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

641–650 of 1001 posts

Re: The dead economy theory

#641

Post by xivzgrev »

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…

What does that have to do with this article? One of the points was unlike past transitions this is hitting everyone.

People move from a farm to the city. If there's no more white collar jobs where do we go for work? It's unprecedented

Re: The dead economy theory

#642

Post by bvcp »

SecretDreams wrote: post #506
pron wrote: post #504

There is certainly a huge problem with displacing labour in multiple industries at the same time, but the economic story told here in "three turns" is different. When productivity rises costs drop, but because of competition, almost the entire gain has to translate not to increased margins but to reduced prices. Paul Krugman recently used this to explain the large disparity between growth in GDP as normally measured…

> Of course, lower prices don't solve your problems if you're unemployed. Demand, indeed, drops if many people are unemployed, which pushes prices further down, but this time in a way that can lead to a recession. This is the major risk right now. I think we'll need to strongly look at UBI and a star trek esque future or, barring that, something more like a star wars esque future..

doesnt this entire premise rely on an even shock to all parts of the labour economy

Re: The dead economy theory

#644

Post by rfrey »

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…

This time, there is nowhere to move to. And there is no interest in supporting the displaced people in any way.

Re: The dead economy theory

#646

Post by lokar »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #433
wcfrobert wrote: post #299

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…

>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…

Unless you change the balance of selection pressures…

Re: The dead economy theory

#647

Post by BoneShard »

iliaxj wrote: post #457

The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law…

but just imagine the brave new world, where a law firm has super-duper-frontier model and you're trying to argue with it in a court with your latest best local oss model (only 6 month behind the bestests ones).

Re: The dead economy theory

#648

Post by rajamaka »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #433
wcfrobert wrote: post #299

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…

>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…

Maybe a stupid question but aren't the Amish essentially this thought process put into practice?

They aren't able to outcompete their neighbouring societies economically yet are in no way impoverished, and in many cases actually come out on top by many QOL/health metrics.

Re: The dead economy theory

#649

Post by thelastgallon »

walrus01 wrote: post #626
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…

> 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. Question about farming in India. How much of the process of mechanizing and scaling up agriculture in India is predicated on something like the more widespread use of diesel or other oil/fossil-fuel powered tractor…

Most land holdings are very very small. 1 acre to 5 acres maybe the vast majority. These are all odd sized and shaped and most likely doing different crops based on water availability. To leverage the benefits of mechanization, we need larger land holdings. The farmers have no other ability or income sources, so they hang on it it. Electricity is free. There is no income tax on farming. Govts provide many incentives to get farmers votes. Each state does different things, but they end up copying each others schemes and it gets worse and worse.

Farmers in most regions are no longer poor. Land prices exploded 100 - 500x in a 100 - 150 km diameter around metro areas. Most farmers are now millionaires, yes millionaires in USD. They held on to their land because they didn't know better, the land was useless (no water) and nobody bought it. Now they are going to HODL.

Re: The dead economy theory

#650

Post by Unit327 »

daft_pink wrote: post #163

I think when these companies IPO later this year, we’re going to see the reality of the PNL numbers and whether they are sustainable etc as all the financials will become public. Rumor mill suggests that Anthropic might be profitable (but at what magnitude), OpenAI is not profitable, Google is mostly vertically integrated and has a low cost structure as they are have pre-existing data center buildouts, their own sili…

Anthropic have only scraped together a month of profitability by cooking the books. They have an extreme compute discount from spacex that only applies for the first couple of months of the deal. By pushing the costs down the road they can make themselves look good before IPO. Even they have admitted publicly though that they don't expect profitability to last.
Post reply on HN