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

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: The dead economy theory

#761

Post by Animats »

lenerdenator wrote: post #530
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…

> Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy. There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still…

> There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.

Mostly for export, in the case of the Asian tigers and China. Once wages reached developed world levels, an export-driven economy gradually became harder to sustain, because there was no longer a labor cost advantage. This is why Party leadership talks about "dual circulation", building up domestic demand within China, and about obtaining a technological edge that continues to make exports profitable. There's been considerable progress on both goals, especially in consumer electronics and the auto industry.

> The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry.

Yes. That happened to Egypt, where the government paid for college and then hired the graduates. Then the oil ran out. It's called "elite overproduction" when new college graduates can't get jobs that actually use their education. Already, in the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't really need a college education.

Re: The dead economy theory

#762

Post by xtn »

epsteingpt wrote: post #740

Not going to be popular, but this article misses the point entirely. The reason we are pursuing AI so quickly is the same reason we (the West, US) pursued the atomic bomb so quickly: not because having it was great (we've only used it twice), but because 'the other guys' having it is worse. As bad as anyone thinks AI is for a free and democratic society with oligarchs, you can be assured that a future in a China or R…

I don't post often, but want to write a bit here to change the world slightly. The outcome depends on how people think and believe. If everyone believe others are evil and will (e.g.) nuke the other country first, then indeed we are fucked. But this does not happen, right? I'm Chinese and lived in Europe for 10 years. I don't feel people are that different. Feel free to visit and talk to people here :)

Re: The dead economy theory

#763

Post by pants2 »

well_ackshually wrote: post #753
joegibbs wrote: post #742

"When Block’s Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half his workforce in March, citing AI coding agents, investors responded with a twenty-five percent stock price surge in after-hours trading. The market rewarded the elimination of human labor with an immediate, massive transfer of value to shareholders." This is very common and has been since before AI, the market can see that the company has overhired and there are a bunch…

Oh, bullshit. Shareholders will literally always think the company overhired. Every single person on this website has lived through at least one instance of firing an employee and distributing his workload to the leftover employees who are usually already overworked. Shareholders see you as useless meat to dispose, the ideal number of employees to them is ZERO.

If layoffs will pump your stock, why aren't there more? Sure there are some layoffs happening, but those could just be companies that will benefit from layoffs. Certainly there could be many companies whose stock price would drop due to layoffs and those companies just haven't done that.

Re: The dead economy theory

#764

Post by cdata »

riazrizvi wrote: post #477
CamperBob2 wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine. The important part is how we've recently learned just how much of our reality is embodied by language. Language does vastly more than anyone thought it did, and that means that language models can do vastly more work than anyone thought they could. There was no reason on Earth to think that "stochastic parrots" could solve…

Yeesh. Math itself is a constructed input-output modeling system that provides functional benefits to the computational organisms that support it. Language is the same type of system, but with more individual slack. "Stochastic parrots" is just your human minimization device, that will either serve you or not. Reality is not embodied by language, we are not in the business of reality representation, we are in the bus…

> What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn’t words. It isn’t material—that’s just an idea. It isn’t spiritual—that’s also an idea; a symbol. Reality is this: [GONG]. You see? We all know what reality is, but we can’t describe it. Just as we all know how to beat our hearts and shape our bones, but cannot say how it is done. - Alan Watts

https://organism.earth/library/document/art-of-meditation

Re: The dead economy theory

#765

Post by freefaler »

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…

The price of their work will go down and it might not be economical to do it at all. Theirs skills (as also many IT skills) will not be needed at that scale. In the same way as typing on a typewriter was a skill that gave economic opportunity not so long time ago. Now everything is an email and part of it is speech to text. When something becomes a commodity, the skilled providers need to find something new to sell on the market.

