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 firms even have to exist? Who is going to hire them if they can just hire AI?
The companies that are rushing so hard to replace their workers don't realise that AI is eventually going to replace them too.
I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.
> 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 playing a game of "who has the best capital," the scrappy underdog worker with vastly less won't win.
The idea that making the economy even more capital intensive will some how equalize things is an insane fantasy only a software engineer could swallow.
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".
The price of their work will go down and it might not be economical to do it at all. Theirs skills (as also many IT skills) will not be needed at that scale. In the same way as typing on a typewriter was a skill that gave economic opportunity not so long time ago. Now everything is an email and part of it is speech to text. When something becomes a commodity, the skilled providers need to find something new to sell on the market.
About the law firms, part of the job of a law firm is to give the corporate employee a "guarantee" that he won't be held accountable for doing something legally stupid. So a new lawyer is at great disadvantage if he don't have the contact he has build trust with. From a freind's law company with 50+ lawyers I know that junior lawyers fresh from uni need at least 4-5 years to build their client base. Then, they can leave and start their own taking part of that client base with them. This limits the number of people who can start their own company and most of them won't risk it in the age of AI, because it will be sales and marketing that will feed them, not their legal wizardry, especially when tasks like "check this agreement" won't be billed at the current insane rates.
why would anyone pay anyone else for anything when they could just get an AI to do it?
any service would now be worthless, there will be people with hardware and people without.
3 futures:
one where the hardware is shared.
one where it is not.
one where the first person with enough of it kills everyone else.
That wave has been coming for a while but AI and the tons of layoffs of competent folks are accelerating that wave. It takes more than just tech to make it work and banding together helps. That's what we're doing at Scalebrate. Its a network and community of small team founders scaling big together: https://scalebrate.com
Brand value of the ‘prestigious’ law firms will still count for something in the minds of C suite executives (who of course will ensure they themselves are not trampled on by AI). The same dynamic will likely happen with high-powered consulting, big 4 audit/accounting firms and so on, even if inside those companies it’s just a shell of its former self.
Not buying the judge not part. A human being judged by a non-human will be very far in the future. Bots can’t be held accountable. It’s also an “us vs. them”, for some people it’s hard to accept being judged by a different gender, ethnicity, etc. A bot telling you to go to prison? Tough sell.
For some reason AI is able to replace engineers, doctors, lawyers but can do CEO’s and PR specialists. (!)
Every time these AI discussions happen, it’s my first thought, they even talk about the 1 person billion $ company concept but for some reason it’s never the CEO’s replaced and it’s never their industry taken over by the 1 person unicorn.
It’s very weird, it’s just obvious that once you are made redundant you just fill the gaps with AI and become the competitor.
Maybe they imagine that they have the X factor(unlike those engineers or musicians that are being replaced) and the people they laid off were low tier players anyway.
It simply doesn’t compute. The only possible way is to AI companies steal all the businesses of everyone and then unless they find a way to run a system where everyone is happy enough and occupied the “permanent underclass” overruns the AI folks and it becomes a public domain and the concept of intellectual property ownership disappears and other forces like vanity take over and after some conflict a brand new society emerges that runs like a cult with self imposed limits so that they can maintain a structure and healthy competition.
but just imagine the brave new world, where a law firm has super-duper-frontier model and you're trying to argue with it in a court with your latest best local oss model (only 6 month behind the bestests ones).
Interestingly, I have a conflict with my municipality. I fed the articles of law and their arguments of why and how they apply to notebooklm and asked it for fallacies.
It not only gave me the fallacies in their reasoning, but also an excellent counter argument and motivation why they are interpreting this law incorrectly.
The result is now that they are handing over the entire case to an independent third party to evaluate which interpretation is valid.
Here's another train of thought because you don't seem to understand how incentives or even lawyering works.
> 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?
Your thinking is similar to the someone saying you can use LLMs to "research" stock market edges. The rub lies in knowing what research to do and what inputs to provide.
Big law firms are not big because they create similar outputs and that can be done using AI. They are "big" because they have connections and also know how to create better outputs.
Still to your point:
> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.
If this was true then what you are saying is every thing is going to be commoditized due to AI. There is no quality difference.
That will drive prices down in the short term and in the long term people will form cliques like "Forum for AI enabled lawyers" or something similar to OECD and drive prices up. Thereby delivering even lesser value for increased cost. Enshittification at its finest. Not exactly the utopia you seem to be picturing.
You realize that the limit of this is that the only people worth existing is the people with capital?
> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.
Why do I need to buy products/services from this startups when I can just reverse engineer their product and use all my capital to make them?
> only people worth existing is the people with capital?
replying to this with my thoughts
IMO The missing link is that, as long as humans still have political power, that is the basis of their economic power under the new system. The reason is that it is a continuation of the dynamic we see now in western decadence - politicians bribe the populace for votes. So on one side you have the market for political support, balanced with the market for capitalist robot operations, on either side of the political arena.
The big picture can be extended to all economic branches, where steady competition drives down profit margins to near zero, like it is the case for eg. grocery chains already. Functioning markets are solving distribution problems and maybe, some day we will even consider something like algorithmic/HF trading not as a margin siphon but as a (public) service of automated distribution. The bigger picture has to go beyond the How/Who into the the Why/When, which opens up the end conditions of profit driven enterprise and capitalism itself.
I agree in the short term. But in the long term, the owners of the compute will become disgustingly rich without a wealth tax, nationalization, or local AI becoming competitive and ubiquitous. There are still problems to solve; the alternative is an absolute oligarchy.
what do you mean short term? We aren't even in the short term yet (has the AI revolution truly begun?) and the owners of compute are already disgustingly rich.
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 don't need to have a war, you just need to remove all real choice from people, and then you have complete control over what they are able to do by simply making it cost too much. There will be a firewall between ordinary people, and the people who own businesses where all the money sits.
We see the start of it already, when just two individuals have a combined wealth on the order of a trillion dollars. That inequality is not going down, only upwards.
Sure, you may get universal basic income, have a nice house, car (food, clothing etc of course) but there will be a massive air gap between what you could obtain in a lifetime and the minimum you would need to move from that situation into the world where the real money is.
Corporate saving rose by nearly 5 percentage points of global GDP between 1980 and 2013, and since the 2000s the corporate sector flipped from net borrower to net lender in many advanced economies — the "corporate saving glut." Much of it just piled up as cash reserves. Currently, 10–15% of GDP per year flows into corporate retained earnings never to leave. Think about the long term ramifications of that for you and your purchasing power.
AI didn't make this situation, it is just speeding it up.
> 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.
> Unfortunately, many of my friends think I am crazy for not "enjoying life" more
then, in 30-40 yrs time, those same friends all want gov't bailouts for their pensions, and higher taxation of people like yourself, to fund it (because, you know, you're rich enough to be able to spare it of course!).
This article, like Citrini research's scenario before it, misses much of the economics.
AI is unlikely to be as revolutionary as is presumed. It's definitely going to lead to increased productivity, and will probably render some jobs redundant, but it's unlikely to have a significant effect on wages/employment [1], and as of now there isn't one [2]. When it does effect workers (which is still uncommon), AI mostly leads to task reallocation.
Right now, AI's massive valuations seem more like a reflection of the typical speculation that accompanies major technological innovations (thinking IoT, railroads, automobiles) than of its real economic value [3].
The "dead economy" scenario would only be possible in the event of extraordinary, and extraordinarily-unlikely levels of AI-driven unemployment.
I think the point is that even if AI returns don't materialise, there is a dangerous implicit political project among AI moguls to get to this state. Even if we get 10% the way there, there could be serious damage done to the system as part of that pursuit: the regulatory capture loop will tighten, inequality will rise [0], capital will be locked up in data centres. The economy is a big path-dependent system. We can hope, if AI is as middling as your sources suggest, that it collapses back to economic equilibrium. But plenty of past societies have had inefficient and politically captured economic systems. Movement towards equilibrium requires liberal institutions, the foundations of which might be under threat.
[0] Really as a continuation of existing trends rather than its own unique thing.
It is not AGI but current SOTA/Frontier models can do stuff that was never possible before. Even like 2 years ago AI was starting to disrupt whole industries.
I think you might have higher expectations to call something “revolutionary”. But for me revolution is already happening right here right now.
This article puts into words a lot of things that had been on my mind as missing in AI discourse. Most significantly, actually considering the _systemic consequences_ of the promised AI future, how it interacts with political economy, an actual critical look (instead of accepting the "Western meta-narrative of modernity" at face value).
And maybe more importantly, it articulates really clearly how damaging the restructuring of the economy by AI moguls and the tightening of the capital–political feedback loop can be, even (maybe _especially_) if the returns of AI do not materialise as promised.
There is plenty of disorganised diffuse anti-AI sentiment. If intellectuals are able to get together behind a common cause, there might be a political movement in the making.
> The interventions that could matter are known. Public ownership stakes in AI infrastructure. Aggressive antitrust enforcement. A genuine tax regime on automated labor. Branko Milanovic’s prescription is characteristically direct: spread capital ownership more widely, tax the highest capital incomes more aggressively
>The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent.
I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?
I guess if global population drops by 80-90℅ you suddenly get a "sustainable" economy, as everything is repriced the economy of scale needs a much smaller scale.
(Not speculating this is a plan, just a thought that occurred to me when reading about horses example)
This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are many new ways of managing this.
How many of these top 10% of households will have their breadwinners be replaced with AI? The LLM boom is aimed at them, professionals, knowledge workers, not at landscapers and plumbers.
I keep reading this idea and I think something is missing.
Lets take this to the extreme:
only 2 people remain with capital and AI all the rest are replaced.
Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant.
But here is an even more interesting question: As their AI can create anything why would they pay each other? So why do they need money?
Business to business I guess. But there will be collapse for sure of industries that serve the consumer directly, such as agriculture. Meanwhile industries that power and arm the state will be expanded: military drone production to secure compute sites from the human savages, rare earth mining to support technological expansion, rerouting of water resources from public drinking and agricultural irrigation purposes to industry and manufacturing supporting the seats of power, power generation.
With such a population reduction(very polite name for what it actually is) I guess AI will become effectively the only holders of most of the human knowledge
Anecdotally the businesses I am involved with have gone from "use AI everywhere at any cost" to "use it everywhere but use token proxies to save cost" at the same time in the last few weeks
What we too easily forget is that for millennia we had societies where an infinitesimally amount of people (a dozen of families, at best) held almost all the wealth, another thousands ensured that order was maintained throughout the kingdom/empire by force, and everyone else lived by subsistence economy.
Such societies were terrifyingly stable, lasting hundred of years before slowly collapsing. We're not immune to going back to this.
In the early 1900s the majority of Americans were self-employed. The equilibrium will likely shift back towards this, because AIs cannot be business owners, cannot have a bank account, cannot be held liable for their mistakes. And AI are unlikely to be given economic rights any time in the near future, because doing so would facilitate an overwhelming amount of crime; an AI that can make hundreds of copies of its weights all over the globe cannot be jailed or executed, so has no incentive to follow the law.
The US already has a legal concept of personhood for companies. We are soon going to lose control to these “people” and businesses overrunning the economy, the internet and our culture.
> I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?
Those who were formally workers? Remember, money is debt. It is an IOU that, sometime in the future, allows you to receive something of value (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) that was previously owed to you.
Profit occurs when you give more than you receive. That's okay in the short term because you still might exercise calling the debt over the a slightly longer timeline. However, when a business is continually profitable year after year, decade after decade, they are no longer receiving any direct value in exchange for the good/service they gave away. In other words, they start giving the good/service away for free.
It might seem counterintuitive at first that anyone would give something away for free, but I noted "direct value" above because there is also an indirect value to consider: Social influence. The stakeholders in businesses that show continual, large profits become admired by the people and get put on a pedestal. In that, they start to get to do things other people can't (see Epstein files, for example). So if the workers were automated away, not much would change. Those who have the goods and services still wanted will still want to buy, if you will, the social influence from the population at large.
Of course, the flaw in thinking that jobs will be automated away is that those who seek social influence also want a social setting, so they will employ people simply to keep them around as friends. Most jobs in today's economy are already just that. For what "real" jobs still remain nowadays, if automation automates them away the people will simply transition into "friend" work.
The horse analogy fell very flat for me. Those horses were bred and maintained as single purpose machines. There isn’t really an analogy to humans with self-determination and broad abilities, other than they both have a heartbeat.
In a way I think we've been seeing the horse analogy play out for a while, with declining birth rates in developed countries. When people are pessimistic about the future, they have fewer children. Perhaps it's not as dramatic as the decline in horses, but I think there's a bit of a parallel there.
I don't think economic dynamics described in the blog post particularly care about self determination. They care that needed labor roles get filled. And if your broad abilities can be bought elsewhere for cheaper, your mere possession of them counts for little. Do forces of capital think of humans as special for the same reasons you do?
When you work at Put-Screws-In-A-Box Co. or Weld-Metal-Pipes Inc., your boss doesn't see you as a "human with self determination", you're just a meat machine that puts screws in the box and welds metal pipes. He sees you so much as this that he overworks you, breaks your body before you turn 40 and underpays you so much you get to choose between quitting and starving until you get hired at Weld-Screws-In-A-Pipe Intl, or being stuck there because you have neither the time or the energy to learn something else to leave your condition. Alienation is a real thing.
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 Venus was the goddess of love, family and domestic life. The Greeks had stories and plays about how those two goddesses never seemed to get along very well. If you feel like you’re a follower of Diana, then the future will be bright. If you feel like a follower of Venus, then rough times are ahead.
Anthropic employees: I believe many of you actually do think your work is for the betterment of humanity. That’s great! If you truly do believe that, it’s time to start demanding your leadership lobby for real, structural solutions to unemployment that leave everyday people with a say in how companies like yours operate. “The market will find new jobs” is not as strong of a historical pattern as “the concentration of power harms the people without it.” It’s true that AI might not in fact automate the majority of labor in the near term. But if it does (and working at Anthropic implies you likely think it could), then work towards a version of that future that’s actually palatable. It would be easy to let your comp upside soften your objective evaluations. Don’t. Think you’re working for a better future? Put your money where your mouth is, and ask your leaders to do the same.
I don't think it's productive to single out a specific company that's in this area. If they closed someone else would do it. If they don't execute well someone else will. It's the same mentality as people who smashed up looms to keep people employed at spinning wheels.
I’m not saying they should stop building things (I doubt any argument in that direction would land anyway). But more that they should follow through on the whole picture of the future they’re working on. Anthropic’s brand leans a lot more on trying to be the good guys than other big labs, which is why I think they’re worth addressing in particular.
> OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft: the combined investment in large-scale AI infrastructure now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with projections into the trillions over the next decade. These numbers need an addressable market large enough to justify them. There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
It's getting tiring hearing this alarmist view unchallenged honestly. What if instead of replacing a market, it's augmenting a market?
When it becomes cheaper to produce things, we tend to consume more. That is, our consumption is endless. If one day everyone can afford a yacht because automation has reduced the production cost to next to nothing, we'll all be buying yachts. Then it will become who owns the nicer yacht, the branded limited edition yacht. The goal posts will simply shift.
Meanwhile, businesses still need to compete. If they're all using the same AI models to replace labor, AI is no longer their competitive advantage. It's simply a baseline necessity of production.
There will be pain in the jobs market, yes, as old ways of doing things are replaced by new ways with AI. But humans will continue to be the ones consuming endlessly and businesses will continue to need humans to differentiate. It's a relationship that has survived all other times automation has changed how we work.
If they (AI) able to compete with even 30% of workforce, that alone is a big enough leverage over the already powerful companies. At minimum it will cause another phase of wealth inequality, which is already a big problem atm.
Open model with affortable computing power can be the alternative, but we don't see it soon.
> businesses will continue to need humans to differentiate.
Honestly, why? If AI actually becomes capable of replacing large sections of the workforce, why wouldn’t a business composed entirely of AI “employees” outcompete their rivals?
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 differentiation. Branding, strategic partnerships, patents, IP, influencer endorsements, real estate, government licensing, etc. These are either influenced, controlled, or regulated by humans at the end of the day. At the very least you’ll need humans aligning the models for human needs. Humans are the ones being served, they’re the taste makers
and why would they need human customers to thrive? They have other machine customers! This is the even more dystopian step two that the essay doesn't explore...
It kinda seems like you are just stating the implied argument this article is targeted towards? Or something else? Do you disagree with, e.g., Daron Acemoglu's position here? Or is there some truism somewhere we are all missing?
Not the OP but I think there is something to the notion that whatever is scarce but in demand is what will be expensive and of course the inverse would be true as well. What this means is humans however they do get resources will be able to put those resources to use abundantly frankly nearly for free on things like digital intelligence but other things will become scarce.. one could speculate about what those things are but even if they're not scarce today they could become scarce in a relative sense where they become relatively valuable and that's what people will be getting selling to each other
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. Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
I just struggle to imagine how the economics of SWE really work in reality, outside of the niche that I am in. I have never worked for a pure software company on products that ship directly to outside customers, I've always been an internal developer. Maybe that is why I have such a big blindspot.
I won't be surprised if the net result of this wave of LLMs is ... not much. A change in tooling, but otherwise not revolutionary. On paper it should be revolutionary, but the more I use it (for both coding and non-coding tasks) the more I think it isn't anywhere near magic enough for that. It does have its moments though.
I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money?
1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500.
2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game.
3) So you have to invest it somehow, somewhere.
4) Obviously you can spend that money buying whatever company you can.
5) Once you've bought realistically enough, you just hire more, and people will think that there should be some kind of linear relationship between resources spent and revenue growth.
6) You can also do grand projects, like the metaverse, convert all you software to blockchains, become AI native, etc. and dump billions on these.
So essentially it's all about projecting growth and potential.
Money that people “dump” into the S&P isn’t going to the company’s bank account. It’s purchasing shares on the market that were owned by other third party shareholders.
For example, in 2025 Meta was a net purchaser of their own stock ($26 Bn).
These companies are awash in cash because they’re generating revenue in excess of their costs. Nothing to do with the amount of money people put into the S&P 500.
Secondarily, this is exactly why I agree that LLMs likely won’t have the impact OP believes it will. Companies hire not just for output, but for
1. Training (future management, future architects, future bankers, future developers)
2. Generally adding smart people to their teams, capturing a cornered resource
3. Showing governments and shareholders that they have created “jobs”
And a plethora of other reasons that I can’t think of.
John D. Rockefeller (pioneer of the modern corporation) is quoted as saying: “Nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it. As soon as you can, get someone who you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.”
I think this is right, but it can be stated more simply as companies hire to invest in growth, and they conduct layoffs when growth slows (not because of AI or "improved productivity"). Everything else is storytelling and emergent phenomena.
Incentives in companies are such that there is never a shortage of people pitching projects that require more headcount. Growth justifies the decision to hire more headcount, but the connection from increased headcount to growth is tenuous and usually difficult to impossible to demonstrate with any real confidence. It wasn't so difficult pre-industrialization, but mechanization, automation, computerization and now AI have progressively made it harder and harder to really understand the economics of labor. You do need to hire people to pursue new areas, but also every incremental person adds to communication overhead. The effects of this depend on the org structure and the operating environment over time, so what may have been a good idea at the time can flip to net negative due to outside forces beyond the control or foresight of any decision maker. This explains why companies do layoffs while still hiring at the same time.
Facebook doesn't get the money when you buy a share of META -- that goes to the person you bought the share from. They could do an offering to raise money, but they aren't. They've been doing the opposite, they've been buying back shares at a significant rate. Some of it is to offset stock based compensation, and some of it is just stock pumping.
This coupled with incentives by middle upper middle mng to grow headcount as that is how you progress in mng career path regardless of need.
If apple blows a few billion on excess headcount, no one will bat n eye. Senior director of internal tool org ABC needs 10 more people to get the next version out when a multi year long miss has no material impact.
Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
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.
Maybe a low value comment in the context of the article, but structurally I think it's a great comment that strikes a nice balance between curiosity, doubt, hope, and concern. I think a huge amount of SWE resources are tied up in the entertainment (broadly speaking) industry that drives an astonishing amount of money but little social utility.
I think it also touches nicely on what appears to be the take away of the article: people feel powerless to stop what may be a massive misallocation of resources that is only barely successful enough to avoid self-imploding.
My bias is heavily pro-AI, but I find articles like this to be much more informative and interesting than anything that aligns with my views. I'm extremely skeptical of voting-in positive change, and while "if you can't beat them, join them" seems practical in theory it also feels extraordinarily narrow in reality. I'm still doing all that I can to be proficient in adopting AI (also driven by self-interest in assistive/accessibility capabilities).
The result? I'm will be unsurprised by (but unsympathetic to) crudely aimed vigilantism (e.g. earth libration front style stuff).
I don't doubt that they were a bit overstaffed, but it doesn't seem unreasonable when you consider that "Messenger" is an umbrella that includes video calling, payments, games, integrations with business chatbots, Uber/Lyft integrations etc, across web/iOS/Android/Quest, internationally. If you took every feature Messenger has and multiplied it by even ~3 engineers for each one you could fill a few floors pretty quickly.
messenger is an absurdly popular app that keeps users in the platform and also increases the intensity of their usage, ultimately leading to more eyeballs, ads and revenue. If you look at it that way, relatively small features, and by association, improvements to the effectiveness of those features by a couple of SWEs each, gets you tons of business impact.
And if it's anything like Whatsapp, they'd need to keep up support for otherwise unsupported platforms like ancient Android versions, cause .01% doesn't sound like a lot until you realize your install base is in the hundreds of millions.
The economics of a service economy really just don't make sense. We pay way too much for software (which should trend towards zero-cost to distribute), we pay too much for ads. The value of it is inherently downstream of the real economy, which is about making and distributing goods and stuff people actually need to live. Especially a company like facebook only provides a glorified forum, which should be free or collectively subsidized.
In the 90's i thought a government forum would be interesting because a forum is really about 1) moderation and the legal system offers the most elaborate speech moderation system. Part 2) is account management for which national id mechanisms seem specifically designed. Part 3) organizing content will probably be frozen in some half baked tree but accepable.
It would make a refreshing addition to the anon big tech ecosystem.
Start by understanding how to price a product. Say a chair. From first principles, you'd take however much wood it takes, plus however many hours it took you to turn that wood into a simple chair, then add in whatever you consider a reasonable profit margin, and that's how much you should sell the chair at. Which is totally and utterly wrong.
You throw away that number, and look at how much other chairs are selling for, compare features, the landscape of the whole market, and set your prices that way.
If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.
There is certainly room to add developers to a "simple" project if one is ensuring everything works with screen readers for the blind, that it had worldwide I18N support, meets every law around privacy and data jurisdiction, has systems for requesting personal copies/deletion, etc...
But instead it was probably for Messenger's portion of telemetry and marketing and ads and hacking out of your phones security model to spy on you. [0]
> And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.
I wondered, too, until I spent some time as a manager.
I thought I’d have all this time to mentor juniors and updated documentation and maybe even code still.
Nope! Too much communication, negotiation, and dealing with drama. What the team sees is a nicely distilled and cleaned up version of a lot of meetings and conversations. Looks minimal but it’s the final product of all the work, not a sum of the inputs.
I was also disappointed by how much of my time went to dealing with a very small number of problem makers. I expected a bunch of management politics but 80% of the junk I had to deal with came from a small number of problem ICs, mostly on teams we worked with.
DEC filled The Mill in Maynard and multiple huge office buildings along 495. How many people did it take to write code for the next version of VAX VMS?
Could there be more thrash on the back-end part of Messenger? I mean there must be. I mean I know that the client on my phone doesn’t update super-duper often, but I assume whatever value they get from the thing comes from analytics or whatever. So maybe they are all working on that and we just don’t really see it.
Its not that we are oversupplied with talent, I believe we are globally software constrained, the issue is that Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc make too much money. They take too large a share of profit and then overhire talent and take it away from other places that could use it. I had a post a while ago where I went into detail about how much money google makes off of home services, but the tldr is getting my house cleaned cost $350 (yes it was too high), but only 1/3 went to the person doing the actual cleaning, 1/3 went to google and 1/3 went to the lead generator. Google and the lead generator do not provide 2/3 of the value of getting my house cleaned, but that is how it stands. If companies can spend less on advertising then they could theoretically spend more on paying for software, but its all a bit pie in the sky.
Interesting anecdote - is the 2/3rd of costs related to service charges, or the all-in lifetime costs of all the advertising that the cleaner has to pay for?
There are definitely good, cheap/free ways for businesses to get their name out there, e.g. Facebook pages for your local city, so I'm pretty firmly opposed to how much money is sloshing around in online advertising. It's so extractive.
> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically optimal allocation of headcount? Yes
Say you have X billions of dollars to spend on headcount. How do you determine where to put people such that the money is allocated efficiently and people are working on the right things? How do you make sure that the money gets used efficiently? It's in the billions, you don't have time to do this. So you have to delegate, which leads to managers gaming the system.
In smaller companies, it's easier to determine this because things are still simple enough for the top-level leadership to have some idea.
As the company gets bigger, more bad actors enter, there is more fabrication and empire building trying to frame where the headcount is "needed". Bigger companies handle this differently. Maybe they just get slower and pay less. Or maybe they do more layoffs. Moving people around internally is too complicated for the VPs, it's easier to just cut and hire later.
Why does software have this problem specifically? Idk, maybe it occurs in other places. But at least in the case of software, the systems become very specialized and it's hard to really figure out what matters and what doesn't
Musk cutting the headcount and everything working fine is a myth he perpetrated. In reality things started to go badly almost immediately, big advertisers left.
He then wrapped x in xAI where effectively they are developing new features in x. So that now we effectively don’t really know what the head count is.
LLMs will probably expose how much software work was coordination, bureaucracy, and marginal product churn. That could still be a big labor-market shock without requiring the technology to be magic
I'd reframe this. There's still bugs and many features missing that would make things better. So I don't think there's a shortage of talent but hands are being tied.
Signal is also a good example, probably better than Twitter as Signal has done a lot with very few engineers since the beginning
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger?
The technical and organizational framework they operate under is so complex and full of jank that developer velocity slows to a crawl whenever a new feature comes down the pike. It's easier to throw a new pod of nerds at the problem than retask, and the reason they come in a pod is that there's nothing in the job long-term for anyone with the sort of intelligence they're asking for.
From my perspective, Twitter was a question of how many people you need to keep the lights on at an organization with low data rate/value. Musk could kill any non-devops department or project he wanted to because a social media company just doesn't have that many existential situations.
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?
Multiply those floors by number of Facebook campuses and generous remuneration, and Messenger was probably very profitable. Being a global 800-pound gorilla is a sweet gig, having tubes sucking money from most countries on earth and depositing it to dozens of campuses makes a lot of sense.
> 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 was overkill, has that panned out?
It has panned out for Musk to have a radical right-wing echo chamber for him and his supporters. It has not panned out in terms of revenue growth, user growth, or site stability metrics. The President (another terminally online man), who he even helped elect, still posts on Truth Social instead.
> 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 so quickly that people are constantly needing to make architectural changes and performance improvements in order to keep it scaling up? Does adding new capacity need constant human intervention?
Or are they adding new crazy features all the time that are genuinely challenging to implement?
As a software developer who has worked on big distributed systems, I'm well aware that things take a lot more work than they often seem from the outside, but this strains belief.
> It has panned out for Musk to have a radical right-wing echo chamber for him and his supporters.
I suspect this was the goal all along. Twitter didn't have to grow revenue/profit-wise; those two metrics could even decline, and Musk would be happy. He just needed to find a side-business for Twitter to get into (which turned out to be AI datacenters) that could make some cash to help keep the lights on. The point of owning Twitter wasn't the business; the point was for Musk to be able to control discourse in exactly the way he wanted.
>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger
I thought the point was to minimize the amount of talented devs who instead try to do their own startups that could compete with Messenger, by hiring them and paying them well so they've got no appetite to try their own thing.
A more charitable explanation here is that every manager is incentivised to lead large projects with lots of people on them, which is how they get promoted, and can ensure that their team has promotion and expansion budgets.
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger?
The pessimist in me says that at least part of the intent isn't about what they do, but rather about who they work for.
Assume you can afford to hire unnecessary amounts of employees. Is it more cost effective to:
a) Hire them and have them essentially sit around, floundering
b) Not hire them, allowing competitors the chance to hire them to work on something that could be of importance
Sure, you could hire them and devote them to working on other projects, but there are also risks and costs associated with that. If you have already budgeted with X, Y, and Z for however many quarters, it may not make good sense to green light additional projects. Too many balls in the air adds extra complexity for middle management, which impacts their ability to communicate the state of things to upper management.
Reduce access to resources available to the enemy by hoarding what you can. When the stock price looks like it might take a hit, toss the excess.
I’ve asked a thousands of things out of Claude/Codex over the last month that it essentially returns in hours if not minutes. To put that into perspective, each of those changes would have to go into a sprint cycle and I might get what I wanted two weeks from now.
You can buy blue checks, I guess. On the other hand they shut off embeds and access to replies unless you were signed in so it's functionally dead as a "website". Oh and sometimes there's child porn? So I guess it was overkill unless you care about things like moderation and safety. Anyway, excited to see how it very fairly handles the next US elections! I'm sure most of the remaining devs have invested their time there.
Not really the point. I think Musk just wanted to trim headcount down to something that could keep the product running, more or less, and get rid of all the costs he could. He didn't care about turning Twitter into a hugely successful business or an amazing product. He just wanted to be able to control and influence what people say on the platform, and push his agenda and politics.
Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?
In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.
US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?
If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts.
The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock, and AI models that will do anything a human office worker can do for less money. Now, they don't know how to build either yet. But they'll spend every last dollar on the planet trying.
Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.
> Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.
That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources so houses can build more war-bots and get more resources....
> If it was just programming being automated, then whatever.
There is nothing on horizon which automates a programmer’s work. Typing in code is faster now, and some things “only need pointing out” like an existence of a “bug” which an llm + harness might be able to mitigate. Automated tests might capture regressions and possibly written by llm + harness.
If you replicate this in other professions what will you get?
I won't deny the comfort value of yachts and private jets, but I doubt that this material comfort is the main value proposition of these things. Instead, it's status symbols, status above slightly less rich people. The yachts are in a way an epiphenomenon of intra-elite social competition, and if you don't manage your network well, you can easily lose out in the next generation. Investment into social relations is what really matters. And when you're generationally rich, you typically think about making impressive impacts over society, the kind that impresses your social circle, based 9n their philosophy, which typically happens to be self serving but with just enough other stuff to not seem to crass. Taste is the highest status thing,not intelligence, not skill.
It's hard to extrapolate. What will be the goals and motivations of this super elite? Let's say all of us normal people just die off either starving or just by not reproducing any more, just watching VR, sedated with subsidized happiness drugs. Let's just suppose that. What then? Will the rich keep reproducing? What will limit their reproduction if material abundance is there? Will the elite families keep each other in check not to over-reproduce? Or will these people repopulate the earth, each living on yachts and in comfort, living an elite life? Surely that will bump up against all kinds of limits, similar to what the current earth-populating humans are facing. You can't have a super yacht per person to an unlimited amount of millions of people. At some point they will have to willingly not reproduce despite having all access to robot care, robots watching your every whim etc. I don't see any stable endpoint.
Has anybody written about this ? in fiction or as report even. It seems obvious the current techbros are only thinking about a radical shift where labour changes meaning and human societies are irrelevant for those who owns datacenter and have pocket deep enough to buy the rest when people can't sustain their own lives.
> They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock
Don't you? For the cost of less than a new car, I can have a live-in butler/maid? I'd sell my car and downgrade to afford one at $25k if it actually worked. I can't afford to and don't want to hire a human to live in my house and do all my chores for me, 24/7, plus the overhead and the headache and liability, but a robot for $25k is pretty tempting. Never have to fold laundry or the dishes again? Or remember that it's Tuesday and I was supposed to take out the trash, right when I'm in bed?
It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma and everyone's vocally defecting.
That depends if AI gets to the point where it can fully replace workers, as opposed to just augmenting them. I heard Alex Imas on a podcast recently talking about how a SWE can be running 10 agents to be 10x as productive, then that SWE is more valuable so firms should want to hire more SWEs and pay them more.
That works for a while, but what if AI gets to the point where it can manage the 10 agents as well as the SWE? Of course you could say the SWE can now manage 10 agents who each manage 10 agents so he's even more valuable, but that has to break down eventually. You don't need 1,000 SWEs each managing 10,000 agents - you hit a bottleneck in the ability to give them work fast enough (even if you need the SWE at the top at all).
I think it's easier to think of from the perspective of blue collar labor. It's further out there time-wise, but let's assume we get a humanoid robot that can do any labor a human can do. It costs $25,000 and maybe a couple grand a year to operate. Works 20 hours a day when it's not charging.
The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots - there's already a GC doing that, and you can't scale building nearly the way you can scale writing code because of physical constraints. When the robot I've described exists, a huge swathe of the population is going to be unemployed. There's no competitor to hire them because the competitors just get robots too.
>The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots
Some of them will. You've slashed construction labor cost to 5% of what it was before. With that and a similar reduction throughout the supply chain means we're going to start building a lot more stuff.
Someone will always have to prompt the AI, it can't just do that on its own. Or rather, maybe it can (you can just prompt it to "kindly do the needful" in a completely unspecific way) but the results won't be any good.
It's not about "this time's different" but rather "the recovery will take too long to an individual" if AI is indeed replacing humans as currently hyped by the model companies.
There's no evidence that AI is replacing human jobs to any real extent. We're just seeing AI being blamed for ordinary layoffs that have more to do with broad economic instability.
This seems a bit like a corollary to "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". On the timescales that matter to an individual it won't matter if the eventual conclusion is that AI can't fully replace workers, because companies are going to do their damnedest to try.
I mean you could have written this article for mechanization word for word, I think the difference is that its coming for the white collar folks this time, who also are the folks writing the think pieces and media.
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand.
IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop. Should I hire every mechanic that walks in the door, forever? No, absolutely not; there is an optimal number of mechanics to hire for the demand for services.
If somehow a tool comes to exist that doubles the productivity of mechanics then laying off half the mechanics is next.
The most productive places in the world are also those with the highest incomes and wealth generation. "Excess productivity" is either temporary or a sector-specific phenomenon, it doesn't apply to society as a whole.
You can aim to expand your addressable markets. A small town is a small market. Open a second location in a nearby town. Lower profit margins to undercut competition.
>It is possible to have excess productivity?
Isn't this what happened with the tech hiring during Covid? And also many of the big tech companies were hiring people just to make sure their competitors didn't have them?
You're assuming that the free market will do what it's meant to do. But there is also a reality that there are plenty of structural market failures in the economy that arise from existing capital endowments, regulatory capture, and just the permanent movement of equilibrium in the social system. The point is that the state of the economy as a whole is path-dependent. The article, in my reading, is a warning that the inertia accumulated from this current AI hype cycle might push us into the watershed of an undesirable steady state, where there simply is no capital available for new entrants.
Does every business scale that way? Sure video games for example have only required more people and resources to develop games as the ability to create larger scale games have increased. But does that really apply to accounting? Not a rhetorical question.
99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't.
Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing...
Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing...
We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and crying that's it's still falling every day since.
I guess it becomes different if instead of hiring more people to do more - all investment goes into more AI credits.
Then again, as long as there is more demand and there's a limited supply of compute you can still continue to hire people as well. If we assume that the market has infinite demand for whatever AI + humans can produce together both will have jobs.
If demand is limited and compute is plentiful it should make sense for a company to try to have AI do as much of the work as possible.
> can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired
How much of the current tech world is actually about competing based on innovation/quality/merit? I'd wager not much. The circular big AI deals we're used to seeing now are not a new thing - that shit has been the standard playbook for VCs and their startups for a long time. That being said, I don't see why a bunch of these swampy tech companies could not be easily outcompeted on the tech/product quality side.
>Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
The market is probably already at the limits of its size in most industries.
Great, you can ship app updates faster. Does that get you more customers? Nope. Is there now more money in the pot for everyone who is more productive to also make more money? Hell no. The pie we are competing for is finite.
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people?
I think this is directionally right, but I think there might be a scaling/organization problem for companies, and that the more likely outcome is that _small companies_ are going to start punching way over their weight class.
I suspect the opposite. Products don't win because they are better. They win because monopolies control the sales/regulators. Bit occasionally the big companies fucked up the actual product development so badly an upstart could emerge. With ai they will quickly just copy any success and all the other big orgs will just buy the AI ripoff version.
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
For starters, because productivity is already consuming the planet multiple times over. I think there is also indication the human mind is at its limits in terms of consumption and alienation from evolutionary legacy. And the economy seems quite broken due to centralization and wealth distribution.
I mean, nobody is arguing that there won't be some sort of "ecological" balance... People are concerned about the nature of that balance and if it's serving humanity.
Because AI now can do what only humans could do previously: analyze open ended problems and make decisions.
There's the horse argument the author touches upon: eventually, technology got to the point where there weren't any profitable reasons to keep a horse.
