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…
> 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? Money. They won't have the money to pay for the tokens, or the best models, because they'll be unemployed. They also won't have the connections to get the clients. When you're…
The dead economy theory
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Re: The dead economy theory
#832I know this isn't exactly related, so maybe a low value comment, but it itches in my mind. Years ago I talked with a recruiter at Facebook and they bragged about how many floors of developers they had working on Messenger in just one location (Seattle). What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? I feel like in a way, AI just adds to that weird situation of overcapacity. M…
Before a covid hiring spree twitter had around 4000 headcount, now they’re around 3000. Basically musk stopped moderating and fired the moderators. What he did demonstrate is that the market didn’t care about moderation, because active user counts increased instead of decreasing.
Re: The dead economy theory
#833Earlier 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
Re: The dead economy theory
#834The 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.
Re: The dead economy theory
#835Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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".
So saving and living below means is a great strategy either way.
Re: The dead economy theory
#836The 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…
I foresee Claude etc being able to do much of that on a self-serve basis. The entrepreneurship you mention to me looks exactly opposite to what you are describing - a middleman between the customer and the product, which is offered by a third party. In my mind that’s why they launched this deployment company for example, to do just that in house as well
Re: The dead economy theory
#837Earlier 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
Re: The dead economy theory
#838Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry that's no realistic. People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital. Assuming token costs will be prohibitive assumes: A) tokens will be really expensive and B) you need to fund tokens before you have revenue. Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.
> People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital. Those people are usually very talented and work 16/7. And they need to convince other similar people to work for them, usually at a lower-than-market rate. The premise here is "talented humans working hard" will stop being a valuable thing due to AI.
Re: The dead economy theory
#839Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?