I quit Reddit because it became infected with the delusion. Now, it appears, Hacker News has as well, and I think my days here may be numbered as the discourse here is not based on reality. LLMs are largely useless except for writing code and marketing copy, but everyone here seems to be convinced already that they're going to supplant all knowledge workers. Yet, no one can give me a body of examples of any companies that have successfully automated with them. The rift between fantasy and reality keeps growing to the point that even the critics seem convinced. It's truly amazing and dumbfounding. What we have to worry about is not AI taking over the world. It's the propagation of mass psychosis and a loss of social connection via shared reality.
The dead economy theory
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: The dead economy theory
#682I 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…
i think the narrative of “all white collar employment replacement in the near future” can sustain their public market valuation for many years, regardless of how profitable they are in the medium term.
Re: The dead economy theory
#683>The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent. I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you…
The horse analogy fell very flat for me. Those horses were bred and maintained as single purpose machines. There isn’t really an analogy to humans with self-determination and broad abilities, other than they both have a heartbeat.
In a way I think we've been seeing the horse analogy play out for a while, with declining birth rates in developed countries. When people are pessimistic about the future, they have fewer children. Perhaps it's not as dramatic as the decline in horses, but I think there's a bit of a parallel there.
Re: The dead economy theory
#684Hrm. I plugged in the first 4000 words of this essay into my free Pangram account and it says "59% AI generated", "We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, AI-assisted, and human-written content".
Who is the customer for this stuff?
Re: The dead economy theory
#685The 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…
You realize that the limit of this is that the only people worth existing is the people with capital?
> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.
Why do I need to buy products/services from this startups when I can just reverse engineer their product and use all my capital to make them?
Re: The dead economy theory
#686The first bit is just a restatement of the "paradox of thrift": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift If every business cuts headcount and costs, then you overall get a contraction in the economy and high unemployment and a recession. Everyone's spending is someone else's salary and revenues. Couldn't get through the rest of it because it was a bunch of overly verbose human-slop writing. I think the bigger…
Human-slop is a new one for me. How would you define it? Low quality work written by a human? Human writing that sounds like an LLM? Something else?
For me, it is writing way too much to say too little.
Re: The dead economy theory
#687Hrm. I plugged in the first 4000 words of this essay into my free Pangram account and it says "59% AI generated", "We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, AI-assisted, and human-written content". Who is the customer for this stuff?
> the text of this piece is entirely human-generated, including the infelicitous phrasings and penchant for two-dollar words.
Re: The dead economy theory
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many of these top 10% of households will have their breadwinners be replaced with AI? The LLM boom is aimed at them, professionals, knowledge workers, not at landscapers and plumbers.
90% of the 10% will be doomed. The remainder, the 1% overall lives off capital not labor, they’ll be fine.
that is incorrect, the 0.1% (>50m) live purely off capital. the 1% are still mostly highly paid specialized labor and despite high savings their capital would not sustain their lifestyle outside a brief retirement.
Re: The dead economy theory
#689India 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
That greatly depends on how much handholding is required and for how long.
The difference between mostly right and actually useable without supervision is why self driving cars still aren’t ready. When someone says AI can do job X, they rarely mean it’s good enough for anyone to blindly trust the results of it doing that job.
Re: The dead economy theory
#690I think this article underestimates how weird things could get if we had low employment but a vast surplus of material goods. I don’t think a society has ever really been in that position