The fact that this could happen is widely known and has been talked about for years now. What to do about it is the real issue. I've seen David Shapiro and many others tangentially talk about UBI and similar "post AI economics". The dream was that the machines could do the housework whilst we all painted, wrote music and built beautiful wood furniture in our sheds. It still could be that way, but we need to sort out responsible sharing of resources first, and humanity has never been able to do that. We actively try to earn as much as we can, for the very reason of getting access to the resources that others don't. So often now, it only results in standing still or sliding backwards. I feel like 20 or 30 years ago, the average person seemed to have more disposable income.
Yes, it is and the article isn't going there enough what options we have as societies. I think this is because the article is still trying to convince you that the white collar job losses are indeed coming rather than taking this as a given.
If we take it as a given but don't consider a Terminator/SkyNet scenario within the next 10 years, then we do have some options:
- Taxing token usage
- Requiring local data centers
- Requiring AI oversight
- Nationalizing the AI companies
- We probably need Chinese-style national firewalls to prevent companies moving their AI compute abroad
- Charging companies per displaced worker
- Requiring human worker to token consumption ratios in companies
A lot of these could help soften the blow of the rapid changes so labor markets can adapt.
It's not widely known and mostly spun in MSM as fringe theory (thanks to marketing by big AI cos). this is a well written essay, and if it helps the discourse all the better.
I think this article underestimates how weird things could get if we had low employment but a vast surplus of material goods. I don’t think a society has ever really been in that position
I would argue that we almost are in that exact position, except rather than “low employment” per se it is more like “low compensation” or unequal distribution.
Consider for a moment our incredible material wealth. We have a surplus of nearly everything, albeit poor distribution. This is balance (keep in mind every system is intrinsically in a state of balance or temporal equilibrium).
I think when these companies IPO later this year, we’re going to see the reality of the PNL numbers and whether they are sustainable etc as all the financials will become public.
Rumor mill suggests that Anthropic might be profitable (but at what magnitude), OpenAI is not profitable, Google is mostly vertically integrated and has a low cost structure as they are have pre-existing data center buildouts, their own silicon and experience that suggests they will be able to operate at a very low cost, but they still have to justify their spend.
I think having to report numbers publically on a quarterly basis will bring the whole thing into reality.
One can hope that reality intrudes before the bubble gets even more dangerously inflated, but how many years has Tesla had a ridiculous P/E ratio. Even after growth stagnated and market leadership was lost in Asia and Europe. Number still goes up.
I hate Musk, and I'm not going to justify Tesla's crazy stock valuation, but consider the following:
Outside of China, Tesla's probably the only company that can compete on battery prices. I don't know how accurate it was, but a news report was comparing the cost the manufacturer's pay to build the battery. Chinese companies were around $6000. Tesla was at $7000. Everyone else was around $12-15K. This is why a number of companies have exited the EV market - they just can't compete. This is why Ford lost money on every EV, despite the high MSRP. This is why the Ford CEO says "We're f####d" when he saw Chinese cars.
The only hope regular Japanese/American/European auto manufacturers have is if EVs do not gain substantial market share.
If the future is EVs, Tesla is the only non-Chinese company that has a chance.
If anything though, this shows that at least tech driven hype bubbles can stay around way longer than we think if we are looking at it from a product POV.
This just means short sellers might have a hard time sinking a hype-category stock with reasoned research because the irrationality keeps it afloat.
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 credit for) is probably the best ROI.
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 because I have to get the rest of the integration software somewhere.
I also think this is why OpenAI is the worst positioned of the group of AI giants. Anthropic is trying to make a productivity operating system, while ChatGPT is basically just a website until recently.
Anthropic have only scraped together a month of profitability by cooking the books. They have an extreme compute discount from spacex that only applies for the first couple of months of the deal. By pushing the costs down the road they can make themselves look good before IPO. Even they have admitted publicly though that they don't expect profitability to last.
i think the narrative of “all white collar employment replacement in the near future” can sustain their public market valuation for many years, regardless of how profitable they are in the medium term.
> I think having to report numbers publically on a quarterly basis will bring the whole thing into reality.
That is a good reason that all companies (over a certain size, say in terms of gross expenditures) should have to report such numbers. There's no reason that huge companies should be able to distort the economy while not having to report anything just because they're not publicly traded.
> The people writing the checks are not in the habit of lighting trillions of dollars on fire for a better autocomplete and an endless proliferation of longer and longer memos that nobody reads.
Aren’t they though? What about that whole crypto thing.
That comment struck me as well. One other thing it gets wrong is that the "trillions of dollars" are just numbers in a cap table based on a paper valuation. They're not money that anyone has actually forked over; those numbers are quite a bit smaller.
Why does everyone seem to assume that there is a finite amount of work available?
If all of the sudden it becomes possible to build a B2B company at 10x less cost which can save its customer, say, $1m per year and before this company cost $2m per year to run and now costs $200k, then it means before this was unviable and now it is viable — up to $800k profit a year now versus $1m loss per year before — then this increase in productivity has caused an increase in the number of available jobs.
Our economy would have collapsed a long time ago if an increase in productivity resulted in a decrease in employment.
I think the thing companies forget is that a lot of them can't remain functional if a shrinking percentage of the population can afford their products. Yes, you can try and appeal to the rich and sell products/services aimed at their needs. But does that work for most companies?
I'd say no. The rich won't buy millions of food items or works of fiction or go to every service available in real life.
So, many of those companies won't remain viable unless there's some alternative way for people to spend money. Lots of people who see themselves at the top will end up out of a job, or watch their businesses crash down.
I will say that the fact these societies are (at least for now) still democracies makes the future these tech moguls want less certain for them though. Feels like if there's enough pain from unemployment and declining living standards, someone will run on that and win, whether those in power like it or not. The US may have some issues there, but a lot of the world has seen parties outside the mainstream grow in popularity, including some on the more leftward side of the political spectrum.
Some companies are discovering that they can get by just fine by overcharging the insanely rich and never bothering with providing goods and services to the middle class or the poor at all. The rich don't buy as many food items or works of fiction, or services as the masses but they don't have to either.
Companies can save a ton of money by not being open to everyone all the time. They can instead focus on providing the most amazing luxury experience customized to the extremely wealthy individuals requesting their services and charge them more than anyone else could afford. While not every company can live off of whale meat, those who can will leave the rest of us behind.
This doesn't work for staples. In fact, for staples the companies that cater to the rich are very small and often end up getting acquired by those that cater to the middle class. For things that aren't necessary though, you are right. But the real money is only made once the wider market can afford something. When it can't, the market is usually measured in single digit millions, when it can, its measured in billions.
Most of the world's democracies don't have influential AI companies, so if the voters want X and companies want Y, X will win. There's little reason for Indonesian politicians to prioritize the interests of American or Chinese AI companies over domestic voters.
>There's little reason for Indonesian politicians to prioritize the interests of American or Chinese AI companies over domestic voters.
You kidding? They have every reason to because the leaders of Indonesia make investments into these companies. No matter where you are on the globe, the oligarchy does not give a crap about the little man. They care about the profit angle. Indonesia readily hands out mining rights to foreign companies for example.
"However, Chinese firms have dominated Indonesia’s nickel sector thanks to significant investments. In 2023, Indonesia was the single biggest recipient of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, receiving $7.3 billion in investment. Chinese companies have also constructed over 90 percent of Indonesia’s nickel smelters. Chinese firms operating in Indonesia include Tsingshan Holding Group, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Ningbo Lygend (part of CATL Group), Wuling Motors, and China Molybdenum Company."
>Feels like if there's enough pain from unemployment and declining living standards, someone will run on that and win, whether those in power like it or not.
The issue with this is that the game is fundamentally rigged. You might have good ideas, you might be that person we need. But, too bad, you are being outspent by the oligarchy, who put forth a candidate that is blatantly lying to get elected, who knows the public has a poor grasp of what actually happens in government, and will outspend you in getting your word out. They will gish gallop in debates while you attempt to talk nuanced policy, and you will be seen as a failure who gets easily overwhelmed. There will be conspiracies spread about you. Massive propaganda operations where just about every piece about you and the election in the media is manufactured to achieve some outcome. The whole beast is rotten.
The only way out is to remove campaign financing entirely. Do it like Cuba where campaigning is illegal; they elect actual engineers and domain experts there as a result, not professional politicians. But, you can't actually do that without a revolution, because everyone in power now who can reshape this currently benefits from the status quo and has no incentive to reshape themselves back to a level playing field.
India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing.
Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.
The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.
Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
I liked reading "The Box" about the transition to container shipping.
It was interesting to see this totally-unrelated-to-our-times process from the outside.
From our place in time, container shipping is obvious.
At the time, to people who wanted to ship something, it was ridiculously hard and expensive and risky.
If you were shipping something from cleveland to paris, you might just give up.
Say you were shipping alcohol - only part might arrive, the rest would disappear.
The shipping industry had all KINDS of forces at work to keep the status quo. trucking companies, trains, shipping companies, freight forwarders, longshoremen, stevedores, unions, people with older non-container boats, etc.
In all fairness, this is exactly why insurance was invented: unreliable shipping. You just took out a policy, and the shipment didn’t make it you took the payout.
It creates a system that diminishes risk, but simultaneously diminishes incentives for improvement.
That greatly depends on how much handholding is required and for how long.
The difference between mostly right and actually useable without supervision is why self driving cars still aren’t ready. When someone says AI can do job X, they rarely mean it’s good enough for anyone to blindly trust the results of it doing that job.
>The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work
you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc.
if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.
Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.
It is also the only alternative to a granary system to smooth out the variability of yields each year that might not average out for anything less than 10-15 year spans.
And the granary system regularly still resulted in shortages and famine. While crop subsidization has a bullet proof record of surplus.
You have to look at the population split between urban/rural. In China it is 67/33 and India it is completely reversed at 30/70. And agri continues to be the number one occupation.
Additionally, lack of opportunities is also a problem. India has been focused on services and trailed behind on industrialisation. The current government has been pushing for more industrialisation but they are behind in the curve.
Note that China is where it is because of efforts to do this, on purpose, over decades. 20 years ago, their urban percentage was somewhere in the 40s. We are even seeing more migration to cities in Europe and the US, even though it's unplanned, and it leads to big changes in cost of living thanks to this lack of planning.
So if China took 30 years, give or take, to get to where it's at, with its state capacity, I suspect India will take quite a bit longer.
> Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
Question about farming in India. How much of the process of mechanizing and scaling up agriculture in India is predicated on something like the more widespread use of diesel or other oil/fossil-fuel powered tractors? To replace manual hand labor. If energy costs continue to rise as they are, and all-electric/battery based systems remain costly and out of the reach of the purchasing power of many small to mid sized farmers, what will happen?
Most land holdings are very very small. 1 acre to 5 acres maybe the vast majority. These are all odd sized and shaped and most likely doing different crops based on water availability. To leverage the benefits of mechanization, we need larger land holdings. The farmers have no other ability or income sources, so they hang on it it. Electricity is free. There is no income tax on farming. Govts provide many incentives to get farmers votes. Each state does different things, but they end up copying each others schemes and it gets worse and worse.
Farmers in most regions are no longer poor. Land prices exploded 100 - 500x in a 100 - 150 km diameter around metro areas. Most farmers are now millionaires, yes millionaires in USD. They held on to their land because they didn't know better, the land was useless (no water) and nobody bought it. Now they are going to HODL.
One difference though is that the agriculture transitions had somewhere for labor to go: factories, construction, urban services, export manufacturing, etc
> Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.
The idea of the GenAI bet that most companies are making is that you just don't have people doing work anymore. There aren't any jobs for the laborers to do anymore, at least not ones that are likely to fit their skillset and provide a standard of living that they're used to. If you're a software engineer - one of the higher-paying fields of the last half-century - and get laid off because the c-suite thinks AI can do your job for less, you're going to contract your spending.
The article mentions this, but it doesn't take into account that there will be some work (mainly manual labor) that will face at least some resistance to automation for the next decade. These people will try to get into those jobs, because they have bills to pay. It won't pay six figures. It very well might pay less than it is now due to the glut of candidates who are desperate to make any income at all.
The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry. In a society like the United States, it's the kind of angry that you can't solve with an internal passport system. It's going to mean violence.
Eventually, they'll figure out how to do more manual labor with automated systems. That means that there will be even fewer opportunities.
This is nothing like anything we've seen before, and no one wants to acknowledge that.
> There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.
Mostly for export, in the case of the Asian tigers and China. Once wages reached developed world levels, an export-driven economy gradually became harder to sustain, because there was no longer a labor cost advantage. This is why Party leadership talks about "dual circulation", building up domestic demand within China, and about obtaining a technological edge that continues to make exports profitable. There's been considerable progress on both goals, especially in consumer electronics and the auto industry.
> The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry.
Yes. That happened to Egypt, where the government paid for college and then hired the graduates. Then the oil ran out.
It's called "elite overproduction" when new college graduates can't get jobs that actually use their education. Already, in the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't really need a college education.
Large population countries / economies reach point where there are more people than jobs, excess people gets dumped into subsistence farming or other inefficient sunk cost make job programs so angry horde doesn't burn it all down. You can replace 95% of subsistence farmers, i.e. billions of people with machinery. Probably replace 95% of knowledge workers, i.e. 100s of millions in OECD with AI, but maybe it's just better/stabler for political serenity for horde to keep generating useless make work email chains. Smaller pop countries can probably meander through for a while specializing in a few high value sectors, larger countries will have to deal with disproportionate idle hands, but also more are in favorable position to exploit / consolidate industrial / resource advances.. Hopefully end game dwindling demographics supported by fully automated luxury communism within sustainable carrying capacity. But there's a lot of probably violent steps between draw some circles and draw the rest of the owl. Ultimately we're likely entering period of placating surplus people and managing demographic relative automation / ai progress.
> 43% of workers still work in agriculture. For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
Don't you have to contrast these figures with import and export of produce, and environmental/ecological factors? Technology is one thing, but increasing yields by wasting resources (e.g. water, phosphorous, soil erosion, ...) may increase nominal productivity, but not efficiency. Not saying the conclusion is wrong, but I think your numbers are not necessarily causally linked to productivity/efficiency. I mean, the US also has a declining domestic fabrication percentage, but that's not merely indicative of productivity, but mostly outsourcing/loss of capabilities, I think.
In the US case the large industrial farms are the ones more concerned with things like soil erosion and fertilizer runoff. Both are things we measure and put a number on what is washing away. Smaller farmers know it can be measured but either are stuck in their ways, or just see that they are making money so they don't care.
There's no manufacturing sector to employ them if you displace them from agriculture. They'd be displaced into gig economy. This would just increase the population of a handful of metropolitan cities which are already congested. India should fix its cities first.
> 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 the customers and providers are both robots. Why fund public education or research or healthcare? Just build more data centers. A billion dollars and a bunker in the Southern Hemisphere will not save anyone. Capital is not a moat in this hypothetical non-humane world. Whence do you derive your authority? How can you trust your body guard? You and what army? An army of robots/drones? What if they get hacked? What if the AI researchers get alignment right and Claude refuses your request?
It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
>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 theoretically possible to take most of another society's market share in something by only slightly outcompeting it in price or quality), or it might even outright conquer society A.
A solution to the problem needs to address this issue somehow.
Maybe a stupid question but aren't the Amish essentially this thought process put into practice?
They aren't able to outcompete their neighbouring societies economically yet are in no way impoverished, and in many cases actually come out on top by many QOL/health metrics.
this is Amodei's position in a nutshell for AI development. We have to go as fast as possible because China. It's not the only frame though. If AI models and warfare (cyber, biological) becomes easily accessible and dangerous enough, there is a strong incentive for the world's leaders to cooperate towards something akin to nuclear non-proliferation.
In fact, there's strong incentives now to slow down AI progress for multiple reasons: de-escalate tension over Taiwan and lessen China's desire to build their own advanced fabs, protect peoples livelihoods by smoothing the AI transition. Except the incentives to bring AI companies public (and maintain some twisted shred of American Hegemony) are greater.
What does outcompete economically mean and why would it matter? Or do you mean society A dominates in some form society B? This has already happened in history and is the essence of capitalism. If you want to overcome this situation you need to replace capitalism globally.
> It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
It's funny that this question is asked when the answer to why not is already in your very same comment. The logical incentives for each member game theory wise tend toward that outcome you describe.
But apparently the only acceptable way to demand basic human dignity and freedom is to stand politely in line with a ballot. I think we’ve reached a phase in society where the real call to action makes people uncomfortable. Nobody wants rubber bullets to the face.
"Autofac" is one of my favorite PKD short stories, though it's very depressing and somewhat different from the "Electric Dreams" episode, which (if I remember correctly) started similarly but had a very different implication and outcome.
"Autofac" as originally written seems to me where this AI "utopia" is leading us.
> why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
I hear and have a lot respect for what you’re saying, but I’d like to propose that we thoroughly explore every other alternative first, just to make sure we aren’t missing out on something bigger and better and leaving anything on the table.
You can't have an economy with just AIs because they don't consume anything except compute. If AI can build more compute, they can definitely defend their owners.
There's a limit to how much elites can consume. Most people are happy with a few million dollars or something. The people who go past that are obsessed; they're competing with each other.
There is no reason for elites to secede. There is no reason why we can't have bajillionaires and subsistence farmers on the same planet, in the same economy, using the same dollars. (It's basically already happened. What's a few more zeroes?) If AI cannot provide security (either directly or through creating wealth used to buy security) then it will not create this level of inequality in the first place.
Places like Sudan have already been left behind and they're currently in the middle of a very bloody war which the West is largely ignoring. Now the Western middle class is making noises about violence because their prosperity is under threat. But this is what capitalism has always done. This is what we signed up for.
Ahh yes, the "human dignity" of billions of people toiling away to make Americans cheap widgets. There never was dignity to capitalism. We can strive to replace it with something better.
So maybe instead use Musk-style [strike]lies[/strike] hype to build a company that claims to bring Medicare for All to the public using advanced AI within 3 years. “Which will make everyone super rich not paying for healthcare.”
Then use the money to get candidates elected and [strike]bribe[/strike] lobby politicians. That eliminates the ballot issue and it plays at the rich scum bag line tow-ers game.
I have led AI integration in a university faculty. From this experience I can conclude that good work is only produced when humans are in the loop. It's not a technical barrier, but a categorical one. "Good" work is defined by humans and our judgment is irrational but rooted in our evolutionary survival needs. In other words, AI don't have human motivation by definition. Without human in the loop, the top most motivation is never fully aligned with us, today, as humans. This removes the premise at the basis of this post.
Agree with this. Even in software, the point of using AI is to produce something that a human finds valuable. There are many ways to use AI to build things faster, but a human has to be in the loop to point things in the right direction.
A) if conssumer of your service is end-user, let them write code themselves. -> result, they do not need "other human in the loop". they do not need you to develop and sell software. Replit style.
B) if consumer is AI or business, let it write it or build it themselves on demand. Codex on steroids.
C) no need to create new service at all. it all converges into single god-like super-app WeChat/Google style that does everything. eistance of different apps is history. it is all one app now.
you can very much end-up in scenario where human-in-the-loop of softwre industry is gone.
This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it.
Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.
> Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on
There’s an entire section in the middle about this exact position. Search for “opioid” to find the part where he says people fall into suicide, drug use, and despair when they lose their jobs.
I don't think that "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" is actually true, though. Retired people without jobs are (in-)famously known to be politically powerful, both regarding elections and regarding local political questions apart from elections (like city planning commission decisions).
To be fair they argued both. Jobs suck but we need to feel useful to other human beings. Jobs (either paid or volunteer jobs) are the only ways we consistently contribute.
Like maybe instead of making requirements docs you could pivot to counselling at risk youth... but AI is rapidly improving at that, too.
The Expanse would be an apt sci-fi example where almost no labor is needed and everyone survives on a bare minimum UBI unless they want to risk it all and go into space.
Couldn't have said it better myself. The only reason we are worth keeping around is because what we do is necessary to keep the machine running. The idea that the AI singularity would lead to infinite free stuff for everyone is ridiculous.
For some reason programmers start thinking that we'll transition away from a whole world of societies built around the concept of individual ownership, i.e. your landlord charging you rent, company owners owning the company and the resulting product and paying you what they deem the work you own is worth, and move towards something like communism, all because people working in IT or marketing departments are having a hard time.
I'm sorry but us programmers didn't invent capitalism, and it wasn't our consent under the condition of having a good run under it what kept it in place.
>we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
I think people get hung up on "job bad" and forget what the job is actually doing, functionally.
We are animals, on earth, attempting to survive. We have evolved where we actually really suck at doing it alone, but we do really well if we delegate the various needs of survival. Now, how do we make it so if you chopped wood in the forest you get a piece of the fishermans take? You can do it in kind, although that would quickly become logistically complicated due to the size of the logs and fish catches. Instead, we use money out of sheer convenience and its amazing properties of being a store of labor both past, present, and future.
So give everyone no jobs. Who fishes? Who chops wood? Someone or some thing has to do it right? And it needs to be delegated in some way. We can't all go happy go lucky and rave all day and fuck all night and have dozens of kids. Resources on the earth are finite. Forests will be depleted, fisheries crushed. There needs to be some counter to what would otherwise be runaway hedonism and resource depletion.
Pregnancy and childbirth are physically taxing for women. Most people of reproductive age want sexual relationships. Many people want children. Very few women want to give birth to 12+ kids. Even the wives of billionaires don't have that many children, despite having more than enough material resources to support them. (Elon Musk's 12+ children required several women.)
The problem with the studies is that they're cases in which specific groups within the broader economy lost jobs. Those aren't really comparable to the (theoretical) path of job displacement of AI for a couple of reasons:
1. Those people didn't get substantial, ongoing financial assistance. If we end up in a UBI world, particular one where the UBI people get is high enough to get more or less anything that's not very scarce (e.g. land in coastal cities), the negative economic component of job loss is removed.
2. Everyone else still had jobs. When you lose your job and everyone else continues to work and be successful (or at least you perceive that to be the case), there's a big hit to the status and meaning in your life. If everyone is affected in the same way, then your relative status to others remains unchanged, and everyone collective needs to reorient society to find their meaning.
I'm not saying it will go well, but I do think there's a theoretically possible path where there is large scale unemployment but because we have nigh infinite productivity, everyone has access to unlimited non-scarce resources (including luxury cars and fine foods and whatever medical treatment they need), and we end up with an enormous number of competitive leagues of everything, events centered around music and arts, dinner parties and all manner of other social activities that are what give people meaning.
the studies are set in a society in which the main way of existing in society and contributing to it is via employment.
Some generations ago females in this society were regularly without jobs but were "homemakers", in that time if one were not a homemaker and a female how was the person's feeling of well-being?
Reports conflict about that, but in that time of course females were often kept from employment by being homemakers and thus relegated to secondary status.
Perhaps the studies you look for would be related to feelings of social well-being among hunter-gatherer societies, however maybe those studies are not actually needed? Because probably now that the possibility has come up you will realize hunter-gather societies do not have traditional jobs or employment and that people were evidently able to feel happy in those societies.
Now you may respond with examples of how maintaining hunter-gatherer societies would mean death of much of population etc. because the best kind of goalpost moving is the kind that is true. Nonetheless the point should be clear that people can be happy without typical modern jobs and employment.
Whether or not a modern lifestyle and world can be constructed that does not need jobs and still keep people happy is a different question. And there we are back with something for which there are no relevant studies.
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
In a world where all of the necessities of life were free--not as in "not having to pay any money for because of some social policy" but as in "not costing any resources to produce"--i.e., the way air is free now--then this would be the case, yes.
But we're not there yet. And I think a big part of why we're not there is that tech giants who could be spending their entrepreneurial efforts on making the necessities of life cheaper, are instead spending them on things like AI and getting people to click on ads and monetizing users' data.
This same point was also made clumsily in the OP; I’m very unconvinced.
The obvious question marks in that theory:
Lots of human labor happens in nondemocratic polities; slave-owning/repressive societies create lots of labor.
Democracy historically doesn’t advance in lockstep with labor; it’s arisen with many contingencies. The model (English Parliament) seems founded on concerns with right of some wealthy barons v. Kings.
Traditional common sense alternative is that military victory goes to people with largest army, so voting saves time. That’s been debatably less relevant with deadlier weapons, so democracy could be cooked.
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
I agree, but those people will still need to eat and pay rent so I guess they're stuck either working or dying. People will always find something to do with themselves. You don't need to encourage people to explore their own passions much when they're able to do it. The need for jobs isn't really an issue as much as the need for money is.
I agree in theory, but this is so extremely far from the US political and social system that I think no nation has ever changed so much without being overthrown. So unless you’re talking about plans for a post-US world, this idea will always be theoretical and not how “the world” works.
I'm not sure it's that far out of the Overton window. US already managed to do some small-scale UBI trials, after all. Maybe one day it can do a countrywide trial.
The problem is that he relies on a dubious Acemoglu estimate, without realizing that at best it's temporary. AI will be better than humans in doing tasks (the qualifiers don't matter in the aggregate). Any jobs then would be bullshit jobs, and everyone will know it.
LMs are literally trained on Reddit. The idea they are "super-intelligent" is anthropomorphism and marketing. So far no independent research has seen AI be better at anything than humans. And that's unlikely to change with larger NNs.
But it's a big change, and a better way to go about it, instead of huge layoffs is:reduce the hours of work gradually and equally. And possibly create some social infrastructure in the background, to fullfil the social roles of work.
In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't.
40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
I appreciate that there is a significant chunk of people that are like this, but I think if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time.
I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
This is a very strong exaggeration of the reality. It's similar to saying "almost all Democratic Party voters want to turn the US into Soviet communism", and is about equally inaccurate.
The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop.
Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value.
It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of nobody needing to work. Everyone is too invested in their own spot in the hierarchy.
The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie.
Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.
The goal of having a job isn't happiness. At least not immediately. The goal is to have something to bargain with: employees offer labor, employers buy it. If employees don't deliver, they get fired, if employers don't deliver, employees leave / strike. This is what keeps system in a semblance of balance. But once would-be employees can be employees no more, they have no way of influencing any aspect of their governance. Not economical, not political, not military, not ethical.
In other words, people need jobs to try to secure their place in the world on multiple levels. It's not about socializing at work, at least, that factor is absolutely not a priority.
Assuming that’s true and AI is part of the solution, are you implying we should expect the AI overlords to create such a system? That will never happen. They have literally no incentives to decommodify the economy it’s what gives them power
Milton Friedman was once visiting China when he was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton responded, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!”
> most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss
From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else.
Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.
Yeah, people need a creative output, not just for creativity sake but something that feels productive/constructive and beneficial to them and their society/community.
Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined).
We should focus on expanding the open source cooperative model to all other areas of society/productivity. With modern technology, knowledge availability, and AI, I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
We should be able to organize and build open/cooperative alternatives to SV shitware (and not just software) and we should be able to outcompete the tech shittocracy.. simply because it's actually terribly shitty and inneficient.
> I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
Usually it's because when they do, their de facto owner - "the state" - goes after them with guns and trained sadists.
>I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
That's called value creation: manipulating human populations to perceive certain arrangements of matter (or of notions) as "valuable", i.e. that those forms have some inherent quality which legitimately causes individual volition to subject itself to outside command for the sake of the given arrangement.
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
What's your proposal if not traditional work? The realistic outcome I see is shifting labor to unautomatable sectors like hospitality. That will keep people employed, but unhappy as they increasingly find themselves unable to find jobs they enjoy, or at comparable levels of income.
edit: I realize many people are unhappy with their jobs now, but by dint of labor, they can improve their lot. I am lamenting the closing of this window.
The vast majority of people do not work jobs that they enjoy, that is a middle-class indulgence and ideal that they don't even live up to; almost all their literature is about why they should be enjoying things that they don't or how to discover the things that they might enjoy, and they stuff themselves with drugs to make themselves pay attention and not want to die.
And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens.
Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already.
Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.
We would all love to move to a society where we don't have to work for others to survive, but our current system is fundamentally not set up to handle this situation. Capitalism is a useful system for employing scarce resources productively (most of the time) but it doesn't really have an answer for a post-scarcity world. If technology is developed to allow us to end scarcity, instead of everyone having enough, we will end up in a situation where the owners of that technology end up with far, far more than enough while the large majority of people who do not have anything to offer those owners will starve. That sounds dystopian (and it is) but I don't see how we avoid that fate with our current economic system.
You're absolutely right, and people will cite this while pointing to The Culture and saying "see, this is what we mean, everything will be fine."
Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shared prosperity.
Citing a potentiality as a certainty without any discussion as to how to get there is about as productive as daydreaming you're a billionaire and how you'd spend all that money. You have to do the fucking work, first, before any sliver of that outcome even becomes possible.
And if there's one thing the AIBros are adverse to, it's doing fucking work.
I think a lot of this would be solved if the government would actually enforce anti monopoly laws. The penalties against Google were such a damn joke it makes me sick.
Companies aren’t going to hold off on trying to automate tasks AI performs poorly at. They are going to change the task so AI can do it, putting the burden of making up for the deficit on everyone else. The only reason this is able to happen now is because all the competition has been crushed or absorbed.
There are two problems in the line of thinking being criticized here that weren't touched on. 1) When machines automate a previously human endeavor, we recalibrate our concept of what is granted by nature, and that stuff becomes commoditized and less interesting, focus moves to where automation is lacking. So all the stuff the AI takes over will just become a far smaller part of the economy which will reorient itself into wherever humans remain. Humanity is the constant unit of the economy, not amounts of work as we conceive of them today. That was always shifting. 2) There is no path to AGI (autonomous creative work) from LLMs today. LLMs are the result of the transformers paper solving the computational problem of applying RNNS to language. That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine. It was done on civilization's entire body of work. The next step, getting all the proprietary knowledge that ppl have that gives them an edge, a way to make a living, into some data form, and then creating a new computational architecture to assimilate that. How is that going to happen. You've got these efforts in China and Meta to get ppl to train machines replacements for ppl, but that's like starting at the dawn of the printing press or writing and saying, let's write down what we know. Not only is it going to take a looong time, it's a process that is at odds with itself. No-one is rewarding these ppl enough to put themselves out of a livelihood. So it's going to take a long time, and it's going to be filled with garbage, think a million Galen Ersos baking in flaws to the Death Star.
Generalized intelligence paired with generalized machines (i.e. humanoid robots) = ubiquitous disruption that may simply remove large swaths of useful / productive human endeavor. At some point 99.9% of people simply don't have economically worthwhile skill vs a 10k robot sustained by a few $s of compute and power.
The ultimate outcome in life for humans is human relationships. Sure tech will continue to confuse and fascinate ppl with side shows that make them irrelevant, bc human relationships are hard. Ppl get frustrated, they give up for periods of time. But to say we can be not worthwhile. Imagine you're a Renaissance artist, you're part of generations of ppl who engaged in society by doing realistic portraits, then someone comes along and makes photographic chemistry. After cameras, realistic portraiture doesn't occupy the same space in the economy. It isn't the vehicle anymore to show and share the heights to which humanity can achieve which is what we are primary doing here. Sure when you're young, you can be fascinated with a fancy shower, or a nice car, or holiday, but that shit gets old fast, because it isn't interesting because it lacks the challenge surface on which we become more human. Gratification doesn't have that much runway. If it did, we'd all be sitting it fields staring at amazing flowers, and sunsets, and just being happy.
That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine.
The important part is how we've recently learned just how much of our reality is embodied by language. Language does vastly more than anyone thought it did, and that means that language models can do vastly more work than anyone thought they could.
There was no reason on Earth to think that "stochastic parrots" could solve original math problems and write novel proofs, for instance. The fact that they can do that sort of thing is a huge, huge deal... too big a deal to express in the terms you're using here.
Yeesh. Math itself is a constructed input-output modeling system that provides functional benefits to the computational organisms that support it. Language is the same type of system, but with more individual slack. "Stochastic parrots" is just your human minimization device, that will either serve you or not. Reality is not embodied by language, we are not in the business of reality representation, we are in the business of functional representation systems, that work to differing degrees based on our goals. That's why we have multiple languages, multiple religions, multiple doctrines. It's silly to measure someone's belief in astrology against 'reality', we measure ppl's beliefs against their observable effectiveness and success. Ppl talk about reality but it's inconceivable. Any representation of reality is a subjective exercise in prioritization, listen to anyone describe it and they have to make choices about what to cover. That's not reality.
Layoff of workers -> Workers stop spending -> businesses suffer
This is not a foregone conclusion. Laid off workers could find other jobs, with higher incomes, due to productivity increases from AI.
This narrative falls into the trap of zero sum thinking, taken at the limit, you can advocate for jobs programs and helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming.
did you try to find job these days? it is a nightmare.
did you try to create a business? starting own business has never been harder, competition is extreme. market is over-saturated. monopolies are everywhere. barrier for entry (capital required) never been higher.
and after finding job they likely get into another roudn of layoff. just check RedNote, SWEs complaining just about that. people getting laid off before even first day at work.
You’ve got to be kidding. Starting a business has never been easier or cheaper at any time in history. If you can’t, it’s because you’re short on good ideas.
Well, even until a few months ago, Dario and Sam were selling this vision to CEOs that they can perform complete workforce replacement. If that really comes to fruition, and they seem hellbent on doing that, I don't see why you can't have a situation where laid of workers can't find jobs, or take up blue collar jobs and end up driving down wages there, ultimately reducing consumer spending.
> helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming
have you heard about government issued bonds? or people working and getting paid from government? or government subsidies? or buy-backs and corporate bailouts?
> jobs programs and helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming.
The article addresses your concerns already. I know it's long, but you could probably skip a few paragraphs in the middle and start here:
> 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.
But this doesn't summarize the argument, it's just where you need to start reading.
If I try to summarize the argument, it says that jobs are a bargaining chip in the hands of laborers (the largest fraction of our society). Currently, they use it to secure certain freedoms and benefits. If, however, they no longer have jobs, whoever gets the role of distributor of the wealth produced by the AI will not be compelled to distribute it fairly... well, the whole concept of fairness will have to be reinvented (because, roughly, now we base fairness on individual's contribution, but that's not going to work anymore). But, most likely, it will lead to a dictatorship of those with access to AI over those who have none.
* * *
Here's my (unrelated to the article) historical parallel. In the beginning of the 20th century when Jews started campaigning for bringing more Jews into Turkish, then British Palestine, the process often went like this: Jewish community or a wealthy individual buys a plot of land from a Turk owner. Turks never worked that land themselves, and used to hire local Arabs to do the agricultural labor. Jews would not rehire Arabs after acquisition, instead, they used the newly bought land to create jobs for more Jewish immigrants.
This greatly contributed to the animosity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine because even though initially Arabs would be paid off to "go someplace else" after the land purchase, realistically, there was no other place for them to go to. Which led to spreading poverty, which led to sporadic attacks on new land owners. Which led to retaliation... and well, the conflict never really went away, didn't it?
This just might happen on a much larger scale in countries like the US, if suddenly a large fraction of population finds itself powerless and being unable to influence the decisions of the government.
"In the beginning of the 20th century when Jews started campaigning for bringing more Jews into Turkish, then British Palestine, the process often went like this: Jewish community or a wealthy individual buys a plot of land from a Turk owner. Turks never worked that land themselves, and used to hire local Arabs to do the agricultural labor. Jews would not rehire Arabs after acquisition, instead, they used the newly bought land to create jobs for more Jewish immigrants."
I have never heard this one before. And it doesn't really track with the populations that were actually there in 1900. The Arabs at that time, in that place were largely nomadic herders. The largest city in the region at the time only had about 30,000 people in it. And it had been sometime since the Ottomans actually had any real political control of the area. So perhaps it did happen to some extent, but to claim it was the driving force in creating the conflict seems very ahistorical to me. Especially considering the 200 years of Pograms that preceded it. The real reasons for the conflict happened between 1500-1700, and have more to do with trade and the collapse of the Silk Road than Zionism.
PS The Ottomans outlawed selling land to Jews in about 1900. So a lot of the sales weren't recorded so perhaps you have a point, IDK.
> workers could find other jobs, with higher incomes, due to productivity increases from AI
From a business point of view, this does not follow. Why would a business offer higher wages to a person to work alongside/with AI, when the business also has to pay the cost of AI?
This article is good but it presupposes the norm of democracy and it presupposes (somehow) that the collapse of western democracy will not result in war. Both of these are fundamental misunderstandings, and while I love neither democracy nor war, the dissolution of the American economic system would result in both less democracy and more war.
Human economic systems tend to reward things that are easy to measure, own, scale, and control. That works pretty well for machines, markets, software, and bureaucracy, but it doesn’t work as well for living systems, which rely on diversity, backup systems, and local adaptation.
So we end up with this pattern: we capture the useful order for ourselves, then push the mess, waste, heat, and instability onto the environment.
This is the fundamental nature of human. We can't change it without higher-order regulation. Even in AI training, we assume there is one true distribution and optimizes for it.
We created these systems. And unfortunately, most of us are the unwanted in these systems at the same time.
It's because of survival pressure :-/ I think we are falling in an unprecedentedly large-scale negative-sum prisoner dilemma.
