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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#811

Post by nevertoolate »

ekidd wrote: post #127
alex_young wrote: post #53

Why is this time different? Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so? If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder…

> Why is this time different? If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts. The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock,…

> If it was just programming being automated, then whatever.

There is nothing on horizon which automates a programmer’s work. Typing in code is faster now, and some things “only need pointing out” like an existence of a “bug” which an llm + harness might be able to mitigate. Automated tests might capture regressions and possibly written by llm + harness. If you replicate this in other professions what will you get?

Re: The dead economy theory

#812

Post by ForHackernews »

pyuser583 wrote: post #654
m463 wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked reading "The Box" about the transition to container shipping. It was interesting to see this totally-unrelated-to-our-times process from the outside. From our place in time, container shipping is obvious. At the time, to people who wanted to ship something, it was ridiculously hard and expensive and risky. If you were shipping something from cleveland to paris, you might just give up. Say you were shipping al…

In all fairness, this is exactly why insurance was invented: unreliable shipping. You just took out a policy, and the shipment didn’t make it you took the payout. It creates a system that diminishes risk, but simultaneously diminishes incentives for improvement.

Ideally the incentives would be driven by the insurance companies: "Put a tamper-proof lock on your crate and get 50% off your theft insurance!"

Re: The dead economy theory

#813

Post by generic92034 »

yaur wrote: post #470
coffeemug wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future you're describing doesn't seem likely to me because in this event the public will force redistribution through political action.

One signficant difference this time is that they can rely on empathyless murder bots to quell riots instead human police.

On the other hand they would never be able again to leave their bunkers, given that it is not hard to assemble a DIY drone and equip it with some explosives.

Re: The dead economy theory

#814

Post by sambuccid »

moneycantbuy wrote: post #724
movpasd wrote: post #502

This article puts into words a lot of things that had been on my mind as missing in AI discourse. Most significantly, actually considering the _systemic consequences_ of the promised AI future, how it interacts with political economy, an actual critical look (instead of accepting the "Western meta-narrative of modernity" at face value). And maybe more importantly, it articulates really clearly how damaging the restru…

Let's do it. What policies to propose?

There are at least 4 in the article:

> The interventions that could matter are known. Public ownership stakes in AI infrastructure. Aggressive antitrust enforcement. A genuine tax regime on automated labor. Branko Milanovic’s prescription is characteristically direct: spread capital ownership more widely, tax the highest capital incomes more aggressively

Re: The dead economy theory

#815

Post by tliltocatl »

Terr_ wrote: post #322
analog31 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.

There is certainly room to add developers to a "simple" project if one is ensuring everything works with screen readers for the blind, that it had worldwide I18N support, meets every law around privacy and data jurisdiction, has systems for requesting personal copies/deletion, etc... But instead it was probably for Messenger's portion of telemetry and marketing and ads and hacking out of your phones security model to…

But that's core product. That's how they make money. Whatever it's a good idea to make money that way is a different story.

Re: The dead economy theory

#816

Post by discodonkey »

ozim wrote: post #810
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The current wave of tech layoffs is much like those that preceded it (e.g. after the pandemic), except this time AI is used as a scapegoat.

Re: The dead economy theory

#817

Post by dynamite-ready »

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

Money is exactly what got us to this point! Besides, I always thought taste, or at least 'popular' taste, was a market function, or something?

That's what people like Rick Rubin (Iovine, the Medici's, etc), deep down, need us to believe. Probably.

Re: The dead economy theory

#818

Post by sambuccid »

spondelkryp wrote: post #91

>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…

With such a population reduction(very polite name for what it actually is) I guess AI will become effectively the only holders of most of the human knowledge

Re: The dead economy theory

#819

Post by noopprod »

kajaktum wrote: post #685
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…

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…

> only people worth existing is the people with capital? replying to this with my thoughts

IMO The missing link is that, as long as humans still have political power, that is the basis of their economic power under the new system. The reason is that it is a continuation of the dynamic we see now in western decadence - politicians bribe the populace for votes. So on one side you have the market for political support, balanced with the market for capitalist robot operations, on either side of the political arena.

Re: The dead economy theory

#820

Post by RandomLensman »

halapro wrote: post #807
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,…

If AI could do it all, why would there be any firm if AI could operate itself, too, then?
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