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".
Haven’t heard that meme, but it seems like you could replace “AI” with “civilizational striving/class struggle” and extend it across the whole of human history
Also... I won't add any details to avoid doxing myself, but trust me on this, Rick is the last person nowadays you'd want to listen to for anything taste-related, unless we're talking about feeding your own ego and carefully curating your own public image, and disappearing for weeks. I'd pay very good money to be around his ghost producers/writers/engineers again, though.
> People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital.
Those people are usually very talented and work 16/7. And they need to convince other similar people to work for them, usually at a lower-than-market rate.
The premise here is "talented humans working hard" will stop being a valuable thing due to AI.
> Sorry that's no realistic. People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital.
You're clinging past: what you is true when human capital counts for something, but what happens when it doesn't? Where the party who can spend the most tokens on the case wins (or has a much greater chance of success)?
Law might not be the best example of that, but (under current trends) a lot of areas will be.
> Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.
You're claiming AI will make the economy more labor intensive? Huh?
Sounds like Jevons Paradox to me: Amount of output per worker-hour increases(cost drops edit sorry), paradoxically worker-hours _increase_.
Mechanism? New Use Cases become viable.
Just like LED lights and Virtual Machines made light-per-watt and workloads-per-server more efficient, what did we do with that efficiency? We didn't pocket the cash, we turned every billboard and many buildings into JumboTrons, and we made millions of new cheap cloud VMs to run hundreds of thousands of new little businesses that never would have happened.
Look at coding now: People are finishing side projects that they never would have, closing out old bugs or test coverage they never would have, starting side businesses they never would have before.
This is new demand being created before our eyes as the cost of knowledge work drops.
It will never happen. Capitalism works when consumers can choose the best service provider. When there is only one universal service provide (AI), behind various "fronts", it would be catastrophic.
And all the consumers lose catastrophically.
So there should be at least some human component to differentiate between the various "AI" providers.
But if the AIs learn from the business (at some point they need to) then the differentiator get's absorbed back. If you figure out how to optimize your AI/humanoid robot, that benefit you have only lasts until the next AI model that incorporates your successes.
But LLMs does not learn/train like that. They need the same thing repeated a gazillion times in the their training data to actually use it in inference.
So unless this human element get absorbed widely into literature, then I think the scenario you present is not possible, at least in the context of current LLMs.
May be there will be true AI in future, that can read a fact and grasp it brilliance, like a human do, and use it in answering future questions. Then what you said could be possible.
I'm assuming for it to work at the level of filling rolls in businesses like this they will need to generate synthetic data to train on from onsite data, which will be the best practices of you and your competitors and hence include the corpus of what makes you better/lean compared to your competitor and remove differentiators.
In the same way that you cannot compete against Ford at making cars without capital because Ford used their capital to automate manual labor at prices and speeds you'll never be able to reach.
"Intellectual" jobs, that require thought were yet spared, as the only way to use capital for that was just to pay for more meat: see Accenture, CapGemini, IBM, etc. You could carve yourself a spot for some people because it was hard for this capital to reach them. Now that AI, a literal machine that automates thought, is here, the costs for reaching bumfuck nowhere to take the clients away from you has dropped drastically for them, but not for you. They get economies of scale, already established patterns, tools, internal databases. You're starting with hopes, dreams and a $20 Claude sub that runs out at 10AM.
There is not infinite need for lawyers, there being more lawyers does not create more legal opportunities and cases past a certain point, and you're then dependent on other things like there being enough judges.
Robots transformed capital into manual actions and killed most manufacturing jobs save for precious few experts or things that are too expensive to automate still. AI will transform that capital into intellectual labor and crush you, take all opportunities away from you.
The price for legal work going down might very well create more demand, including for people operating "law machines". Not sure we know where future equilibria lie.
One recent comment from my interviews was that people who use AI are using it for tasks in domains they didnt deal with before. So this would be creating dashboards or writing sql queries. Or reading and reviewing contracts.