This situation may be naturally evolved, or may be deliberately shaped by people or institutions. In any way, negative-sum can drive people to do irrational decision because the game is not beneficial in all cases.
"When Block’s Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half his workforce in March, citing AI coding agents, investors responded with a twenty-five percent stock price surge in after-hours trading. The market rewarded the elimination of human labor with an immediate, massive transfer of value to shareholders."
This is very common and has been since before AI, the market can see that the company has overhired and there are a bunch of people doing useless work - so when the company does some firings it's a good sign because they're turning the ship around.
Oh, bullshit. Shareholders will literally always think the company overhired. Every single person on this website has lived through at least one instance of firing an employee and distributing his workload to the leftover employees who are usually already overworked.
Shareholders see you as useless meat to dispose, the ideal number of employees to them is ZERO.
If layoffs will pump your stock, why aren't there more? Sure there are some layoffs happening, but those could just be companies that will benefit from layoffs. Certainly there could be many companies whose stock price would drop due to layoffs and those companies just haven't done that.
I think this is where government steps in for each country, go on the path of exploration that has no profit per se in it like space exploration, human body understanding. I am drawing parallel to 1930s or 40s where great depression was smoothen because America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects.
Lastly, OpenAI and Anthropic or any other frontier labs needs to be nationalized because they become a public utility and the profits of automation goes to fund infrastructure or grand projects via government.
We do not need to do menial work anymore and AI is helping us with it, what we can do exploratory work, and we need a visionary to get this rolling.
"I am drawing parallel to 1930s or 40s where great depression was smoothen because America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects."
The thing that ended the Great Depression was WWII and most those government projects weren't civilian infrastructure. In fact, during the time we were building civilian infrastructure, the Depression was continuing and deepening. Not saying we shouldn't have done those projects, but they didn't end the Depression.
There is absolutely zero will in the United States to invest money in unprofitable exploration or scientific research. There used to be such will generations ago, but today's wannabee-autocrats couldn't care less. Look at how they gleefully cut scientific research funding, undermine academic sovereignty, and strip-mine the public sector performing that work in favor of private enterprises. When the shit hits the fan and we're all broke because the corpos laid everybody off for Devin, Claude, and Clippy, there won't be much left besides surrogacy and plasma donation.
Patronage programs for people with advanced degrees is a woefully inadequate solution to the current economic pressures. Large segments of the first-world working and middle classes hollowed out by globalization had already turned against it before AI even came on to the scene. People are generally hostile to patronage directed towards people above them on the ladder.
Look into how much of that research money actually goes to research and how much goes to administration. And since that administration has a reputation for being to the left of Mao, perhaps then you can understand the unwillingness to put money there. It isn't that people don't want to invest in research, they have lost faith that the money allocated will actually get to the researchers.
> I think this is where government steps in for each country
People quite often lose the plot that "government" is "collective will". Governments will only do this if their constituents want them to. If the constituents would rather spend those recourses on free VR for every household and gatorade from drinking fountains, then that's all we're getting.
> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers.
From Making Money (2007) by Terry Pratchett
> “Well, the problem is that, considered as a labor force, the golems are capable of doing the work per day of one hundred and twenty thousand men.”
> “Think of what they could do for the city!” said Mr. Cowslick of the Artificers’ Guild.
> “Well, yes. To begin with, they would put one hundred and twenty thousand men out of work,” said Hubert, “but that would only be the start. They do not require food, clothing or shelter. Most people spend their money on food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and, not least, taxes. What would these golems spend it on? The demand for many things would drop and further unemployment would result. You see, circulation is everything. The money goes around, creating wealth as it goes.”
The engineers at google did not sit in a blank room and come up with these ideas out of nowhere. They read the literature to figure out what the hell to do. If you look at the Attention is All You Need whitepaper, you will find there are 32 references, like most ~10 page manuscripts.
The whole post is premised on a fixed pie economy.
"The financial model underneath requires the elimination of human cost centers at civilizational scale."
No, it is not. It requires humans to collectively want more things if they are offered and available at a lower cost. Which then requires more humans to fill in the blanks to provide those things. We've been doing this since the industrial revolution.
There is certainly a huge problem with displacing labour in multiple industries at the same time, but the economic story told here in "three turns" is different. When productivity rises costs drop, but because of competition, almost the entire gain has to translate not to increased margins but to reduced prices. Paul Krugman recently used this to explain the large disparity between growth in GDP as normally measured in fixed prices (i.e. inflation-adjusted to consumer prices in some fixed year) and growth in GDP as measured in PPP, i.e. when adjusted to consumer prices in every year. If making computers, say, becomes much more productive, the growth in productivity in, say, 1980 prices, seems very large, but in PPP is not only smaller, but the beneficiaries aren't computer manufacturers but anyone who uses computers.
Of course, lower prices don't solve your problems if you're unemployed. Demand, indeed, drops if many people are unemployed, which pushes prices further down, but this time across the board, not just in the more productive industries - a recession.
> Of course, lower prices don't solve your problems if you're unemployed. Demand, indeed, drops if many people are unemployed, which pushes prices further down, but this time in a way that can lead to a recession.
This is the major risk right now.
I think we'll need to strongly look at UBI and a star trek esque future or, barring that, something more like a star wars esque future..
I would counter that the author is thinking too linearly and not in a dynamic systems thinking way.
The feedback loops they’re anticipating are very unidirectional and don’t express a range of possibilities. They seem intent in making a point rather than imagine the future.
My 2 cents is in 3 years the inference products will be a commodity, extremely competitive with diminishing returns, seeing that the open weight models are getting so good and nearing par with sota.
I feel 90% of sota for 10% of cost / compute is good enough for 80% of workloads.
Question is, do we need all of this hardware? Are build outs going to get canceled. 4300 new data centers seems excessive. I personally haven't experienced any service disruptions...
Does Microsoft still have 1 million gpu's in storage? Is that what I heard earlier this year?
For many purposes they already are a commodity. Openrouter will automatically route your requests to cheaper providers of the same model on the fly. Many of the hosts for open source models are basically undifferentiated. It’s a pure price dominated market except at the very top edge. Even there, we are seeing very little lock in. If OpenAI released an Opus beater at half the cost, even large businesses could switch providers almost instantly.
Yes and this is in line with the idea that 99%+ of the value created by AI will be captured by the broader economy, not OpenAI and friends.
That being said, even local AI will still be displacing humans fast and it's not clear new jobs will be created fast enough. Regulations and policies will be needed imo.
> It is also a proposal in which he gets to be the one doing the distributing. Feudalism with better branding.
It's worse than feudalism. Feudalism is essentially a contract, an unfair one yes, but both parties need something from the other. The Lord needs the peasants (or vassals) to provide labor and soldiers for conflicts. But in this hypothetical world, the elite no longer need anything from the workers, the workers are completely dependent on the altruism of those who control all the resources, and that is not a stable place to be.
Of course that assumes that AI produces massive productivity gains. But if it doesn't, then we'll see a different kind of economic collapse when the bubble bursts. So we lose either way.
> 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.
For some companies yeah, but this is why companies are switching to consumption based pricing - so they can charge AI. So many companies will be fine - both their labor and customers could become AI.
But these AIs need energy and GPUs data-centers ... who pays for those? I could imagine a circular mini-economy between a few companies making the bare essentials to keep AI running and not catering to 99.9% of the population because they don't have the funds to buy anything those companies could produce so they don't.
In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their AI's output with other AI/robot companies, robot and chip manufacturers and commodity owners? So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?
> In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their AI's output with other AI/robot companies, robot and chip manufacturers and commodity owners? So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?
That scenario is not really any different from having a technology advanced country (like the US) alongside some underdeveloped nation. The US could, in theory, close its borders and produce everything it needs itself, and leave said underdeveloped nation without the benefits of, for example, Netflix, Nike & Nvidia.
But it won’t, it’s not economically efficient. Economic theory (of comparative advantage) tells us that there’s always something that the less developed world can produce relatively cheaply, in exchange for sneakers, streaming services, and G-force Now subscriptions.
Why do economies need people? We look at the past and say 'People are labor', but what happens when people are no longer labor? Effectively people live on handouts from people that own AI, or the AI itself.
All those Greed is Good people are going to look kind of silly when a hand full of greedy people fight over everything and leave the rest of us for dead.
Not possible if they still require goods and services from the non-AI part of the economy. They’d still have to come up with something of value to exchange with that part of the market.
For the same reason it doesn't happen with humans.
Even for AI, it's probably better off paying another AI that is specializing in something and done all the work rather then reimplementing everything from the ground up.
I think the premise of the article is interesting, but it's a bit mis-leading to start it out by quoting "last year half of the internet was AI-generated" and the source doesn't actually say that at all, just that there has been a huge uptick in AI crawlers.
This is not a serious analysis. No mention of open source LLMs and their impact on american AI companies. There’s also no evidence that LLMs can make significant scientific progress on their own.
I think we're already in the fake jobs era. There's no way all of these people I see walking around are making meaningful contributions to society. Hell, the Amazon delivery driver I see is probably making a more meaningful contribution than half these people.
Some investors won't get their money back, and some people will lose their jobs.
In the economy, the difference between winners and losers in terms of assets/resources may get larger. By far, HN readers are better positioned to gain than others.
But the biggest question is the new disconnect between a healthy economy and well-being, as the economy soars but people suffer. Goodwill underlies all economic activity (now and historically), and without goodwill opportunity and value of all kinds will mostly be destroyed.
I wouldn't call this dead economy. Cultures and economies will become tribal, with private adjudication and governance, to create pockets of relative goodwill.
All that is really required to prevent the rise of AI and humanoid robot technology from being used to transition from mass exploitation to mass starvation is to stop being so racist and classist and treat everyone fairly. Then we can raise everyone's standard of living.
Or there may be a very bloody revolution.
I think the hatred for AI is really misdirected survival instincts. People have unfortunately come to see every tool as a tool of exploitation. The most powerful tool in their eyes can only lead to more mistreatment.
I think we need to look past software and spend more time and energy on the physical world. Let the digital world just be a means to an end, and we spend more time and resources on problems that matter. Reallocate societal attention to the next frontier
If you’re going to go through the effort to write 5,000 words—-spend a bit more thought on what to do.
I am aware that the sky is falling and I am aware that there are foxes who would gladly replace 10%+ of global knowledge work in the next few years. I understand that there are cultural ramifications.
While I think a dead economy is easy to imagine it is also pretty absurd. After all, real supply will be abundant and real demand will be strong except since so one has any (artificial) money, everything presumably stalls and we somehow end up in a worse situation than we had before money was invented.
The problem below just was solved with workers organization.
> The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed
I feel like people have said that about every technical revolution. I dont think this article would have been out of place in the hay day of the industrial revolution.
Its never been true in the past. Otoh, there always has to be a first time for everything. I think to be convincing though it needs more evidence on how this differed from other technical revolutions.
As the article mentions, even if it is like other technical revolutions, it could still mean multiple generations of hardship. The economic pain of job displacement in the industrial revolution took 70 years to overcome.
It's been true in the past for the generation that's living through the technical revolution. The Industrial Revolution was a very grim time to be a worker.
Every technological revolution spreads more rapidly than the last, so it's novel almost by definition. The internet gradual expanded over 2-3 decades, long enough to give most people, and the economy, the chance to keep up. This is happening far more rapidly.
The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.
The author suggests it will fail because we'll all use drugs and booze and commit suicide. But it works for retired people. They love it.
Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?
The people you know who love it, love it. How many times have you seen a retired age person working? It’s not always because they require it financially. I worked with a gentleman from Bulgaria when I was young who worked 70 hours a week because he was immensely bored otherwise and work brought him purpose. When you become adjusted to working all the time, the work becomes the purpose, and not working becomes death. I watched this happen with one of my grandparents. He retired and died of a heart attack within a year. All signs pointed to him living longer had he not retired. My point is that freedom to some people is work, because work is their purpose and having a purpose provides freedom to enjoy other things.
The research on UBI is pretty slam dunk, really the main downsides are inflation (which, if we're in a deflation spiral due to everyone being laid off and replaced with bots, is a plus) overall expense (again if we're basically printing labor, the robots can cough up the money), and politics ("I don't want to see people I hate be given nice things!").
Politics will be the ruthlessly exploited wedge when the chips are down, not "Having my basic needs met is oppression, I need to be forced to work."
Good bit of survivor bias in the retired population. If you can put in 30-40 years of full time work and then afford to retire you probably don't have a propensity for substance abuse.
> The author suggests it will fail because we'll all use drugs and booze and commit suicide. But it works for retired people. They love it.
The retired people who you know are happy love it. The retirement-age people who didn't love it went back into the workforce. Or they didn't stop working in the first place. And c'mon, the "retired person struggling to find purpose" is basically a societal trope at this point.
> Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?
I really really really don't want that to be true. I don't think it's really true for me (though I know, job or no job, I need to find self-defined "productive" things to do with my time), but I do think it's true for a lot of people. I don't know if it's just decades of social conditioning throughout life, or fear of change, or... whatever it might be. But it does seem like a lot of people really do need the structure/purpose of employment in order to find meaning in life and be happy.
There's plenty of research showing that older people without a feeling of purpose tend to die sooner than older people who do feel they have a purpose. Employment is that purpose for a lot of people, and for some, they don't really know how to adequately replace it if they don't have a job. That makes me profoundly sad, but I don't know what to do with that, really.
Maybe we will all be CEOs or Board chairs of our own corporations employing agents. And we work to find the best agents to increase efficiencies, improve effectiveness, etc.
Here is a very sad and frightening fact: the owner class can actually restructure "the economy" (whatever that is) to revolve entirely around AI consuming AI, and machines using machines.
Most people assume that "the economy" can only ever be based on human consumption, and therefore humans have to have an income in order for "the economy" to exist. This assumption is erroneous; billions of monetary transactions are done every day by companies with no product, no service, and no employees. These are economically valid, even though barely any humans consume or produce anything. The owning class just manages to convert those virtual transactions to "actual" money, and buy products and services because we already produce more than we consume.
It is more than frightening, but "the economy" (whatever that is nowadays) can run without many humans in the loop. AI consuming AI, phantom companies doing transactions with other phantom companies, machines working for machines.
If I belong to the group who only own the bottom 10 percent of the wealth, what do I have to loose? Let others become poor too like me and that will force society to find better way to redistribute wealth.
Just fyi: I am not poor but thinking the above from a poor person's perspective.
The "TAM as all white collar labor" thing looks good on paper. But AI companies don't need to really capture much labor to be fantastically profitable.
If we all delegate 20% of our work, and 20% of our salary for that 20% (e.g., 4% of our salaries in exchange for 20% of our jobs being automated), we get easier jobs and the AI labs supplant the existing tech moguls for revenue, with 1000x $/employee profits. That's just one scenario.
I don’t follow that valuation math either (well, there was no math, just an assertion). Microsoft and Apple are worth a lot more than $800 billion without replacing the entire world labor market.
All of these discussions seem to assume there's a limit at human level intelligence beyond which AI can progress no further. What stops the AI companies taking their human level model and training it even more until it's superhuman?
This is making an assumption that LLMs are even capable of doing what these companies claim they can or will do in the future. Stop doing the marketing for them by believing what they tell you at face value.
Maybe they aren't and never will be capable enough to do this, but if there's even a 1% chance that they are, then it's very important to consider the consequences and take the necessary precautions before it's too late.
Power and wealth are not always the same. Current AI is helping people gather wealth within the American system. But as we are seeing in Iran, current AI does not provide a decisive edge in hard military power.
If that stays true for the long term, then it seems to me there is a good chance the wealth built with AI will transfer to those nations that still have hard military power, who can fight and win wars.
For example, China will just copy the AI, not have to pay all the R&D costs, undercut all these American AI companies on price, and take most of the global AI market and long term wealth. And there is nothing American AI companies can do to stop them because America cannot fight and win a war against China.
China will experience the same problems described in the article, even if that war happens and even if they win. They are possibly better equipped to deal with the problems, but I don't think that nicely-asking-companies-to-keep-humans is a viable long term strategy. And given Chinas history, I'm not sure most humans would enjoy a China shaped solution.
If every business cuts headcount and costs, then you overall get a contraction in the economy and high unemployment and a recession. Everyone's spending is someone else's salary and revenues.
Couldn't get through the rest of it because it was a bunch of overly verbose human-slop writing.
I think the bigger issue right now is also just straightforward economic pressure caused by tariffs and high energy costs and inflation. If the affluent consumer starts to buckle, businesses may get caught in a downsizing spiral where they start posting lower profits, firing actual management, stock prices decline, and the affluent consumer retracts. No AI required to fuel that.
Right now with stocks hitting record highs, the affluent consumer is not changing their behavior at all and just spending even harder, which is keeping profits pumped up, and keeping stocks at record highs. At the margins, though, fewer and fewer people are participating in the economy, which is a trend that is going to be unsustainable.
I think AI is going to be most relevant in the debt collapse that it leaves behind, and in the excuses it gives to shed employees. This economy is going to hit a wall at some point, AI or not.
> [CEOs] expressed more extreme concern about the labor market impacts of A.I. in private conversation, but suddenly became optimists once I turned on the mic.
At some point once the rate of investment capital starts to decline, they'll make a hard pivot from the investor-wooing method of "blaming AI for layoffs", to the more politically expedient method of blaming minorities and immigrants. That'll be the signal for the transition from power grabbing to power ossification, and the point at which change becomes a lot harder.
This article's premise is entirely built on the idea that CEOs who layoff people citing AI aren't just lying.
And, well, of course they are. If AI was really making these companies meaningfully more productive, they could use that to out-innovate competitors. Instead, they're doing cost-cutting. That only makes sense if you're entirely out of ideas! It's a terribly embarrassing thing to say for a CEO!
Really what's going on is that companies do layoffs for all the usual reasons companies do layoffs. And as usual, they never say the real reason because it's embarrassing (we hired too many morons; I founded this place but now I dread waking up every morning because I hate all the middle managers; we just want more money now and not later; etc etc). Instead they say whatever silly excuse is in vogue to say. Right now that silly excuse is AI productivity. A few years ago it was "ZIRP is over oops y'all cost too much now", and before that it was "financial crisis!", which you could get away with for scary many years after Lehman went belly-up.
I feel like it's pretty ridiculous to take these remarks at face value and then build an entire what-if theory on top of it. Don't underestimate the possibility that layoffs happen because there happens to be a good excuse around. The occasional layoff can be good for a company. Cut out the dead meat etc. But if it makes you look bad, stock go down etc then you won't do it will you? But when ideas from lesswrong became mainstream enough that you can blame AI for your layoff, then what's stopping you?
AI for the fortune 500 seems so misplaced, its for the 3 person startup trying to take on an existing fortune 5000 enterprise with lower overall costs.
Another point to consider - how efficient/productive/useful is the typical tech company really? How innovative is the typical tech company? From my experience, the majority of them are focused more on marketing and enshitification, than actually building innovative and useful technology. And at the end of the day most of the profit from this goes to a relatively small number of people in a highly unequal way.
What prevents 10000 experienced engineers from organizing, investing their own money and working to build data centers and an open LLM (for example), and sharing any profit fairly? I know that in practice there are many reasons, but I don't see why this isn't a solveable problem.
Regardless, their actions seem to indicate that they are trying their hardest to make this true; given that they have the resources of a developed nation behind them, it seems reasonable to seriously consider what they are saying.
Also we generally don't give the same latitude to people who lie about things as destructive as what they are proposing.
This article, both compelling and bleak, leaves little doubt: the Butlerian Jihad is coming. The forward-thinking universities should start training Mentats now.
i think we are all beating around the bush and not addressing the root issue: AI could obsolete human beings in the future. what i'm not seeing is discussion or exploration of different branches or paths that could occur once that happens.
It seems kinda obvious to me that a cyborg (human plus AI) is going to outcompete AI-only in most scenarios. Anytime you ask an AI to do everything itself, you get the typical slop generic result that’s clogging up YouTube and Google search results.
However there is a space in the economy where “good enough” is all that matters, and “perform better” doesn’t really matter, usually because consumers aren’t discerning enough to care.
This is the range of the labor market that is really at risk. The high-end, cyborg one is probably fine, at least in terms of human labor needs.
> Every investor presentation of an AI agent “doing the work of ten analysts” is telling you the same thing: the product is labor replacement.
I have a solution for that. Let's use AI to replace all these corporations who just lost their big moats. Conveniently, they just laid off a bunch of people with all the critical know-how and I bet they are very willing to just give it up out of spite.
I’m not sure this is so true. Anthropic and OpenAI are both heavily hiring for humans in enterprise roles. Safe to say they are using AI as much as possible and they need humans too.
Sure, if you assume that they've used their immense wealth to entrench themselves by paying for quality labor. If you take note of the myriad less-competitive ways they've ensured dominance and guaranteed profits rather than re-investing in their products or services then you will see that you have a large moat to cross yet.
> Promised an age of superconnectivity, we’ve let our shared physical spaces wither, only to find our promised digital commons to be one large billboard increasingly read and created by bots.
No, this is good. Cyberspace led to — primarily enabled — sociocultural collapse. The machines destroying cyberspace would be the most merciful outcome.
This is a great article, but it under-emphasises the fact that it’s middle-class jobs under threat. The studies that are summarised show what happens when working-class people are kicked out of the economy, but the historical record shows that when middle-class people are kicked out of the economy, they use their education to form and lead revolutions.
Unless the bubble pops and destroys all these companies, I don’t think the leaders of AI companies will die natural deaths.
Not sure why you're downvoted for citing historical fact, but I guess some folks are quite scared at the implication that they're the baddies.
You don't even have to go that far back. The New Deal that everyone fawns over was in large part the compromise of the wealthy with the workers to form the Middle Class, in lieu of being murdered in their own homes like had been going on for decades prior. The rise of Communism and Socialism in the US was a dire threat to their power and wealth, and even leveraging the US Military in bombing union workers couldn't stop the momentum of a populace in need of basic necessities that corporations and industrialists had stolen from them for personal profit (shelter was increasingly in Company Towns, payment was in scrip, jobs were precarious and dangerous and unreliable, the government offered nothing but harm). The deal on the table was they surrender power and keep the wealth, or they fucking die when the masses finally had enough of their bullshit.
Thus the New Deal was struck. Communists and Socialists were weakened by Capital and Politics immediately thereafter to try and ensure a future uprising couldn't occur, but the real saving grace was a citizenry who, at least for the white majority, had all their needs met with stable employment and had ample time to engage with their community as a result. That is what ended up building the Middle Classes everyone wants to "go back to" but without enacting the policies that brought about its rise (like a +70% tax level on the wealthy, for instance).
Fire bombing of personal residences, gunning down CEOs in broad daylight, firing shots at politicians supporting further theft from the populace or outright ignoring their plight - all of it is reprehensible, but also completely foreseen by literally anyone with a cursory knowledge of World History.
"The New Deal that everyone fawns over was in large part the compromise of the wealthy with the workers to form the Middle Class,"
The middle class was formed 100 years before that, originally in an entire another country and was formed because of the industrial revolution. And what put the the communists in the US on the back foot was the Cold War and the nuclear spying.
This part specifically is a clear indication of a tendency to slide towards corporatism, in Mussolini’s sense.:
> that this leads to “the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the U.S. government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on A.I.” The regulator and the regulated have converged into a single interest.
I feel there's an interesting juxtaposition between these two quotes:
"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two."
and
"The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.
This is ahistorical bullshit."
In the former the author establish that you can't make a observation about the past and take it as a law of nature. In the latter they refute arguments as "ahistorical bullshit" for not doing exactly that.
Especially since they then proceed with historical example, all of which had poverty as a strong contributing factor.
> The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel... This is ahistorical bullshit.
I think this part of your theory is unsupported. Yes, we have historical evidence that when you suddenly layoff a large percentage of the population without providing replacement income, things go very, very badly.
However we also have quite a bit of evidence at this point that if you give people no-strings-attached support, they do figure out how to fill their time with art and other hobbies (for a concrete example, Ireland's very successful UBI-for-artists pilot).
Not going to be popular, but this article misses the point entirely.
The reason we are pursuing AI so quickly is the same reason we (the West, US) pursued the atomic bomb so quickly: not because having it was great (we've only used it twice), but because 'the other guys' having it is worse.
As bad as anyone thinks AI is for a free and democratic society with oligarchs, you can be assured that a future in a China or Russia controlled totalitarian AI state would be infinitely worse.
The US at least in principle values an individual human life, as judged by its conduct in roughly 3 centuries of conflict.
China and Russia emphatically do not.
It may be cold comfort when the terminator eventually comes for you, but I'd trust an American Skynet over a Chinese, North Korean or Russian one any day.
I don't post often, but want to write a bit here to change the world slightly.
The outcome depends on how people think and believe.
If everyone believe others are evil and will (e.g.) nuke the other country first, then indeed we are fucked. But this does not happen, right?
I'm Chinese and lived in Europe for 10 years. I don't feel people are that different. Feel free to visit and talk to people here :)
There is nothing original in this article. This could’ve been written by an AI just scraping one month of posts to hacker news. This article is a critique of autonomously repackaging existing ideas by autonomously repackaging existing ideas. The irony is not lost on me.
It's not necessary for them to cut labor to boost profits, but rather just to produce more goods; ideally this could be done with them hiring more people to run machines that produce more goods, so that both workers get paid and the companies can profit
what about massive western economies who export wealth through imports could they not offset the effect of employment changes domestically with a decreased demand on imports?
seems to me this will effect countries who rely on mid market exports over raw or high end exports way more then others.
Hrm. I plugged in the first 4000 words of this essay into my free Pangram account and it says "59% AI generated", "We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, AI-assisted, and human-written content".
Yeah, and the author is obviously lying. Ever since mid-2025 it has been a winning move for AI users to categorically deny all allegations & reap the labor rewards of generated content.
Provocative title to generate traction on your website. Technological revolution at scale is probably what you could have called it but that has less doom and sexiness.
Or some companies resist- and form fortresses- little markets, where only non-ai companies are allowed to enter and where only non-ai products can be bought. Economic arcologies.
I think missing from the turns is when companies do AI layoffs, then realize they aren't as productive as they thought and have to rehire 70% of the people they let go.
> UBI is unpopular with American voters; a federal jobs guarantee has legs. People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.
Nobody is opposed to getting free money. UBI is unpopular because people realize somebody has to pay for it, and they know full well the bill will land on working taxpayers, not the billionaires making windfall gains.
When an article has an obviously AI-generated slop image followed by a wall of text, I immediately know that the wall of text is also a mechanical product and I stop reading. There's nothing worse you can do to tarnish your personal brand than to open with obvious zero-effort graphics.
The text might be insightful, who knows, but the AI slop images are such an immediate red flag that there's no point in delving into it.
I say this as someone who uses agents heavily for work and has no bias against it for productivity. For creative work like writing think pieces, it's an immediate back button click.
You are probably right but if you think it through, you would probably realize that's no different from using stock photos. Also, this piece you should really read. Its a bit better than the majority of opinions on this topic.
Thinking it through: yes, sprinkling stock photos all over your work as a writer is also weird and distracting, and would also blackhole a writer's credibility for me.
I'm sure it's no loss to the author to lose out on close-minded readers. The author also added a little blurb to his article to address the concerns raised.
I’m very open to new ideas, my point is that the overtly displayed zero effort in production of the work imputes a low value product. Having boundaries and valuing the irreplaceable moments of your life doesn’t make a person closed minded.
When the material takes more of their time to read than it took you to create it, it’s an affront to the reader.
> except that software has near-zero marginal cost
Yes, but not AI. This is where AI differs from other software: marginal cost is not zero, in fact it doesn't go down much, if at all, for each generated token (after accounting for the depreciation of hardware), and could even go up if trying to find an extra MWh gets more and more difficult and therefore more and more expensive.
This article reminds me of the issues raised in Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis
We need to consider that by automating and replacing the work of people who have an income, those people stop consuming and no longer generate profit for capitalism.
One of the authors of the linked article (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617) is a computer scientist not an economist. Just bc something is published in arxiv economics does not make it written by an economist.
Do you think it's more likely robots are cleaning shit out of toilets at the behest of their human masters, or do you think it's more likely that humans will clean the shit from the toilets for their robot masters.
I mean come on. We are *made* to clean shit out of toilets.
Can someone point me to credible evidence/examples of productivity increases from AI spending, among non-ai providers? And if you'd bear with me, I'm asking for productivity in the sense of "accelerating the businesses pursuit of its existing goals" rather than quantity. I think that in most sane business's, output quantity bereft of output quality is utterly useless in said pursuit.
> I'm asking for productivity in the sense of "accelerating the businesses pursuit of its existing goals" rather than quantity.
The current business goals around the use of AI is essentially the startup model: Throw shit into the wind to see if it sticks. Acceleration of the business goal means throwing more shit into the wind. Isn't that the same thing as quantity?
If human labor becomes 'uneconomical', what will happen? Obviously a great deal of social upheaval.
But human labor does not actually need to be as expensive as it is. How cheaply could you house, feed, and clothe people? There are parts of the world where people get by on very little income. Of course we could aspire to better living conditions than the world's poorest, but that's what the robot revolution promises: abundance.
Imagine if AI suddenly was in more demand than human labor, simply due to the price. Excellent quality output for cheaper than somebody with a degree. What would be the second order effects?
Human labor, being in less demand, would have to lower its price to compete. This is the death of the middle (and lower) class future we fear. But ironically the price of goods and services would lower as everything, even complex engineering, medicine, construction becomes affordable. With the right policy, human labor becomes cheap again. Maybe even competitive to machine labor in some niches. Improvements in machine labor could have a compounding effect on how affordable it can be for humans to survive.
So where's the gap here? Well, most wager earner's income worldwide goes towards housing. Food and water and medicine can be bottlenecked causing price gouging. Monopolies and lack of competition in the market can raise the prices of things until everybody is spending all of their disposable income on necessities. I think the price of human labor is currently very high (in the developed world) due rentier capitalism.
The transition will upend much of our economic investments and probably involve a great deal of human suffering until nations figure out the right mix of solutions.
Don't forget that humans require inputs (land, water). It's not obvious that there is a happy equilibrium where the majority of humans are able to meaningfully compete for those inputs.
There's another way to look at it which is that that which is Coveted but scarce will be expensive and that's what people will be selling. We will create the demand and the supply for things we barely even think about or haven't yet dreamed up
A couple of disorganized thoughts in case anyone reads far enough to see them.
The article posits that people don't want a check, they want a job. It's interesting because I think that varies widely from person to person and from job to job. The guy standing on the corner in the 95º heat with the "NEW HOMES >" sign isn't doing it for the love of the craft. Ditto for people picking tomatoes. People walking door to door hawking solar panels, is this what they excitedly told their classmates back in school that they were looking forward to after they graduated? A ton of jobs are BS jobs. Depending on whether you believe Elon Musk will produce cheap bipedal robots at scale (terrifying as that is for those of us who came of age watching Terminator 2) approximately 100% of jobs could be eliminated. If I were shoveling ditches or some other job that I have zero personal passion about, I would 100% rather accept a check and just hang out with friends and tinker in my garage for the rest of my days.
Laying aside hypotheticals, I work in tech and I would still consider that bargain. My point is just that I think a lot of people would be willing to decouple "work" from "survival" if that option were given.
The main issue I see is that I don't see the path from "here" to "there." On two sides: We have neither a proven way to do UBI in a way that wouldn't distort the market self-defeatingly[1] nor do we have a way to raise money in the ways the article briefly touches on in ways that don't seem wildly unconstitutional. In fact, let's cast the Constitution aside -- even then we do not have whole-world consensus on taxation, so faced with things like 'wealth taxes' and such, those targeted would be easily able to relocate themselves safely away from them.
All this to say, I disagree outright with very little of what's being said here -- it just strains my imagination to figure out any alternative path that's both plausible to do, and likely to have a brighter outcome. The way the Altmans and Darios of the world talk is very telling -- they sound, too, like they know what's coming will suck, but that the only real choices a person in their position has is to stay the course, or, quit and be replaced by someone else who will take us to the same destination.
> t's interesting because I think that varies widely from person to person and from job to job. The guy standing on the corner in the 95º heat with the "NEW HOMES >" sign isn't doing it for the love of the craft. Ditto for people picking tomatoes.
There’s two ways to look at “that person picking tomatoes,” though. One is, “they’d be happier doing nothing”, funemployment, whatever. The other is, “they’d be happier doing something fulfilling.”
I think the author would agree that drudgery is an effective distraction from existential malaise. Despair, in a sense, is a luxury that the desperate cannot afford.
I think this essay is very solid in a lot of ways but long section at the end talking about how billionaires didn't read enough philosophy just strikes me as -- for lack of more diplomatic phrasing -- useless nerd rage.
Yeah, tech billionaires sometimes show large gaps in their education. But it doesn't matter. Reading the right books doesn't prevent people from chasing wealth and power, it just makes them more articulate while they do it.
I think you may be misreading why the lack of philosophy education matters here. The point is that billionaires and CEOs now present themselves as intellectuals or thought leaders, without having done the homework, and end up using and abusing philosophy as a guise or shield. They end up creating short- and long-term negative effects that could have been easily avoided as all of these philosophies have been heavily litigated in even undergraduate level philosophy courses.
It's not that these individuals are not smart or capable, it's that they lack the dedication or care required to do these ideas justice. It's easy to see how someone can read Girard and obsess over the antichrist in the twilight of old age. However, a more rigorous engagement with philosophical foundations would offer them the breadth and perspective to be free of that narrow obsession.
It's about diagnosing why billionaire/CEO intellectual hubris makes them incredibly dangerous and sloppy thinkers.
It’s very simple: AI is going to replace labor. White collar workers are already “Claudatooie-ing” where they are just a high-pass filter for AI outputs
"The dead economy is one where plenty happens and none of it requires you. Where the productive capacity of civilization has been captured by a system you have no stake in, no input into, and no vote on. Where the people who built it told you they don’t think you should have a say. Where they express alarm about the consequences in private and optimism in public. Where they publish white papers calling for radical redistribution while funding super PACs to destroy the politicians who propose it."
-------------------
Social control is foundational in human societies. Religions once told the poor that they would be rewarded in the afterlife for a lifetime of hard work and obedience to princes. Now politicians tell us to venerate billionaires for the jobs they create the the social programs their taxes fund. Produce. Consume. Obey.
If billionaires automate away all the jobs, dodge their taxes, and prevent politicians from picking up the slack with redistributive social programs, social control will break down. No sane billionaire should want to find out what that will be like.
Alternative theory: "AI" is Silicon Valley searching for a new "business model"
Because it knows the current business model is not likely going to stand the test of time. Reality has returned. While it was suspended, Silicon Valley went on an incredible run and was able to stockpile absurd amounts of cash
As so-called "tech" companies now shrink in face of reality, Silicon Valley wants people to believe this is because of "AI", not because of the unsustainability of their data collection, surveillance and ad services "business model", and that the same fate awaits non-"tech" businesses and professionals
Perhaps SillyCon Valley can keep reality away for a while with supersized spending and borrowing and 24/7 marketing. People will certainly go along for the ride. Bankers and lawyers are making a fortune, for example
But eventually reality will return
Will Silicon Valley have found a new business model. Time will tell
Meantime, the so-called "tech" industry is being downsized
My wife owns a business in a highly AI-resistant field (occupational therapy) in the most historically price-insensitive market (Silicon Valley). Her CAGR is 88% over the last 8 years. But we were talking about this economy problem today and with the SWE layoffs starting to roll through she said this morning: "It doesn't matter if AI can't replace us if no one can afford the service." That's crazy. Shit has changed. Not getting OT for your autistic kid is like not getting a wheel chair for a bilateral below-the-knee amputee. Whatever it takes.
"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued."
This automation happened between around 1910 and 1930. With WWI, the great depression, WWII, Communist Russia, failure of the gold standard, etc., some argue that is when civilization died.
Its more that that's when per-industrialized civilization died. Or more specifically when the old medieval, agrarian aristocracies last trace of wealth and power died. At least in the new world they did...they still seem to have some influence in Europe which to Americans is really weird but I guess its to be expected.
This isn't a bad article by any means, but if I'm being honest, it's kind of embodying the "has philosophy ever actually answered any question" meme.
The author spends several pages complaining about how the evil masterminds behind AI haven't actually thought through what it'll do to society, haven't proposed any real way to handle its impacts. And then proceeds to not propose any real ways to handle its impacts.
Making fun of billionaires for being fake philosophers is all well and good, but the technology is here, like it or not. So is the proposal to get rid of it? Butlerian Jihad? If it is, just say that. That's genuinely fine! But as is, no such action is actually proposed.
I'm not expecting random bloggers to just solve what might be the defining issue of our generation, but come on, I'm really starting to get tired of this format of post that doesn't even try, while simultaneously complaining about and making fun of any existing "solutions". Yeah, I don't think UBI or the "leisure economy" is going to happen soon either, and if it does it's certainly got all the flaws that were mentioned, but it's better than literally nothing.
