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The dead economy theory

owenmcgrann.com

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Re: The dead economy theory

#901

Post by ksec »

rootusrootus wrote: post #226

I 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…

WhatsApp managed both Android and iOS App along with backend serving half a billion customers with only 40 engineers.

And that was at a time they had to fix a lot of things and scabbily issues by themselves. Now FreeBSD, Erlang, CPU, SSD, RAM babe all improved a lot.

I honestly struggle to see why they need many floors of developers just for messenger.

Re: The dead economy theory

#902

Post by bombcar »

rzmmm wrote: post #823
moneycantbuy wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do it. What policies to propose?

Let's start with laws which mandates that copyleft in LLM inputs transfer to LLM outputs

If AI results in the abolishment of the copyright regime as we know it, at least some good will come from the wreckage of society.

Re: The dead economy theory

#903

Post by abalashov »

dangus wrote: post #188
daxfohl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and assuming local open AI models start catching up, which they seem to be doing, the foundation models' hold on society gets a lot slipperier. If there's a "what to do about all this" from an engineer's standpoint, pushing the needle toward local models, whether in research, agents, or just using them, understanding how they work, and advocating for them when it makes sense (which is more often than they get…

While I agree with you on open models getting better, I have been starting to see how the value, the reason you pay for Claude, isn’t in the models. For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was. A local model can’t do that for me…

I get local models to drive applications through MCP (e.g. Google Chrome DevTools) via OpenCode all the time, and do things that would otherwise be very token-intensive and result in pointless meatspin. This is totally possible, and will become more so.

The real reason you pay for Claude _is_ in the models. The locally runnable models are impressive for what they are, but simply will not accomplish the task as effectively, incisively or quickly enough. I have to be willing to let OpenCode run in agentic loop on "download my bank statements"[1] for an hour and just walk away, and take a low-ish but profoundly nonzero chance that it will just fail. Claude can do it in 5 minutes, if I let it (I have), and it will not fail. Both are driving the browser via MCP and performing the same task.

[1] One of those difficult-to-use, modal-rich JavaScript-laden banking portals that seems quite intentionally designed to prevent this sort of downloading, or I wouldn't bother letting an agent loose on it in the first place.

Re: The dead economy theory

#904

Post by bombcar »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #887

While I am ideologically aligned with the author (ie, humans matter) and agree with their proposed interventions (progressive taxation, spread the base of capital across society, aggressive antitrust enforcement) and appreciate the thrust of the essay, I’m doubtful of the underlying predicate that human labor will be replaced with AI. I don’t believe we have seen AI-driven layoffs yet (despite the CEO’s prognosticati…

If we can work on the solution for when 90% of “human labor” is replaced by machines and intelligent machines, we’ll have a roadmap for how society should be structured.

Ever since we moved a step above subsistence farming we’ve been heading this way, and continually developing new ways to waste effort and work isn’t sustainable.

Re: The dead economy theory

#905

Post by NSUserDefaults »

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.

Responsibility, reputation, reliability, human connection and empathy (ahem lawyers, right…)

Re: The dead economy theory

#906

Post by thomasfl »

gattr wrote: post #888
thomasfl wrote: post #751

AI will accelerate the decline in the world’s population. No job, no marriage and no kids will be the norm for most people. For many years to come. Some will say it’s good for the planet and especially for other species of vertebrates. Others will see it as a personal failure to not have any living offspring when they get old. In ancient Greece, Diana was the goddess of hunting, wildlife and personal freedom and Venu…

Nitpick: in Greek mythology it's Artemis and Aphrodite. Diana and Venus are Roman equivalents.

Thanks for pointing that out. Not nitpicking, but facts.

Re: The dead economy theory

#907

Post by hammock »

palmotea wrote: post #737
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…

> 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…

So you’re saying banks (who can loan new money out of thin air) will end up being the winners of all this.

Re: The dead economy theory

#908

Post by hammock »

easyThrowaway wrote: post #785
palmotea wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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".

Haven’t heard that meme, but it seems like you could replace “AI” with “civilizational striving/class struggle” and extend it across the whole of human history

Re: The dead economy theory

#909

Post by hammock »

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…

We know what it looks like. We call it post industrial society. The rust belt, decrepit mill and mining towns, shrinking cities, etc.

Re: The dead economy theory

#910

Post by jhbadger »

palmotea wrote: post #896
noslenwerdna wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely going to be cheap or open source models

> There's definitely going to be cheap or open source models What makes you think your "cheap or open source model" running on your piddling desktop cluster will be able to complete against a SOTA one running in a billion-dollar datacenter? It's a cyberpunk fantasy. It won't work out that way.

Local models that run on a laptop (not even needing a "cluster") are already better than ChatGPT from a couple of years ago. Yes, Claude and ChatGPT today are certainly better than these local models, but they can't keep getting better indefinitely -- there's only so much info to scrape. When they hit a plateau, it is only a matter of time that consumer hardware will catch up to it.
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