The “easy stuff” for someone’s job, is now the AI stuff for someone else’s job. Where you would hire an intern, the potential client is using Claude instead.
The issue is that this breaks the talent / growth pipeline. You can’t have experts if they don’t go through the process of getting trained and working on incrementally harder problems.
Demand for law related things isn't elastic. In fact, in an increasingly unemployed, AI first future, work law is a dead end, contract law is a dead end, and there will not be "AI law" jobs created.
"Price go down means more demand" applied blindly is a an economic theory so absurdly shit that even the most apeshit libertarians like Ayn Rand know it isn't true. Don't make me defend Ayn Rand.
Labor law will be hit more by widespread use of robotics, but I can envision a much larger market for contract disputes and transactional law. Having AI in both sides doesn’t mean people won’t disagree about stuff.
What is an "AI first future"? Infinitely capable robots and AI? All current laws and regulations suddenly gone or changed?
Why would there be less demand for contract law or for privacy related law, for example? There is certainly some elasticity in law related things from my own experience.
Which hasn't changed, because the company you would have sued that was spending 200k on a lawyer is now spending 500k worth of tokens to spend the next consecutive 300 hours without sleep to find out that you took an unauthorised 5.1 minute shit on April 23 at 3PM by reviewing every single hour of camera footage and establishing a physical movement map of MAC addresses based on proximity to the WiFi relays they put every 10 meters.
You. Cannot. Win. Against. Capital.
And then you're going to sue, and realize that the system is so massively overloaded that the next available judge and jury are in 32 years. Also they're lobbying to replace those with AI judges where they entirely removed the concept of nuance.
It's ok. AI will have replaced most VCs by then and increase the efficiency of capital allocation. The right people will get funded, competition will work it's magic, and consumers will benefit mightily. Nobody's profit margins are safe.
Of course, who knows. There's always another angle you can look at this from
> There's definitely going to be cheap or open source models
What makes you think your "cheap or open source model" running on your piddling desktop cluster will be able to complete against a SOTA one running in a billion-dollar datacenter?
It's a cyberpunk fantasy. It won't work out that way.
Local models that run on a laptop (not even needing a "cluster") are already better than ChatGPT from a couple of years ago. Yes, Claude and ChatGPT today are certainly better than these local models, but they can't keep getting better indefinitely -- there's only so much info to scrape. When they hit a plateau, it is only a matter of time that consumer hardware will catch up to it.
The author’s implied argument is that capital control’s the entrepreneurship game already.
There is only 1 top law firm, financiers of law firms have no interest in starting a race to the bottom. Foundation model labs will take a significant portion of the value, the remainder will be captured by entrenched monopolies.
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.
Law firms are already limited by sales and marketing, and I believe the concept of ‘legal wizardry’ is misplaced. There’s almost nothing one law firm can do that another couldn’t do just as well. The only thing clients want are the ‘you don’t get fired for buying IBM’ factor and asking ‘how high’ when they say jump. The first is all based on cultivating an image and that’s just marketing and sales, and the second is just pure workaholic-fueled hustle.
Exactly right, it's Porter's Five Forces with Threats of Substitutes and Threats of New Entrants, which means that margins will be compressed massively, which means that being a lawyer will often mean lower wages. The p99() of lawyer wages will probably decline, but the max() will likely increase for the niches that are not adequately covered by AI use cases.
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.
The entire discussion is predicated on the arrival of an AI future where AI can do any human labor at incredibly low costs and all but eliminating the value of human expertise. If getting something done resembles "doing everything themselves" then that future did not arrive.
Yeah... Take it even one step further, why would AI companies even sell access at all? They could just run competitor firms directly themselves, and that outcome is really the only way they can ever hope to make ROI, so for sure they'll do it if it ever becomes possible.
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.
Lawyers will be fine they will work with legislators to make it illegal for AI to practice law. Then, even if the lawyers job is mostly presenting the work of a legal AI, they will still be employed. Other knowledge workers will need to wisen up and do the same.