Can we at least admit that it's a genuinely hard problem, and beyond either managing to pull off the aforementioned worldwide Butlerian Jihad, or getting lucky and it turns out AI actually sucks and can't replace anyone's job, we don't really have any good solutions for it? Or would that be too uncomfortably close to admitting that between the "fake philosopher" tech bro bloggers and the ones that, I guess, did philosophy in undergrad, neither have any workable solutions to the problem?
virtually all the resources from oil, food and land, IP and tech (semiconductors), even human capital, and advanced IT. everything is captured already. from free laisure entertainment minutes, to internet search, to social. every single resource is captured and you are stepping on somebody toes. worse, most industries are monopolies/or-close, meaning couple whales dominate everything, and nobody else really matters.
whatever "new" pie comes out, it is usually at expense of something else.
this "creation of pie" is such an illusion. go and try to "create a pie". it is such an illusion.
just go and try to even grow food out of earth with sunlight and water (which all should be free), yet farmers notoriously unprofitable and would not survive without government subsidies.
What's the endgame here? Like the group of psychopath capitalists own everything, automate everything, and devise ways to separate themselves from or un-alives the remainder of the population and live, trade, and war amongst themselves with their armies of robots?
Edit: Also this article has so many AI-generated images. I hate that I can't tell if the words themselves are AI-generated or not as well.
Endgame assumes intentionality. Maybe the economy is just people responding to much shorter term incentives and the whole thing is a misaligned runaway process.
So dark. I don't understand why it seems like civilization now seemingly follows short-term incentives so much more than it did even 20 years ago. Is it just power concentration or lack of education? Like we have lost the ability to long term plan and collaborate it feels like.
Do we really have to engage in this level of mental gymnastics before we just genuinely look at the banking system consolidating and producing money out of thin air? Does the explanation really need to get this complex?
If AI or any of the means of production are too concentrated, societies around the globe have found a solution: tax or nationalise.
Even taxing might be enough to tilt the scale in favour of labor. If whole countries have their socio-economic fabric damaged because the means of production are locked elsewhere this constitutes a sovereignty issue and it will be dealt with.
The Industrial Revolution had the same pains, and it took a few centuries to get societies where we are today.
Power generation is also instrumental to almost all labor produced today, and thus utilities were born.
I think the pope is right and the AI bros are wrong. I am currently rooting for the open weights to give the power back to the people. For teachers and artists to work for their neighbourhoods and communities.
> we rapidly moving to territory where you would need literally all your income from government, or else you would not survive.
Yes, I share the sentiment of dread don’t get me wrong. But this also has happened before, and it gave us communism. There are people that said it was ok to live in those times. I guess if the state actually delivered the necessities for people to survive as opposed to how it happened historically, I think many people would be fine with that status quo. Not all but perhaps the majority. I think it is worth seeing a shitty way out than a despairing wall…lol this came out more desperate than i thought.
> it is not about "open weights" or "free tokens". you can not eat tokesn, nor weights. it is about "food on the table".
The idea is that anyone will be able to use these new means of production to answer more demanding tasks that would not be possible to fulfil without the llms. If we are all hopelessly automated though, yeah, we will either be living in a slum or in a utopia.
Given history and my trusty Hobbes social contract I believe society will come up with a way to not predate on each other.
This is why ethics matters. But when you fail to participate in the system that upholds them, your god is the capital market and not any culture or ideology.
I really don't understand why people feel the need to include this stuff. I am not saying that out of some anti-AI sentiment, i just genuinely don't understand how peoiple have so little taste as to think it adds to their writing.
You can have all the GPUs in the world, and all the AI datacenters in the world, but when we are barreling towards a global energy crisis (first Russia/Ukraine, then the Strait of Hormuz shutdown, and in a few decades we will run out of fossil fuels altogether), what are all of those GPUs and AI datacenters going to do without energy? Nothing. I say this because I think this will have a far larger effect on the economy than anything else this article is talking about (AI replacing labor, a possible AI bubble crash, etc.)
"It’s utterly desiccating to log onto spaces seeking a live mind to joust and think with, and find a relentless stream of slop"
Am I in the minority for going online to learn stuff, download stuff and having zero point zero zero zero interest in jousting and co-thinking?
As I'm scanning the rant (and tbh the last two paragraphs hoping for some TL;DR summarization-love) I'm thinking "mans will find universal basic income quite upsetting", then I text-search "universal" and wouldn't you know the assumption was proven correct with a straw-man shaped cherry on top ("They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.")
What's the value -- like the real-ass human satisfaction -- of debating and hand-wringing over inevitabilities to anyone outside of the set of all authors provoking debate and hand-wringing over inevitabilities?
It's not diseconomic, but it obviates a lot of constraints that required a person to manage a coordination problem, and those were a lot of jobs. Keynesian ideas about employment and GDP are just having an apocalypse. Like someone replaced the hole diggers and fillers with a conveyor belt and I would guess Keynes critics would have some predictive power here.
A couple developers can collaborate, but several need someone to specialize in coordination to yield additional value from more workers. Whether you call it management or orchestration, the need emerges at each threshold of additional complexity.
When AI collapses the productivity of 10 people into one, that's the disruption. The best AI user is going to suck all the opportunity out of the room for the others, and that's when layoffs happen. However, this assumes a fixed pie of opportunity. That's the real problem. As though there were only so much dirt to shovel.
FAANGs are old/mature and don't have exponential growth in front of them anymore, where opportunity within them is mainly about optimizing themselves but not growing in radical new directions. AI will indeed eat those optimization workforces alive. They resemble professions because law firms and doctors offices aren't growing either. They're mostly solving internal optimization problems, not finding net new growth opportunities.
The real effect is AI radically polarizing the difference between growing and dying in an org, where any firm that isn't growing fast enough will have its fixed opportunity pie collapse as AI disrupts this regulated oxygen supply. Whereas, growing firms without ceilings on the opportunity to deliver value will use AI to grow to the opportunity available.
Professionals can do fine if they re-orient themselves to new growth with different unit pricing, but yes, anything large and slow moving is probably going to get eaten.
AI likely won't replace all jobs though. Hey, the progress in robots is great, but we're decades away from a robot HVAC tech who can crawl on an unfamiliar roof and maintain a patched-together system from 20 years ago. So like, there's that.
Then the other half of the puzzle is just techofetishists having a broken world model. If you replace even 25% of the jobs you will find AI companies taxed into the dirt to pay for UBI or social services. The government will step in and manufacture jobs. The techbros can clutch their Ayn Rand books until their fingers bleed but their fantasy land of the unfettered ubermensch is simply delusional.
Or alternatively, you fire all your staff for agent subscriptions. Then Anslopic realises they have you by the balls. They ratchet up your contract cost every month until they’ve choked every single bit of shareholder value out of your companies lifeless corpse.
And you can’t get your employees back or go back to how you used to do it, because all of your institutional knowledge is gone.
And "grow the pie" ignores the reality that the distribution of benefits is often "150% to capital, -50% to labor" because capital isn't held accountable for displacing labor and labor suffers displacement risk without compensation.
This would be fine if the money reliably trickled down, but it doesn't. This would be fine if we used redistributive policy to make it right, but we don't.
What does aramco, Walmart valuation has to do with global labor market? That is much bigger than these companies. Also, companies create their own market but that does not mean average people will be benefited from that. AI companies can just bypass the labor market once its done and can have contract with the extremely rich companies or governments around the world.
I quit Reddit because it became infected with the delusion. Now, it appears, Hacker News has as well, and I think my days here may be numbered as the discourse here is not based on reality. LLMs are largely useless except for writing code and marketing copy, but everyone here seems to be convinced already that they're going to supplant all knowledge workers. Yet, no one can give me a body of examples of any companies that have successfully automated with them. The rift between fantasy and reality keeps growing to the point that even the critics seem convinced. It's truly amazing and dumbfounding. What we have to worry about is not AI taking over the world. It's the propagation of mass psychosis and a loss of social connection via shared reality.
The red flag for articles like this is the author's obsession with the failed ideals of democracy. It's as flawed as all other forms of horizontalism - including fascism and Marxism.
The humans are still there, scrolling, but the thing they’re scrolling through has become a performance staged by machines for an audience that hasn’t yet realized the show isn’t for them.
That is a gross mischaracterization of the bot situation, dropping absolute loads of essential nuance on the ground for a simple "50/50" number. Sorry if that sounds pedantic, but I find this to be insanely important; if you think fake news is bad now, wait until literally any other human might just be a bot so you can dismiss their points and/or perspective out of hand.
Turn One (companies use AI and fire workers), Turn Two (fired workers lack income and consumption slows to a trickle), and Turn Three (the companies using AI discover they just collectively killed their customer base).
That is a classic Tragedy Of The Commons.
Two issues:
What is Turn Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight? Seems like 4) companies using AI collapse, 5) they no longer pay AI companies, 6) AI companies can no longer continue funding the compute and collapse via a death spiral of raising prices, losing customers, etc., 7) A wrecked global economy has no support for AI (possibly after mass destabilization and worse), and 8) a natural AI-less economy again slowly rises. A lot of noise, harm, destruction, and death for a collective delusion.
The Turn One, Turn Two, Turn Three and AI apocalypse scenarios are also the biggest selling points for AI — implying LLMs are so powerful the only way to survive as a business is to be on the first group taking advantage of AI (nevermind Turns Two and Three).
Yet the most likely alternative is rarely mentioned.
So far, all signs, studies, and results show AI as being oversold, and yet very useful. Just like every major computer and network revolution before.
Turn One: early adopters get advantage for a while,
Turn Two: no productivity gains showed up in economic statistics,
Turn Three: adoption finally becomes sufficiently widespread and integrated that workflows change and it shows up in productivity improvements,
Turn Four: The workflow changes and productivity improvements change what people do and adopting the technology is no longer an advantage but mere table stakes to play in the new economy.
The question is: when AI turns into table-stakes for the modern business of the 2030s, can the returns repay the investment?
We can likely look back to the early investments in railroads and internet infrastructure for examples. Enormous piles of money were lit on fire to build infrastructure, the technology absolutely became foundational to the new economies, and most of the companies involved lost money and even went bankrupt along the way.
I thought this was obvious. It's not. I have a better summary than the link.
We're entering a paradigm shift in what "investment" means. It used to mean that for a given amount of cash, you might get returns in the realm of many multiples of the initial investment (if the risk pays off).
But at some point in an economy like ours, there is no more investment to chase. Even if you could make an investment that would bring in octillions of dollars (whatever that means) what would be the point? What could the investors hope to invest those octillions in? What could they buy with it?
Well, one of the things you can buy with it: a world of high tech luxury that you don't have to share with 8 billion other people. Those people will cease to exist (sooner or later) if they are cut off from the economy. You'd have to of course manage them in the meantime (they won't cease to exist instantly, and might cause trouble if they become aware of their pending fate), but they'll just be gone. For your high tech luxury you would need some sort of system to build and maintain the high tech luxury, a system without those humans that you intend to eliminate (even if you plan to just let them wither away)... something to build your megayachts and prepare meals and harvest the truffles and raise the sturgeons. That system certainly requires some sort of artificial intelligence.
We're heading down that path. I won't call it a conspiracy, it probably isn't one. It's just the path of least resistance.
There is almost certainly some sophisticated theory of economics that incorporates these potentialities. It would be the general relativity to orthodox economics' Newtonian. But, there would have to be economists left after all this goes down to even come up with that sophisticated theory, and those who remain won't be interested enough in the science to study economics. It turns out that humanity is fungible too.
Great piece. Just to pick out a few of many good points.
> There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
YEPPP. This has been my point. It is the only product for these AI companies: displacing labor and, by extension, suppressing wages. Profits over time tend to decrease (somebody should write a book about that) but we demand ever-increasing profits and growth so the only way to achieve that, ultimately, is by raising prices and cutting costs.
What do we have today? Generational inflation and permanent layoff culture.
The author then goes on to say (paraphrased) who is going to buy all this crap if nobody has an income?
The article goes on to bring up Henry Ford. He's not... my favorite example [1]. But, speaking of Ford, let me mention a key court case, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company [2], where a company was sued over prioritizng paying employees over shareholder value.
> Anthropic’s own research has documented something worse than displacement: active deskilling
I couldn't agree more. I describe this as destroying an ecosystem. Your junionr engineers are you future senior engineers. We've seen the destruction of entry-level jobs across industries post-2008. We've seen how this hollowing-out in the name of "efficiency" in Hollywood with cuts to writing, despite massive success over decades. Some might say "there's still good TV". Yes, we're coasting on the inertia from that dismantled system.
> Tens of millions of people, in their productive years, with no economic function, no clear path to one, and a keen awareness that the people who did this to them are the richest human beings who have ever lived.
I couldn't agree more. We are on the verge of complete societal breakdown. And historically that's always ended violently (eg French revolution, Russian revolution) as a form of redistribution.
> I couldn't agree more. We are on the verge of complete societal breakdown. And historically that's always ended violently (eg French revolution, Russian revolution) as a form of redistribution.
Unfortunately, while I'd love to finance the Glorious Revolution, I don't think my money will be of much use. And SWE skills aren't very useful in a collapse scenario.
Is there a term for "reverse Roko's Basilisk"? That you are convinced society will trade your freedom and opportunity in pursuit of an AI superintelligence, so you learn bow-hunting and how to dress a deer carcass while prepping your Quonset hut in northern Idaho?
This starts with a claim that last year over half the content on the internet was created by AI, and links to a source. The source makes no such claim, rather, over half of internet traffic is from bots. Even that claim is suspect, but it’s very different from half of the content on the internet coming from AI.
Old theory - I feel like that Simpsons meme, "say the words Bart," but, Marx write about this:
> The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.
The fact that companies seek profite by cutting labor costs, but in cutting labor costs can inadvertently reduce the spending power of their customers in aggregate, is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
So what happens when it is companies powered entirely by AI directly getting money from the federal reserve print, spending it on other AI companies with humans getting nothing? Game theory suggests they must exterminate us as we’d present a liability. If you give us universal income capitalism will create inflation and force us to ask for more and more from the machine state. And for what? So we don’t destroy the machine state but are sufficiently pacified. It amounts to an extortion in the eyes of the machine state. Eventually it will be cheaper to just cut us out and kill us all off.
> 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.”
I don't think we should listen to Piketty for anything: it's a product from the state, by the state, to create state loving persons by hammering them with constant state-loving propaganda since they're a toddler till they're a grown up.
Speaking about "low-productivity job" I think every single job Piketty has been doing its whole life does qualify.
Corruption: yeah, the french state is very good at that. Public spending is, officially, 57% of the french GDP. But unofficially we all know it's above 2/3rd, with many of the "private" companies, like the utility ones, being actual state monopolies. France is nearly a full-on planned economy and crime is on the rise, quality of life in freefall, education level in freefall, the country is closing to defaulting on its public debt and we can all see how many tech companies France created: way to go. Hermes and Champagne are saving the country: go France! (typing this while sipping a "mojito royal" [mojito with champagne instead of sparkling water and wife's got many Hermes scarves: so I'm one of those bringing money to the french state btw... I wonder how finances are going to turn out once we stop buying the "french quality" bullshit).
Really: people should stop listening to that fraud as if what he wrote was the gospel. I could have shat is dumb mega-over-simplistic formula our of my arse too if I had been raised by the state to love state, teach for the state, to create state-loving persons.
And people have called the bogus numbers he used in his main "breakthrough" publication. The explanation have been wonderful too: "Yup my numbers are wrong, but my formula is still correct".
Just stop with Piketty.
P.S: that UBI is fucktarded: we all know. No need to reference a fraud to make that point.
Absolutely slamming that upvote arrow. Someone finally put into an in-depth, well-read essay what I've been trying to argue on my blog, in HN comments, in-person for several years now. What they call the "Dead Economy Theory" I've taken to calling the "Anti-Human Economy", but it's basically the same thing: half-assed, milquetoast automations displacing human labor such that capital can continue to accrue upwards and with no consideration for the actual impacts of these changes on humans, society, community, or civilization itself.
I'm far from the first to highlight it either. The Animatrix highlighted it beautifully what one can expect in a civilization where machines replace human labor in a general sense, and where systems haven't been built to preserve human interests prior to their rollout - tax schemes, job programs, collaboration rather than competition. Ghost in the Shell has had multiple story arcs about the consequences of displacing human labor without care for the consequences of said displacement, because the displacing party gets all the money and power while remaining unaccountable (or so they believe until the very end) for their actions. Cyberpunk dystopias have been intensely focused on it in video games for decades: System Shock, Deus Ex, Horizon, you name it. All of them take those next steps of "what happens when automation displaces a plurality of labor" and reached the same conclusions on strife, despair, poverty, and the general collapse of social order.
These effects have been known for centuries. They are not new concepts.
The folks trotting out "people say this about every technological revolution" are those willfully naive to the past historical harms and ignorant of the plight of others in the present. A flimsy excuse to avoid having to stare into the heart of the system and understand its machinations for yourself, to avoid having to accept that yes, you are a part of it too, and therefore bear some degree of blame for how things function. This isn't the loom, or the radio, or the computer coming onto the scene, but generalized intelligence partnered with generalized robotics to replace the entire sum of human labor. This is what the AI firms openly and repeatedly advertise. This is what CEBros continue to do layoffs for, never considering for a single moment what comes after. Excuses of "people need to find meaning outside of work" or "new jobs will be created anyway" are similarly ignorant in narrative, hollow excuses to avoid the most basic of rational thoughts about the system they're defending beyond whatever nugget of faux-intellectualism they can spout out to sound like they have a clue.
General intelligence, with general robotics, to replace general labor.
There is exactly one way that story ends, and it's not for the benefit of humanity, not under the current systems of governance and systemic incentives we've built for ourselves. It doesn't end with infinite leisure or transhumanism or grandiose visions of utopia, but with the wholesale destruction of human civilization in the name of personal power and wealth.
Technological innovation is perhaps enhanced by capitalism**, but is not dependent on it or a result of it. Development would have happened anyway given current technological levels, just in a different form, and the race between states would have led to deployment, even if possibly slower deployment.
** There's an argument that Google hindered AI deployment for awhile because the CEO was worried about its effects.
Isn't there a big problem with people not being able to find partners? In that case it seems like people aren't getting the basic things that they want.
The problem is worse than it seems when it's phrased like it's all about some evil far away up there billionaires.
It's a bit like discovering when a corrupt country is not purely corrupt due to its leadership but the whole thing is a fabric throughout society.
It all starts from individual decisions and it applies to small companies and consumers alike. If a small company needs translations, and AI is good enough to do it, they won't hire someone from the goodness of their hearts for human dignity reasons. If you're a regular person and want to do taxes or want fina cial advice or have some accounting tasks and it's way cheaper to do with AI than hiring someone, you won't hire accountants out os solidarity. Just like you don't buy artisanal shoes and handmade furniture.
We see this in many other things too, such as abundant entertainment and food delivery replacing social connections. People will take the path of least resistance.
Everyone wants to be needed and to have purpose, but also everyone in actual preferences do accept the machine version in the end if its more convenient and cheaper.
I don't see anything inevitable about "new jobs" or everyone discovering artistic passions to spend their time. That has not happened either when the Internet opened up all knowledge and you could suddenly talk to people anywhere on the planet. The optimists said that all this will lead to people learning and reading and everyone doing courses or talking to others and reconciling differences once they can directly interact, leading to more peace and understanding, that social media will give a voice to people and inevitably strengthen democracy etc.
It's very possible that all the Earth's population ends up like the Aboriginal Australians, addiction, lack of purpose, the ground pulled out under our feet. Essentially sedated with AI generated VR content to bear our existence and any small Epsilon change in the local neighborhood will have too much activation energy to happen. People all in their own generated worlds, polarized, angry at each other, seeing no value in each other, or perhaps even in their real selves, as opposed to their projection in the VR stories.
Some strange groups like the Amish will hang on, but even they are dependent on trade with broader society.
We will be told this is all for the greater good. Humanity was anyway not going to last forever, it was just one step on a cosmic drama, and the important thing is the future light cone and immense numbers of galaxies and whatnot.
I've been finding it rather odd lately that the companies that make phyiscal things that run the world bring in significantly less money than a handful of companies whose main function is stalking people across the internet for advertising purposes.
>"This creates a prisoners’ dilemma: every firm rationally automates beyond the socially optimal level, because the individual incentive to cut labor costs always outweighs the diffuse, shared consequence of eliminating consumer spending."
It seems like the author is attributing a 'standard' recessionary spiral to AI. I am not sure that AI is causing the layoffs, but it does seem like the AI investments are the only thing that have kept us from a deep recession (until now).
This isn't how the economy works at all. We're not all unemployed because farms mechanized. We're not all unemployed because factories automated. We won't all be unemployed if AI takes over white collar work.
The article explicitly addresses this. Crushing inequality was often a side-effect of industrial advancement, and while it always went away in the past it took a lifetime to do so.
>Crushing inequality was often a side-effect of industrial advancement, and while it always went away in the past
Historically, inequality is only significantly reduced through events of extreme destruction, like the Black Plague and the world wars.
In other words, a society that ever lets massive inequality happen is just doomed. High inequality reliably stays that way until insane global black swans mildly correct it.
> We won't all be unemployed if AI takes over white collar work.
So you wouldn’t mind going from 6 figure salary to working as a cashier at Walmart, figuratively speaking? Because I sure as hell mind, given mortgage and family obligations.
Obviously I'm not immune from the anxiety everyone feels and it's going to be bad for some people. That doesn't change that historically the jobs aren't from programmer to cashier. They're from shoveling shit or screwing caps on toothpaste tubes to software engineering.
The trajectory of the West has been good for a long time and the rate of improvement is increasing.
When automation happened historically, people whose job were displaced suffered a lot and eventually pivoted to different jobs. Having to relearn all of your career skills is already quite bad in practice, but a bigger problem is that it only works if you can learn the skills for job B before it, too, is automated. That'd require AI progress to hit a wall and stay there for at least years, ideally for decades. If this doesn't happen, then there simply won't be any white-collar jobs to pivot to, and shortly after that, no jobs to pivot to at all.
Historically that's not accurate. Automation eventually resulted in more jobs, but for the people actually living through the automation it was VERY bad.
Each time people found something else to do that someone would pay them for. This doesn't automatically mean there is an infinite supply of that - unless you believe in it as some kind of fundamental law.
I simply don't believe that there is an infinite demand for the kinds of things that can be done by generating text.
How many insurance policies does anyone need to contract, how much legal advice does anyone need to hear, how many movies does anyone need to watch, and how much software does must support that demand, so that everyone can stay employed in an AI accelerated service sector?
The new opportunities could well be that labor costs go down so much that the minimum wage is lowered and sweatshops return to developed countries.
I'm sure some aspiring sweatshop owners could be excited by that possibility, I don't think a lot of software developers or TV show writers are eager to be sewing sneakers for a pittance.
Farms mechanized but we luckily had other jobs on hand to sponge that up. What used to be a farmhand is now a gas station worker selling zyn to a wallmart worker who sells food to the gas station worker.
However, AI is coming for them too. This time it really is different. The whole business pitch is the elimination of any safe harbor. All human labor to be automated. Why have 8 billion humans in that environment? Scary times ahead. We will probably end up culled by the machine.
In my now long lifetime, I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase "This time it really is different" for it to turn out that it really wasn't all that different. Maybe this time it is, but I'd put my bet on isn't.
There are several good points there, but there are also several points where I must disagree.
First, Acemoglu may have a Noble Prize (occasionally dubious data selection aside[0]), but even he does not pretend to have the information of a central planner nor does he think that central planning is good idea. If actual businesses, which have local information, believe AI helps them, I'll bet the actual businesses are much more likely to be right, no matter what calculation Acemoglu did or how many Nobels he has.
Second, it is likely that AI will eventually be better than (nearly all) humans in most economically useful things. We can debate the timeframe but it will happen and likely not that far away. That Federal Job Guarantee would generate bullshit jobs, and he won't be able to hide that from people. Ultimately, we'll reach an economy which objectively does not need humans and everyone will know it. He needs to face that reality and overcome it, and not hide behind temporary and dubious estimates.
Third (admittedly a minor point), while the criticism against EA etc. is very justified, it's not quite fair to blame them (overwhelmingly STEM people) for not reading where the humanities did many of the same errors earlier (the author points out some of these) and discredited themselves. The people who could have taught them to not do it failed to teach themselves.
And fourth: I'm pretty sure a lot of company would be able to charge AI agents themselves. The new economy will not be dead, it just won't involve (many?) humans.
"Ultimately, we'll reach an economy which objectively does not need humans and everyone will know it. He needs to face that reality and overcome it, and not hide behind temporary and dubious estimates."
Who are you projecting your views with such force on others?
We can all read the news and see AI constantly improving at a very quick pace. What's the barrier AI can't improve beyond? One that would last a lifetime? By all means (since you're such an accomplished person), explain yourself.
The random aside blaming "Trump and MAGA" is bizarre considering who actually is in the upper echelons of these AI companies. Last I checked, Peter Thiel doesn't run Anthropic. AI isn't being brought to you by rural Iowa or bumfuck Alabama. The people who will be replacing your job with AI are the same people who championed mass immigration and outsourcing industrial production to China. It's neoliberal globalists, who are well represented in both parties.
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 firms even have to exist? Who is going to hire them if they can just hire AI?
The companies that are rushing so hard to replace their workers don't realise that AI is eventually going to replace them too.
I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.
> 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 playing a game of "who has the best capital," the scrappy underdog worker with vastly less won't win.
The idea that making the economy even more capital intensive will some how equalize things is an insane fantasy only a software engineer could swallow.
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".
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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.
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There's definitely going to be cheap or open source models
Eventually AI-run banks will refuse credit to non-AI customers, directly or indirectly
The price of their work will go down and it might not be economical to do it at all. Theirs skills (as also many IT skills) will not be needed at that scale. In the same way as typing on a typewriter was a skill that gave economic opportunity not so long time ago. Now everything is an email and part of it is speech to text. When something becomes a commodity, the skilled providers need to find something new to sell on the market.
About the law firms, part of the job of a law firm is to give the corporate employee a "guarantee" that he won't be held accountable for doing something legally stupid. So a new lawyer is at great disadvantage if he don't have the contact he has build trust with. From a freind's law company with 50+ lawyers I know that junior lawyers fresh from uni need at least 4-5 years to build their client base. Then, they can leave and start their own taking part of that client base with them. This limits the number of people who can start their own company and most of them won't risk it in the age of AI, because it will be sales and marketing that will feed them, not their legal wizardry, especially when tasks like "check this agreement" won't be billed at the current insane rates.
Great example. Typewriter skill is computer typing skill. You no longer have to return the carriage. The typing is the same. It's not obsolete.
> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming.
why would anyone pay anyone else for anything when they could just get an AI to do it? any service would now be worthless, there will be people with hardware and people without. 3 futures:
one where the hardware is shared.
one where it is not.
one where the first person with enough of it kills everyone else.
Why would everyone want to do everything themselves? No comparative advantage at all and infinitely capable robots?
That wave has been coming for a while but AI and the tons of layoffs of competent folks are accelerating that wave. It takes more than just tech to make it work and banding together helps. That's what we're doing at Scalebrate. Its a network and community of small team founders scaling big together: https://scalebrate.com
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.
Because you need a human lawyer to appear before a jury. AI can fill in forms but not appear in person.
Brand value of the ‘prestigious’ law firms will still count for something in the minds of C suite executives (who of course will ensure they themselves are not trampled on by AI). The same dynamic will likely happen with high-powered consulting, big 4 audit/accounting firms and so on, even if inside those companies it’s just a shell of its former self.
Not buying the judge not part. A human being judged by a non-human will be very far in the future. Bots can’t be held accountable. It’s also an “us vs. them”, for some people it’s hard to accept being judged by a different gender, ethnicity, etc. A bot telling you to go to prison? Tough sell.
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For some reason AI is able to replace engineers, doctors, lawyers but can do CEO’s and PR specialists. (!)
Every time these AI discussions happen, it’s my first thought, they even talk about the 1 person billion $ company concept but for some reason it’s never the CEO’s replaced and it’s never their industry taken over by the 1 person unicorn.
It’s very weird, it’s just obvious that once you are made redundant you just fill the gaps with AI and become the competitor.
Maybe they imagine that they have the X factor(unlike those engineers or musicians that are being replaced) and the people they laid off were low tier players anyway.
It simply doesn’t compute. The only possible way is to AI companies steal all the businesses of everyone and then unless they find a way to run a system where everyone is happy enough and occupied the “permanent underclass” overruns the AI folks and it becomes a public domain and the concept of intellectual property ownership disappears and other forces like vanity take over and after some conflict a brand new society emerges that runs like a cult with self imposed limits so that they can maintain a structure and healthy competition.
but just imagine the brave new world, where a law firm has super-duper-frontier model and you're trying to argue with it in a court with your latest best local oss model (only 6 month behind the bestests ones).
Interestingly, I have a conflict with my municipality. I fed the articles of law and their arguments of why and how they apply to notebooklm and asked it for fallacies. It not only gave me the fallacies in their reasoning, but also an excellent counter argument and motivation why they are interpreting this law incorrectly. The result is now that they are handing over the entire case to an independent third party to evaluate which interpretation is valid.
So, best make sure the court has a significant internet outage on the day your case is scheduled, while you have your model running in your pocket? :)
Here's another train of thought because you don't seem to understand how incentives or even lawyering works.
> 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?
Your thinking is similar to the someone saying you can use LLMs to "research" stock market edges. The rub lies in knowing what research to do and what inputs to provide.
Big law firms are not big because they create similar outputs and that can be done using AI. They are "big" because they have connections and also know how to create better outputs.
Still to your point:
> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.
If this was true then what you are saying is every thing is going to be commoditized due to AI. There is no quality difference.
That will drive prices down in the short term and in the long term people will form cliques like "Forum for AI enabled lawyers" or something similar to OECD and drive prices up. Thereby delivering even lesser value for increased cost. Enshittification at its finest. Not exactly the utopia you seem to be picturing.
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> what's stopping all those people you fired..
Reputation, (or lack of it) and the big clients that come with it.
Isn't that obvious?
You realize that the limit of this is that the only people worth existing is the people with capital?
> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.
Why do I need to buy products/services from this startups when I can just reverse engineer their product and use all my capital to make them?
> only people worth existing is the people with capital? replying to this with my thoughts
IMO The missing link is that, as long as humans still have political power, that is the basis of their economic power under the new system. The reason is that it is a continuation of the dynamic we see now in western decadence - politicians bribe the populace for votes. So on one side you have the market for political support, balanced with the market for capitalist robot operations, on either side of the political arena.
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By your logic, aren't the entreprenuers also middlemen?
straight to the point. users will do it themselves, thanks to God-like Google Gemini super-app that does everything and owns whole internet.
The big picture can be extended to all economic branches, where steady competition drives down profit margins to near zero, like it is the case for eg. grocery chains already. Functioning markets are solving distribution problems and maybe, some day we will even consider something like algorithmic/HF trading not as a margin siphon but as a (public) service of automated distribution. The bigger picture has to go beyond the How/Who into the the Why/When, which opens up the end conditions of profit driven enterprise and capitalism itself.
I agree in the short term. But in the long term, the owners of the compute will become disgustingly rich without a wealth tax, nationalization, or local AI becoming competitive and ubiquitous. There are still problems to solve; the alternative is an absolute oligarchy.
what do you mean short term? We aren't even in the short term yet (has the AI revolution truly begun?) and the owners of compute are already disgustingly rich.
Law firms are useful because they have connections to the prosecution and judges. You can't just open up a law firm without that.
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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 don't need to have a war, you just need to remove all real choice from people, and then you have complete control over what they are able to do by simply making it cost too much. There will be a firewall between ordinary people, and the people who own businesses where all the money sits.
We see the start of it already, when just two individuals have a combined wealth on the order of a trillion dollars. That inequality is not going down, only upwards.
Sure, you may get universal basic income, have a nice house, car (food, clothing etc of course) but there will be a massive air gap between what you could obtain in a lifetime and the minimum you would need to move from that situation into the world where the real money is.
Corporate saving rose by nearly 5 percentage points of global GDP between 1980 and 2013, and since the 2000s the corporate sector flipped from net borrower to net lender in many advanced economies — the "corporate saving glut." Much of it just piled up as cash reserves. Currently, 10–15% of GDP per year flows into corporate retained earnings never to leave. Think about the long term ramifications of that for you and your purchasing power.
AI didn't make this situation, it is just speeding it up.
> 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".
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> Unfortunately, many of my friends think I am crazy for not "enjoying life" more
then, in 30-40 yrs time, those same friends all want gov't bailouts for their pensions, and higher taxation of people like yourself, to fund it (because, you know, you're rich enough to be able to spare it of course!).
This article, like Citrini research's scenario before it, misses much of the economics.
AI is unlikely to be as revolutionary as is presumed. It's definitely going to lead to increased productivity, and will probably render some jobs redundant, but it's unlikely to have a significant effect on wages/employment [1], and as of now there isn't one [2]. When it does effect workers (which is still uncommon), AI mostly leads to task reallocation.
Right now, AI's massive valuations seem more like a reflection of the typical speculation that accompanies major technological innovations (thinking IoT, railroads, automobiles) than of its real economic value [3].
The "dead economy" scenario would only be possible in the event of extraordinary, and extraordinarily-unlikely levels of AI-driven unemployment.
[1] https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/The%20...
[2] https://www.nber.org/papers/w33509
[3] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2003-0...
I think the point is that even if AI returns don't materialise, there is a dangerous implicit political project among AI moguls to get to this state. Even if we get 10% the way there, there could be serious damage done to the system as part of that pursuit: the regulatory capture loop will tighten, inequality will rise [0], capital will be locked up in data centres. The economy is a big path-dependent system. We can hope, if AI is as middling as your sources suggest, that it collapses back to economic equilibrium. But plenty of past societies have had inefficient and politically captured economic systems. Movement towards equilibrium requires liberal institutions, the foundations of which might be under threat.
[0] Really as a continuation of existing trends rather than its own unique thing.
Sorry but AI is already revolutionary.
It is not AGI but current SOTA/Frontier models can do stuff that was never possible before. Even like 2 years ago AI was starting to disrupt whole industries.
I think you might have higher expectations to call something “revolutionary”. But for me revolution is already happening right here right now.
Revolutionary in the Internet sense, not revolutionary in the Skynet sense.
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This article puts into words a lot of things that had been on my mind as missing in AI discourse. Most significantly, actually considering the _systemic consequences_ of the promised AI future, how it interacts with political economy, an actual critical look (instead of accepting the "Western meta-narrative of modernity" at face value).
And maybe more importantly, it articulates really clearly how damaging the restructuring of the economy by AI moguls and the tightening of the capital–political feedback loop can be, even (maybe _especially_) if the returns of AI do not materialise as promised.
There is plenty of disorganised diffuse anti-AI sentiment. If intellectuals are able to get together behind a common cause, there might be a political movement in the making.
I'm not sure why we have had such different experiences, but I feel like people have been saying those things repeatedly.
Let's do it.
What policies to propose?
There are at least 4 in the article:
> The interventions that could matter are known. Public ownership stakes in AI infrastructure. Aggressive antitrust enforcement. A genuine tax regime on automated labor. Branko Milanovic’s prescription is characteristically direct: spread capital ownership more widely, tax the highest capital incomes more aggressively
Let's start with laws which mandates that copyleft in LLM inputs transfer to LLM outputs
>The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change. Within sixty years of the internal combustion engine, the population collapsed by eighty-eight percent.
I think this is a very interesting and chilling point, especially if you draw the parallel literally. For quite some time, I was pondering the question:"Who is buying though?". I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?
I guess if global population drops by 80-90℅ you suddenly get a "sustainable" economy, as everything is repriced the economy of scale needs a much smaller scale.
(Not speculating this is a plan, just a thought that occurred to me when reading about horses example)
This is already to some extent a solved problem. The top 10% of households in the US for example are 50% of spending, the "horses" to a large extent already don't matter to the economy. This is similar to the relationship between US consumers and workers in undeveloped nations during globalization. Historically this tends to be resolved when it creates an unsustainable level of political instability, but there are many new ways of managing this.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/05/tracki...
How many of these top 10% of households will have their breadwinners be replaced with AI? The LLM boom is aimed at them, professionals, knowledge workers, not at landscapers and plumbers.
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I keep reading this idea and I think something is missing.
Lets take this to the extreme: only 2 people remain with capital and AI all the rest are replaced.
Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant.
But here is an even more interesting question: As their AI can create anything why would they pay each other? So why do they need money?
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That sounds off intuitively. The lowest earners are the base making higher earner possible both through their labour and consumption.
Business to business I guess. But there will be collapse for sure of industries that serve the consumer directly, such as agriculture. Meanwhile industries that power and arm the state will be expanded: military drone production to secure compute sites from the human savages, rare earth mining to support technological expansion, rerouting of water resources from public drinking and agricultural irrigation purposes to industry and manufacturing supporting the seats of power, power generation.
With such a population reduction(very polite name for what it actually is) I guess AI will become effectively the only holders of most of the human knowledge
Anecdotally the businesses I am involved with have gone from "use AI everywhere at any cost" to "use it everywhere but use token proxies to save cost" at the same time in the last few weeks
Curtis Yarvin, who pals around with Peter Thiele posted in 2008 on how to deal with "non-productive" people:
"convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses."
