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Comment by itsalwaysgood

8 hours ago

The economy

And famously, the economy never changes course. Something, something, stocks always go up.

  • Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?

    Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?

    Doesn't matter how much stock prices move up and down...AI is here to stay and no amount of booing changes our desires to compete.

    The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.

    I recall all the bemoaning when IT jobs started going overseas... businesses always go with the cheapest labor.

    The world is dog eat dog, and those that prepare for the future are better equipped to deal.

    • It's a massive long shot pipe dream, but we might somehow end up with legislators who have backbones and actually represent the people, and they'll enact regulation to reign in the applications of AI, provide a safety net for the millions who will be affected by it, and/or at least find a way to spread the prosperity that comes from AI across the population rather than into the hands of the few. I'm not betting on it, but it theoretically could happen.

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    • > Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?

      Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought.

      >The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.

      It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schmidts, Trumps, Musks, Epsteins. Just not to poorer people.

      > Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?

      In fact, with well run economy that systematically prevents monopolies, yes it tends to hire people no matter what technological level. Currents state where few super powerful companies are able to push themselves into everything and create monopolies via dumping prices, even as they are not profitable and can count on their friends in administration to bail them out once if all goes pop is the ineffective economy.

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The economy looked really good before the dotcom crash too. The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions.

Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I don’t expect a bubble pop to make us go back in time to 2022, but I expect it will put an end these the AI mandates, token maxing, and other foolish behavior.

  • A lot of businesses depend on the Internet.

    AI will be the same in the future. Not sure what to say about the ups and downs of stock price, or hype cycles.

  • > The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions.

    The crash did not make the internet go away. I don't foresee a world where we will go back to the pre-AI times either. In the same way that post dotcom crash, you would be a fool to not have your business online, I think we will find similar things to be the case around AI. Even if the bubble bursts AI is here to stay and that will have major consequences for labor.

    • The irony of the dotcom crash is that a lot of 'dark fiber' service started rolling out decades later. Fiber that was laid during the dotcom era.

      There are lots of datacenters going up in similar fashion. I don't know if they'd have the same utility decades later (very unlikely), but it's interesting.