Edit: same for any profession that requires professional accreditation: lawyers, doctors, cpas, professional engineers, etc.
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.
> 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.
What services would those be? You already stated the AI will eliminate the need for companies in many areas so I'm not sure how this fits in with that statement.
In that scenario, the AI owners become rentiers - able to charge as much as the market will bear for brokerage - and everyone else gets to offer their services via said brokerages, which charge the customer the most they can bear, and pay the worker the least.
Any economy of scale - which is, in a way, what allows knowledge economies to exist at all - will accrue to the middleman.
Good news for those able to master manual, craft skills to a degree most cannot. High-end tradespeople, specialist installation technicians and so on. Bad news for everyone else besides rentiers.
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.
The best early example of this is that Anthropic is already eating the lunch of all the new “AI security audit” companies. And they were only a few years old.
Those guys certainly thought they were being novel and creative, using AI to disrupt an expensive and labor intensive business model. But now with Claude Security, their own market share is going to be gobbled up before they can even get established.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's because of this Big Tech is busy undermining the basis of democracy, isolating people in bubbles, poisoning political discourse with slop and pimping would be autocrats. They want to strip political power from common citizens, turning toward sefdom.
I foresee Claude etc being able to do much of that on a self-serve basis. The entrepreneurship you mention to me looks exactly opposite to what you are describing - a middleman between the customer and the product, which is offered by a third party. In my mind that’s why they launched this deployment company for example, to do just that in house as well
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.
The practical difference between a select few owning everything and governments owning everything ends up being practically minor. The key is disperse true ownership (which is NOT just collective ownership via the standard shares; your share in Meta gives you as much control of that as your vote does the government).
> 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.
Isn't there an inconsistency here? You've set up this narrative of businesses as being the only entities with money (wealth?) but then singled out two individuals.
Also, how do calls for equality of wealth address the inequality in contribution of value and efficiency to society and the economy at large?
Businesses will still be owned or at heavily influenced by individuals and it is those individuals that will be able to steer how those business’ capital is allocated (including towards themselves).
At this point in time I doubt that AI is ever going to escape the control of the humans with capital, and those humans will just use it as a tool in order to amass ever more capital.
The hopeful outlook is that AI is also a lever for the working class. It's why I think local models are important.
> 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.
I think the point is that it is his OPs opinion and they cannot read the future. Nobody here can, so the reply has just as much weight as the original.
So saving and living below means is a great strategy either way.
It doesn't cost life to eat modestly and live smaller than you can afford, you live life while doing this. Many think the best part of their life was when they were young and poor, its not a bad life to have low costs so you can live stress free.
Unless you think that the rich experiences of life are what make life worth living, that money grants you access to some of those richest experiences, and that you are more able to fully appreciate and incorporate those experiences into your personhood at a younger age.
I'd advise that person to change their attitude about that, because it's stupid and inhuman. Otherwise you get the absurd statement that average people in most countries, billions, a normal married guy in Vietnam, none of their lives are worth living.
> 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.
For over a decade there were talks of an academia bubble in the US and that choosing a trade job actually puts you in a financially better position compared to almost all college and univeristy degrees except finance and computer science.
People have to understand that they are merely cells in a bigger organism at work. As some types of cells can be more easily be replaced by AI agents than others, some earlier, some later.
People have been replaceable forever in capitalism. It's what makes it run, turning workers into a commodity or replaceable assets.
Now the big fantasy of the big AI companies is of course that almost everyone will be replaced by THEIR products. They are in the scaling business, large models, large compute, no optimization because scaling is faster, they are in a sprint, not in a marathon. The sprint will end eventually.
But AI will stay. The future will be decided between large scaling which means data centers, subscription models, centralized control, or decentralized, local, smarter more optimized lean models, with curated training. Tech has already anticipated that owning hardware that is capable of neuronal computing is the key to the future. The battle for hardware ownership has just begun and it's immensely important.
And a similar battle is happening inside corporations right now. Big tech wants to implant their subscription/cloud model into the economy, into as many businesses as possible. If they succeed we are in trouble. Because even though their fantasy will fail, forcing it unto us will do a lot of destructition to human society.