About the law firms, part of the job of a law firm is to give the corporate employee a "guarantee" that he won't be held accountable for doing something legally stupid. So a new lawyer is at great disadvantage if he don't have the contact he has build trust with. From a freind's law company with 50+ lawyers I know that junior lawyers fresh from uni need at least 4-5 years to build their client base. Then, they can leave and start their own taking part of that client base with them. This limits the number of people who can start their own company and most of them won't risk it in the age of AI, because it will be sales and marketing that will feed them, not their legal wizardry, especially when tasks like "check this agreement" won't be billed at the current insane rates.

Re: The dead economy theory

#766

Post by josh-sematic »

Neil44 wrote: post #749
josh-sematic wrote: post #747

Anthropic employees: I believe many of you actually do think your work is for the betterment of humanity. That’s great! If you truly do believe that, it’s time to start demanding your leadership lobby for real, structural solutions to unemployment that leave everyday people with a say in how companies like yours operate. “The market will find new jobs” is not as strong of a historical pattern as “the concentration of…

I don't think it's productive to single out a specific company that's in this area. If they closed someone else would do it. If they don't execute well someone else will. It's the same mentality as people who smashed up looms to keep people employed at spinning wheels.

I’m not saying they should stop building things (I doubt any argument in that direction would land anyway). But more that they should follow through on the whole picture of the future they’re working on. Anthropic’s brand leans a lot more on trying to be the good guys than other big labs, which is why I think they’re worth addressing in particular.

Re: The dead economy theory

#767

Post by chrinic6391 »

thisisit wrote: post #734
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…

Here's another train of thought because you don't seem to understand how incentives or even lawyering works. > 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? Your thinking is similar to the someone saying you can use LLMs to "research" stock market edges. The rub lies in knowing what research to do and w…

[dead]

Re: The dead economy theory

#768

Post by mrtksn »

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…

For some reason AI is able to replace engineers, doctors, lawyers but can do CEO’s and PR specialists. (!)

Every time these AI discussions happen, it’s my first thought, they even talk about the 1 person billion $ company concept but for some reason it’s never the CEO’s replaced and it’s never their industry taken over by the 1 person unicorn.

It’s very weird, it’s just obvious that once you are made redundant you just fill the gaps with AI and become the competitor.

Maybe they imagine that they have the X factor(unlike those engineers or musicians that are being replaced) and the people they laid off were low tier players anyway.

It simply doesn’t compute. The only possible way is to AI companies steal all the businesses of everyone and then unless they find a way to run a system where everyone is happy enough and occupied the “permanent underclass” overruns the AI folks and it becomes a public domain and the concept of intellectual property ownership disappears and other forces like vanity take over and after some conflict a brand new society emerges that runs like a cult with self imposed limits so that they can maintain a structure and healthy competition.

Re: The dead economy theory

#769

Post by chrinic6391 »

josh-sematic wrote: post #766
Neil44 wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's productive to single out a specific company that's in this area. If they closed someone else would do it. If they don't execute well someone else will. It's the same mentality as people who smashed up looms to keep people employed at spinning wheels.

I’m not saying they should stop building things (I doubt any argument in that direction would land anyway). But more that they should follow through on the whole picture of the future they’re working on. Anthropic’s brand leans a lot more on trying to be the good guys than other big labs, which is why I think they’re worth addressing in particular.

[dead]

Re: The dead economy theory

#770

Post by dguest »

20after4 wrote: post #397
Henchman21 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PKD short story “Autofac” seems highly relevant. Amazon had the HUGE BRASS BALLS to include this as an episode in “Electric Dreams”: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/

Absolutely loved that episode. I also thought it was incredible that Amazon was the company to release this.

That Amazon releases this seems to be consistent with the trend the original linked article mentioned: these big tech companies are happy to warn people of the apocalypse they are causing.

It helps not to think of corporations as a single coherent consciousness: hypothetically everyone who works there, from top to bottom, can believe that what they are doing is harmful, but also feel powerless to fight the hand of the market.

In practice I doubt the entire management structure agrees on that, some honestly believe they are doing good, but there's nothing stopping EvilCorp from emerging from a bunch of perfectly good people who are "just doing their job".

Post reply on HN