life used to be for quite a lot of people, and just how much better it is these days.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#603

Post by mittensc »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #515
amy_petrik wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a simple catch-22 - women don't want to leave the workforce because one salary cannot support a family - yet women remaining in the workforce, since single-salary is infeasible, thusly doubling supply of workers, lowering salaries, which itself makes it infeasible to single-income a family Not to pick on women, as a feminist if you ask me, all modern men should have to be houseboys to serve their feminine master…

A woman who intentionally went corporate and avoided having kids, and wasted her maternal instincts on someone else's profits, will suffer when their body clock catches up to them, and the company leaves them behind. You can't go back and get pregnant. And your marriage probably ended in divorce already anyway by now, which is a whole more amount of suffering.

Why do you feel the need to tell others how to live their lives?, frustration with your own?

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#604

Post by gessha »

johnisgood wrote: post #586
jamesblonde wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from the free appartment, that's the same as most countries in Europe.

University is not free in most countries in Europe though, is it?

It is or it’s heavily subsidized and what you pay for is the admin costs typically, which end up <$1000/year.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#605

Post by gessha »

croes wrote: post #534
jaredklewis wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it. I'm skeptical of this explanation for falling birthrates just because birthrates are falling across the world and there seems to be no correlation between fertility and financial security. America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates. Hung…

Having many kids is often because of a necessity like cheap workforce for the family or high child mortality. Kids can be fun but also can be really exhausting. How many kids are really born just for having am offspring and not because of other reasons. If people can consciously decide to have or not to have kids my bet is on falling birth rates. For stable population you need two kids per couple and first could be a…

I have a partner and we are the age where we need to decide if we want to have kids or not.

Genuinely curious - what are some reasons to have kids aside from “just having offspring”?

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#606

Post by piltdownman »

roenxi wrote: post #491
uniq7 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which of those countries is it possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children?

If they're happy to do it to 1970s standards, probably most of them. The standard of what an ordinary life looks like has gone up a lot. Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job - much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot. It is worth remembering that in the early 1900s there were a lot of houses that didn't even have electricity. The trends [0] are clear. As so…

// Plus when only the man worked looking after a home was a full time job

If we completely ignore the commonplace role of the maid, nanny or domestic helper — women in 1965 spent the same amount of time on child care and only about 10 more hours on housework a week than women in 2011. According to the 1870 census, “52 percent of employed women worked in ‘domestic and personal service.’” From 1870 through the mid-1900s, that percentage only increased.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/decline...

//much less in the way of microwaves and washing machines and whatnot

The CPI accounts for these as 'hedonic quality adjustment'.

It's always convenient to benchmark this against 1970s onwards as it was the first year that data on race and ethnicity was included in the income statistics. However 1970 is also a recession year which bottomed out the market and eventually led to an oil crisis for most of the decade.

Adjust for inflation to 2023 and its inarguable.

New house: $23,450 -> $174,468 Average Income: $9,400 -> $69,936 New car: $3,450 -> $25,668 Minimum Wage: $2.10 -> $15.62

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#607

Post by giancarlostoro »

lelanthran wrote: post #575
giancarlostoro wrote: post #69

I think it will pop but not in the way everyone thinks it will pop. There's plenty that's not going to go away / anywhere, but I'm sure lots of startups will fail and close their doors.

> I think it will pop but not in the way everyone thinks it will pop. Everyone thinks it will pop the way the dotcom bubble popped > There's plenty that's not going to go away / anywhere, but I'm sure lots of startups will fail and close their doors. Just like the dotcom bubble pop - IOW, just like the way everyone thinks it will pop.

I guess I was too young during that bubble to really have it as a point of reference, is there a solid write up of it somewhere?

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#608

Post by jimbokun »

nradov wrote: post #219
jimbokun wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So "social capital" == "education"? The US has pushed a shit ton of money into education. I mean an unreasonable amount of it went to administrators. But the goal and the intent was certainly there.

Education is part of it. But a lot of the social capital which makes societies prosperous is separate from what we usually consider to be education. On an individual behavior level that includes things like knowing how to show up for work on time, sober, and properly dressed, and follow management instructions without arguing or taking things personally. These are skills that people in the middle and upper classes ta…

That comes from growing up in a two parent family where both parents are responsible and hard working and willing to discipline their children.

Government can’t really do much to help with that.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#609

Post by Quotation1898 »

lesuorac wrote: post #49

> He told the BBC that the company owns what he called a “full stack” of technologies, from chips to YouTube data to models and frontier science research. This integrated approach, he suggested, would help the company weather any market turbulence better than competitors. I guess but is it better for an investor to own 2 shares of Google or 1 share of OpenAI and 1 share of TSMC? Like I have no doubt that being vertic…

In more traditional industries investors seem to prefer less integration. One example being Siemens, who divested their Healthineers and Energy divisions and all their share values increased by a lot.

Maybe this is because these industries are better understood and there is less risk involved, but I wonder if the current big software companies will take similar paths in the future.

Re: Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'

#610

Post by DeathArrow »

aurareturn wrote: post #379
consp wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta has the giant advantage that other people interact with your data. I think that is widely more valuable than what chat engines have.

Given that OpenAI has publicly stated that they're working on monetizing free users (ads), I think they can make ads targeting as good as Meta can. This is why Meta is all in on AI by the way. With nearly 1 billion users, ChatGPT is a huge threat to Meta's ad empire.

>With nearly 1 billion users, ChatGPT is a huge threat to Meta's ad empire.

People are on Facebook to interact with other human beings, not LLMs. People won't leave Facebook to use ChatGPT.

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