Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality' • Hacker News Board

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

#671

Post by satvikpendem » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

The book Capital in the 21st Century comes to the conclusion that this is a historical anomaly due to World War II (and really only in the US, and really only for white families in the US). Don't take the anomaly of the past and treat it as the normality of what people in history experienced.

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

#672

Post by satvikpendem » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:17 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #184

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if you bar over 50% of your workforce from working at market clearing wages then naturally the other 50% are going to get paid at their expense. When you underpay minorities and often outright ban women from working formal employment, it's not hard to see how wages for the others remain high.

Well congratulations! We have succeeded in having stagnating wages and stagnating standard of living for everyone now!

Will you volunteer to not work so that I can instead?

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

#673

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #385

amypetrik8 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but pretty sure with your 1974 28k you could buy a nice house, whereas with your 2024 (equivalent) 45k you can buy an OK car, not a house

In theory this graph is already inflation-adjusted. In practice, I think this shows why economic statistics are borderline lies.

The problem is inflation. We have no way to reliably measure it over any long time-frame. Make the time long enough, and it even stops making sense as a concept.

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

#674

Post by satvikpendem » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #326

Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.

> If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will.

- Steve Jobs

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

#675

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:19 PM UTC

bluescrn wrote: post #442

xnx wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? It has been for the last few thousand years.

That ended in around 2010, IMHO. Now technology mostly divides and manipulates us, enshittifies things, and works to turn billionaires into trillionaires.

It's not technology that is doing that.

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

#676

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #373

janalsncm wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much money should everyone get?

The right answer to this is not a number, but rather a feedback loop that converges on the right number. When everyone is laid off without production of goods slowing down, the result is deflation; when everyone gets too much money relative to production of goods, the result is inflation. So that means you can use the CPI inflation as a feedback variable, and adjust the UBI amount until the CPI is stable.

I'm all for using a UBI to stabilize inflation (it's way better than giving the money to rich people like we do today), I don't think you got the sizes of things correctly.

Any UBI that avoids people getting poor will have to come mainly form taxes, and will mostly not make any bit of inflation.

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

#677

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:33 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #674

willis936 wrote: post #326

Forget the talk about bubbles and corrections. Can someone explain to me the rationale of investing in a product, marketing it, seeing that it drives consumers away from your product and erodes trust, and then you continue to invest at an accelerating rate? Good business would have driven us very far away from this point years ago. This is very deep in the "because we can" territory. It's not FOMO.

> If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will. - Steve Jobs

Eh... That's only worth anything if the new version of "you" is better than the original.

I'm certain Jobs thought there's no need to point that detail, because nobody still living¹ would be dumb enough not to understand it implicitly. Too bad that we have evidence otherwise.

1 - At the worst case, selection bias should make it true.

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

#678

Post by saxenaabhi » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

jcgrillo wrote: post #665

saxenaabhi wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to…

> 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.

As I said the evidence is in companies not hiring anymore since they don't need as many developers as before. If you want rigorous controlled studies you'll get it in due time. In the meantime maybe just look into the workflows of how people are using

re AI skeptics: I started pushing AI in our company early this year, and one of the first questions I got was that "are we doing it to reduce costs". I fully understood and sympathize with the fact many engineers feel threatened and feel they are being replaced. So I clarified it's just to increase our feature velocity which was my honest intention since ofc I'm not a monster.

I then asked this engineer to develop a feature using bolt, and he partially managed to do it but in the worst way possible. His approach was to spend no time on planning/architecture and to just ask AI to do it in a few lines. When hit with bugs he would ask the AI "to fix the bug" without even describing the bug. His reasoning was that if he had to do this prep work then why would he use AI. Nonetheless he finished entire month's worth of credit in a single day.

I can't find the proper words, but there's a certain amount of dishonesty in this attitude that really turns me off. Like turbotax sabotaging tax reforms so they can rent seek.

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

#679

Post by zwnow » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:36 PM UTC

hello_moto wrote: post #632

zwnow wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the middle of nowhere in Northern Germany. A house where you wont have to tear down the whole place starts at 400k. And that's a basic small sub 100m^2 house with no garden. Sorry but I wont get myself into 40 year debt for a bungalow. After my father's death we sold our old family home for ~70k€ 15 years ago. It would have been in the 300-400k range nowadays. My salary certainly did not double - triple in…

Inflation and rich people buying asset class drives everything up

Ill just live for rent and let landlords leech my hard earned money. Gives me freedom to leave whenever I feel like it...

I am already 30, wont have a good start capital at 40 and I for sure wont buy a house that late in life.

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

#680

Post by mitthrowaway2 » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:48 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #676

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right answer to this is not a number, but rather a feedback loop that converges on the right number. When everyone is laid off without production of goods slowing down, the result is deflation; when everyone gets too much money relative to production of goods, the result is inflation. So that means you can use the CPI inflation as a feedback variable, and adjust the UBI amount until the CPI is stable.

I'm all for using a UBI to stabilize inflation (it's way better than giving the money to rich people like we do today), I don't think you got the sizes of things correctly. Any UBI that avoids people getting poor will have to come mainly form taxes, and will mostly not make any bit of inflation.

Why would it come from taxes, rather than simply from being printed?

The typical answer is "printing money causes inflation", but in the context of this feedback loop, it only causes exactly as much inflation as is required to cancel out the deflation caused by automation-induced layoffs and productivity increases. That's the magic of feedback.

But if it's because the resulting UBI would still be insufficient for welfare, we could also use taxes to fund a secondary "revenue-neutral" layer of UBI that taxes the rich and redistributes to everybody, but probably it makes sense to go in slower steps, seeing what level the primary UBI stabilizes at and then adding a secondary tax-funded one if the primary one isn't sufficient for both welfare and sustaining economic demand.

(The secondary UBI would probably still be somewhat inflationary, even though it's funded by taxes, just because poor people spend more of their money on things that are highly-weighted in the CPI, but the feedback loop will balance that out).