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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'

#661

Post by moduspol »

spicyusername wrote: post #572
ahoka wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children" Have you considered that there's more to human existence than to pay a mortgage and women are not something you keep in your house to watch after your offspring so they can do the very same when growing up?

I'm not sure what you're responding to, or why you're responding in such a hostile way. The wife can be the breadwinner, too. Owning a home and having a parent be able to stay home with your children, husband or wife, are important pillars of a stable life. Who wants a society in which couples don't have time to parent their children or manage their household? It's a fact that seeing to your children's education and…

> Owning a home and having a parent be able to stay home with your children, husband or wife, are important pillars of a stable life.

I'm with you but I think we're in the minority nowadays. "Progress" seems to mean paying someone else (who cares a lot less about your children than you do to) to raise your children starting from the moment that maternity leave ends. But at least you get to live close to a big city, and I guess our GDP is a little higher.

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

#662

Post by bigbuppo »

lazide wrote: post #161
diroussel wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if WhatsApp had an outage, but you needed to communicate to someone, you wouldn't be able to? Don't you have contacts saved locally, and other message apps available?

In most of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and about half of Europe? You’d be pretty stuck. I guess SMS might work, but it wouldn’t for most businesses (they use the WhatsApp business functionality, there is no SMS thing backing it). Most people don’t even use text anymore. China has it’s own Apps, but everyone else uses WhatsApp exclusively at this point.

Really? Please indicate your source for that claim that "most people don't even use text anymore" because I have never once in my life been asked about WhatsApp, but have implemented a few dozen SMS integrations after all the annoying rules changes where you have to ask "mother may I" and submit a stool sample to send an SMS message from something other than a phone.

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

#663

Post by user____name »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #357
nradov wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? I didn't make any claims about averages. We could do a lot more to improve opportunities and social mobility for people caught in the permanent underclass.

But we have. The underclass today has much better lives in many aspects than the highest class from many decades ago. The absolute level of wealth has increased, it's simply that the delta between the high and the low is widening. Would you rather live equally in poverty or live comfortably with others who are way more wealthy than you? Surprisingly people do seem to prefer the former, though I'd prefer the latter

This is the sort of reductio ad absurdum inverse relationship that never survives a reality check.

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

#664

Post by carefulfungi »

jacquesm wrote: post #532

No shit. But it works, if you're stupid. If you're not then you will end up frustrated because it will be as if you have an over-eager trainee that is only slightly less dumb than a box of rocks when it comes to actual thinking but that has near perfect recall about a massive amount of information. A sort of idiot-savant. I gave it a try for a practical problem to see how long it would take to converge on a solution.…

Having experienced plenty of this but also having regularly experienced Claude Code writing correct, useful programs - it is reasonably possible that coding agents are the beginning of a disruption in how we code. They'll continue to improve (and we'll continue to surround them with tools and languages that feed that improvement cycle).

Combining early, faulty "worse is better" technology with a change in cost structure (tokens vs. programers) and capability (programs in minutes not days) often wins. Even when it sucks at first.

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

#665

Post by jcgrillo »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #644
Vegenoid wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The proof is in feature velocity of devs/teams that use it and in the layoffs due to efficiency gains. I think it's very hard to convince AI skeptics since for some reason they feel more threatened by it than rest. It's counterproductive and would hinder them professionally but then it's their choice.

Without rigorous, controlled study I'm not ready to accept claims of velocity, efficiency, etc. I'm a professional software engineer, I have tried various AI tools in the workplace both for code review and development. I found personally that they were more harmful than effective. But I don't think my personal experience is really important data here. Just like I don't think yours is. What matters is whether these tools actually do something or whether instead they just make some users feel something.

The studies I've seen--and there are very few--seem to indicate the effect is more placebo than pharmacological.

Regardless, breathless claims that I'm somehow damaging my career by wondering whether these tools actually work are going to do nothing to persuade me. I'm quite secure in my career prospects, thank you kindly.

I do admit I don't much like being labeled an "AI skeptic" either. I've been following developments in machine learning for like 2 decades and I'm familiar with results in the field going back to the 1950s. You have the opportunity here to convince me, I want to believe there is some merit to this latest AI summer. But I am not seeing the evidence for it.

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

#666

Post by janalsncm »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #497
janalsncm wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intuitively, the whole economy cannot be B2B SAAS companies funded by VCs. At some point you need to provide value to consumers or the government. If those consumers don’t have any money and/or aren’t willing to spend a paycheck making studio ghibli profile pics, you have a problem. I guess Sam Altman has been asking for a government bailout so maybe he is going for the b2g option in a backwards sort of way.

These consumers will have to stop being entitled salaryman and show some entrepreneurship to survive. I think that's good thing.

Sure, maybe the majority will go back to being peasants or serfs, which I would argue is the default state of humanity. It might be that the last 300 years, where individuals have the ability to sell useful services back to society, were an anomaly and things will go back to the way they were before that.

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

#667

Post by jchallis »

nradov wrote: post #633
alexjplant wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 makin…

The uneven demographic curve shows that many elderly current homeowners will have to sell over the next couple decades due to death or moving into assisted living facilities. That will increase supply and reduce demand, although the impact will vary widely by region. Don't expect any major price reductions in popular areas but there may be further collapses in certain rural and economically stagnant areas. You can lo…

Tax planning can help here. By converting the house to ownership by a tax-advantaged trust , a family absolutely can continue to extract rent from a former property without selling. Doubly so if the mortgage is paid off.

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

#668

Post by jacquesm »

carefulfungi wrote: post #664
jacquesm wrote: post #532

No shit. But it works, if you're stupid. If you're not then you will end up frustrated because it will be as if you have an over-eager trainee that is only slightly less dumb than a box of rocks when it comes to actual thinking but that has near perfect recall about a massive amount of information. A sort of idiot-savant. I gave it a try for a practical problem to see how long it would take to converge on a solution.…

Having experienced plenty of this but also having regularly experienced Claude Code writing correct, useful programs - it is reasonably possible that coding agents are the beginning of a disruption in how we code. They'll continue to improve (and we'll continue to surround them with tools and languages that feed that improvement cycle). Combining early, faulty "worse is better" technology with a change in cost struct…

Yes, but who will write the code that trains the AI on future stuff? Someone somewhere will have to write original code, and without writing a lot of code that new original code will be of lesser quality than what went before. Once that cycle starts there will be less money to be made in programming, so fewer high grade programmers (and we already have too little of those as it is).

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

#669

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> Because to me it looks like the opposite.

It's neither. None of that is about technology, and it's not the first time in history that it happened either.

And if AI somehow replace a third of the workforce, it's still not enough of an structural change to make technology a cause. If it goes way above that, it can be different, but it's not right now.

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

#670

Post by marcosdumay »

jaredklewis wrote: post #310
cedws wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Financial security to young people has been highly correlated all over the world for many decades.
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