Comment by blltprfmnk
10 hours ago
Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy. That may change in time, but we aren’t seeing massive losses as a result of AI, despite some C suites using that as an excuse to lay off after over hiring.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-re...
This is my first time seeing this publication. It was insightful -- thank you for sharing.
Change comes slowly, then all at once.
Sometimes. And often in unanticipated directions.
So for instance like if AI becomes slowly less relevant, then is discarded all at once. Change will be surprising! That much is likely.
I'm a pretty big AI skeptic, but can't get behind this comment.
It is changing the economy. It is changing how work is done. We are not going back, even if the emphasis in the workplace and role it performs matures.
I'm still patiently waiting for this whole "Internet" thing to become less relevant too. It surely is just a fad with no economic benefits.
> Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy.
Economists (including but not limited to Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and Arthur Levitt) also spent a decade arguing against Brooksley Born's 1998 warnings that unregulated over-the-counter derivatives would inevitably lead to a financial crisis.
Economists can be spectacularly wrong and short-sighted (and blinded by prior assumptions of how things work) until suddenly the thing that should have been obvious the whole time is no longer ignorable.
True. But it's also true that "the thing that should have been obvious the whole time" may turn out not to be so obvious after all. For example, the inevitability of poor working conditions leading to a worldwide socialist revolution and the collapse of capitalism.
The economies that have collapsed are the socialist ones.
Breaking news, frog in pot says water isn’t too hot yet