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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'

#621

Post by TuringNYC »

uniq7 wrote: post #314
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…

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?

>> 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?

It seems impossible to do this in 2025 with white collar work because so much of it is tied to HCOL cities (except for hedge funders, FAANG workers who got lucky on timing, bankers, some lawyers.)

From what I can see amongst friends and family -- it is possible with blue collar trades jobs where you can be selective on where in the country you can live and where you have some level of ownership of your practice. There are numerous affordable locations in the country.

I can confirm -- based on how difficult it is to get an appointment -- that my tree guy, electrician, and plumber all make more than me as an executive. Some of these workers further force payments in cash, so they are probably not even paying tax on all their income.

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

#622

Post by philipallstar »

varnaud wrote: post #584
philipallstar wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be some people like that (e.g. middle class kid has terrible work ethic; communicates it to his kid and now that kid has bad habits), but in the large it's more about culture than individual habits. If one person doesn't show up on time, that's a bad habit. If no one shows up on time then that's a cultural issue[0], and much more devastating. As an example, Zim dug itself a huge hole by kicking out the pro…

The productive decline of the farms is because of the fast-track land reform. Before 2000-2001, there were no effective national programs to prepare the people to run the farms. The opposition party was gaining ground, and so to stay in power, the ruling party rushed the land reform with no preparation. Not sure how this is a relevant example of a culture that don't value punctuality.

Well, for the reason I said. You've reframed it in a way that removes responsibility from everyone involved, but that's just an example of how to reframe things. It's not actually useful.

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

#623

Post by alexjplant »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #509
zdragnar wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two of my friends with relatively ordinary jobs have stay at home spouses. The cost of daycare is so high that it would basically eat up one of their salaries, and this way they get to actually spend time with their children, which they find to be more filling than a BS career. It is definitely doable in the US, and I would imagine most Western countries as well. My knowledge outside of them isn't current enough to s…

It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved. People will never own a house if they didn't have skin in the game by 2021. Salaries are not rising to match housing price inflation. Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down. More supply isn't helping much either, as there is no dive…

> house prices [...] need to go down heavily.

As a layperson I have a feeling that's not going to happen. The working class has too much wealth tied up in their homes because US society and the government have encouraged people to treat it as a store of wealth instead of a box that shields them from the weather. People talk constantly about "getting on the property ladder", "buying more land because they aren't making more of it", "having a landlord side hustle", etc. A house is a lot more tangible than stocks so people without knowledge of finance feel much better about investing in one (understandably so - also forget about Social Security). Combine this with associated government tax subsidies and mortgage underwriting programs and you've basically created a situation where home prices can't do anything but go up.

Look at the amortization table for the proposed 50 year mortgage: borrowers wouldn't be making a dent in the principal for a good 10 or 15 years. The underlying assumption here is that people would make money via home price appreciation, i.e. speculation, not from creating an actual store of value. We already kicked this can once when the 30-year mortgage became a thing 60 years ago.

Of course one can't draw the current trend line into infinity because of affordability but I highly doubt it'll go down appreciably. I also don't know enough to have a solution to this problem - any ideas?

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

#624

Post by bpt3 »

ethanwillis wrote: post #460
bpt3 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that it doesn't support his preconceived notion that everyone is doing terribly.

Actually I outlined what I believed the issue is before you replied and it's not that.

Your post is just a more verbose version of what I said.

Your "concerns" are all well known and accounted for when calculating things like the consumer price index.

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

#625

Post by hyperadvanced »

eitally wrote: post #292
conartist6 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is in a pickle. They put AI lipstick on top of decades of unfixed tech debt and their relationship with their userbase isn't great. Their engineering culture is clearly not healthy. For their size and financial resources, their position in the market right now is very delicate.

I disagree. They're the one place that can get away without investing in frontier model research and still win in the enterprise. Google is only place that serves the enterprise (Workspace for productivity, Cloud for IT, Devices for end users) AND conducts meaningful AI research. AWS doesn't (they can sell cloud effectively, but don't have any meaningful in-house AI R&D), Meta doesn't (they don't cover enterprise and…

I agree that AWS/Amazon seems to be uniquely badly positioned to benefit at all from AI, while also being potentially screwed by AI companies failing.

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

#626

Post by Vegenoid »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #487
jcgrillo wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article Pichai is quoted saying: > "It doesn't matter whether you want to be a teacher [or] a doctor. All those professions will be around, but the people who will do well in each of those professions are people who learn how to use these tools." Bullshit. Citation very much needed. It's a shame--a shameful stain on the profession--that journalists don't respond critically to such absurd nonsense and ask the o…

There are hundreds of thousands of developers here including me who would vouch that AI does make them vastly more productive.

And AI skeptics are waiting to see the proof in the pudding. If we have a new tool that makes hundreds of thousands of devs vastly more productive, I expect to see the results of that in new, improved software. So far, I'm just seeing more churn and more bugs. It may well be the case that in a couple years we'll see the fruits of AI productivity gains, but talk is cheap.

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

#628

Post by lumost »

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…

Many industries are stuck in either prisoner dilemmas, all payer auctions, or other game theoretic environments that make it impossible to pull back spend.

If the army was 1000x more “productive” on a dollar basis- would you cut back military spending? No, because everyone else will be 1000x as productive soon. Spend may even rise with efficiency gains unlocking new capabilities/risks.

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

#629

Post by hello_moto »

formerly_proven wrote: post #522
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved. People will never own a house if they didn't have skin in the game by 2021. Salaries are not rising to match housing price inflation. Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down. More supply isn't helping much either, as there is no dive…

> It's do-able, but the housing crisis needs to be resolved. Why? Almost everywhere a majority of people (and certainly the majority of voters) are already invested in housing and do not want their investment to loose value. > Specifically, both house prices and interest need to go down heavily. Sadly, they used higher interest to try to lower prices, and that didn't really bring prices down. People are more willing…

Diversity in property means condos with various configurations, rowhouses, townhouses, multiplex (duplex, quadplex, sixplex).

Where I live, the local government decided to remove zoning thereby allowing more varieties of properties.

Price comes down in the sense that the missing middle provide options between condo to townhouse to detached

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

#630

Post by ThunderSizzle »

4ggr0 wrote: post #592
Jensson wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Men make work, Women make baby. Men hard, Women soft. Men strong and powerful. Women weak and emotional. On average those are true though, men work more, women take more care of children, men are harder than women, men are stronger than women, and women are more emotional than men. On average. It is fine for women to be manly and men to be feminine, but that doesn't negate the fact that most women are feminine and…

Agree to Disagree, I've spent enough time of my life to discuss this exact topic. Men® are Men® and Women™ are Women™, so be it. On average everyone is exactly the same, as long as you look at the same gender. Wait, what's gend...forget it.

"All people are the same" argument basically negates thousands of years of history, basic human knowledge, etc. Biology impacts quite a bit. For example, if your family comes from Asia, chances are your more prone to lactose intolerance than European-based areas. It's also why most Asian dishes don't have any sort of cheese or dairy - there was no real history of that type of agriculture compared to Europe. To ignore all this and throw it out so that people can pretend to be the exact same is to throw all of history out the window, and to pretend that we're not standing on shoulders of giants that helped craft modern civilization as we know it.

Men are Men, and Women are Women. But Women wanted to be like Men, so they did, but Men don't like Women as Men, and Women are shocked to learn this.

Now people don't even know what a Woman is.

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