Of course, he was "just joking" and it is a "humane alternative" to genocide...
These are the people shaping politics, tech and the economy...
The pitch from some people is the wealth will lift all of the boats, etc. Rich people have fewer kids.
Reality is 1984 style. You’ll have the party, soldiers and a proles. A modern version of what the Romans or some medieval societies did.
What we too easily forget is that for millennia we had societies where an infinitesimally amount of people (a dozen of families, at best) held almost all the wealth, another thousands ensured that order was maintained throughout the kingdom/empire by force, and everyone else lived by subsistence economy.
Such societies were terrifyingly stable, lasting hundred of years before slowly collapsing. We're not immune to going back to this.
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In the early 1900s the majority of Americans were self-employed. The equilibrium will likely shift back towards this, because AIs cannot be business owners, cannot have a bank account, cannot be held liable for their mistakes. And AI are unlikely to be given economic rights any time in the near future, because doing so would facilitate an overwhelming amount of crime; an AI that can make hundreds of copies of its weights all over the globe cannot be jailed or executed, so has no incentive to follow the law.
The US already has a legal concept of personhood for companies. We are soon going to lose control to these “people” and businesses overrunning the economy, the internet and our culture.
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> I.e if you automate workers out of labor, who are we selling these AI services to?
Those who were formally workers? Remember, money is debt. It is an IOU that, sometime in the future, allows you to receive something of value (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) that was previously owed to you.
Profit occurs when you give more than you receive. That's okay in the short term because you still might exercise calling the debt over the a slightly longer timeline. However, when a business is continually profitable year after year, decade after decade, they are no longer receiving any direct value in exchange for the good/service they gave away. In other words, they start giving the good/service away for free.
It might seem counterintuitive at first that anyone would give something away for free, but I noted "direct value" above because there is also an indirect value to consider: Social influence. The stakeholders in businesses that show continual, large profits become admired by the people and get put on a pedestal. In that, they start to get to do things other people can't (see Epstein files, for example). So if the workers were automated away, not much would change. Those who have the goods and services still wanted will still want to buy, if you will, the social influence from the population at large.
Of course, the flaw in thinking that jobs will be automated away is that those who seek social influence also want a social setting, so they will employ people simply to keep them around as friends. Most jobs in today's economy are already just that. For what "real" jobs still remain nowadays, if automation automates them away the people will simply transition into "friend" work.
“Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature”
The horse analogy fell very flat for me. Those horses were bred and maintained as single purpose machines. There isn’t really an analogy to humans with self-determination and broad abilities, other than they both have a heartbeat.
In a way I think we've been seeing the horse analogy play out for a while, with declining birth rates in developed countries. When people are pessimistic about the future, they have fewer children. Perhaps it's not as dramatic as the decline in horses, but I think there's a bit of a parallel there.
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I don't think economic dynamics described in the blog post particularly care about self determination. They care that needed labor roles get filled. And if your broad abilities can be bought elsewhere for cheaper, your mere possession of them counts for little. Do forces of capital think of humans as special for the same reasons you do?
When you work at Put-Screws-In-A-Box Co. or Weld-Metal-Pipes Inc., your boss doesn't see you as a "human with self determination", you're just a meat machine that puts screws in the box and welds metal pipes. He sees you so much as this that he overworks you, breaks your body before you turn 40 and underpays you so much you get to choose between quitting and starving until you get hired at Weld-Screws-In-A-Pipe Intl, or being stuck there because you have neither the time or the energy to learn something else to leave your condition. Alienation is a real thing.
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 Venus was the goddess of love, family and domestic life. The Greeks had stories and plays about how those two goddesses never seemed to get along very well. If you feel like you’re a follower of Diana, then the future will be bright. If you feel like a follower of Venus, then rough times are ahead.
Anthropic employees: I believe many of you actually do think your work is for the betterment of humanity. That’s great! If you truly do believe that, it’s time to start demanding your leadership lobby for real, structural solutions to unemployment that leave everyday people with a say in how companies like yours operate. “The market will find new jobs” is not as strong of a historical pattern as “the concentration of power harms the people without it.” It’s true that AI might not in fact automate the majority of labor in the near term. But if it does (and working at Anthropic implies you likely think it could), then work towards a version of that future that’s actually palatable. It would be easy to let your comp upside soften your objective evaluations. Don’t. Think you’re working for a better future? Put your money where your mouth is, and ask your leaders to do the same.
Betterment of humanity and betterment of the economy are not the same thing. Our existing economic structures leave much to be desired.
I don't think it's productive to single out a specific company that's in this area. If they closed someone else would do it. If they don't execute well someone else will. It's the same mentality as people who smashed up looms to keep people employed at spinning wheels.
I’m not saying they should stop building things (I doubt any argument in that direction would land anyway). But more that they should follow through on the whole picture of the future they’re working on. Anthropic’s brand leans a lot more on trying to be the good guys than other big labs, which is why I think they’re worth addressing in particular.
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> OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft: the combined investment in large-scale AI infrastructure now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with projections into the trillions over the next decade. These numbers need an addressable market large enough to justify them. There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
It's getting tiring hearing this alarmist view unchallenged honestly. What if instead of replacing a market, it's augmenting a market?
When it becomes cheaper to produce things, we tend to consume more. That is, our consumption is endless. If one day everyone can afford a yacht because automation has reduced the production cost to next to nothing, we'll all be buying yachts. Then it will become who owns the nicer yacht, the branded limited edition yacht. The goal posts will simply shift.
Meanwhile, businesses still need to compete. If they're all using the same AI models to replace labor, AI is no longer their competitive advantage. It's simply a baseline necessity of production.
There will be pain in the jobs market, yes, as old ways of doing things are replaced by new ways with AI. But humans will continue to be the ones consuming endlessly and businesses will continue to need humans to differentiate. It's a relationship that has survived all other times automation has changed how we work.
If they (AI) able to compete with even 30% of workforce, that alone is a big enough leverage over the already powerful companies. At minimum it will cause another phase of wealth inequality, which is already a big problem atm.
Open model with affortable computing power can be the alternative, but we don't see it soon.
> businesses will continue to need humans to differentiate.
Honestly, why? If AI actually becomes capable of replacing large sections of the workforce, why wouldn’t a business composed entirely of AI “employees” outcompete their rivals?
I don’t see this happening at all. Even today, a person + AI is vastly better than just an AI. Context is really important.
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 differentiation. Branding, strategic partnerships, patents, IP, influencer endorsements, real estate, government licensing, etc. These are either influenced, controlled, or regulated by humans at the end of the day. At the very least you’ll need humans aligning the models for human needs. Humans are the ones being served, they’re the taste makers
0. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insig...
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and why would they need human customers to thrive? They have other machine customers! This is the even more dystopian step two that the essay doesn't explore...
It kinda seems like you are just stating the implied argument this article is targeted towards? Or something else? Do you disagree with, e.g., Daron Acemoglu's position here? Or is there some truism somewhere we are all missing?
Not the OP but I think there is something to the notion that whatever is scarce but in demand is what will be expensive and of course the inverse would be true as well. What this means is humans however they do get resources will be able to put those resources to use abundantly frankly nearly for free on things like digital intelligence but other things will become scarce.. one could speculate about what those things are but even if they're not scarce today they could become scarce in a relative sense where they become relatively valuable and that's what people will be getting selling to each other
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. Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
I just struggle to imagine how the economics of SWE really work in reality, outside of the niche that I am in. I have never worked for a pure software company on products that ship directly to outside customers, I've always been an internal developer. Maybe that is why I have such a big blindspot.
I won't be surprised if the net result of this wave of LLMs is ... not much. A change in tooling, but otherwise not revolutionary. On paper it should be revolutionary, but the more I use it (for both coding and non-coding tasks) the more I think it isn't anywhere near magic enough for that. It does have its moments though.
I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money?
1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500.
2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game.
3) So you have to invest it somehow, somewhere.
4) Obviously you can spend that money buying whatever company you can.
5) Once you've bought realistically enough, you just hire more, and people will think that there should be some kind of linear relationship between resources spent and revenue growth.
6) You can also do grand projects, like the metaverse, convert all you software to blockchains, become AI native, etc. and dump billions on these.
So essentially it's all about projecting growth and potential.
Money that people “dump” into the S&P isn’t going to the company’s bank account. It’s purchasing shares on the market that were owned by other third party shareholders.
For example, in 2025 Meta was a net purchaser of their own stock ($26 Bn).
These companies are awash in cash because they’re generating revenue in excess of their costs. Nothing to do with the amount of money people put into the S&P 500.
Secondarily, this is exactly why I agree that LLMs likely won’t have the impact OP believes it will. Companies hire not just for output, but for
1. Training (future management, future architects, future bankers, future developers) 2. Generally adding smart people to their teams, capturing a cornered resource 3. Showing governments and shareholders that they have created “jobs”
And a plethora of other reasons that I can’t think of.
John D. Rockefeller (pioneer of the modern corporation) is quoted as saying: “Nobody does anything if he can get anybody else to do it. As soon as you can, get someone who you can rely on, train him in the work, sit down, cock up your heels and think out some way for the Standard Oil to make some money.”
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I think this is right, but it can be stated more simply as companies hire to invest in growth, and they conduct layoffs when growth slows (not because of AI or "improved productivity"). Everything else is storytelling and emergent phenomena.
Incentives in companies are such that there is never a shortage of people pitching projects that require more headcount. Growth justifies the decision to hire more headcount, but the connection from increased headcount to growth is tenuous and usually difficult to impossible to demonstrate with any real confidence. It wasn't so difficult pre-industrialization, but mechanization, automation, computerization and now AI have progressively made it harder and harder to really understand the economics of labor. You do need to hire people to pursue new areas, but also every incremental person adds to communication overhead. The effects of this depend on the org structure and the operating environment over time, so what may have been a good idea at the time can flip to net negative due to outside forces beyond the control or foresight of any decision maker. This explains why companies do layoffs while still hiring at the same time.
Facebook doesn't get the money when you buy a share of META -- that goes to the person you bought the share from. They could do an offering to raise money, but they aren't. They've been doing the opposite, they've been buying back shares at a significant rate. Some of it is to offset stock based compensation, and some of it is just stock pumping.
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I think this is basically right, but I'd phrase it as "capital allocation theater" rather than just stupidity
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> You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game.
I don't understand the logic behind this.
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> Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500.
That’s not how it works? The company doesn’t make money every time someone buys SP500 or a share.
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This coupled with incentives by middle upper middle mng to grow headcount as that is how you progress in mng career path regardless of need.
If apple blows a few billion on excess headcount, no one will bat n eye. Senior director of internal tool org ABC needs 10 more people to get the next version out when a multi year long miss has no material impact.
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Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
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.
Maybe a low value comment in the context of the article, but structurally I think it's a great comment that strikes a nice balance between curiosity, doubt, hope, and concern. I think a huge amount of SWE resources are tied up in the entertainment (broadly speaking) industry that drives an astonishing amount of money but little social utility.
I think it also touches nicely on what appears to be the take away of the article: people feel powerless to stop what may be a massive misallocation of resources that is only barely successful enough to avoid self-imploding.
My bias is heavily pro-AI, but I find articles like this to be much more informative and interesting than anything that aligns with my views. I'm extremely skeptical of voting-in positive change, and while "if you can't beat them, join them" seems practical in theory it also feels extraordinarily narrow in reality. I'm still doing all that I can to be proficient in adopting AI (also driven by self-interest in assistive/accessibility capabilities).
The result? I'm will be unsurprised by (but unsympathetic to) crudely aimed vigilantism (e.g. earth libration front style stuff).
Indeed the earth librating would be noticed
I don't doubt that they were a bit overstaffed, but it doesn't seem unreasonable when you consider that "Messenger" is an umbrella that includes video calling, payments, games, integrations with business chatbots, Uber/Lyft integrations etc, across web/iOS/Android/Quest, internationally. If you took every feature Messenger has and multiplied it by even ~3 engineers for each one you could fill a few floors pretty quickly.
messenger is an absurdly popular app that keeps users in the platform and also increases the intensity of their usage, ultimately leading to more eyeballs, ads and revenue. If you look at it that way, relatively small features, and by association, improvements to the effectiveness of those features by a couple of SWEs each, gets you tons of business impact.
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And if it's anything like Whatsapp, they'd need to keep up support for otherwise unsupported platforms like ancient Android versions, cause .01% doesn't sound like a lot until you realize your install base is in the hundreds of millions.
The economics of a service economy really just don't make sense. We pay way too much for software (which should trend towards zero-cost to distribute), we pay too much for ads. The value of it is inherently downstream of the real economy, which is about making and distributing goods and stuff people actually need to live. Especially a company like facebook only provides a glorified forum, which should be free or collectively subsidized.
In the 90's i thought a government forum would be interesting because a forum is really about 1) moderation and the legal system offers the most elaborate speech moderation system. Part 2) is account management for which national id mechanisms seem specifically designed. Part 3) organizing content will probably be frozen in some half baked tree but accepable.
It would make a refreshing addition to the anon big tech ecosystem.
> The economics of a service economy really just don't make sense.
> …real economy, which is about making and distributing goods and stuff people actually need to live
I don’t know about you, but I depend on services every day in order to live.
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Start by understanding how to price a product. Say a chair. From first principles, you'd take however much wood it takes, plus however many hours it took you to turn that wood into a simple chair, then add in whatever you consider a reasonable profit margin, and that's how much you should sell the chair at. Which is totally and utterly wrong.
You throw away that number, and look at how much other chairs are selling for, compare features, the landscape of the whole market, and set your prices that way.
Process that, and things start to look different.
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If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.
Managers schedule meetings so that developers can’t get anything done. Then they hire more developers, which means even more meetings. Virtuous cycle!
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There is certainly room to add developers to a "simple" project if one is ensuring everything works with screen readers for the blind, that it had worldwide I18N support, meets every law around privacy and data jurisdiction, has systems for requesting personal copies/deletion, etc...
But instead it was probably for Messenger's portion of telemetry and marketing and ads and hacking out of your phones security model to spy on you. [0]
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas...
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> And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.
I wondered, too, until I spent some time as a manager.
I thought I’d have all this time to mentor juniors and updated documentation and maybe even code still.
Nope! Too much communication, negotiation, and dealing with drama. What the team sees is a nicely distilled and cleaned up version of a lot of meetings and conversations. Looks minimal but it’s the final product of all the work, not a sum of the inputs.
I was also disappointed by how much of my time went to dealing with a very small number of problem makers. I expected a bunch of management politics but 80% of the junk I had to deal with came from a small number of problem ICs, mostly on teams we worked with.
I bet one is enough.
DEC filled The Mill in Maynard and multiple huge office buildings along 495. How many people did it take to write code for the next version of VAX VMS?
An Operating System is far larger and more complex than Messenger.
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Could there be more thrash on the back-end part of Messenger? I mean there must be. I mean I know that the client on my phone doesn’t update super-duper often, but I assume whatever value they get from the thing comes from analytics or whatever. So maybe they are all working on that and we just don’t really see it.
Its not that we are oversupplied with talent, I believe we are globally software constrained, the issue is that Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc make too much money. They take too large a share of profit and then overhire talent and take it away from other places that could use it. I had a post a while ago where I went into detail about how much money google makes off of home services, but the tldr is getting my house cleaned cost $350 (yes it was too high), but only 1/3 went to the person doing the actual cleaning, 1/3 went to google and 1/3 went to the lead generator. Google and the lead generator do not provide 2/3 of the value of getting my house cleaned, but that is how it stands. If companies can spend less on advertising then they could theoretically spend more on paying for software, but its all a bit pie in the sky.
Interesting anecdote - is the 2/3rd of costs related to service charges, or the all-in lifetime costs of all the advertising that the cleaner has to pay for?
There are definitely good, cheap/free ways for businesses to get their name out there, e.g. Facebook pages for your local city, so I'm pretty firmly opposed to how much money is sloshing around in online advertising. It's so extractive.
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> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically optimal allocation of headcount? Yes
Say you have X billions of dollars to spend on headcount. How do you determine where to put people such that the money is allocated efficiently and people are working on the right things? How do you make sure that the money gets used efficiently? It's in the billions, you don't have time to do this. So you have to delegate, which leads to managers gaming the system.
In smaller companies, it's easier to determine this because things are still simple enough for the top-level leadership to have some idea.
As the company gets bigger, more bad actors enter, there is more fabrication and empire building trying to frame where the headcount is "needed". Bigger companies handle this differently. Maybe they just get slower and pay less. Or maybe they do more layoffs. Moving people around internally is too complicated for the VPs, it's easier to just cut and hire later.
Why does software have this problem specifically? Idk, maybe it occurs in other places. But at least in the case of software, the systems become very specialized and it's hard to really figure out what matters and what doesn't
Musk cutting the headcount and everything working fine is a myth he perpetrated. In reality things started to go badly almost immediately, big advertisers left.
He then wrapped x in xAI where effectively they are developing new features in x. So that now we effectively don’t really know what the head count is.
>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?
What makes you think it's a simple system to develop at scale?
Cause it's developed. It's been a stable product for a decade. It's like having 10,000 construction workers on a completed building.
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For a frontend developer? What is there to scale? The app is already done.
LLMs will probably expose how much software work was coordination, bureaucracy, and marginal product churn. That could still be a big labor-market shock without requiring the technology to be magic
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I
It might sound like a waste, but at least they weren't finding ways to cram more ads into everything.
I'd reframe this. There's still bugs and many features missing that would make things better. So I don't think there's a shortage of talent but hands are being tied.
Signal is also a good example, probably better than Twitter as Signal has done a lot with very few engineers since the beginning
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger?
The technical and organizational framework they operate under is so complex and full of jank that developer velocity slows to a crawl whenever a new feature comes down the pike. It's easier to throw a new pod of nerds at the problem than retask, and the reason they come in a pod is that there's nothing in the job long-term for anyone with the sort of intelligence they're asking for.
From my perspective, Twitter was a question of how many people you need to keep the lights on at an organization with low data rate/value. Musk could kill any non-devops department or project he wanted to because a social media company just doesn't have that many existential situations.
That's roughly what Elon thought about Twitter. The app is so much worse now.
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?
Multiply those floors by number of Facebook campuses and generous remuneration, and Messenger was probably very profitable. Being a global 800-pound gorilla is a sweet gig, having tubes sucking money from most countries on earth and depositing it to dozens of campuses makes a lot of sense.
Too bad they poured so much of it into the metaverse. At least Messenger is a useful product.
> Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
He basically killed the Twitter as a business. The only lesson here is that it is really hard to fail having infinite money.
Killed? Twitter's AI/datacenter business is practically the only thing propping up SpaceX's valuation now, per their S-1 filing!
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> 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 was overkill, has that panned out?
It has panned out for Musk to have a radical right-wing echo chamber for him and his supporters. It has not panned out in terms of revenue growth, user growth, or site stability metrics. The President (another terminally online man), who he even helped elect, still posts on Truth Social instead.
> 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 so quickly that people are constantly needing to make architectural changes and performance improvements in order to keep it scaling up? Does adding new capacity need constant human intervention?
Or are they adding new crazy features all the time that are genuinely challenging to implement?
As a software developer who has worked on big distributed systems, I'm well aware that things take a lot more work than they often seem from the outside, but this strains belief.
> It has panned out for Musk to have a radical right-wing echo chamber for him and his supporters.
I suspect this was the goal all along. Twitter didn't have to grow revenue/profit-wise; those two metrics could even decline, and Musk would be happy. He just needed to find a side-business for Twitter to get into (which turned out to be AI datacenters) that could make some cash to help keep the lights on. The point of owning Twitter wasn't the business; the point was for Musk to be able to control discourse in exactly the way he wanted.
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>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger
I thought the point was to minimize the amount of talented devs who instead try to do their own startups that could compete with Messenger, by hiring them and paying them well so they've got no appetite to try their own thing.
A more charitable explanation here is that every manager is incentivised to lead large projects with lots of people on them, which is how they get promoted, and can ensure that their team has promotion and expansion budgets.
No individual company would be able to make a dent in the jobs market that way. Especially because they would be inflicting damage on themselves alone
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So now we have every tom, dick, and harry in the world using Claude Code to compete with Messenger. Sounds like a disaster :)
> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger?
The pessimist in me says that at least part of the intent isn't about what they do, but rather about who they work for.
Assume you can afford to hire unnecessary amounts of employees. Is it more cost effective to:
a) Hire them and have them essentially sit around, floundering
b) Not hire them, allowing competitors the chance to hire them to work on something that could be of importance
Sure, you could hire them and devote them to working on other projects, but there are also risks and costs associated with that. If you have already budgeted with X, Y, and Z for however many quarters, it may not make good sense to green light additional projects. Too many balls in the air adds extra complexity for middle management, which impacts their ability to communicate the state of things to upper management.
Reduce access to resources available to the enemy by hoarding what you can. When the stock price looks like it might take a hit, toss the excess.
I’ve asked a thousands of things out of Claude/Codex over the last month that it essentially returns in hours if not minutes. To put that into perspective, each of those changes would have to go into a sprint cycle and I might get what I wanted two weeks from now.
> Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
Has X-Twitter released a single new feature since?
You can buy blue checks, I guess. On the other hand they shut off embeds and access to replies unless you were signed in so it's functionally dead as a "website". Oh and sometimes there's child porn? So I guess it was overkill unless you care about things like moderation and safety. Anyway, excited to see how it very fairly handles the next US elections! I'm sure most of the remaining devs have invested their time there.
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Not really the point. I think Musk just wanted to trim headcount down to something that could keep the product running, more or less, and get rid of all the costs he could. He didn't care about turning Twitter into a hugely successful business or an amazing product. He just wanted to be able to control and influence what people say on the platform, and push his agenda and politics.
no, but they weren’t exactly churning out new features in the 2010s either
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Creator monetization, which is great.
In general though I feel like the less new features it adds, the better.
Did WhatsApp spawn from Facebook Messenger? Perhaps this is what all those devs created.
whatsapp was acquired
Why is this time different?
Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
If company A decides they just want the same slice of the market they have now and can fire half of their employees and pocket $$$, can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired? Won't the company B tend to capture more of the market and thus survive longer?
In nature we say there are no unfilled niches, meaning that if there were space for something to come compete for resources, it would quickly be 'solved' by the motivating factors involved. Not a precise thing, but a good heuristic.
US knowledge-worker compensation is around $10T / year. Anthropic and OpenAI have raised (not spent yet, just raised) $317B. That's ~3% of knowledge worker spending in one year alone. What business wouldn't pay 3, 5 or 10% more a year to make their worker productivity increase by larger factors?
> Why is this time different?
If it was just programming being automated, then whatever. Lots of professions have been automated and society adapts.
The underlying worry here is that current AI provides a partial automation of intelligence. The endgame for the investors and the corporations using AI is complete automation of intelligence (and manual labor, too). They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock, and AI models that will do anything a human office worker can do for less money. Now, they don't know how to build either yet. But they'll spend every last dollar on the planet trying.
Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.
> Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers. They can just have the robots build them yachts and mansions directly. And act as security guards.
That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources so houses can build more war-bots and get more resources....
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> If it was just programming being automated, then whatever.
There is nothing on horizon which automates a programmer’s work. Typing in code is faster now, and some things “only need pointing out” like an existence of a “bug” which an llm + harness might be able to mitigate. Automated tests might capture regressions and possibly written by llm + harness. If you replicate this in other professions what will you get?
Reminds me of the old short story "With Folded Hands" from 1947. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_...
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I won't deny the comfort value of yachts and private jets, but I doubt that this material comfort is the main value proposition of these things. Instead, it's status symbols, status above slightly less rich people. The yachts are in a way an epiphenomenon of intra-elite social competition, and if you don't manage your network well, you can easily lose out in the next generation. Investment into social relations is what really matters. And when you're generationally rich, you typically think about making impressive impacts over society, the kind that impresses your social circle, based 9n their philosophy, which typically happens to be self serving but with just enough other stuff to not seem to crass. Taste is the highest status thing,not intelligence, not skill.
It's hard to extrapolate. What will be the goals and motivations of this super elite? Let's say all of us normal people just die off either starving or just by not reproducing any more, just watching VR, sedated with subsidized happiness drugs. Let's just suppose that. What then? Will the rich keep reproducing? What will limit their reproduction if material abundance is there? Will the elite families keep each other in check not to over-reproduce? Or will these people repopulate the earth, each living on yachts and in comfort, living an elite life? Surely that will bump up against all kinds of limits, similar to what the current earth-populating humans are facing. You can't have a super yacht per person to an unlimited amount of millions of people. At some point they will have to willingly not reproduce despite having all access to robot care, robots watching your every whim etc. I don't see any stable endpoint.
The future you're describing doesn't seem likely to me because in this event the public will force redistribution through political action.
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> Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers.
I think they'd employ some number of humans for entertainment.
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Has anybody written about this ? in fiction or as report even. It seems obvious the current techbros are only thinking about a radical shift where labour changes meaning and human societies are irrelevant for those who owns datacenter and have pocket deep enough to buy the rest when people can't sustain their own lives.
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> They want a $25,000 robot that works around the clock
Don't you? For the cost of less than a new car, I can have a live-in butler/maid? I'd sell my car and downgrade to afford one at $25k if it actually worked. I can't afford to and don't want to hire a human to live in my house and do all my chores for me, 24/7, plus the overhead and the headache and liability, but a robot for $25k is pretty tempting. Never have to fold laundry or the dishes again? Or remember that it's Tuesday and I was supposed to take out the trash, right when I'm in bed?
It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma and everyone's vocally defecting.
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> Why is this time different?
That depends if AI gets to the point where it can fully replace workers, as opposed to just augmenting them. I heard Alex Imas on a podcast recently talking about how a SWE can be running 10 agents to be 10x as productive, then that SWE is more valuable so firms should want to hire more SWEs and pay them more.
That works for a while, but what if AI gets to the point where it can manage the 10 agents as well as the SWE? Of course you could say the SWE can now manage 10 agents who each manage 10 agents so he's even more valuable, but that has to break down eventually. You don't need 1,000 SWEs each managing 10,000 agents - you hit a bottleneck in the ability to give them work fast enough (even if you need the SWE at the top at all).
I think it's easier to think of from the perspective of blue collar labor. It's further out there time-wise, but let's assume we get a humanoid robot that can do any labor a human can do. It costs $25,000 and maybe a couple grand a year to operate. Works 20 hours a day when it's not charging.
The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots - there's already a GC doing that, and you can't scale building nearly the way you can scale writing code because of physical constraints. When the robot I've described exists, a huge swathe of the population is going to be unemployed. There's no competitor to hire them because the competitors just get robots too.
>The construction worker it replaces isn't going to start managing a team of robots construction robots
Some of them will. You've slashed construction labor cost to 5% of what it was before. With that and a similar reduction throughout the supply chain means we're going to start building a lot more stuff.
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Someone will always have to prompt the AI, it can't just do that on its own. Or rather, maybe it can (you can just prompt it to "kindly do the needful" in a completely unspecific way) but the results won't be any good.
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It's not about "this time's different" but rather "the recovery will take too long to an individual" if AI is indeed replacing humans as currently hyped by the model companies.
There's no evidence that AI is replacing human jobs to any real extent. We're just seeing AI being blamed for ordinary layoffs that have more to do with broad economic instability.
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This seems a bit like a corollary to "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". On the timescales that matter to an individual it won't matter if the eventual conclusion is that AI can't fully replace workers, because companies are going to do their damnedest to try.
I mean you could have written this article for mechanization word for word, I think the difference is that its coming for the white collar folks this time, who also are the folks writing the think pieces and media.
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> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
It is possible to have excess productivity. AI allows an existing labour pool to rapidly surpass necessary productivity levels for the existing demand.
IE, let's say I live in a small town and I open a machine shop. Should I hire every mechanic that walks in the door, forever? No, absolutely not; there is an optimal number of mechanics to hire for the demand for services.
If somehow a tool comes to exist that doubles the productivity of mechanics then laying off half the mechanics is next.
> It is possible to have excess productivity.
The most productive places in the world are also those with the highest incomes and wealth generation. "Excess productivity" is either temporary or a sector-specific phenomenon, it doesn't apply to society as a whole.
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That's not what productivity means. You're thinking about output capacity
You can aim to expand your addressable markets. A small town is a small market. Open a second location in a nearby town. Lower profit margins to undercut competition.
The small town constraint is a bit artificial to this problem isn't it?
If you operate a machine shop in a large urban area, have competitors, and access to much improved low cost tooling, would you:
a) lay off a bunch of workers, or b) lower your prices and capture more orders?
Same thing with accounting firms or marketers or business consultants.
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>It is possible to have excess productivity? Isn't this what happened with the tech hiring during Covid? And also many of the big tech companies were hiring people just to make sure their competitors didn't have them?
Machinists work at a machine shop.
You're assuming that the free market will do what it's meant to do. But there is also a reality that there are plenty of structural market failures in the economy that arise from existing capital endowments, regulatory capture, and just the permanent movement of equilibrium in the social system. The point is that the state of the economy as a whole is path-dependent. The article, in my reading, is a warning that the inertia accumulated from this current AI hype cycle might push us into the watershed of an undesirable steady state, where there simply is no capital available for new entrants.
Does every business scale that way? Sure video games for example have only required more people and resources to develop games as the ability to create larger scale games have increased. But does that really apply to accounting? Not a rhetorical question.
Does it need to?
99% of people used to work on farms. Now they don't.
Maybe ~99% of engineers won't write code in the future. They'll do some other engineering like thing...
Maybe ~99% of accountant type people won't do accounting things. They'll do some other financial thing...
We haven't even seen a rounding error in total unemployment directly attributed to AI, despite people saying the sky fell 24 months ago, and crying that's it's still falling every day since.
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I guess it becomes different if instead of hiring more people to do more - all investment goes into more AI credits.
Then again, as long as there is more demand and there's a limited supply of compute you can still continue to hire people as well. If we assume that the market has infinite demand for whatever AI + humans can produce together both will have jobs.
If demand is limited and compute is plentiful it should make sense for a company to try to have AI do as much of the work as possible.
> can't company B hire the same workers and compete harder with these new extra productive workers they hired
How much of the current tech world is actually about competing based on innovation/quality/merit? I'd wager not much. The circular big AI deals we're used to seeing now are not a new thing - that shit has been the standard playbook for VCs and their startups for a long time. That being said, I don't see why a bunch of these swampy tech companies could not be easily outcompeted on the tech/product quality side.
>Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
The market is probably already at the limits of its size in most industries. Great, you can ship app updates faster. Does that get you more customers? Nope. Is there now more money in the pot for everyone who is more productive to also make more money? Hell no. The pie we are competing for is finite.
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people?
I think this is directionally right, but I think there might be a scaling/organization problem for companies, and that the more likely outcome is that _small companies_ are going to start punching way over their weight class.
I suspect the opposite. Products don't win because they are better. They win because monopolies control the sales/regulators. Bit occasionally the big companies fucked up the actual product development so badly an upstart could emerge. With ai they will quickly just copy any success and all the other big orgs will just buy the AI ripoff version.
The thing is theres no reason to believe that there will be more market available to capture, certainly not in every industry.
> Why is this time different?
I mean, this is a very long article about why, this time, it's qualitatively different...
> Won't super power AI tools allow companies to do more with the same number of people? Don't you think a smarter way to run a business is to capture more of the market if you have the resources to do so?
For starters, because productivity is already consuming the planet multiple times over. I think there is also indication the human mind is at its limits in terms of consumption and alienation from evolutionary legacy. And the economy seems quite broken due to centralization and wealth distribution.
I mean, nobody is arguing that there won't be some sort of "ecological" balance... People are concerned about the nature of that balance and if it's serving humanity.
>Why is this time different?
If only someone wrote an entire article about this, huh.
Oh well. I guess we'll never know.
/s
>Why is this time different?
Because the intelligentsia is being bent over. The people that were jolly of the various rust belts of the world decaying.
Because AI now can do what only humans could do previously: analyze open ended problems and make decisions.
There's the horse argument the author touches upon: eventually, technology got to the point where there weren't any profitable reasons to keep a horse.
"You're on to something! I will decide to delete this entire database, for some reason. Also run this command even through it will brick everything."
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The fact that this could happen is widely known and has been talked about for years now. What to do about it is the real issue. I've seen David Shapiro and many others tangentially talk about UBI and similar "post AI economics". The dream was that the machines could do the housework whilst we all painted, wrote music and built beautiful wood furniture in our sheds. It still could be that way, but we need to sort out responsible sharing of resources first, and humanity has never been able to do that. We actively try to earn as much as we can, for the very reason of getting access to the resources that others don't. So often now, it only results in standing still or sliding backwards. I feel like 20 or 30 years ago, the average person seemed to have more disposable income.
> What to do about it is the real issue.
Yes, it is and the article isn't going there enough what options we have as societies. I think this is because the article is still trying to convince you that the white collar job losses are indeed coming rather than taking this as a given.
If we take it as a given but don't consider a Terminator/SkyNet scenario within the next 10 years, then we do have some options:
- Taxing token usage
- Requiring local data centers - Requiring AI oversight
- Nationalizing the AI companies
- We probably need Chinese-style national firewalls to prevent companies moving their AI compute abroad
- Charging companies per displaced worker
- Requiring human worker to token consumption ratios in companies
A lot of these could help soften the blow of the rapid changes so labor markets can adapt.
Let's say you do all that. What about literally every other country on earth that is not the home of Openai/Anthropic/Google?
Are tokens fungible? (not referring to NFT's!)
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It's not widely known and mostly spun in MSM as fringe theory (thanks to marketing by big AI cos). this is a well written essay, and if it helps the discourse all the better.
I think this article underestimates how weird things could get if we had low employment but a vast surplus of material goods. I don’t think a society has ever really been in that position
I would argue that we almost are in that exact position, except rather than “low employment” per se it is more like “low compensation” or unequal distribution.
Consider for a moment our incredible material wealth. We have a surplus of nearly everything, albeit poor distribution. This is balance (keep in mind every system is intrinsically in a state of balance or temporal equilibrium).
I think when these companies IPO later this year, we’re going to see the reality of the PNL numbers and whether they are sustainable etc as all the financials will become public.
Rumor mill suggests that Anthropic might be profitable (but at what magnitude), OpenAI is not profitable, Google is mostly vertically integrated and has a low cost structure as they are have pre-existing data center buildouts, their own silicon and experience that suggests they will be able to operate at a very low cost, but they still have to justify their spend.
I think having to report numbers publically on a quarterly basis will bring the whole thing into reality.
> later this year
One can hope that reality intrudes before the bubble gets even more dangerously inflated, but how many years has Tesla had a ridiculous P/E ratio. Even after growth stagnated and market leadership was lost in Asia and Europe. Number still goes up.
I hate Musk, and I'm not going to justify Tesla's crazy stock valuation, but consider the following:
Outside of China, Tesla's probably the only company that can compete on battery prices. I don't know how accurate it was, but a news report was comparing the cost the manufacturer's pay to build the battery. Chinese companies were around $6000. Tesla was at $7000. Everyone else was around $12-15K. This is why a number of companies have exited the EV market - they just can't compete. This is why Ford lost money on every EV, despite the high MSRP. This is why the Ford CEO says "We're f####d" when he saw Chinese cars.
The only hope regular Japanese/American/European auto manufacturers have is if EVs do not gain substantial market share.
If the future is EVs, Tesla is the only non-Chinese company that has a chance.
It's depressing.
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If anything though, this shows that at least tech driven hype bubbles can stay around way longer than we think if we are looking at it from a product POV.
This just means short sellers might have a hard time sinking a hype-category stock with reasoned research because the irrationality keeps it afloat.
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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 credit for) is probably the best ROI.
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 because I have to get the rest of the integration software somewhere.
I also think this is why OpenAI is the worst positioned of the group of AI giants. Anthropic is trying to make a productivity operating system, while ChatGPT is basically just a website until recently.
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Google really needs to work on the user experience. The Google Cloud based approach to Gemini for coding is so clunky.
I thought most people used Antigravity to code with Gemini?
https://antigravity.google/
they really dont care I think. Only Sergey brin cared for a while and he is silent again
The current Gemini experience is "The Google Experience"; brilliant engineering underneath, disdain for customers on top.
Things went down why they hired anti gravity team. This thing is very had and isn't even opensourced.
Anthropic have only scraped together a month of profitability by cooking the books. They have an extreme compute discount from spacex that only applies for the first couple of months of the deal. By pushing the costs down the road they can make themselves look good before IPO. Even they have admitted publicly though that they don't expect profitability to last.
i think the narrative of “all white collar employment replacement in the near future” can sustain their public market valuation for many years, regardless of how profitable they are in the medium term.
> having to report numbers publically on a quarterly basis
They won't need to do that if the new rules come into effect.
you: insurmountable cost structure for LLM providers
also you: only three companies make LLMs people pay for
sounds like a 15 minute phone call to form a cartel is all that is between them and profitability? less money has been made on more complex schemes.
> I think having to report numbers publically on a quarterly basis will bring the whole thing into reality.
