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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#801

Post by chii »

itake wrote: post #796
My_Name wrote: post #784

Not many people see that the end result is that when ordinary people stop earning money, and stop buying products, all the money will be used purely for B2B transactions. Money will still exist, but people will not see hardly any of it. To break out of being just a person and start a business you will still need money, but be unable to get any. Thus, the endgame is revealed. You don't need to form a dictatorship, you…

> That inequality is not going down, only upwards. This was talked about 15+ years ago when I was a young student. I saw the writing on the wall and made it a priority to live below my means and aggressively invest. Unfortunately, many of my friends think I am crazy for not "enjoying life" more... We shall see what happens I guess.

> Unfortunately, many of my friends think I am crazy for not "enjoying life" more

then, in 30-40 yrs time, those same friends all want gov't bailouts for their pensions, and higher taxation of people like yourself, to fund it (because, you know, you're rich enough to be able to spare it of course!).

Re: The dead economy theory

#802

Post by close04 »

peonicles wrote: post #662
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…

We can take your train of thought further still. If AI ever becomes super good at lawyering, why would we even need law firms and lawyers at all? We could feed legislation and constitution into the model and have it argue against other lawyer bots in court in front of a judge bot.

Not buying the judge not part. A human being judged by a non-human will be very far in the future. Bots can’t be held accountable. It’s also an “us vs. them”, for some people it’s hard to accept being judged by a different gender, ethnicity, etc. A bot telling you to go to prison? Tough sell.

Re: The dead economy theory

#803

Post by chii »

nearbuy wrote: post #752
gls2ro wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep reading this idea and I think something is missing. Lets take this to the extreme: only 2 people remain with capital and AI all the rest are replaced. Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant. But here is an even more interesting question: As their AI can create anything why would they pay each…

> Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant. The money just circulating around is actually more or less how a normal economy works. If you have a two person world where one person makes food and the other makes tools, the money just bounces back and forth between the two people as they trade tools and f…

UBI only works if the technology advances to a level where there is zero scarcity. I dont believe AI will produce that level of abundance.

Re: The dead economy theory

#804

Post by easyThrowaway »

bob1029 wrote: post #795
easyThrowaway wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has become a meme at this point but this sentence still stands: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth".

Taste and experience are so much more important than the raw talent. You can't fix this with money. https://youtube.com/shorts/akcSX81KOv4

The whole "Taste makes all the difference" has been meme'd to death too: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYuj_4dxVg2/.

Also... I won't add any details to avoid doxing myself, but trust me on this, Rick is the last person nowadays you'd want to listen to for anything taste-related, unless we're talking about feeding your own ego and carefully curating your own public image, and disappearing for weeks. I'd pay very good money to be around his ghost producers/writers/engineers again, though.

Re: The dead economy theory

#805

Post by chii »

jameslk wrote: post #748
scared_together wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> businesses will continue to need humans to differentiate. Honestly, why? If AI actually becomes capable of replacing large sections of the workforce, why wouldn’t a business composed entirely of AI “employees” outcompete their rivals?

Because they would all be using the same AI model (in reality a fixed set of them, but let’s say it’s just one for the sake of argument). That isn’t differentiation [0] It’s like if every company hired the same guy named Karl. If everyone is relying on Karl, and Karl is making the same stuff for all these businesses, how is one business going to outcompete another? At that point you need something else to drive diffe…

> would all be using the same AI model

i think this is a very large assumption.

What if in the future, AI models are as guarded as nuclear weapons? Because why doesn't this argument apply for nuclear weapons, but does for AI?

Re: The dead economy theory

#806

Post by bananaflag »

easyThrowaway wrote: post #799
Spooky23 wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pitch from some people is the wealth will lift all of the boats, etc. Rich people have fewer kids. Reality is 1984 style. You’ll have the party, soldiers and a proles. A modern version of what the Romans or some medieval societies did.

What we too easily forget is that for millennia we had societies where an infinitesimally amount of people (a dozen of families, at best) held almost all the wealth, another thousands ensured that order was maintained throughout the kingdom/empire by force, and everyone else lived by subsistence economy. Such societies were terrifyingly stable, lasting hundred of years before slowly collapsing. We're not immune to go…

> Such societies were terrifyingly stable, lasting hundred of years before slowly collapsing. We're not immune to going back to this.

They were very vulnerable to succession crises. This is the main problem that representative democracy fixed.

Re: The dead economy theory

#807

Post by halapro »

runeks wrote: post #797

Why does everyone seem to assume that there is a finite amount of work available? If all of the sudden it becomes possible to build a B2B company at 10x less cost which can save its customer, say, $1m per year and before this company cost $2m per year to run and now costs $200k, then it means before this was unviable and now it is viable — up to $800k profit a year now versus $1m loss per year before — then this incr…

I'm not buying this argument at all. What jobs are available to humans if AI can do it all? I foresee everyone paying Anthropic to do anything.

The only jobs left are manual jobs at small scale (think waiters, cleaners, nurses), but only because robots still aren't good enough.

LLMs have shown us that all the jobs we once thought were safe (creative, coding) are really not safe at all.

Even if it results in AI slop, you can clearly tell that people don't mind and don't realize.

Re: The dead economy theory

#808

Post by joegibbs »

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.

They don’t always think that, since sometimes share prices decrease as the result of layoffs, which would indicate they think it’s a bad decision.

Re: The dead economy theory

#809

Post by ahoka »

itake wrote: post #796
My_Name wrote: post #784

Not many people see that the end result is that when ordinary people stop earning money, and stop buying products, all the money will be used purely for B2B transactions. Money will still exist, but people will not see hardly any of it. To break out of being just a person and start a business you will still need money, but be unable to get any. Thus, the endgame is revealed. You don't need to form a dictatorship, you…

> That inequality is not going down, only upwards. This was talked about 15+ years ago when I was a young student. I saw the writing on the wall and made it a priority to live below my means and aggressively invest. Unfortunately, many of my friends think I am crazy for not "enjoying life" more... We shall see what happens I guess.

The point was it does not matter if you only eat rice and beans for your whole life, no amount of salaries will get you into the "club".

Re: The dead economy theory

#810

Post by ozim »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #793
ozim wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but AI is already revolutionary. It is not AGI but current SOTA/Frontier models can do stuff that was never possible before. Even like 2 years ago AI was starting to disrupt whole industries. I think you might have higher expectations to call something “revolutionary”. But for me revolution is already happening right here right now.

Revolutionary in the Internet sense, not revolutionary in the Skynet sense.

Tell that to copywriters and translators, all those tech workers that were fired in thousands.
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