Comment by zeroonetwothree

But think about it this way: something simple like Slack charges $9/month/person and companies already pay that on many behalf. How hard would it be to imagine all those same companies (and lots more) would pay $30/month/employee for something something AI? Generating an extra $400 per year in value, per employee, isn't that much extra.

A lot of iPhone users will be given a subscription via their job. If they still have a job at that point.

It could be priced into your appstore purchases like apple 30% cut is and you wouldn't notice.

Why you even said you wouldn’t subscribe? It’s not relevant in the slightest.

That's about an extra iPhone every 3-4 years.

Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, etc have been able to collect large amounts of revenue from a global customer base so I don't think the assumption was that unreasonable.

Obviously, China will protect its homegrown AI industry. Current geopolitics trending towards US decoupling in Europe might slow it. But under the old status quo, US AI would have been rapidly adopted in the EU (and it still might. It depends greatly on how much of the Trump Doctrine outlasts the current administration).

Developing countries eventually adopt new technologies. First they adopted personal computers and became customers of Microsoft, then they adopted the Internet and became customers of Google, they adopted smartphones and became customers of Apple. Eventually they will adopt AI and become customers of someone. The question is whether it will be US tech or Chinese tech.

Agreed. Applying the intelligence we already have more broadly will have a huge impact. That's been true for a while now, and it keeps getting more true as models keep getting better.

The idea that companies need "cover" to perform layoffs (particularly in the US) doesn't make sense to me. Tech companies, all companies lay people off regularly. (To a first order approximation) if a worker is a net positive to a company then the company will want to keep them, and if they are not then the company will want to get rid of them. AI or no AI.

Lots of jobs like daycare, teachers, cleaning, the material costs are near zero and your ability to increase productivity using technology is very low.

You can reduce quality of cleaning. But it's very hard to clean faster and better at the same time.

These industries are not going to be optimized by an AI. The only optimization is lower overhead or lower salaries.

Sure, we could have robots in daycare, but I don't think lack of AI is why my wife would have concerns :)

If that seems reasonable to you then you don't know anything about residential construction. The problems that homebuilders face aren't amenable to mathematical solutions. They have to deal with permitting issues, corrupt / incompetent government officials, supplier delays, bad weather, flakey workers, etc. The notion of a 5% improvement from LLM is ludicrously naive.

In the expenditures for the economy making up GDP, not a lot of it screams “AI-able.” Page 9 here breaks down GDP on expenditure basis.

https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2026-01/gdp3q25-upda...

Given how much of the spending is hard goods and simply not AI-able (rent, most of housing new construction, most of other goods, most health care, much of other services), the replacement theory would require a massive displacement.

exactly.

It cannot be sustained with just one-time growth. Capital always has to grow, or it will decrease. If this bubble actually manages to deliver interest, this will lead to the bubble growing even larger, driving even more interest.

China’s GDP per capita fell for the first 40 years of CCP rule, making it way easier to have constant growth after that period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_(191...

Developed countries have slow growth because they need to invent the improvements not just copy what works from other countries.

In 1979, median income in China was $100 USD a year.

In 1979, median income in the US was $16,530 USD a year.

Not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

Did China really do it though? We can clearly see that China has achieved huge economic growth since Deng Xiaoping took control. But the specific numbers can't be attempted to be believed. Communist Party officials at every level heavily manipulate the official economic data to meet their annual goals and no independent auditing is allowed.

By pulling ten million people a year from farms into factories and ploughing 40% of GDP into infrastructure and education. Sounds like a sound analogy to me.

Yeah but China actively works in the best interest of their entire population.

Tech companies never last. Apple will miss a disruptive innovation or make a key strategic error causing them to lose their dominant spot. Look at the top tech companies 50 years ago: how are they doing today?

Is like the transition from monarchies to nation states.

By the 19th century, the rise of nation-states accelerated due to the spread of nationalism, the decline of feudal structures, and the unification of countries like Germany (1871) and Italy (1861). Centralized governments, uniform laws, national education systems, and a sense of collective identity became defining features. The French Revolution (1789) played a pivotal role by promoting citizenship, legal equality, and national sovereignty over dynastic rule

Maybe in 2300 they'll say something similar about nationalism

There is exactly 0.00% chance Apple will be around in 50 years let alone 100.