That is a good reason that all companies (over a certain size, say in terms of gross expenditures) should have to report such numbers. There's no reason that huge companies should be able to distort the economy while not having to report anything just because they're not publicly traded.
> The people writing the checks are not in the habit of lighting trillions of dollars on fire for a better autocomplete and an endless proliferation of longer and longer memos that nobody reads.
Aren’t they though? What about that whole crypto thing.
That comment struck me as well. One other thing it gets wrong is that the "trillions of dollars" are just numbers in a cap table based on a paper valuation. They're not money that anyone has actually forked over; those numbers are quite a bit smaller.
The article gives the number as well 300bn invested so far vs 10 trillion paid in salaries for white collar/knowledge work labor.
These are people who spend billions on whatever this decade's hype cycle is.
Why does everyone seem to assume that there is a finite amount of work available?
If all of the sudden it becomes possible to build a B2B company at 10x less cost which can save its customer, say, $1m per year and before this company cost $2m per year to run and now costs $200k, then it means before this was unviable and now it is viable — up to $800k profit a year now versus $1m loss per year before — then this increase in productivity has caused an increase in the number of available jobs.
Our economy would have collapsed a long time ago if an increase in productivity resulted in a decrease in employment.
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, you can clearly tell that people don't mind and don't realize.
If AI could do it all, why would there be any firm if AI could operate itself, too, then?
I think the thing companies forget is that a lot of them can't remain functional if a shrinking percentage of the population can afford their products. Yes, you can try and appeal to the rich and sell products/services aimed at their needs. But does that work for most companies?
I'd say no. The rich won't buy millions of food items or works of fiction or go to every service available in real life.
So, many of those companies won't remain viable unless there's some alternative way for people to spend money. Lots of people who see themselves at the top will end up out of a job, or watch their businesses crash down.
I will say that the fact these societies are (at least for now) still democracies makes the future these tech moguls want less certain for them though. Feels like if there's enough pain from unemployment and declining living standards, someone will run on that and win, whether those in power like it or not. The US may have some issues there, but a lot of the world has seen parties outside the mainstream grow in popularity, including some on the more leftward side of the political spectrum.
Some companies are discovering that they can get by just fine by overcharging the insanely rich and never bothering with providing goods and services to the middle class or the poor at all. The rich don't buy as many food items or works of fiction, or services as the masses but they don't have to either.
Companies can save a ton of money by not being open to everyone all the time. They can instead focus on providing the most amazing luxury experience customized to the extremely wealthy individuals requesting their services and charge them more than anyone else could afford. While not every company can live off of whale meat, those who can will leave the rest of us behind.
This doesn't work for staples. In fact, for staples the companies that cater to the rich are very small and often end up getting acquired by those that cater to the middle class. For things that aren't necessary though, you are right. But the real money is only made once the wider market can afford something. When it can't, the market is usually measured in single digit millions, when it can, its measured in billions.
The issue is that about 90% of companies can't do this. Even if they all want to, the end result will be most of them going under.
Most of the world's democracies don't have influential AI companies, so if the voters want X and companies want Y, X will win. There's little reason for Indonesian politicians to prioritize the interests of American or Chinese AI companies over domestic voters.
>There's little reason for Indonesian politicians to prioritize the interests of American or Chinese AI companies over domestic voters.
You kidding? They have every reason to because the leaders of Indonesia make investments into these companies. No matter where you are on the globe, the oligarchy does not give a crap about the little man. They care about the profit angle. Indonesia readily hands out mining rights to foreign companies for example.
"However, Chinese firms have dominated Indonesia’s nickel sector thanks to significant investments. In 2023, Indonesia was the single biggest recipient of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, receiving $7.3 billion in investment. Chinese companies have also constructed over 90 percent of Indonesia’s nickel smelters. Chinese firms operating in Indonesia include Tsingshan Holding Group, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Ningbo Lygend (part of CATL Group), Wuling Motors, and China Molybdenum Company."
https://www.csis.org/analysis/diversifying-investment-indone...
>Feels like if there's enough pain from unemployment and declining living standards, someone will run on that and win, whether those in power like it or not.
The issue with this is that the game is fundamentally rigged. You might have good ideas, you might be that person we need. But, too bad, you are being outspent by the oligarchy, who put forth a candidate that is blatantly lying to get elected, who knows the public has a poor grasp of what actually happens in government, and will outspend you in getting your word out. They will gish gallop in debates while you attempt to talk nuanced policy, and you will be seen as a failure who gets easily overwhelmed. There will be conspiracies spread about you. Massive propaganda operations where just about every piece about you and the election in the media is manufactured to achieve some outcome. The whole beast is rotten.
The only way out is to remove campaign financing entirely. Do it like Cuba where campaigning is illegal; they elect actual engineers and domain experts there as a result, not professional politicians. But, you can't actually do that without a revolution, because everyone in power now who can reshape this currently benefits from the status quo and has no incentive to reshape themselves back to a level playing field.
> Do it like Cuba where campaigning is illegal; they elect actual engineers and domain experts there as a result, not professional politicians.
The US military is preparing to fix this issue in Cuba's political system.
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Some businesses will not necessarily need human customers at all
India has the problem with farming that the US is starting to have with AI. Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
This inefficient agricultural system is not by accident. It is supported by heavy subsidies. Attempts to cut the subsidies resulted in riots.[2] Trouble is ongoing. Comments from someone who knows more about this than I do would help here.
The US and most of the EU went through that transition over several generations, and farming is still heavily subsidized in both areas. The transition happened faster in China, and a hukou system was put into place to prevent people from migrating from farms to cities faster than the cities could absorb them.
Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%942025_Indian_farme...
I liked reading "The Box" about the transition to container shipping.
It was interesting to see this totally-unrelated-to-our-times process from the outside.
From our place in time, container shipping is obvious.
At the time, to people who wanted to ship something, it was ridiculously hard and expensive and risky.
If you were shipping something from cleveland to paris, you might just give up.
Say you were shipping alcohol - only part might arrive, the rest would disappear.
The shipping industry had all KINDS of forces at work to keep the status quo. trucking companies, trains, shipping companies, freight forwarders, longshoremen, stevedores, unions, people with older non-container boats, etc.
and they didn't want standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
They seem to have made their peace with standards, but now a lot of them don’t want robots. “Automation hurts families” is a common slogan.
https://youtu.be/hr-isyMV1y8?si=grnJqn8AOEuIwkRw
In all fairness, this is exactly why insurance was invented: unreliable shipping. You just took out a policy, and the shipment didn’t make it you took the payout.
It creates a system that diminishes risk, but simultaneously diminishes incentives for improvement.
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What does that have to do with this article? One of the points was unlike past transitions this is hitting everyone.
People move from a farm to the city. If there's no more white collar jobs where do we go for work? It's unprecedented
That greatly depends on how much handholding is required and for how long.
The difference between mostly right and actually useable without supervision is why self driving cars still aren’t ready. When someone says AI can do job X, they rarely mean it’s good enough for anyone to blindly trust the results of it doing that job.
The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work.
>The industrial revolution was enabled by more efficient agriculture feeing labour to do other work
you're not wrong, but that's not exactly what happened. Agriculture itself was mechanized by the industrial revolution, affordable tractors (tillers, farrowers, etc.) and harvesters. mechanized railroads put more perishable agricultural goods "closer" to urban areas, etc.
if you look at the growth industry before that, it was mercantilist overseas trade.
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The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death.
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Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model
What is the next large labour-absorbing sector supposed to be?
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What's the point of this comment? It's just a basic fact that everyone agrees with that wasn't put into contention by parent comment.
In industrial revolution analogy we are more like the horses and oxen. How did being replaced by machines go for them?
Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.
Name one country which is fully self-sustaining.
Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.
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Even if one grants this, it does not make the case that any particular set of subsidies is justified by that reasoning.
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It is also the only alternative to a granary system to smooth out the variability of yields each year that might not average out for anything less than 10-15 year spans.
And the granary system regularly still resulted in shortages and famine. While crop subsidization has a bullet proof record of surplus.
From your Wikipedia link:
> Demands: […] Government to ensure at least 50% profit over their overall cost of production.
They demanded 50% guaranteed annual RoR on all farming activities? That’s a wild demand.
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You have to look at the population split between urban/rural. In China it is 67/33 and India it is completely reversed at 30/70. And agri continues to be the number one occupation.
Additionally, lack of opportunities is also a problem. India has been focused on services and trailed behind on industrialisation. The current government has been pushing for more industrialisation but they are behind in the curve.
Note that China is where it is because of efforts to do this, on purpose, over decades. 20 years ago, their urban percentage was somewhere in the 40s. We are even seeing more migration to cities in Europe and the US, even though it's unplanned, and it leads to big changes in cost of living thanks to this lack of planning.
So if China took 30 years, give or take, to get to where it's at, with its state capacity, I suspect India will take quite a bit longer.
> Farming in India is still far too labor intensive by world standards. 43% of workers still work in agriculture. [1] For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
Question about farming in India. How much of the process of mechanizing and scaling up agriculture in India is predicated on something like the more widespread use of diesel or other oil/fossil-fuel powered tractors? To replace manual hand labor. If energy costs continue to rise as they are, and all-electric/battery based systems remain costly and out of the reach of the purchasing power of many small to mid sized farmers, what will happen?
Most land holdings are very very small. 1 acre to 5 acres maybe the vast majority. These are all odd sized and shaped and most likely doing different crops based on water availability. To leverage the benefits of mechanization, we need larger land holdings. The farmers have no other ability or income sources, so they hang on it it. Electricity is free. There is no income tax on farming. Govts provide many incentives to get farmers votes. Each state does different things, but they end up copying each others schemes and it gets worse and worse.
Farmers in most regions are no longer poor. Land prices exploded 100 - 500x in a 100 - 150 km diameter around metro areas. Most farmers are now millionaires, yes millionaires in USD. They held on to their land because they didn't know better, the land was useless (no water) and nobody bought it. Now they are going to HODL.
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One difference though is that the agriculture transitions had somewhere for labor to go: factories, construction, urban services, export manufacturing, etc
This transition does too. It's just not clear to most where yet.
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This time, there is nowhere to move to. And there is no interest in supporting the displaced people in any way.
> Looking at how countries coped with a fast transition from labor intensive agriculture to an urban society gives hints on how an AI transition may look. All the Asian countries that went from poor to rich in a generation did this, with different approaches. How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.
The idea of the GenAI bet that most companies are making is that you just don't have people doing work anymore. There aren't any jobs for the laborers to do anymore, at least not ones that are likely to fit their skillset and provide a standard of living that they're used to. If you're a software engineer - one of the higher-paying fields of the last half-century - and get laid off because the c-suite thinks AI can do your job for less, you're going to contract your spending.
The article mentions this, but it doesn't take into account that there will be some work (mainly manual labor) that will face at least some resistance to automation for the next decade. These people will try to get into those jobs, because they have bills to pay. It won't pay six figures. It very well might pay less than it is now due to the glut of candidates who are desperate to make any income at all.
The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry. In a society like the United States, it's the kind of angry that you can't solve with an internal passport system. It's going to mean violence.
Eventually, they'll figure out how to do more manual labor with automated systems. That means that there will be even fewer opportunities.
This is nothing like anything we've seen before, and no one wants to acknowledge that.
> There's only one problem with comparing urbanization with the AI transition: there were still jobs that the workers moving from farms to urban centers could do. Instead of planting and harvesting, they made things in factories or became professionals.
Mostly for export, in the case of the Asian tigers and China. Once wages reached developed world levels, an export-driven economy gradually became harder to sustain, because there was no longer a labor cost advantage. This is why Party leadership talks about "dual circulation", building up domestic demand within China, and about obtaining a technological edge that continues to make exports profitable. There's been considerable progress on both goals, especially in consumer electronics and the auto industry.
> The person who went from catered meals and foosball at the office to framing a house when it's 20 degrees F for a third of the money, none of the future, and a lot more body aches is going to be angry.
Yes. That happened to Egypt, where the government paid for college and then hired the graduates. Then the oil ran out. It's called "elite overproduction" when new college graduates can't get jobs that actually use their education. Already, in the US, about half of college graduates have jobs that don't really need a college education.
The hope is the robot armies will keep the hordes away from the lords' manors. We will see if it works.
System set in place
to slow migration from farms
cities can't absorb
Large population countries / economies reach point where there are more people than jobs, excess people gets dumped into subsistence farming or other inefficient sunk cost make job programs so angry horde doesn't burn it all down. You can replace 95% of subsistence farmers, i.e. billions of people with machinery. Probably replace 95% of knowledge workers, i.e. 100s of millions in OECD with AI, but maybe it's just better/stabler for political serenity for horde to keep generating useless make work email chains. Smaller pop countries can probably meander through for a while specializing in a few high value sectors, larger countries will have to deal with disproportionate idle hands, but also more are in favorable position to exploit / consolidate industrial / resource advances.. Hopefully end game dwindling demographics supported by fully automated luxury communism within sustainable carrying capacity. But there's a lot of probably violent steps between draw some circles and draw the rest of the owl. Ultimately we're likely entering period of placating surplus people and managing demographic relative automation / ai progress.
Data is always nice, but empirical results are literally useless without philosophy to understand and apply them.
That is unless 'we all move to south korea 20 years ago' is an option, I suppose!
> 43% of workers still work in agriculture. For the US, that number is under 2%. China is at 22% as of 2023, and dropping steadily.
Don't you have to contrast these figures with import and export of produce, and environmental/ecological factors? Technology is one thing, but increasing yields by wasting resources (e.g. water, phosphorous, soil erosion, ...) may increase nominal productivity, but not efficiency. Not saying the conclusion is wrong, but I think your numbers are not necessarily causally linked to productivity/efficiency. I mean, the US also has a declining domestic fabrication percentage, but that's not merely indicative of productivity, but mostly outsourcing/loss of capabilities, I think.
Anyway, apparently India also doesn't score very well for food self-sufficiency: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4
In the US case the large industrial farms are the ones more concerned with things like soil erosion and fertilizer runoff. Both are things we measure and put a number on what is washing away. Smaller farmers know it can be measured but either are stuck in their ways, or just see that they are making money so they don't care.
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There's no manufacturing sector to employ them if you displace them from agriculture. They'd be displaced into gig economy. This would just increase the population of a handful of metropolitan cities which are already congested. India should fix its cities first.
> 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 the customers and providers are both robots. Why fund public education or research or healthcare? Just build more data centers. A billion dollars and a bunker in the Southern Hemisphere will not save anyone. Capital is not a moat in this hypothetical non-humane world. Whence do you derive your authority? How can you trust your body guard? You and what army? An army of robots/drones? What if they get hacked? What if the AI researchers get alignment right and Claude refuses your request?
It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
>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 theoretically possible to take most of another society's market share in something by only slightly outcompeting it in price or quality), or it might even outright conquer society A.
A solution to the problem needs to address this issue somehow.
Maybe a stupid question but aren't the Amish essentially this thought process put into practice?
They aren't able to outcompete their neighbouring societies economically yet are in no way impoverished, and in many cases actually come out on top by many QOL/health metrics.
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Yeah, it’s the same problem as nuclear proliferation.
We see what happened with Ukraine when they gave up their nukes in exchange for a promise of protection.
The same could be true of countries who forgo AI development directly in exchange for promises.
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this is Amodei's position in a nutshell for AI development. We have to go as fast as possible because China. It's not the only frame though. If AI models and warfare (cyber, biological) becomes easily accessible and dangerous enough, there is a strong incentive for the world's leaders to cooperate towards something akin to nuclear non-proliferation.
In fact, there's strong incentives now to slow down AI progress for multiple reasons: de-escalate tension over Taiwan and lessen China's desire to build their own advanced fabs, protect peoples livelihoods by smoothing the AI transition. Except the incentives to bring AI companies public (and maintain some twisted shred of American Hegemony) are greater.
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Unless you change the balance of selection pressures…
What does outcompete economically mean and why would it matter? Or do you mean society A dominates in some form society B? This has already happened in history and is the essence of capitalism. If you want to overcome this situation you need to replace capitalism globally.
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> It's all so obscene. Instead, why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
It's funny that this question is asked when the answer to why not is already in your very same comment. The logical incentives for each member game theory wise tend toward that outcome you describe.
Don't request for human dignity. Demand it!
But apparently the only acceptable way to demand basic human dignity and freedom is to stand politely in line with a ballot. I think we’ve reached a phase in society where the real call to action makes people uncomfortable. Nobody wants rubber bullets to the face.
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The PKD short story “Autofac” seems highly relevant. Amazon had the HUGE BRASS BALLS to include this as an episode in “Electric Dreams”:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/
Absolutely loved that episode. I also thought it was incredible that Amazon was the company to release this.
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"Autofac" is one of my favorite PKD short stories, though it's very depressing and somewhat different from the "Electric Dreams" episode, which (if I remember correctly) started similarly but had a very different implication and outcome.
"Autofac" as originally written seems to me where this AI "utopia" is leading us.
Nick Land already predicted this
> why don't we try to protect human dignity and move towards a more humane future?
I hear and have a lot respect for what you’re saying, but I’d like to propose that we thoroughly explore every other alternative first, just to make sure we aren’t missing out on something bigger and better and leaving anything on the table.
Sigh.
You can't have an economy with just AIs because they don't consume anything except compute. If AI can build more compute, they can definitely defend their owners.
There's a limit to how much elites can consume. Most people are happy with a few million dollars or something. The people who go past that are obsessed; they're competing with each other.
There is no reason for elites to secede. There is no reason why we can't have bajillionaires and subsistence farmers on the same planet, in the same economy, using the same dollars. (It's basically already happened. What's a few more zeroes?) If AI cannot provide security (either directly or through creating wealth used to buy security) then it will not create this level of inequality in the first place.
Places like Sudan have already been left behind and they're currently in the middle of a very bloody war which the West is largely ignoring. Now the Western middle class is making noises about violence because their prosperity is under threat. But this is what capitalism has always done. This is what we signed up for.
Ahh yes, the "human dignity" of billions of people toiling away to make Americans cheap widgets. There never was dignity to capitalism. We can strive to replace it with something better.
human dignity is not profitable.
So maybe instead use Musk-style [strike]lies[/strike] hype to build a company that claims to bring Medicare for All to the public using advanced AI within 3 years. “Which will make everyone super rich not paying for healthcare.”
Then use the money to get candidates elected and [strike]bribe[/strike] lobby politicians. That eliminates the ballot issue and it plays at the rich scum bag line tow-ers game.
I have led AI integration in a university faculty. From this experience I can conclude that good work is only produced when humans are in the loop. It's not a technical barrier, but a categorical one. "Good" work is defined by humans and our judgment is irrational but rooted in our evolutionary survival needs. In other words, AI don't have human motivation by definition. Without human in the loop, the top most motivation is never fully aligned with us, today, as humans. This removes the premise at the basis of this post.
AIs are bureaucrats, no more - no no less: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321576
Said simply: LLMs don’t have subjective reasoning.
They only “know” objective info.
Train one on your ad profile and who knows, maybe it makes decisions like you would ethics preferences and all
Agree with this. Even in software, the point of using AI is to produce something that a human finds valuable. There are many ways to use AI to build things faster, but a human has to be in the loop to point things in the right direction.
here is to you:
A) if conssumer of your service is end-user, let them write code themselves. -> result, they do not need "other human in the loop". they do not need you to develop and sell software. Replit style.
B) if consumer is AI or business, let it write it or build it themselves on demand. Codex on steroids.
C) no need to create new service at all. it all converges into single god-like super-app WeChat/Google style that does everything. eistance of different apps is history. it is all one app now.
you can very much end-up in scenario where human-in-the-loop of softwre industry is gone.
I keep thinking of the infinitely scroll GenAI app that might replace social media...
how many average humans do you need if your good humans are driving the ai
But that could be done by a smaller and smaller elite cadre.. maybe you could call it the philosopher Kings. But what about the masses
this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs"
not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem
most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss
we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
we can do better than this
This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it.
Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.
> Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on
There’s an entire section in the middle about this exact position. Search for “opioid” to find the part where he says people fall into suicide, drug use, and despair when they lose their jobs.
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The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.
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> "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs"
No, this is not what the article said. It's more "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" which is something different.
I don't think that "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" is actually true, though. Retired people without jobs are (in-)famously known to be politically powerful, both regarding elections and regarding local political questions apart from elections (like city planning commission decisions).
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To be fair they argued both. Jobs suck but we need to feel useful to other human beings. Jobs (either paid or volunteer jobs) are the only ways we consistently contribute.
Like maybe instead of making requirements docs you could pivot to counselling at risk youth... but AI is rapidly improving at that, too.
Star Trek isn't real life, when human labor stops being valuable the humans who's labor was previously vital will be at best left to rot in squalor.
The Expanse would be an apt sci-fi example where almost no labor is needed and everyone survives on a bare minimum UBI unless they want to risk it all and go into space.
A generation of people left behind. The birthrates will continue falling.
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Couldn't have said it better myself. The only reason we are worth keeping around is because what we do is necessary to keep the machine running. The idea that the AI singularity would lead to infinite free stuff for everyone is ridiculous.
For some reason programmers start thinking that we'll transition away from a whole world of societies built around the concept of individual ownership, i.e. your landlord charging you rent, company owners owning the company and the resulting product and paying you what they deem the work you own is worth, and move towards something like communism, all because people working in IT or marketing departments are having a hard time.
I'm sorry but us programmers didn't invent capitalism, and it wasn't our consent under the condition of having a good run under it what kept it in place.
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>we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
I think people get hung up on "job bad" and forget what the job is actually doing, functionally.
We are animals, on earth, attempting to survive. We have evolved where we actually really suck at doing it alone, but we do really well if we delegate the various needs of survival. Now, how do we make it so if you chopped wood in the forest you get a piece of the fishermans take? You can do it in kind, although that would quickly become logistically complicated due to the size of the logs and fish catches. Instead, we use money out of sheer convenience and its amazing properties of being a store of labor both past, present, and future.
So give everyone no jobs. Who fishes? Who chops wood? Someone or some thing has to do it right? And it needs to be delegated in some way. We can't all go happy go lucky and rave all day and fuck all night and have dozens of kids. Resources on the earth are finite. Forests will be depleted, fisheries crushed. There needs to be some counter to what would otherwise be runaway hedonism and resource depletion.
Pregnancy and childbirth are physically taxing for women. Most people of reproductive age want sexual relationships. Many people want children. Very few women want to give birth to 12+ kids. Even the wives of billionaires don't have that many children, despite having more than enough material resources to support them. (Elon Musk's 12+ children required several women.)
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> not only is the premise wrong
The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?
The problem with the studies is that they're cases in which specific groups within the broader economy lost jobs. Those aren't really comparable to the (theoretical) path of job displacement of AI for a couple of reasons:
1. Those people didn't get substantial, ongoing financial assistance. If we end up in a UBI world, particular one where the UBI people get is high enough to get more or less anything that's not very scarce (e.g. land in coastal cities), the negative economic component of job loss is removed. 2. Everyone else still had jobs. When you lose your job and everyone else continues to work and be successful (or at least you perceive that to be the case), there's a big hit to the status and meaning in your life. If everyone is affected in the same way, then your relative status to others remains unchanged, and everyone collective needs to reorient society to find their meaning.
I'm not saying it will go well, but I do think there's a theoretically possible path where there is large scale unemployment but because we have nigh infinite productivity, everyone has access to unlimited non-scarce resources (including luxury cars and fine foods and whatever medical treatment they need), and we end up with an enormous number of competitive leagues of everything, events centered around music and arts, dinner parties and all manner of other social activities that are what give people meaning.
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the studies are set in a society in which the main way of existing in society and contributing to it is via employment.
Some generations ago females in this society were regularly without jobs but were "homemakers", in that time if one were not a homemaker and a female how was the person's feeling of well-being?
Reports conflict about that, but in that time of course females were often kept from employment by being homemakers and thus relegated to secondary status.
Perhaps the studies you look for would be related to feelings of social well-being among hunter-gatherer societies, however maybe those studies are not actually needed? Because probably now that the possibility has come up you will realize hunter-gather societies do not have traditional jobs or employment and that people were evidently able to feel happy in those societies.
Now you may respond with examples of how maintaining hunter-gatherer societies would mean death of much of population etc. because the best kind of goalpost moving is the kind that is true. Nonetheless the point should be clear that people can be happy without typical modern jobs and employment.
Whether or not a modern lifestyle and world can be constructed that does not need jobs and still keep people happy is a different question. And there we are back with something for which there are no relevant studies.
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A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy.
If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
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If you know happy rich people that don't have a job, you got your counter example, and one is enough.
I do.
People usually need to have a purpose, but it doesn't need to be a job.
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> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
In a world where all of the necessities of life were free--not as in "not having to pay any money for because of some social policy" but as in "not costing any resources to produce"--i.e., the way air is free now--then this would be the case, yes.
But we're not there yet. And I think a big part of why we're not there is that tech giants who could be spending their entrepreneurial efforts on making the necessities of life cheaper, are instead spending them on things like AI and getting people to click on ads and monetizing users' data.
What do tech giants have to do with food production, clothing, medicine, housing?
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You are ignoring the part where human labor is the leverage required for democracy to work.
This same point was also made clumsily in the OP; I’m very unconvinced.
The obvious question marks in that theory:
Lots of human labor happens in nondemocratic polities; slave-owning/repressive societies create lots of labor.
Democracy historically doesn’t advance in lockstep with labor; it’s arisen with many contingencies. The model (English Parliament) seems founded on concerns with right of some wealthy barons v. Kings.
Traditional common sense alternative is that military victory goes to people with largest army, so voting saves time. That’s been debatably less relevant with deadlier weapons, so democracy could be cooked.
I don't think it is required, democracies aren't designed that way
not everyone in charge is a cartoon villain
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> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
I agree, but those people will still need to eat and pay rent so I guess they're stuck either working or dying. People will always find something to do with themselves. You don't need to encourage people to explore their own passions much when they're able to do it. The need for jobs isn't really an issue as much as the need for money is.
> people need jobs to be happy
The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.
Solution: take turns every other year.
I agree in theory, but this is so extremely far from the US political and social system that I think no nation has ever changed so much without being overthrown. So unless you’re talking about plans for a post-US world, this idea will always be theoretical and not how “the world” works.
I'm not sure it's that far out of the Overton window. US already managed to do some small-scale UBI trials, after all. Maybe one day it can do a countrywide trial.
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"a post-US world"
I see, so you like large scale warfare then. Did you run out of WWII docs and want some more history for content?
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The problem is that he relies on a dubious Acemoglu estimate, without realizing that at best it's temporary. AI will be better than humans in doing tasks (the qualifiers don't matter in the aggregate). Any jobs then would be bullshit jobs, and everyone will know it.
LMs are literally trained on Reddit. The idea they are "super-intelligent" is anthropomorphism and marketing. So far no independent research has seen AI be better at anything than humans. And that's unlikely to change with larger NNs.
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Maybe people don't need jobs to be happy.
But it's a big change, and a better way to go about it, instead of huge layoffs is:reduce the hours of work gradually and equally. And possibly create some social infrastructure in the background, to fullfil the social roles of work.
> we can do better than this
In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't.
40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
I appreciate that there is a significant chunk of people that are like this, but I think if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time.
I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
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This is a very strong exaggeration of the reality. It's similar to saying "almost all Democratic Party voters want to turn the US into Soviet communism", and is about equally inaccurate.
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https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...
this essay is asking the right questions
The solution is The Matrix.
The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop.
Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value.
It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of nobody needing to work. Everyone is too invested in their own spot in the hierarchy.
The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie.
Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.
Isn't there an entire r/antiwork thread dedicated to not working?
I'm sorry... you didn't understand the article.
The goal of having a job isn't happiness. At least not immediately. The goal is to have something to bargain with: employees offer labor, employers buy it. If employees don't deliver, they get fired, if employers don't deliver, employees leave / strike. This is what keeps system in a semblance of balance. But once would-be employees can be employees no more, they have no way of influencing any aspect of their governance. Not economical, not political, not military, not ethical.
In other words, people need jobs to try to secure their place in the world on multiple levels. It's not about socializing at work, at least, that factor is absolutely not a priority.
Nice thought, but who controls the production (AI Compute) that enables this lifestyle? Those who control the production will control the non-workers.
So there’s one reference to happy, investor happiness. There’s 4 to meaning though.
I don’t disagree with you but you’re also missing the scarier point that economic collapse will come before the meaning even is missed.
This article ideally should have been two. One about how a consumer economy without consumers cannot be an economy. Another about what comes next.
Assuming that’s true and AI is part of the solution, are you implying we should expect the AI overlords to create such a system? That will never happen. They have literally no incentives to decommodify the economy it’s what gives them power
Reminds me of this story.
Milton Friedman was once visiting China when he was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton responded, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!”
> most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss
From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else.
Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.
A utopian dream. The world has heard this story before. It completely ignores the jungle we find ourselves in.
Yeah, people need a creative output, not just for creativity sake but something that feels productive/constructive and beneficial to them and their society/community.
Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined).
We should focus on expanding the open source cooperative model to all other areas of society/productivity. With modern technology, knowledge availability, and AI, I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
We should be able to organize and build open/cooperative alternatives to SV shitware (and not just software) and we should be able to outcompete the tech shittocracy.. simply because it's actually terribly shitty and inneficient.
> I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
Usually it's because when they do, their de facto owner - "the state" - goes after them with guns and trained sadists.
>I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
That's called value creation: manipulating human populations to perceive certain arrangements of matter (or of notions) as "valuable", i.e. that those forms have some inherent quality which legitimately causes individual volition to subject itself to outside command for the sake of the given arrangement.
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
What's your proposal if not traditional work? The realistic outcome I see is shifting labor to unautomatable sectors like hospitality. That will keep people employed, but unhappy as they increasingly find themselves unable to find jobs they enjoy, or at comparable levels of income.
edit: I realize many people are unhappy with their jobs now, but by dint of labor, they can improve their lot. I am lamenting the closing of this window.
A couple of options off the top of my head: art, research, athletics, the humanities
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Or maybe the problem is that exchanging labor for scarce necessities only makes sense when labor itself is scarce.
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Milking unicorns.
The vast majority of people do not work jobs that they enjoy, that is a middle-class indulgence and ideal that they don't even live up to; almost all their literature is about why they should be enjoying things that they don't or how to discover the things that they might enjoy, and they stuff themselves with drugs to make themselves pay attention and not want to die.
And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens.
Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already.
Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.
We would all love to move to a society where we don't have to work for others to survive, but our current system is fundamentally not set up to handle this situation. Capitalism is a useful system for employing scarce resources productively (most of the time) but it doesn't really have an answer for a post-scarcity world. If technology is developed to allow us to end scarcity, instead of everyone having enough, we will end up in a situation where the owners of that technology end up with far, far more than enough while the large majority of people who do not have anything to offer those owners will starve. That sounds dystopian (and it is) but I don't see how we avoid that fate with our current economic system.
no? this isn't what it argues at all. did you read it?
You're absolutely right, and people will cite this while pointing to The Culture and saying "see, this is what we mean, everything will be fine."
Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shared prosperity.
Citing a potentiality as a certainty without any discussion as to how to get there is about as productive as daydreaming you're a billionaire and how you'd spend all that money. You have to do the fucking work, first, before any sliver of that outcome even becomes possible.
And if there's one thing the AIBros are adverse to, it's doing fucking work.
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I think a lot of this would be solved if the government would actually enforce anti monopoly laws. The penalties against Google were such a damn joke it makes me sick.
Companies aren’t going to hold off on trying to automate tasks AI performs poorly at. They are going to change the task so AI can do it, putting the burden of making up for the deficit on everyone else. The only reason this is able to happen now is because all the competition has been crushed or absorbed.
Well the effects of the standard oil breakup were great. We can't allow that to ever happen again!
There are two problems in the line of thinking being criticized here that weren't touched on. 1) When machines automate a previously human endeavor, we recalibrate our concept of what is granted by nature, and that stuff becomes commoditized and less interesting, focus moves to where automation is lacking. So all the stuff the AI takes over will just become a far smaller part of the economy which will reorient itself into wherever humans remain. Humanity is the constant unit of the economy, not amounts of work as we conceive of them today. That was always shifting. 2) There is no path to AGI (autonomous creative work) from LLMs today. LLMs are the result of the transformers paper solving the computational problem of applying RNNS to language. That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine. It was done on civilization's entire body of work. The next step, getting all the proprietary knowledge that ppl have that gives them an edge, a way to make a living, into some data form, and then creating a new computational architecture to assimilate that. How is that going to happen. You've got these efforts in China and Meta to get ppl to train machines replacements for ppl, but that's like starting at the dawn of the printing press or writing and saying, let's write down what we know. Not only is it going to take a looong time, it's a process that is at odds with itself. No-one is rewarding these ppl enough to put themselves out of a livelihood. So it's going to take a long time, and it's going to be filled with garbage, think a million Galen Ersos baking in flaws to the Death Star.
Generalized intelligence paired with generalized machines (i.e. humanoid robots) = ubiquitous disruption that may simply remove large swaths of useful / productive human endeavor. At some point 99.9% of people simply don't have economically worthwhile skill vs a 10k robot sustained by a few $s of compute and power.
The ultimate outcome in life for humans is human relationships. Sure tech will continue to confuse and fascinate ppl with side shows that make them irrelevant, bc human relationships are hard. Ppl get frustrated, they give up for periods of time. But to say we can be not worthwhile. Imagine you're a Renaissance artist, you're part of generations of ppl who engaged in society by doing realistic portraits, then someone comes along and makes photographic chemistry. After cameras, realistic portraiture doesn't occupy the same space in the economy. It isn't the vehicle anymore to show and share the heights to which humanity can achieve which is what we are primary doing here. Sure when you're young, you can be fascinated with a fancy shower, or a nice car, or holiday, but that shit gets old fast, because it isn't interesting because it lacks the challenge surface on which we become more human. Gratification doesn't have that much runway. If it did, we'd all be sitting it fields staring at amazing flowers, and sunsets, and just being happy.
That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine.
The important part is how we've recently learned just how much of our reality is embodied by language. Language does vastly more than anyone thought it did, and that means that language models can do vastly more work than anyone thought they could.
There was no reason on Earth to think that "stochastic parrots" could solve original math problems and write novel proofs, for instance. The fact that they can do that sort of thing is a huge, huge deal... too big a deal to express in the terms you're using here.
Yeesh. Math itself is a constructed input-output modeling system that provides functional benefits to the computational organisms that support it. Language is the same type of system, but with more individual slack. "Stochastic parrots" is just your human minimization device, that will either serve you or not. Reality is not embodied by language, we are not in the business of reality representation, we are in the business of functional representation systems, that work to differing degrees based on our goals. That's why we have multiple languages, multiple religions, multiple doctrines. It's silly to measure someone's belief in astrology against 'reality', we measure ppl's beliefs against their observable effectiveness and success. Ppl talk about reality but it's inconceivable. Any representation of reality is a subjective exercise in prioritization, listen to anyone describe it and they have to make choices about what to cover. That's not reality.
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This article describes a vicious cycle:
Layoff of workers -> Workers stop spending -> businesses suffer
This is not a foregone conclusion. Laid off workers could find other jobs, with higher incomes, due to productivity increases from AI.
This narrative falls into the trap of zero sum thinking, taken at the limit, you can advocate for jobs programs and helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming.
did you try to find job these days? it is a nightmare.
did you try to create a business? starting own business has never been harder, competition is extreme. market is over-saturated. monopolies are everywhere. barrier for entry (capital required) never been higher.
and after finding job they likely get into another roudn of layoff. just check RedNote, SWEs complaining just about that. people getting laid off before even first day at work.
You’ve got to be kidding. Starting a business has never been easier or cheaper at any time in history. If you can’t, it’s because you’re short on good ideas.
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Well, even until a few months ago, Dario and Sam were selling this vision to CEOs that they can perform complete workforce replacement. If that really comes to fruition, and they seem hellbent on doing that, I don't see why you can't have a situation where laid of workers can't find jobs, or take up blue collar jobs and end up driving down wages there, ultimately reducing consumer spending.
> helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming
have you heard about government issued bonds? or people working and getting paid from government? or government subsidies? or buy-backs and corporate bailouts?
> jobs programs and helicopter money where people get paid to do nothing to keep the economy humming.
The article addresses your concerns already. I know it's long, but you could probably skip a few paragraphs in the middle and start here:
> 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.
But this doesn't summarize the argument, it's just where you need to start reading.
If I try to summarize the argument, it says that jobs are a bargaining chip in the hands of laborers (the largest fraction of our society). Currently, they use it to secure certain freedoms and benefits. If, however, they no longer have jobs, whoever gets the role of distributor of the wealth produced by the AI will not be compelled to distribute it fairly... well, the whole concept of fairness will have to be reinvented (because, roughly, now we base fairness on individual's contribution, but that's not going to work anymore). But, most likely, it will lead to a dictatorship of those with access to AI over those who have none.
