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The dead economy theory

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Re: The dead economy theory

#911

Post by halapro »

RandomLensman wrote: post #820
halapro wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Only the highest and lowest level jobs are available. Someone needs to report to shareholders and plan. If a PM can just write tickets and they get done, then you just need one PM.

Maybe this isn't practical today, but in 2, 5, 10 years? I still have to work 30-40 years before I retire, what do I do?

Re: The dead economy theory

#912

Post by phillipcarter »

kelnos wrote: post #674
phillipcarter wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really? Over 1 billion monthly users and over 100 billion messages a day, much of which is multimedia. Plus ads, payments, business integrations, a developer platform... ...you need quite a lot of devs for that, even if you freeze all feature development forever. > Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it…

> Over 1 billion monthly users and over 100 billion messages a day, much of which is multimedia. Plus ads, payments, business integrations, a developer platform... Right, but it's already doing that, and runs just fine, from what I understand. The developers don't have to sit there pounding the enter key on their keyboards over and over all day to keep the messages flowing. Is the user count and message rate growing…

> Right, but it's already doing that, and runs just fine, from what I understand. The developers don't have to sit there pounding the enter key on their keyboards over and over all day to keep the messages flowing.

It “works fine” precisely because there’s a lot of engineers pounding the enter key.

This is really just basic stuff, when you serve literally billions of users worldwide, you need a lot of people just to keep everything going smoothly as more and more people adopt it. Software doesn’t just magically scale to arbitrary usage and what made sense to build 5 years ago may no longer be the correct architecture today.

Re: The dead economy theory

#913

Post by largbae »

palmotea wrote: post #745
unusualmonkey wrote: post #741

Earlier 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.

> Sorry that's no realistic. People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital. You're clinging past: what you is true when human capital counts for something, but what happens when it doesn't? Where the party who can spend the most tokens on the case wins (or has a much greater chance of success)? Law might not be the best example of that, but (under current trends) a lot of areas…

Sounds like Jevons Paradox to me: Amount of output per worker-hour increases(cost drops edit sorry), paradoxically worker-hours _increase_.

Mechanism? New Use Cases become viable.

Just like LED lights and Virtual Machines made light-per-watt and workloads-per-server more efficient, what did we do with that efficiency? We didn't pocket the cash, we turned every billboard and many buildings into JumboTrons, and we made millions of new cheap cloud VMs to run hundreds of thousands of new little businesses that never would have happened.

Look at coding now: People are finishing side projects that they never would have, closing out old bugs or test coverage they never would have, starting side businesses they never would have before.

This is new demand being created before our eyes as the cost of knowledge work drops.

Re: The dead economy theory

#914

Post by gverrilla »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #433
wcfrobert wrote: post #299

> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market. If we take it to the extreme, the final solution to this problem is secessionism: a fully non-human AI economy where t…

>It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future? I think the Darwinian logic of reality might make this hard. If society A and society B are both developing AI and one of them stops in order to protect humans, society B may continue to develop AI and then it might either outcompete society A economically to the point of reducing it to poverty (it is theor…

"Darwinian logic of reality"

Re: The dead economy theory

#915

Post by root_axis »

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…

Yeah... Take it even one step further, why would AI companies even sell access at all? They could just run competitor firms directly themselves, and that outcome is really the only way they can ever hope to make ROI, so for sure they'll do it if it ever becomes possible.

Re: The dead economy theory

#916

Post by peder »

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…

Exactly right, it's Porter's Five Forces with Threats of Substitutes and Threats of New Entrants, which means that margins will be compressed massively, which means that being a lawyer will often mean lower wages. The p99() of lawyer wages will probably decline, but the max() will likely increase for the niches that are not adequately covered by AI use cases.

Re: The dead economy theory

#917

Post by vinceguidry »

> Piketty, no conservative, has argued that UBI fails to address root structural problems: “unequal access to education and health, low-paying and low-productivity jobs, malfunctioning markets, corruption, and regressive tax systems.” David Shor’s polling data bears this out from the other direction: UBI is unpopular with American voters; a federal jobs guarantee has legs. People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.

I stopped reading here. The whole piece's argument rests on 'people need work for meaning'. Patent bullshit, this is 2026's 'let them eat cake'. The folks displaced from manufacturing didn't fall into poverty and drugs because they couldn't find meaning without work, claiming this is just what historically happens is bullshit of the highest order. You best believe if these folks had been offered an off-ramp they would have found the meaning and purpose to build a services economy. Instead society and policy intentionally left them to rot. A simple UBI for these folks would have worked wonders.

Re: The dead economy theory

#918

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

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.

yeah, there'll be loads and loads of disruption, but it'll take a lot longer than many people expect (much like the internet disruption did).

Re: The dead economy theory

#919

Post by jayd16 »

It's crazy to me that we're seriously discussing these things replacing all workers when they still cannot do proper addition.

I can see a world where these tools stay popular but I don't think they'll be able to be used without someone holding responsibility for their output.

Re: The dead economy theory

#920

Post by bloppe »

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…

It's ok. AI will have replaced most VCs by then and increase the efficiency of capital allocation. The right people will get funded, competition will work it's magic, and consumers will benefit mightily. Nobody's profit margins are safe.

Of course, who knows. There's always another angle you can look at this from

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