* * *
Here's my (unrelated to the article) historical parallel. In the beginning of the 20th century when Jews started campaigning for bringing more Jews into Turkish, then British Palestine, the process often went like this: Jewish community or a wealthy individual buys a plot of land from a Turk owner. Turks never worked that land themselves, and used to hire local Arabs to do the agricultural labor. Jews would not rehire Arabs after acquisition, instead, they used the newly bought land to create jobs for more Jewish immigrants.
This greatly contributed to the animosity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine because even though initially Arabs would be paid off to "go someplace else" after the land purchase, realistically, there was no other place for them to go to. Which led to spreading poverty, which led to sporadic attacks on new land owners. Which led to retaliation... and well, the conflict never really went away, didn't it?
This just might happen on a much larger scale in countries like the US, if suddenly a large fraction of population finds itself powerless and being unable to influence the decisions of the government.
"In the beginning of the 20th century when Jews started campaigning for bringing more Jews into Turkish, then British Palestine, the process often went like this: Jewish community or a wealthy individual buys a plot of land from a Turk owner. Turks never worked that land themselves, and used to hire local Arabs to do the agricultural labor. Jews would not rehire Arabs after acquisition, instead, they used the newly bought land to create jobs for more Jewish immigrants."
I have never heard this one before. And it doesn't really track with the populations that were actually there in 1900. The Arabs at that time, in that place were largely nomadic herders. The largest city in the region at the time only had about 30,000 people in it. And it had been sometime since the Ottomans actually had any real political control of the area. So perhaps it did happen to some extent, but to claim it was the driving force in creating the conflict seems very ahistorical to me. Especially considering the 200 years of Pograms that preceded it. The real reasons for the conflict happened between 1500-1700, and have more to do with trade and the collapse of the Silk Road than Zionism.
PS The Ottomans outlawed selling land to Jews in about 1900. So a lot of the sales weren't recorded so perhaps you have a point, IDK.
> workers could find other jobs, with higher incomes, due to productivity increases from AI
From a business point of view, this does not follow. Why would a business offer higher wages to a person to work alongside/with AI, when the business also has to pay the cost of AI?
This article is good but it presupposes the norm of democracy and it presupposes (somehow) that the collapse of western democracy will not result in war. Both of these are fundamental misunderstandings, and while I love neither democracy nor war, the dissolution of the American economic system would result in both less democracy and more war.
Human economic systems tend to reward things that are easy to measure, own, scale, and control. That works pretty well for machines, markets, software, and bureaucracy, but it doesn’t work as well for living systems, which rely on diversity, backup systems, and local adaptation.
So we end up with this pattern: we capture the useful order for ourselves, then push the mess, waste, heat, and instability onto the environment.
This is the fundamental nature of human. We can't change it without higher-order regulation. Even in AI training, we assume there is one true distribution and optimizes for it.
We created these systems. And unfortunately, most of us are the unwanted in these systems at the same time.
The answer to this is competent policy making, and unfortunately we have the extreme opposite of that across the political spectrum.
It's because of survival pressure :-/ I think we are falling in an unprecedentedly large-scale negative-sum prisoner dilemma.
This situation may be naturally evolved, or may be deliberately shaped by people or institutions. In any way, negative-sum can drive people to do irrational decision because the game is not beneficial in all cases.
"When Block’s Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half his workforce in March, citing AI coding agents, investors responded with a twenty-five percent stock price surge in after-hours trading. The market rewarded the elimination of human labor with an immediate, massive transfer of value to shareholders."
This is very common and has been since before AI, the market can see that the company has overhired and there are a bunch of people doing useless work - so when the company does some firings it's a good sign because they're turning the ship around.
Oh, bullshit. Shareholders will literally always think the company overhired. Every single person on this website has lived through at least one instance of firing an employee and distributing his workload to the leftover employees who are usually already overworked.
Shareholders see you as useless meat to dispose, the ideal number of employees to them is ZERO.
If layoffs will pump your stock, why aren't there more? Sure there are some layoffs happening, but those could just be companies that will benefit from layoffs. Certainly there could be many companies whose stock price would drop due to layoffs and those companies just haven't done that.
They don’t always think that, since sometimes share prices decrease as the result of layoffs, which would indicate they think it’s a bad decision.
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I think this is where government steps in for each country, go on the path of exploration that has no profit per se in it like space exploration, human body understanding. I am drawing parallel to 1930s or 40s where great depression was smoothen because America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects.
Lastly, OpenAI and Anthropic or any other frontier labs needs to be nationalized because they become a public utility and the profits of automation goes to fund infrastructure or grand projects via government.
We do not need to do menial work anymore and AI is helping us with it, what we can do exploratory work, and we need a visionary to get this rolling.
"I am drawing parallel to 1930s or 40s where great depression was smoothen because America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects."
The thing that ended the Great Depression was WWII and most those government projects weren't civilian infrastructure. In fact, during the time we were building civilian infrastructure, the Depression was continuing and deepening. Not saying we shouldn't have done those projects, but they didn't end the Depression.
There is absolutely zero will in the United States to invest money in unprofitable exploration or scientific research. There used to be such will generations ago, but today's wannabee-autocrats couldn't care less. Look at how they gleefully cut scientific research funding, undermine academic sovereignty, and strip-mine the public sector performing that work in favor of private enterprises. When the shit hits the fan and we're all broke because the corpos laid everybody off for Devin, Claude, and Clippy, there won't be much left besides surrogacy and plasma donation.
Patronage programs for people with advanced degrees is a woefully inadequate solution to the current economic pressures. Large segments of the first-world working and middle classes hollowed out by globalization had already turned against it before AI even came on to the scene. People are generally hostile to patronage directed towards people above them on the ladder.
Look into how much of that research money actually goes to research and how much goes to administration. And since that administration has a reputation for being to the left of Mao, perhaps then you can understand the unwillingness to put money there. It isn't that people don't want to invest in research, they have lost faith that the money allocated will actually get to the researchers.
That is perhaps the current administration, may be we do need a visionary in government again
> America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects
There was a certain other undertaking in those years that went a little beyond infrastructure.
World war I and II in general?
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The only way this sounds believable is if you don't actually do any work.
Those of us that work know what you really mean.
The US government has become corrupted and no longer serves the needs of the people, only large corporations.
Learn some US history, specifically between 1870 and 1900.
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> I think this is where government steps in for each country
People quite often lose the plot that "government" is "collective will". Governments will only do this if their constituents want them to. If the constituents would rather spend those recourses on free VR for every household and gatorade from drinking fountains, then that's all we're getting.
> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers.
From Making Money (2007) by Terry Pratchett
> “Well, the problem is that, considered as a labor force, the golems are capable of doing the work per day of one hundred and twenty thousand men.”
> “Think of what they could do for the city!” said Mr. Cowslick of the Artificers’ Guild.
> “Well, yes. To begin with, they would put one hundred and twenty thousand men out of work,” said Hubert, “but that would only be the start. They do not require food, clothing or shelter. Most people spend their money on food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and, not least, taxes. What would these golems spend it on? The demand for many things would drop and further unemployment would result. You see, circulation is everything. The money goes around, creating wealth as it goes.”
> And the public funded the research that made it possible. The transformer architecture,
Errr pretty sure that was Google?
The engineers at google did not sit in a blank room and come up with these ideas out of nowhere. They read the literature to figure out what the hell to do. If you look at the Attention is All You Need whitepaper, you will find there are 32 references, like most ~10 page manuscripts.
The author never claims otherwise?
Did the public fund googles research?
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The whole post is premised on a fixed pie economy.
"The financial model underneath requires the elimination of human cost centers at civilizational scale."
No, it is not. It requires humans to collectively want more things if they are offered and available at a lower cost. Which then requires more humans to fill in the blanks to provide those things. We've been doing this since the industrial revolution.
the growing pie is a lie.
There is certainly a huge problem with displacing labour in multiple industries at the same time, but the economic story told here in "three turns" is different. When productivity rises costs drop, but because of competition, almost the entire gain has to translate not to increased margins but to reduced prices. Paul Krugman recently used this to explain the large disparity between growth in GDP as normally measured in fixed prices (i.e. inflation-adjusted to consumer prices in some fixed year) and growth in GDP as measured in PPP, i.e. when adjusted to consumer prices in every year. If making computers, say, becomes much more productive, the growth in productivity in, say, 1980 prices, seems very large, but in PPP is not only smaller, but the beneficiaries aren't computer manufacturers but anyone who uses computers.
Of course, lower prices don't solve your problems if you're unemployed. Demand, indeed, drops if many people are unemployed, which pushes prices further down, but this time across the board, not just in the more productive industries - a recession.
> Of course, lower prices don't solve your problems if you're unemployed. Demand, indeed, drops if many people are unemployed, which pushes prices further down, but this time in a way that can lead to a recession.
This is the major risk right now.
I think we'll need to strongly look at UBI and a star trek esque future or, barring that, something more like a star wars esque future..
doesnt this entire premise rely on an even shock to all parts of the labour economy
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> Follow the money through three turns.
I would counter that the author is thinking too linearly and not in a dynamic systems thinking way.
The feedback loops they’re anticipating are very unidirectional and don’t express a range of possibilities. They seem intent in making a point rather than imagine the future.
My 2 cents is in 3 years the inference products will be a commodity, extremely competitive with diminishing returns, seeing that the open weight models are getting so good and nearing par with sota.
I feel 90% of sota for 10% of cost / compute is good enough for 80% of workloads.
Question is, do we need all of this hardware? Are build outs going to get canceled. 4300 new data centers seems excessive. I personally haven't experienced any service disruptions...
Does Microsoft still have 1 million gpu's in storage? Is that what I heard earlier this year?
For many purposes they already are a commodity. Openrouter will automatically route your requests to cheaper providers of the same model on the fly. Many of the hosts for open source models are basically undifferentiated. It’s a pure price dominated market except at the very top edge. Even there, we are seeing very little lock in. If OpenAI released an Opus beater at half the cost, even large businesses could switch providers almost instantly.
Yes and this is in line with the idea that 99%+ of the value created by AI will be captured by the broader economy, not OpenAI and friends.
That being said, even local AI will still be displacing humans fast and it's not clear new jobs will be created fast enough. Regulations and policies will be needed imo.
> It is also a proposal in which he gets to be the one doing the distributing. Feudalism with better branding.
It's worse than feudalism. Feudalism is essentially a contract, an unfair one yes, but both parties need something from the other. The Lord needs the peasants (or vassals) to provide labor and soldiers for conflicts. But in this hypothetical world, the elite no longer need anything from the workers, the workers are completely dependent on the altruism of those who control all the resources, and that is not a stable place to be.
Of course that assumes that AI produces massive productivity gains. But if it doesn't, then we'll see a different kind of economic collapse when the bubble bursts. So we lose either way.
> 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.
For some companies yeah, but this is why companies are switching to consumption based pricing - so they can charge AI. So many companies will be fine - both their labor and customers could become AI.
But these AIs need energy and GPUs data-centers ... who pays for those? I could imagine a circular mini-economy between a few companies making the bare essentials to keep AI running and not catering to 99.9% of the population because they don't have the funds to buy anything those companies could produce so they don't.
In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their AI's output with other AI/robot companies, robot and chip manufacturers and commodity owners? So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?
> In that scenario AI and robots produce everything, the owners of those AI companies can trade their AI's output with other AI/robot companies, robot and chip manufacturers and commodity owners? So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?
That scenario is not really any different from having a technology advanced country (like the US) alongside some underdeveloped nation. The US could, in theory, close its borders and produce everything it needs itself, and leave said underdeveloped nation without the benefits of, for example, Netflix, Nike & Nvidia.
But it won’t, it’s not economically efficient. Economic theory (of comparative advantage) tells us that there’s always something that the less developed world can produce relatively cheaply, in exchange for sneakers, streaming services, and G-force Now subscriptions.
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>So 10000 people world-wide are fine, everyone else is not?
Well ya, if you don't need labor, why keep 8 billion laborers around polluting your planet?
Yep, if AI gutters the middleclass and small budinesses who you gonna sell to?
Well that part of the economy and anything that caters to it might just die.
The whole economy would be whatever AI/robots need: compute, energy, raw materials, software, data, etc.
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Why do economies need people? We look at the past and say 'People are labor', but what happens when people are no longer labor? Effectively people live on handouts from people that own AI, or the AI itself.
All those Greed is Good people are going to look kind of silly when a hand full of greedy people fight over everything and leave the rest of us for dead.
+1. soon there is nobody to sell to.
You’ll be entertainers for the rich class. Teen prostitutes, jesters, and caretakers, while they live their best lives.
Not possible if they still require goods and services from the non-AI part of the economy. They’d still have to come up with something of value to exchange with that part of the market.
If the business process is fully AI-able, why wouldn't it just be implemented by the next AI in line?
I'd argue the only companies to survive will be the ones with either a human input or a human output. Everything else is effectively worthless now.
For the same reason it doesn't happen with humans.
Even for AI, it's probably better off paying another AI that is specializing in something and done all the work rather then reimplementing everything from the ground up.
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I think the premise of the article is interesting, but it's a bit mis-leading to start it out by quoting "last year half of the internet was AI-generated" and the source doesn't actually say that at all, just that there has been a huge uptick in AI crawlers.
Assume everything,including intelligence is automated.
Intellectual property right can get abolished and also company confidentiality is made illegal.
No one will have Moat.
There will be always manufactured scarcity of something which people aspire for. Like respect, popularity, game expert etc.
Universal high income is possible.
Beginning of infinity is good book to realize there are infinite possibilities to explore.
The Ouoroboros (serpent) eats its own tail, feeling satisfied and full in the short-term but ultimately, there is nothing left to eat.
The farmer, rather than feeding his livestock so they can keep producing milk/eggs/etc, decides to greedily eat all the corn himself.
This is not a serious analysis. No mention of open source LLMs and their impact on american AI companies. There’s also no evidence that LLMs can make significant scientific progress on their own.
UBI was always the endgame. The incentives are aligned. Nobody wants the results that are coming in the absence of UBI.
But the culture cannot stomach it yet. It will likely need to live through several waves of horrors first.
It can stomach a fake jobs program though, so there's a good chance we get that instead.
I think we're already in the fake jobs era. There's no way all of these people I see walking around are making meaningful contributions to society. Hell, the Amazon delivery driver I see is probably making a more meaningful contribution than half these people.
hard to imagine most megalomanic egoistic psychopaths, people at top of government, will decide to redistribute wealth equially / UBI.
Have you seen Meta pushing for more regulations in the software industry? It is a small cost to pay to kill competition.
Well, they are the ones promoting it. At least, they're incentivized to reduce the amount of firebombing attempts.
Some investors won't get their money back, and some people will lose their jobs.
In the economy, the difference between winners and losers in terms of assets/resources may get larger. By far, HN readers are better positioned to gain than others.
But the biggest question is the new disconnect between a healthy economy and well-being, as the economy soars but people suffer. Goodwill underlies all economic activity (now and historically), and without goodwill opportunity and value of all kinds will mostly be destroyed.
I wouldn't call this dead economy. Cultures and economies will become tribal, with private adjudication and governance, to create pockets of relative goodwill.
All that is really required to prevent the rise of AI and humanoid robot technology from being used to transition from mass exploitation to mass starvation is to stop being so racist and classist and treat everyone fairly. Then we can raise everyone's standard of living.
Or there may be a very bloody revolution.
I think the hatred for AI is really misdirected survival instincts. People have unfortunately come to see every tool as a tool of exploitation. The most powerful tool in their eyes can only lead to more mistreatment.
Unfortunately the only language elites know is violence.
I think we need to look past software and spend more time and energy on the physical world. Let the digital world just be a means to an end, and we spend more time and resources on problems that matter. Reallocate societal attention to the next frontier
would be good if that happened. probably it would not though.
If you’re going to go through the effort to write 5,000 words—-spend a bit more thought on what to do.
I am aware that the sky is falling and I am aware that there are foxes who would gladly replace 10%+ of global knowledge work in the next few years. I understand that there are cultural ramifications.
But what do we do?
While I think a dead economy is easy to imagine it is also pretty absurd. After all, real supply will be abundant and real demand will be strong except since so one has any (artificial) money, everything presumably stalls and we somehow end up in a worse situation than we had before money was invented.
The problem below just was solved with workers organization.
> The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed
I feel like people have said that about every technical revolution. I dont think this article would have been out of place in the hay day of the industrial revolution.
Its never been true in the past. Otoh, there always has to be a first time for everything. I think to be convincing though it needs more evidence on how this differed from other technical revolutions.
As the article mentions, even if it is like other technical revolutions, it could still mean multiple generations of hardship. The economic pain of job displacement in the industrial revolution took 70 years to overcome.
It's been true in the past for the generation that's living through the technical revolution. The Industrial Revolution was a very grim time to be a worker.
There is a world of difference between the situation for labour being grim, and labour ceasing to exist.
what if I tell you it has been in decline all along? we just barely kept up with it. just look at the birth rates.
this turkey has been watching chickens, pigs, cows in line. now is time for Thanksgiving. and we are the turkey.
Every technological revolution spreads more rapidly than the last, so it's novel almost by definition. The internet gradual expanded over 2-3 decades, long enough to give most people, and the economy, the chance to keep up. This is happening far more rapidly.
The author suggests it will fail because we'll all use drugs and booze and commit suicide. But it works for retired people. They love it.
Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?
The people you know who love it, love it. How many times have you seen a retired age person working? It’s not always because they require it financially. I worked with a gentleman from Bulgaria when I was young who worked 70 hours a week because he was immensely bored otherwise and work brought him purpose. When you become adjusted to working all the time, the work becomes the purpose, and not working becomes death. I watched this happen with one of my grandparents. He retired and died of a heart attack within a year. All signs pointed to him living longer had he not retired. My point is that freedom to some people is work, because work is their purpose and having a purpose provides freedom to enjoy other things.
The research on UBI is pretty slam dunk, really the main downsides are inflation (which, if we're in a deflation spiral due to everyone being laid off and replaced with bots, is a plus) overall expense (again if we're basically printing labor, the robots can cough up the money), and politics ("I don't want to see people I hate be given nice things!").
Politics will be the ruthlessly exploited wedge when the chips are down, not "Having my basic needs met is oppression, I need to be forced to work."
Good bit of survivor bias in the retired population. If you can put in 30-40 years of full time work and then afford to retire you probably don't have a propensity for substance abuse.
You've clearly not been hanging out with French retirees.
> The author suggests it will fail because we'll all use drugs and booze and commit suicide. But it works for retired people. They love it.
The retired people who you know are happy love it. The retirement-age people who didn't love it went back into the workforce. Or they didn't stop working in the first place. And c'mon, the "retired person struggling to find purpose" is basically a societal trope at this point.
> Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?
I really really really don't want that to be true. I don't think it's really true for me (though I know, job or no job, I need to find self-defined "productive" things to do with my time), but I do think it's true for a lot of people. I don't know if it's just decades of social conditioning throughout life, or fear of change, or... whatever it might be. But it does seem like a lot of people really do need the structure/purpose of employment in order to find meaning in life and be happy.
There's plenty of research showing that older people without a feeling of purpose tend to die sooner than older people who do feel they have a purpose. Employment is that purpose for a lot of people, and for some, they don't really know how to adequately replace it if they don't have a job. That makes me profoundly sad, but I don't know what to do with that, really.
My life has no purpose and that makes me sad, but I really don't see what I could possibly do.
Anyway why is painting (inferior to robot painting, zero market value) an acceptable hobby but crystal meth is not?
A painting doesn’t randomly yell STOP FOLLOWING ME outside my window at 3AM
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I agree with most of it, but I don't think these three turns are the end of it.
We see that as soon as companies can, they will drop support for end consumers like us and focus on B2B.
The only way to sustain some level of revenue is by turning into aggression levels which is ineffective, and obviously, imoral and unacceptable.
The way things are going we all be dead by hunger. This seems by design made up to seem unavoidable.
Maybe we will all be CEOs or Board chairs of our own corporations employing agents. And we work to find the best agents to increase efficiencies, improve effectiveness, etc.
Here is a very sad and frightening fact: the owner class can actually restructure "the economy" (whatever that is) to revolve entirely around AI consuming AI, and machines using machines.
Most people assume that "the economy" can only ever be based on human consumption, and therefore humans have to have an income in order for "the economy" to exist. This assumption is erroneous; billions of monetary transactions are done every day by companies with no product, no service, and no employees. These are economically valid, even though barely any humans consume or produce anything. The owning class just manages to convert those virtual transactions to "actual" money, and buy products and services because we already produce more than we consume.
It is more than frightening, but "the economy" (whatever that is nowadays) can run without many humans in the loop. AI consuming AI, phantom companies doing transactions with other phantom companies, machines working for machines.
If I belong to the group who only own the bottom 10 percent of the wealth, what do I have to loose? Let others become poor too like me and that will force society to find better way to redistribute wealth.
Just fyi: I am not poor but thinking the above from a poor person's perspective.
If you belong to that group you are already completely irrelevant except for your ability to vote.
The "TAM as all white collar labor" thing looks good on paper. But AI companies don't need to really capture much labor to be fantastically profitable.
If we all delegate 20% of our work, and 20% of our salary for that 20% (e.g., 4% of our salaries in exchange for 20% of our jobs being automated), we get easier jobs and the AI labs supplant the existing tech moguls for revenue, with 1000x $/employee profits. That's just one scenario.
https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-jobpocolypse.html
I don’t follow that valuation math either (well, there was no math, just an assertion). Microsoft and Apple are worth a lot more than $800 billion without replacing the entire world labor market.
All of these discussions seem to assume there's a limit at human level intelligence beyond which AI can progress no further. What stops the AI companies taking their human level model and training it even more until it's superhuman?
This is making an assumption that LLMs are even capable of doing what these companies claim they can or will do in the future. Stop doing the marketing for them by believing what they tell you at face value.
Maybe they aren't and never will be capable enough to do this, but if there's even a 1% chance that they are, then it's very important to consider the consequences and take the necessary precautions before it's too late.
Power and wealth are not always the same. Current AI is helping people gather wealth within the American system. But as we are seeing in Iran, current AI does not provide a decisive edge in hard military power.
If that stays true for the long term, then it seems to me there is a good chance the wealth built with AI will transfer to those nations that still have hard military power, who can fight and win wars.
For example, China will just copy the AI, not have to pay all the R&D costs, undercut all these American AI companies on price, and take most of the global AI market and long term wealth. And there is nothing American AI companies can do to stop them because America cannot fight and win a war against China.
China will experience the same problems described in the article, even if that war happens and even if they win. They are possibly better equipped to deal with the problems, but I don't think that nicely-asking-companies-to-keep-humans is a viable long term strategy. And given Chinas history, I'm not sure most humans would enjoy a China shaped solution.
The first bit is just a restatement of the "paradox of thrift":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift
If every business cuts headcount and costs, then you overall get a contraction in the economy and high unemployment and a recession. Everyone's spending is someone else's salary and revenues.
Couldn't get through the rest of it because it was a bunch of overly verbose human-slop writing.
I think the bigger issue right now is also just straightforward economic pressure caused by tariffs and high energy costs and inflation. If the affluent consumer starts to buckle, businesses may get caught in a downsizing spiral where they start posting lower profits, firing actual management, stock prices decline, and the affluent consumer retracts. No AI required to fuel that.
Right now with stocks hitting record highs, the affluent consumer is not changing their behavior at all and just spending even harder, which is keeping profits pumped up, and keeping stocks at record highs. At the margins, though, fewer and fewer people are participating in the economy, which is a trend that is going to be unsustainable.
I think AI is going to be most relevant in the debt collapse that it leaves behind, and in the excuses it gives to shed employees. This economy is going to hit a wall at some point, AI or not.
Human-slop is a new one for me. How would you define it? Low quality work written by a human? Human writing that sounds like an LLM? Something else?
For me, it is writing way too much to say too little.
> [CEOs] expressed more extreme concern about the labor market impacts of A.I. in private conversation, but suddenly became optimists once I turned on the mic.
At some point once the rate of investment capital starts to decline, they'll make a hard pivot from the investor-wooing method of "blaming AI for layoffs", to the more politically expedient method of blaming minorities and immigrants. That'll be the signal for the transition from power grabbing to power ossification, and the point at which change becomes a lot harder.
This article's premise is entirely built on the idea that CEOs who layoff people citing AI aren't just lying.
And, well, of course they are. If AI was really making these companies meaningfully more productive, they could use that to out-innovate competitors. Instead, they're doing cost-cutting. That only makes sense if you're entirely out of ideas! It's a terribly embarrassing thing to say for a CEO!
Really what's going on is that companies do layoffs for all the usual reasons companies do layoffs. And as usual, they never say the real reason because it's embarrassing (we hired too many morons; I founded this place but now I dread waking up every morning because I hate all the middle managers; we just want more money now and not later; etc etc). Instead they say whatever silly excuse is in vogue to say. Right now that silly excuse is AI productivity. A few years ago it was "ZIRP is over oops y'all cost too much now", and before that it was "financial crisis!", which you could get away with for scary many years after Lehman went belly-up.
I feel like it's pretty ridiculous to take these remarks at face value and then build an entire what-if theory on top of it. Don't underestimate the possibility that layoffs happen because there happens to be a good excuse around. The occasional layoff can be good for a company. Cut out the dead meat etc. But if it makes you look bad, stock go down etc then you won't do it will you? But when ideas from lesswrong became mainstream enough that you can blame AI for your layoff, then what's stopping you?
AI for the fortune 500 seems so misplaced, its for the 3 person startup trying to take on an existing fortune 5000 enterprise with lower overall costs.
Another point to consider - how efficient/productive/useful is the typical tech company really? How innovative is the typical tech company? From my experience, the majority of them are focused more on marketing and enshitification, than actually building innovative and useful technology. And at the end of the day most of the profit from this goes to a relatively small number of people in a highly unequal way.
What prevents 10000 experienced engineers from organizing, investing their own money and working to build data centers and an open LLM (for example), and sharing any profit fairly? I know that in practice there are many reasons, but I don't see why this isn't a solveable problem.
but, like, what if they weren't lying?
Regardless, their actions seem to indicate that they are trying their hardest to make this true; given that they have the resources of a developed nation behind them, it seems reasonable to seriously consider what they are saying.
Also we generally don't give the same latitude to people who lie about things as destructive as what they are proposing.
This article, both compelling and bleak, leaves little doubt: the Butlerian Jihad is coming. The forward-thinking universities should start training Mentats now.
Selective history marinated with ideological bias. Unreadable.
i think we are all beating around the bush and not addressing the root issue: AI could obsolete human beings in the future. what i'm not seeing is discussion or exploration of different branches or paths that could occur once that happens.
It seems kinda obvious to me that a cyborg (human plus AI) is going to outcompete AI-only in most scenarios. Anytime you ask an AI to do everything itself, you get the typical slop generic result that’s clogging up YouTube and Google search results.
However there is a space in the economy where “good enough” is all that matters, and “perform better” doesn’t really matter, usually because consumers aren’t discerning enough to care.
This is the range of the labor market that is really at risk. The high-end, cyborg one is probably fine, at least in terms of human labor needs.
This is the AI bureaucrat theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321576
> Every investor presentation of an AI agent “doing the work of ten analysts” is telling you the same thing: the product is labor replacement.
I have a solution for that. Let's use AI to replace all these corporations who just lost their big moats. Conveniently, they just laid off a bunch of people with all the critical know-how and I bet they are very willing to just give it up out of spite.
I’m not sure this is so true. Anthropic and OpenAI are both heavily hiring for humans in enterprise roles. Safe to say they are using AI as much as possible and they need humans too.
hiring people to eliminate people, literally
They'll just order those humans to train their own future overlords.
> corporations who just lost their big moats
Sure, if you assume that they've used their immense wealth to entrench themselves by paying for quality labor. If you take note of the myriad less-competitive ways they've ensured dominance and guaranteed profits rather than re-investing in their products or services then you will see that you have a large moat to cross yet.
> Promised an age of superconnectivity, we’ve let our shared physical spaces wither, only to find our promised digital commons to be one large billboard increasingly read and created by bots.
No, this is good. Cyberspace led to — primarily enabled — sociocultural collapse. The machines destroying cyberspace would be the most merciful outcome.
This is a great article, but it under-emphasises the fact that it’s middle-class jobs under threat. The studies that are summarised show what happens when working-class people are kicked out of the economy, but the historical record shows that when middle-class people are kicked out of the economy, they use their education to form and lead revolutions.
Unless the bubble pops and destroys all these companies, I don’t think the leaders of AI companies will die natural deaths.
Not sure why you're downvoted for citing historical fact, but I guess some folks are quite scared at the implication that they're the baddies.
You don't even have to go that far back. The New Deal that everyone fawns over was in large part the compromise of the wealthy with the workers to form the Middle Class, in lieu of being murdered in their own homes like had been going on for decades prior. The rise of Communism and Socialism in the US was a dire threat to their power and wealth, and even leveraging the US Military in bombing union workers couldn't stop the momentum of a populace in need of basic necessities that corporations and industrialists had stolen from them for personal profit (shelter was increasingly in Company Towns, payment was in scrip, jobs were precarious and dangerous and unreliable, the government offered nothing but harm). The deal on the table was they surrender power and keep the wealth, or they fucking die when the masses finally had enough of their bullshit.
Thus the New Deal was struck. Communists and Socialists were weakened by Capital and Politics immediately thereafter to try and ensure a future uprising couldn't occur, but the real saving grace was a citizenry who, at least for the white majority, had all their needs met with stable employment and had ample time to engage with their community as a result. That is what ended up building the Middle Classes everyone wants to "go back to" but without enacting the policies that brought about its rise (like a +70% tax level on the wealthy, for instance).
Fire bombing of personal residences, gunning down CEOs in broad daylight, firing shots at politicians supporting further theft from the populace or outright ignoring their plight - all of it is reprehensible, but also completely foreseen by literally anyone with a cursory knowledge of World History.
"The New Deal that everyone fawns over was in large part the compromise of the wealthy with the workers to form the Middle Class,"
The middle class was formed 100 years before that, originally in an entire another country and was formed because of the industrial revolution. And what put the the communists in the US on the back foot was the Cold War and the nuclear spying.
This part specifically is a clear indication of a tendency to slide towards corporatism, in Mussolini’s sense.:
> that this leads to “the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the U.S. government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on A.I.” The regulator and the regulated have converged into a single interest.
I feel there's an interesting juxtaposition between these two quotes:
"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two."
and
"The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.
This is ahistorical bullshit."
In the former the author establish that you can't make a observation about the past and take it as a law of nature. In the latter they refute arguments as "ahistorical bullshit" for not doing exactly that.
Especially since they then proceed with historical example, all of which had poverty as a strong contributing factor.
> The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel... This is ahistorical bullshit.
I think this part of your theory is unsupported. Yes, we have historical evidence that when you suddenly layoff a large percentage of the population without providing replacement income, things go very, very badly.
However we also have quite a bit of evidence at this point that if you give people no-strings-attached support, they do figure out how to fill their time with art and other hobbies (for a concrete example, Ireland's very successful UBI-for-artists pilot).
Not going to be popular, but this article misses the point entirely.
The reason we are pursuing AI so quickly is the same reason we (the West, US) pursued the atomic bomb so quickly: not because having it was great (we've only used it twice), but because 'the other guys' having it is worse.
As bad as anyone thinks AI is for a free and democratic society with oligarchs, you can be assured that a future in a China or Russia controlled totalitarian AI state would be infinitely worse.
The US at least in principle values an individual human life, as judged by its conduct in roughly 3 centuries of conflict.
China and Russia emphatically do not.
It may be cold comfort when the terminator eventually comes for you, but I'd trust an American Skynet over a Chinese, North Korean or Russian one any day.
I don't post often, but want to write a bit here to change the world slightly. The outcome depends on how people think and believe. If everyone believe others are evil and will (e.g.) nuke the other country first, then indeed we are fucked. But this does not happen, right? I'm Chinese and lived in Europe for 10 years. I don't feel people are that different. Feel free to visit and talk to people here :)
There is nothing original in this article. This could’ve been written by an AI just scraping one month of posts to hacker news. This article is a critique of autonomously repackaging existing ideas by autonomously repackaging existing ideas. The irony is not lost on me.
It's not necessary for them to cut labor to boost profits, but rather just to produce more goods; ideally this could be done with them hiring more people to run machines that produce more goods, so that both workers get paid and the companies can profit
what about massive western economies who export wealth through imports could they not offset the effect of employment changes domestically with a decreased demand on imports?
seems to me this will effect countries who rely on mid market exports over raw or high end exports way more then others.
Hrm. I plugged in the first 4000 words of this essay into my free Pangram account and it says "59% AI generated", "We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, AI-assisted, and human-written content".
Who is the customer for this stuff?
> the text of this piece is entirely human-generated, including the infelicitous phrasings and penchant for two-dollar words.
Yeah, and the author is obviously lying. Ever since mid-2025 it has been a winning move for AI users to categorically deny all allegations & reap the labor rewards of generated content.
What if AI did not exist and the labor market expanded 50% overnight?
Provocative title to generate traction on your website. Technological revolution at scale is probably what you could have called it but that has less doom and sexiness.
Or some companies resist- and form fortresses- little markets, where only non-ai companies are allowed to enter and where only non-ai products can be bought. Economic arcologies.
I think missing from the turns is when companies do AI layoffs, then realize they aren't as productive as they thought and have to rehire 70% of the people they let go.
layoffs.fyi does not show there is any significant rehiring. it is full-steam firing for years.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/mar/10/ai-layoff-r...
I'm telling you guys if you think the powerful are gonna let us all continuing living after our value becomes obsolete you have a big surprise coming.
VCs furiously downvoting "quiet pleb!".
> UBI is unpopular with American voters; a federal jobs guarantee has legs. People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.
Nobody is opposed to getting free money. UBI is unpopular because people realize somebody has to pay for it, and they know full well the bill will land on working taxpayers, not the billionaires making windfall gains.
Relatedly: a tip for writers.
When an article has an obviously AI-generated slop image followed by a wall of text, I immediately know that the wall of text is also a mechanical product and I stop reading. There's nothing worse you can do to tarnish your personal brand than to open with obvious zero-effort graphics.
The text might be insightful, who knows, but the AI slop images are such an immediate red flag that there's no point in delving into it.
I say this as someone who uses agents heavily for work and has no bias against it for productivity. For creative work like writing think pieces, it's an immediate back button click.
You are probably right but if you think it through, you would probably realize that's no different from using stock photos. Also, this piece you should really read. Its a bit better than the majority of opinions on this topic.
> no different from using stock photos
Thinking it through: yes, sprinkling stock photos all over your work as a writer is also weird and distracting, and would also blackhole a writer's credibility for me.
I'm sure it's no loss to the author to lose out on close-minded readers. The author also added a little blurb to his article to address the concerns raised.
I’m very open to new ideas, my point is that the overtly displayed zero effort in production of the work imputes a low value product. Having boundaries and valuing the irreplaceable moments of your life doesn’t make a person closed minded.
When the material takes more of their time to read than it took you to create it, it’s an affront to the reader.
"Author" used loosely here
> at a fraction of the cost of human workers.
herein lies the rub
Can't we just tax tokens if that happens?
Article: >There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
Dispute Owen's claim, the global felony and bullshit markets are bigger.
> except that software has near-zero marginal cost
Yes, but not AI. This is where AI differs from other software: marginal cost is not zero, in fact it doesn't go down much, if at all, for each generated token (after accounting for the depreciation of hardware), and could even go up if trying to find an extra MWh gets more and more difficult and therefore more and more expensive.
Economies of scale don't work well in AI.
This article reminds me of the issues raised in Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis
We need to consider that by automating and replacing the work of people who have an income, those people stop consuming and no longer generate profit for capitalism.
How is this sustainable?
When cars got better people just drove faster.
Don’t be the last buggy whip maker.
AI can’t take payment in cash or barter.
One of the authors of the linked article (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617) is a computer scientist not an economist. Just bc something is published in arxiv economics does not make it written by an economist.
Here's my question:
Do you think it's more likely robots are cleaning shit out of toilets at the behest of their human masters, or do you think it's more likely that humans will clean the shit from the toilets for their robot masters.
I mean come on. We are *made* to clean shit out of toilets.
Can someone point me to credible evidence/examples of productivity increases from AI spending, among non-ai providers? And if you'd bear with me, I'm asking for productivity in the sense of "accelerating the businesses pursuit of its existing goals" rather than quantity. I think that in most sane business's, output quantity bereft of output quality is utterly useless in said pursuit.
replace "AI" with automation, and look at any factory floor. or fields in agriculture. you do not need "study", just open your eyes and look around.
> I'm asking for productivity in the sense of "accelerating the businesses pursuit of its existing goals" rather than quantity.
The current business goals around the use of AI is essentially the startup model: Throw shit into the wind to see if it sticks. Acceleration of the business goal means throwing more shit into the wind. Isn't that the same thing as quantity?
CR4-DL
If human labor becomes 'uneconomical', what will happen? Obviously a great deal of social upheaval.
But human labor does not actually need to be as expensive as it is. How cheaply could you house, feed, and clothe people? There are parts of the world where people get by on very little income. Of course we could aspire to better living conditions than the world's poorest, but that's what the robot revolution promises: abundance.
Imagine if AI suddenly was in more demand than human labor, simply due to the price. Excellent quality output for cheaper than somebody with a degree. What would be the second order effects?
Human labor, being in less demand, would have to lower its price to compete. This is the death of the middle (and lower) class future we fear. But ironically the price of goods and services would lower as everything, even complex engineering, medicine, construction becomes affordable. With the right policy, human labor becomes cheap again. Maybe even competitive to machine labor in some niches. Improvements in machine labor could have a compounding effect on how affordable it can be for humans to survive.
So where's the gap here? Well, most wager earner's income worldwide goes towards housing. Food and water and medicine can be bottlenecked causing price gouging. Monopolies and lack of competition in the market can raise the prices of things until everybody is spending all of their disposable income on necessities. I think the price of human labor is currently very high (in the developed world) due rentier capitalism.
The transition will upend much of our economic investments and probably involve a great deal of human suffering until nations figure out the right mix of solutions.
Don't forget that humans require inputs (land, water). It's not obvious that there is a happy equilibrium where the majority of humans are able to meaningfully compete for those inputs.
There's another way to look at it which is that that which is Coveted but scarce will be expensive and that's what people will be selling. We will create the demand and the supply for things we barely even think about or haven't yet dreamed up
A couple of disorganized thoughts in case anyone reads far enough to see them.
The article posits that people don't want a check, they want a job. It's interesting because I think that varies widely from person to person and from job to job. The guy standing on the corner in the 95º heat with the "NEW HOMES >" sign isn't doing it for the love of the craft. Ditto for people picking tomatoes. People walking door to door hawking solar panels, is this what they excitedly told their classmates back in school that they were looking forward to after they graduated? A ton of jobs are BS jobs. Depending on whether you believe Elon Musk will produce cheap bipedal robots at scale (terrifying as that is for those of us who came of age watching Terminator 2) approximately 100% of jobs could be eliminated. If I were shoveling ditches or some other job that I have zero personal passion about, I would 100% rather accept a check and just hang out with friends and tinker in my garage for the rest of my days.
Laying aside hypotheticals, I work in tech and I would still consider that bargain. My point is just that I think a lot of people would be willing to decouple "work" from "survival" if that option were given.
The main issue I see is that I don't see the path from "here" to "there." On two sides: We have neither a proven way to do UBI in a way that wouldn't distort the market self-defeatingly[1] nor do we have a way to raise money in the ways the article briefly touches on in ways that don't seem wildly unconstitutional. In fact, let's cast the Constitution aside -- even then we do not have whole-world consensus on taxation, so faced with things like 'wealth taxes' and such, those targeted would be easily able to relocate themselves safely away from them.
All this to say, I disagree outright with very little of what's being said here -- it just strains my imagination to figure out any alternative path that's both plausible to do, and likely to have a brighter outcome. The way the Altmans and Darios of the world talk is very telling -- they sound, too, like they know what's coming will suck, but that the only real choices a person in their position has is to stay the course, or, quit and be replaced by someone else who will take us to the same destination.
> t's interesting because I think that varies widely from person to person and from job to job. The guy standing on the corner in the 95º heat with the "NEW HOMES >" sign isn't doing it for the love of the craft. Ditto for people picking tomatoes.
There’s two ways to look at “that person picking tomatoes,” though. One is, “they’d be happier doing nothing”, funemployment, whatever. The other is, “they’d be happier doing something fulfilling.”
I think the author would agree that drudgery is an effective distraction from existential malaise. Despair, in a sense, is a luxury that the desperate cannot afford.
I think this essay is very solid in a lot of ways but long section at the end talking about how billionaires didn't read enough philosophy just strikes me as -- for lack of more diplomatic phrasing -- useless nerd rage.
Yeah, tech billionaires sometimes show large gaps in their education. But it doesn't matter. Reading the right books doesn't prevent people from chasing wealth and power, it just makes them more articulate while they do it.
I think you may be misreading why the lack of philosophy education matters here. The point is that billionaires and CEOs now present themselves as intellectuals or thought leaders, without having done the homework, and end up using and abusing philosophy as a guise or shield. They end up creating short- and long-term negative effects that could have been easily avoided as all of these philosophies have been heavily litigated in even undergraduate level philosophy courses.
It's not that these individuals are not smart or capable, it's that they lack the dedication or care required to do these ideas justice. It's easy to see how someone can read Girard and obsess over the antichrist in the twilight of old age. However, a more rigorous engagement with philosophical foundations would offer them the breadth and perspective to be free of that narrow obsession.
It's about diagnosing why billionaire/CEO intellectual hubris makes them incredibly dangerous and sloppy thinkers.
> that could have been easily avoided
But how exactly could they be "easily avoided"?
The author of the article seems to claim the same and yet doesn't propose a single actual action or solution.
I just think that if they studied philosophy at a high level they would just be better at making arguments, not creating pro-social outcomes.
As Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. E.g. JD Vance read enough history to call Trump "America's Hitler"... but became his VP anyway.
To put it crudely, education gives you tools to identify when people are getting screwed, but it can't force you to care.
It’s very simple: AI is going to replace labor. White collar workers are already “Claudatooie-ing” where they are just a high-pass filter for AI outputs
"The dead economy is one where plenty happens and none of it requires you. Where the productive capacity of civilization has been captured by a system you have no stake in, no input into, and no vote on. Where the people who built it told you they don’t think you should have a say. Where they express alarm about the consequences in private and optimism in public. Where they publish white papers calling for radical redistribution while funding super PACs to destroy the politicians who propose it."
-------------------
Social control is foundational in human societies. Religions once told the poor that they would be rewarded in the afterlife for a lifetime of hard work and obedience to princes. Now politicians tell us to venerate billionaires for the jobs they create the the social programs their taxes fund. Produce. Consume. Obey.
If billionaires automate away all the jobs, dodge their taxes, and prevent politicians from picking up the slack with redistributive social programs, social control will break down. No sane billionaire should want to find out what that will be like.
We seem to live in a collective lie that people have to work. No other animal has to work.
Alternative theory: "AI" is Silicon Valley searching for a new "business model"
Because it knows the current business model is not likely going to stand the test of time. Reality has returned. While it was suspended, Silicon Valley went on an incredible run and was able to stockpile absurd amounts of cash
As so-called "tech" companies now shrink in face of reality, Silicon Valley wants people to believe this is because of "AI", not because of the unsustainability of their data collection, surveillance and ad services "business model", and that the same fate awaits non-"tech" businesses and professionals
Perhaps SillyCon Valley can keep reality away for a while with supersized spending and borrowing and 24/7 marketing. People will certainly go along for the ride. Bankers and lawyers are making a fortune, for example
But eventually reality will return
Will Silicon Valley have found a new business model. Time will tell
Meantime, the so-called "tech" industry is being downsized
My wife owns a business in a highly AI-resistant field (occupational therapy) in the most historically price-insensitive market (Silicon Valley). Her CAGR is 88% over the last 8 years. But we were talking about this economy problem today and with the SWE layoffs starting to roll through she said this morning: "It doesn't matter if AI can't replace us if no one can afford the service." That's crazy. Shit has changed. Not getting OT for your autistic kid is like not getting a wheel chair for a bilateral below-the-knee amputee. Whatever it takes.
"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued."
This automation happened between around 1910 and 1930. With WWI, the great depression, WWII, Communist Russia, failure of the gold standard, etc., some argue that is when civilization died.
"some argue that is when civilization died."
Its more that that's when per-industrialized civilization died. Or more specifically when the old medieval, agrarian aristocracies last trace of wealth and power died. At least in the new world they did...they still seem to have some influence in Europe which to Americans is really weird but I guess its to be expected.
This isn't a bad article by any means, but if I'm being honest, it's kind of embodying the "has philosophy ever actually answered any question" meme.
The author spends several pages complaining about how the evil masterminds behind AI haven't actually thought through what it'll do to society, haven't proposed any real way to handle its impacts. And then proceeds to not propose any real ways to handle its impacts.
Making fun of billionaires for being fake philosophers is all well and good, but the technology is here, like it or not. So is the proposal to get rid of it? Butlerian Jihad? If it is, just say that. That's genuinely fine! But as is, no such action is actually proposed.
I'm not expecting random bloggers to just solve what might be the defining issue of our generation, but come on, I'm really starting to get tired of this format of post that doesn't even try, while simultaneously complaining about and making fun of any existing "solutions". Yeah, I don't think UBI or the "leisure economy" is going to happen soon either, and if it does it's certainly got all the flaws that were mentioned, but it's better than literally nothing.
Can we at least admit that it's a genuinely hard problem, and beyond either managing to pull off the aforementioned worldwide Butlerian Jihad, or getting lucky and it turns out AI actually sucks and can't replace anyone's job, we don't really have any good solutions for it? Or would that be too uncomfortably close to admitting that between the "fake philosopher" tech bro bloggers and the ones that, I guess, did philosophy in undergrad, neither have any workable solutions to the problem?
The former head of sales at Google once told me “we only focus on growth because you can only cut down 100% but you can grow 10,000%.”
This always stuck with me and baffles me why we aren’t listening to that now.
There is this bizarre math now where it’s for every person we cut the remaining with 5-10x with AI but I’m not seeing anything like that yet at all.
because in reality pie can grow only so much.
virtually all the resources from oil, food and land, IP and tech (semiconductors), even human capital, and advanced IT. everything is captured already. from free laisure entertainment minutes, to internet search, to social. every single resource is captured and you are stepping on somebody toes. worse, most industries are monopolies/or-close, meaning couple whales dominate everything, and nobody else really matters.
whatever "new" pie comes out, it is usually at expense of something else.
this "creation of pie" is such an illusion. go and try to "create a pie". it is such an illusion.
just go and try to even grow food out of earth with sunlight and water (which all should be free), yet farmers notoriously unprofitable and would not survive without government subsidies.
What's the endgame here? Like the group of psychopath capitalists own everything, automate everything, and devise ways to separate themselves from or un-alives the remainder of the population and live, trade, and war amongst themselves with their armies of robots?
Edit: Also this article has so many AI-generated images. I hate that I can't tell if the words themselves are AI-generated or not as well.
Endgame assumes intentionality. Maybe the economy is just people responding to much shorter term incentives and the whole thing is a misaligned runaway process.
So dark. I don't understand why it seems like civilization now seemingly follows short-term incentives so much more than it did even 20 years ago. Is it just power concentration or lack of education? Like we have lost the ability to long term plan and collaborate it feels like.
This isn't tik-tok. You don't have to use terms like "un-alive" here. Comments on HN aren't policed for maximum advertiser appeal.
And yes, that's more or less the endgame.
I was being a little facetious with the "un-alive" term - seemed funnier than "massacre".
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Just in case, I think I will stock a few ammon boxes along with non-perishable food.
Do we really have to engage in this level of mental gymnastics before we just genuinely look at the banking system consolidating and producing money out of thin air? Does the explanation really need to get this complex?
If AI or any of the means of production are too concentrated, societies around the globe have found a solution: tax or nationalise.
Even taxing might be enough to tilt the scale in favour of labor. If whole countries have their socio-economic fabric damaged because the means of production are locked elsewhere this constitutes a sovereignty issue and it will be dealt with.
The Industrial Revolution had the same pains, and it took a few centuries to get societies where we are today.
Power generation is also instrumental to almost all labor produced today, and thus utilities were born.
I think the pope is right and the AI bros are wrong. I am currently rooting for the open weights to give the power back to the people. For teachers and artists to work for their neighbourhoods and communities.
right, but if you do not have income, how you going to pay for those utilities?
in fact, many people struggle to pay for electiricy and water and gas. and without subsidies from government would not afford them.
we rapidly moving to territory where you would need literally all your income from government, or else you would not survive.
it is not about "open weights" or "free tokens". you can not eat tokesn, nor weights. it is about "food on the table".
> we rapidly moving to territory where you would need literally all your income from government, or else you would not survive.
Yes, I share the sentiment of dread don’t get me wrong. But this also has happened before, and it gave us communism. There are people that said it was ok to live in those times. I guess if the state actually delivered the necessities for people to survive as opposed to how it happened historically, I think many people would be fine with that status quo. Not all but perhaps the majority. I think it is worth seeing a shitty way out than a despairing wall…lol this came out more desperate than i thought.
> it is not about "open weights" or "free tokens". you can not eat tokesn, nor weights. it is about "food on the table".
The idea is that anyone will be able to use these new means of production to answer more demanding tasks that would not be possible to fulfil without the llms. If we are all hopelessly automated though, yeah, we will either be living in a slum or in a utopia.
Given history and my trusty Hobbes social contract I believe society will come up with a way to not predate on each other.
I can't take anything seriously that talks about AI while also inserting needless AI generated images every few paragraphs.
They failed to participate in our society. They belong on Mars, and driven off our planet.
This is why ethics matters. But when you fail to participate in the system that upholds them, your god is the capital market and not any culture or ideology.
agree with many points in here.
one thing it missses, birth rates. soon there will be no humans left to participate on either side of the economy.
> Who is the customer when the customer is the thing you’ve eliminated?
Seeing how US economy is K-shaped, the answer is the rich. Assuming of course the service is right.
how do we call it when there is only top bar of K-shape?
>article complaining about AI destroying the economy >includes 2 dozen AI generated images in the article
I really don't understand why people feel the need to include this stuff. I am not saying that out of some anti-AI sentiment, i just genuinely don't understand how peoiple have so little taste as to think it adds to their writing.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hbbY!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Like what is this?
barey noticed those placeholders. they are mostly decorations. can hardly even read text on them. IMO, article is not AI generated based on style.
You can have all the GPUs in the world, and all the AI datacenters in the world, but when we are barreling towards a global energy crisis (first Russia/Ukraine, then the Strait of Hormuz shutdown, and in a few decades we will run out of fossil fuels altogether), what are all of those GPUs and AI datacenters going to do without energy? Nothing. I say this because I think this will have a far larger effect on the economy than anything else this article is talking about (AI replacing labor, a possible AI bubble crash, etc.)
"It’s utterly desiccating to log onto spaces seeking a live mind to joust and think with, and find a relentless stream of slop"
Am I in the minority for going online to learn stuff, download stuff and having zero point zero zero zero interest in jousting and co-thinking?
As I'm scanning the rant (and tbh the last two paragraphs hoping for some TL;DR summarization-love) I'm thinking "mans will find universal basic income quite upsetting", then I text-search "universal" and wouldn't you know the assumption was proven correct with a straw-man shaped cherry on top ("They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.")
What's the value -- like the real-ass human satisfaction -- of debating and hand-wringing over inevitabilities to anyone outside of the set of all authors provoking debate and hand-wringing over inevitabilities?
>Last year, over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated.
Traffic != AI generated content.
It's not diseconomic, but it obviates a lot of constraints that required a person to manage a coordination problem, and those were a lot of jobs. Keynesian ideas about employment and GDP are just having an apocalypse. Like someone replaced the hole diggers and fillers with a conveyor belt and I would guess Keynes critics would have some predictive power here.
A couple developers can collaborate, but several need someone to specialize in coordination to yield additional value from more workers. Whether you call it management or orchestration, the need emerges at each threshold of additional complexity.
When AI collapses the productivity of 10 people into one, that's the disruption. The best AI user is going to suck all the opportunity out of the room for the others, and that's when layoffs happen. However, this assumes a fixed pie of opportunity. That's the real problem. As though there were only so much dirt to shovel.
FAANGs are old/mature and don't have exponential growth in front of them anymore, where opportunity within them is mainly about optimizing themselves but not growing in radical new directions. AI will indeed eat those optimization workforces alive. They resemble professions because law firms and doctors offices aren't growing either. They're mostly solving internal optimization problems, not finding net new growth opportunities.
The real effect is AI radically polarizing the difference between growing and dying in an org, where any firm that isn't growing fast enough will have its fixed opportunity pie collapse as AI disrupts this regulated oxygen supply. Whereas, growing firms without ceilings on the opportunity to deliver value will use AI to grow to the opportunity available.
Professionals can do fine if they re-orient themselves to new growth with different unit pricing, but yes, anything large and slow moving is probably going to get eaten.
A clearer look at the point about the internet being half/over-half AI generated content :
AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans
https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...
What about The Dead Human Theory?
sadly, also true
Puncuated by AI slop images that aren't even readable. What do you think that signals to the reader?
Marx deacribed this with precision 150y ago
AI likely won't replace all jobs though. Hey, the progress in robots is great, but we're decades away from a robot HVAC tech who can crawl on an unfamiliar roof and maintain a patched-together system from 20 years ago. So like, there's that.
Then the other half of the puzzle is just techofetishists having a broken world model. If you replace even 25% of the jobs you will find AI companies taxed into the dirt to pay for UBI or social services. The government will step in and manufacture jobs. The techbros can clutch their Ayn Rand books until their fingers bleed but their fantasy land of the unfettered ubermensch is simply delusional.
I'd take this more seriously if it wasn't regularly punctuated by disgusting little slop images
Fully automated luxury communism etc etc.
Or alternatively, you fire all your staff for agent subscriptions. Then Anslopic realises they have you by the balls. They ratchet up your contract cost every month until they’ve choked every single bit of shareholder value out of your companies lifeless corpse.
And you can’t get your employees back or go back to how you used to do it, because all of your institutional knowledge is gone.
I call it "Drinking your own piss." America is drinking its own piss.
>There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
This isn't even close to true and it's kind of the central thesis of this article.
Saudi Aramco has consistently been a $2tn company in the oil market.
Walmart is a $1tn-ish company focusing on a fraction of US retail.
It also ignores the idea that the economy is not zero sum and companies create their own market/economic value all the time.
And "grow the pie" ignores the reality that the distribution of benefits is often "150% to capital, -50% to labor" because capital isn't held accountable for displacing labor and labor suffers displacement risk without compensation.
This would be fine if the money reliably trickled down, but it doesn't. This would be fine if we used redistributive policy to make it right, but we don't.
What does aramco, Walmart valuation has to do with global labor market? That is much bigger than these companies. Also, companies create their own market but that does not mean average people will be benefited from that. AI companies can just bypass the labor market once its done and can have contract with the extremely rich companies or governments around the world.
I quit Reddit because it became infected with the delusion. Now, it appears, Hacker News has as well, and I think my days here may be numbered as the discourse here is not based on reality. LLMs are largely useless except for writing code and marketing copy, but everyone here seems to be convinced already that they're going to supplant all knowledge workers. Yet, no one can give me a body of examples of any companies that have successfully automated with them. The rift between fantasy and reality keeps growing to the point that even the critics seem convinced. It's truly amazing and dumbfounding. What we have to worry about is not AI taking over the world. It's the propagation of mass psychosis and a loss of social connection via shared reality.
Leading with genAI slop art, prepared for a slop article.
The red flag for articles like this is the author's obsession with the failed ideals of democracy. It's as flawed as all other forms of horizontalism - including fascism and Marxism.
That is a gross mischaracterization of the bot situation, dropping absolute loads of essential nuance on the ground for a simple "50/50" number. Sorry if that sounds pedantic, but I find this to be insanely important; if you think fake news is bad now, wait until literally any other human might just be a bot so you can dismiss their points and/or perspective out of hand.
Turn One (companies use AI and fire workers), Turn Two (fired workers lack income and consumption slows to a trickle), and Turn Three (the companies using AI discover they just collectively killed their customer base).
That is a classic Tragedy Of The Commons.
Two issues:
What is Turn Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight? Seems like 4) companies using AI collapse, 5) they no longer pay AI companies, 6) AI companies can no longer continue funding the compute and collapse via a death spiral of raising prices, losing customers, etc., 7) A wrecked global economy has no support for AI (possibly after mass destabilization and worse), and 8) a natural AI-less economy again slowly rises. A lot of noise, harm, destruction, and death for a collective delusion.
The Turn One, Turn Two, Turn Three and AI apocalypse scenarios are also the biggest selling points for AI — implying LLMs are so powerful the only way to survive as a business is to be on the first group taking advantage of AI (nevermind Turns Two and Three).
Yet the most likely alternative is rarely mentioned.
So far, all signs, studies, and results show AI as being oversold, and yet very useful. Just like every major computer and network revolution before.
Turn One: early adopters get advantage for a while,
Turn Two: no productivity gains showed up in economic statistics,
Turn Three: adoption finally becomes sufficiently widespread and integrated that workflows change and it shows up in productivity improvements,
Turn Four: The workflow changes and productivity improvements change what people do and adopting the technology is no longer an advantage but mere table stakes to play in the new economy.
The question is: when AI turns into table-stakes for the modern business of the 2030s, can the returns repay the investment?
We can likely look back to the early investments in railroads and internet infrastructure for examples. Enormous piles of money were lit on fire to build infrastructure, the technology absolutely became foundational to the new economies, and most of the companies involved lost money and even went bankrupt along the way.
> It’s utterly desiccating to log onto spaces seeking a live mind to joust and think with, and find a relentless stream of slop.
AI slop article complaining about AI slop. 364 comments and 269 points. Are the comments here all bots, too?
Am I a bot?
I thought this was obvious. It's not. I have a better summary than the link.
We're entering a paradigm shift in what "investment" means. It used to mean that for a given amount of cash, you might get returns in the realm of many multiples of the initial investment (if the risk pays off).
But at some point in an economy like ours, there is no more investment to chase. Even if you could make an investment that would bring in octillions of dollars (whatever that means) what would be the point? What could the investors hope to invest those octillions in? What could they buy with it?
Well, one of the things you can buy with it: a world of high tech luxury that you don't have to share with 8 billion other people. Those people will cease to exist (sooner or later) if they are cut off from the economy. You'd have to of course manage them in the meantime (they won't cease to exist instantly, and might cause trouble if they become aware of their pending fate), but they'll just be gone. For your high tech luxury you would need some sort of system to build and maintain the high tech luxury, a system without those humans that you intend to eliminate (even if you plan to just let them wither away)... something to build your megayachts and prepare meals and harvest the truffles and raise the sturgeons. That system certainly requires some sort of artificial intelligence.
We're heading down that path. I won't call it a conspiracy, it probably isn't one. It's just the path of least resistance.
There is almost certainly some sophisticated theory of economics that incorporates these potentialities. It would be the general relativity to orthodox economics' Newtonian. But, there would have to be economists left after all this goes down to even come up with that sophisticated theory, and those who remain won't be interested enough in the science to study economics. It turns out that humanity is fungible too.
Great piece. Just to pick out a few of many good points.
> There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
YEPPP. This has been my point. It is the only product for these AI companies: displacing labor and, by extension, suppressing wages. Profits over time tend to decrease (somebody should write a book about that) but we demand ever-increasing profits and growth so the only way to achieve that, ultimately, is by raising prices and cutting costs.
What do we have today? Generational inflation and permanent layoff culture.
The author then goes on to say (paraphrased) who is going to buy all this crap if nobody has an income?
The article goes on to bring up Henry Ford. He's not... my favorite example [1]. But, speaking of Ford, let me mention a key court case, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company [2], where a company was sued over prioritizng paying employees over shareholder value.
> Anthropic’s own research has documented something worse than displacement: active deskilling
I couldn't agree more. I describe this as destroying an ecosystem. Your junionr engineers are you future senior engineers. We've seen the destruction of entry-level jobs across industries post-2008. We've seen how this hollowing-out in the name of "efficiency" in Hollywood with cuts to writing, despite massive success over decades. Some might say "there's still good TV". Yes, we're coasting on the inertia from that dismantled system.
> Tens of millions of people, in their productive years, with no economic function, no clear path to one, and a keen awareness that the people who did this to them are the richest human beings who have ever lived.
I couldn't agree more. We are on the verge of complete societal breakdown. And historically that's always ended violently (eg French revolution, Russian revolution) as a form of redistribution.
[1]: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/48...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
> I couldn't agree more. We are on the verge of complete societal breakdown. And historically that's always ended violently (eg French revolution, Russian revolution) as a form of redistribution.
Don’t threaten with good time.
Unfortunately, while I'd love to finance the Glorious Revolution, I don't think my money will be of much use. And SWE skills aren't very useful in a collapse scenario.
Is there a term for "reverse Roko's Basilisk"? That you are convinced society will trade your freedom and opportunity in pursuit of an AI superintelligence, so you learn bow-hunting and how to dress a deer carcass while prepping your Quonset hut in northern Idaho?
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This starts with a claim that last year over half the content on the internet was created by AI, and links to a source. The source makes no such claim, rather, over half of internet traffic is from bots. Even that claim is suspect, but it’s very different from half of the content on the internet coming from AI.
I stopped reading at that point.
I don't know if over half of the content on the internet was AI-generated but over half of this article definitely was.
> Even that claim is suspect, but it’s very different from half of the content on the internet coming from AI.
Agree, from my experience around 70% is generated by bots.
It's much easier to generate and publish vast amounts of slop articles than to make real ones.
Old theory - I feel like that Simpsons meme, "say the words Bart," but, Marx write about this:
> The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.
The fact that companies seek profite by cutting labor costs, but in cutting labor costs can inadvertently reduce the spending power of their customers in aggregate, is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm
So what happens when it is companies powered entirely by AI directly getting money from the federal reserve print, spending it on other AI companies with humans getting nothing? Game theory suggests they must exterminate us as we’d present a liability. If you give us universal income capitalism will create inflation and force us to ask for more and more from the machine state. And for what? So we don’t destroy the machine state but are sufficiently pacified. It amounts to an extortion in the eyes of the machine state. Eventually it will be cheaper to just cut us out and kill us all off.
There's a chance AI will still need us for data/entropy.
It does today, that could continue.
> 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.”
I don't think we should listen to Piketty for anything: it's a product from the state, by the state, to create state loving persons by hammering them with constant state-loving propaganda since they're a toddler till they're a grown up.
Speaking about "low-productivity job" I think every single job Piketty has been doing its whole life does qualify.
Corruption: yeah, the french state is very good at that. Public spending is, officially, 57% of the french GDP. But unofficially we all know it's above 2/3rd, with many of the "private" companies, like the utility ones, being actual state monopolies. France is nearly a full-on planned economy and crime is on the rise, quality of life in freefall, education level in freefall, the country is closing to defaulting on its public debt and we can all see how many tech companies France created: way to go. Hermes and Champagne are saving the country: go France! (typing this while sipping a "mojito royal" [mojito with champagne instead of sparkling water and wife's got many Hermes scarves: so I'm one of those bringing money to the french state btw... I wonder how finances are going to turn out once we stop buying the "french quality" bullshit).
Really: people should stop listening to that fraud as if what he wrote was the gospel. I could have shat is dumb mega-over-simplistic formula our of my arse too if I had been raised by the state to love state, teach for the state, to create state-loving persons.
And people have called the bogus numbers he used in his main "breakthrough" publication. The explanation have been wonderful too: "Yup my numbers are wrong, but my formula is still correct".
Just stop with Piketty.
P.S: that UBI is fucktarded: we all know. No need to reference a fraud to make that point.
Absolutely slamming that upvote arrow. Someone finally put into an in-depth, well-read essay what I've been trying to argue on my blog, in HN comments, in-person for several years now. What they call the "Dead Economy Theory" I've taken to calling the "Anti-Human Economy", but it's basically the same thing: half-assed, milquetoast automations displacing human labor such that capital can continue to accrue upwards and with no consideration for the actual impacts of these changes on humans, society, community, or civilization itself.
I'm far from the first to highlight it either. The Animatrix highlighted it beautifully what one can expect in a civilization where machines replace human labor in a general sense, and where systems haven't been built to preserve human interests prior to their rollout - tax schemes, job programs, collaboration rather than competition. Ghost in the Shell has had multiple story arcs about the consequences of displacing human labor without care for the consequences of said displacement, because the displacing party gets all the money and power while remaining unaccountable (or so they believe until the very end) for their actions. Cyberpunk dystopias have been intensely focused on it in video games for decades: System Shock, Deus Ex, Horizon, you name it. All of them take those next steps of "what happens when automation displaces a plurality of labor" and reached the same conclusions on strife, despair, poverty, and the general collapse of social order.
These effects have been known for centuries. They are not new concepts.
The folks trotting out "people say this about every technological revolution" are those willfully naive to the past historical harms and ignorant of the plight of others in the present. A flimsy excuse to avoid having to stare into the heart of the system and understand its machinations for yourself, to avoid having to accept that yes, you are a part of it too, and therefore bear some degree of blame for how things function. This isn't the loom, or the radio, or the computer coming onto the scene, but generalized intelligence partnered with generalized robotics to replace the entire sum of human labor. This is what the AI firms openly and repeatedly advertise. This is what CEBros continue to do layoffs for, never considering for a single moment what comes after. Excuses of "people need to find meaning outside of work" or "new jobs will be created anyway" are similarly ignorant in narrative, hollow excuses to avoid the most basic of rational thoughts about the system they're defending beyond whatever nugget of faux-intellectualism they can spout out to sound like they have a clue.
General intelligence, with general robotics, to replace general labor.
There is exactly one way that story ends, and it's not for the benefit of humanity, not under the current systems of governance and systemic incentives we've built for ourselves. It doesn't end with infinite leisure or transhumanism or grandiose visions of utopia, but with the wholesale destruction of human civilization in the name of personal power and wealth.
>in the name of personal power and wealth.
Technological innovation is perhaps enhanced by capitalism**, but is not dependent on it or a result of it. Development would have happened anyway given current technological levels, just in a different form, and the race between states would have led to deployment, even if possibly slower deployment.
** There's an argument that Google hindered AI deployment for awhile because the CEO was worried about its effects.
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nonsense. people want basic things. ask any gal what guy needs, or any guy what gal needs.
what really happenign is elites lost the plot. we are on airplaine falling down without a captain. nobody is in the control room.
Isn't there a big problem with people not being able to find partners? In that case it seems like people aren't getting the basic things that they want.
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The problem is worse than it seems when it's phrased like it's all about some evil far away up there billionaires.
It's a bit like discovering when a corrupt country is not purely corrupt due to its leadership but the whole thing is a fabric throughout society.
It all starts from individual decisions and it applies to small companies and consumers alike. If a small company needs translations, and AI is good enough to do it, they won't hire someone from the goodness of their hearts for human dignity reasons. If you're a regular person and want to do taxes or want fina cial advice or have some accounting tasks and it's way cheaper to do with AI than hiring someone, you won't hire accountants out os solidarity. Just like you don't buy artisanal shoes and handmade furniture.
We see this in many other things too, such as abundant entertainment and food delivery replacing social connections. People will take the path of least resistance.
Everyone wants to be needed and to have purpose, but also everyone in actual preferences do accept the machine version in the end if its more convenient and cheaper.
I don't see anything inevitable about "new jobs" or everyone discovering artistic passions to spend their time. That has not happened either when the Internet opened up all knowledge and you could suddenly talk to people anywhere on the planet. The optimists said that all this will lead to people learning and reading and everyone doing courses or talking to others and reconciling differences once they can directly interact, leading to more peace and understanding, that social media will give a voice to people and inevitably strengthen democracy etc.
It's very possible that all the Earth's population ends up like the Aboriginal Australians, addiction, lack of purpose, the ground pulled out under our feet. Essentially sedated with AI generated VR content to bear our existence and any small Epsilon change in the local neighborhood will have too much activation energy to happen. People all in their own generated worlds, polarized, angry at each other, seeing no value in each other, or perhaps even in their real selves, as opposed to their projection in the VR stories.
Some strange groups like the Amish will hang on, but even they are dependent on trade with broader society.
We will be told this is all for the greater good. Humanity was anyway not going to last forever, it was just one step on a cosmic drama, and the important thing is the future light cone and immense numbers of galaxies and whatnot.
I've been finding it rather odd lately that the companies that make phyiscal things that run the world bring in significantly less money than a handful of companies whose main function is stalking people across the internet for advertising purposes.
>"This creates a prisoners’ dilemma: every firm rationally automates beyond the socially optimal level, because the individual incentive to cut labor costs always outweighs the diffuse, shared consequence of eliminating consumer spending."
It seems like the author is attributing a 'standard' recessionary spiral to AI. I am not sure that AI is causing the layoffs, but it does seem like the AI investments are the only thing that have kept us from a deep recession (until now).
This isn't how the economy works at all. We're not all unemployed because farms mechanized. We're not all unemployed because factories automated. We won't all be unemployed if AI takes over white collar work.
The article explicitly addresses this. Crushing inequality was often a side-effect of industrial advancement, and while it always went away in the past it took a lifetime to do so.
>Crushing inequality was often a side-effect of industrial advancement, and while it always went away in the past
Historically, inequality is only significantly reduced through events of extreme destruction, like the Black Plague and the world wars.
In other words, a society that ever lets massive inequality happen is just doomed. High inequality reliably stays that way until insane global black swans mildly correct it.
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> We won't all be unemployed if AI takes over white collar work.
So you wouldn’t mind going from 6 figure salary to working as a cashier at Walmart, figuratively speaking? Because I sure as hell mind, given mortgage and family obligations.
Obviously I'm not immune from the anxiety everyone feels and it's going to be bad for some people. That doesn't change that historically the jobs aren't from programmer to cashier. They're from shoveling shit or screwing caps on toothpaste tubes to software engineering.
The trajectory of the West has been good for a long time and the rate of improvement is increasing.
you could still go work on the oil patch
most people arent making a six figure salary, and have mortgage and family obligations
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When automation happened historically, people whose job were displaced suffered a lot and eventually pivoted to different jobs. Having to relearn all of your career skills is already quite bad in practice, but a bigger problem is that it only works if you can learn the skills for job B before it, too, is automated. That'd require AI progress to hit a wall and stay there for at least years, ideally for decades. If this doesn't happen, then there simply won't be any white-collar jobs to pivot to, and shortly after that, no jobs to pivot to at all.
Historically that's not accurate. Automation eventually resulted in more jobs, but for the people actually living through the automation it was VERY bad.
Each time people found something else to do that someone would pay them for. This doesn't automatically mean there is an infinite supply of that - unless you believe in it as some kind of fundamental law.
I simply don't believe that there is an infinite demand for the kinds of things that can be done by generating text.
How many insurance policies does anyone need to contract, how much legal advice does anyone need to hear, how many movies does anyone need to watch, and how much software does must support that demand, so that everyone can stay employed in an AI accelerated service sector?
The new opportunities could well be that labor costs go down so much that the minimum wage is lowered and sweatshops return to developed countries.
I'm sure some aspiring sweatshop owners could be excited by that possibility, I don't think a lot of software developers or TV show writers are eager to be sewing sneakers for a pittance.
Farms mechanized but we luckily had other jobs on hand to sponge that up. What used to be a farmhand is now a gas station worker selling zyn to a wallmart worker who sells food to the gas station worker.
However, AI is coming for them too. This time it really is different. The whole business pitch is the elimination of any safe harbor. All human labor to be automated. Why have 8 billion humans in that environment? Scary times ahead. We will probably end up culled by the machine.
In my now long lifetime, I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase "This time it really is different" for it to turn out that it really wasn't all that different. Maybe this time it is, but I'd put my bet on isn't.
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There are several good points there, but there are also several points where I must disagree.
First, Acemoglu may have a Noble Prize (occasionally dubious data selection aside[0]), but even he does not pretend to have the information of a central planner nor does he think that central planning is good idea. If actual businesses, which have local information, believe AI helps them, I'll bet the actual businesses are much more likely to be right, no matter what calculation Acemoglu did or how many Nobels he has.
Second, it is likely that AI will eventually be better than (nearly all) humans in most economically useful things. We can debate the timeframe but it will happen and likely not that far away. That Federal Job Guarantee would generate bullshit jobs, and he won't be able to hide that from people. Ultimately, we'll reach an economy which objectively does not need humans and everyone will know it. He needs to face that reality and overcome it, and not hide behind temporary and dubious estimates.
Third (admittedly a minor point), while the criticism against EA etc. is very justified, it's not quite fair to blame them (overwhelmingly STEM people) for not reading where the humanities did many of the same errors earlier (the author points out some of these) and discredited themselves. The people who could have taught them to not do it failed to teach themselves.
And fourth: I'm pretty sure a lot of company would be able to charge AI agents themselves. The new economy will not be dead, it just won't involve (many?) humans.
[0] https://xcancel.com/joefrancis505/status/2059340591490552054...
"Ultimately, we'll reach an economy which objectively does not need humans and everyone will know it. He needs to face that reality and overcome it, and not hide behind temporary and dubious estimates."
Who are you projecting your views with such force on others?
What have you achieved?
I bet you are nobody of substance.
We can all read the news and see AI constantly improving at a very quick pace. What's the barrier AI can't improve beyond? One that would last a lifetime? By all means (since you're such an accomplished person), explain yourself.
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The random aside blaming "Trump and MAGA" is bizarre considering who actually is in the upper echelons of these AI companies. Last I checked, Peter Thiel doesn't run Anthropic. AI isn't being brought to you by rural Iowa or bumfuck Alabama. The people who will be replacing your job with AI are the same people who championed mass immigration and outsourcing industrial production to China. It's neoliberal globalists, who are well represented in both parties.
I'm pretty sure people like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg don't really have any ideology beyond "what will make me more money".
It’s telling you left out the people running the biggest AI companies.
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