I can only encourage people to DIY, to learn a trade as a backup and be hands-on when it comes to computing. Don't aim for a high paying job and buy gimmicks that do things for you, that manage your life with "personal AI" or some bullshit. While actually you would have the skills to build the work or personal tools for yourself, share your designs or even start a company that does things differently. You all can shape things.
AI is so new, almost nobody has an idea of what it could do for them. There isn't a demand yet because people don't know what it could do. So big tech tries to create demands in all sorts of ways. This is what's happening right now, it's not set in stone.
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.
that is incorrect, the 0.1% (>50m) live purely off capital. the 1% are still mostly highly paid specialized labor and despite high savings their capital would not sustain their lifestyle outside a brief retirement.
In the US, 99th percentile household wealth is ~$14M, which at historical rates of return is enough to live opulently indefinitely. (Of course although we're discussing a scenario where capital holds most of the cards, who knows if those returns would be dependable.)
>>> 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.
> 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.
The point of AI is to make inequality even more extreme. A well-off worker is still a worker, and it's the dream of every capitalist to not have to pay any of them a dime.
For supposedly smart people, software engineers are really dumb. We should have unionized a decade ago, at the height of our power. Instead too many of us inhaled libertarian propaganda and identified with our bosses instead of our own class.
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?
> 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.
The money just circulating around is actually more or less how a normal economy works. If you have a two person world where one person makes food and the other makes tools, the money just bounces back and forth between the two people as they trade tools and food. It facilitates trade by acting as an IOU in case the first person doesn't need to trade tools at the exact moment the other needs to trade food.
AI and robotics will one day be able to produce food and tools without human labor. So there could be plenty of wealth created. The question is how do we distribute that wealth when humans aren't needed to make it? We need a new distribution system that isn't based on pay for labor. A lot of people suggest UBI.
Different AIs will be optimized for different types of tasks, or have completely different capabilities e.g. huge data access versus physical bodies. It could be more efficient for different firms to optimize and specialize their hardware and software for these use-cases and exchange for use of the labor of the other rather than for everyone to have a fully generalized fleet. I imagine this will be true even for incredibly advanced AI but who knows.
It's pretty obvious: once automation and wealth concentration get so extreme, the economy will get weird and stop being "capitalist" as we understand it.
For instance: it'd expect money to become near-meaningless, and the economic activity of the trillionaire class will consist mostly of direct extraction and consumption of resources (basically a personal autarky). There may be some barter of things like energy, raw materials, and maybe a small amount of proprietary items.
Given the lack of need to pay labor and the direct control of more resources than they'll ever need, the trillionaire will direct the world enonomy to towards pet projects (e.g. an Elon Musk commanding his robot army to build a giant steel pyramid on the moon in his honor, because why not? It'll be cool!).
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.
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
It seems that Yarvin didn't realise -- accidentally or more probably intentionally -- that the society in Soylent Green was not supposed to be taken as a model to emulate. It's not supposed to be a documentary! To even joke about it is telling.
As a tech industry we'll probably be complacent on whatever is coming up in the future, no matter if it's something like this or something far more insidious. But hey, some of our class got very wealthy and got to enjoy material prosperity so it's all good, right? People would chase ever higher wages and shiny trinkets and end up working for Evil Megacorps because "one needs to be able to afford to live comfortably".
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
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.
Historically one pattern this took was patronage. Most famously associated with sponsoring artists, but historically it covered a wide variety of professions. The patron gets power, influence, the ability to call on a guy who can do the thing, and so on.
Of course the first thing we replaced with AI was artists, so expect more exclusively as the lower rungs of patronage clients fall off the economic ladder.
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.
> When people are pessimistic about the future, they have fewer children.
But also, statistically, the richer you are, the fewer children you have. Why do you think those who are seemingly in the best position to be optimistic about the future are those most pessimistic about it? It is quite counterintuitive on the surface. Is it because the rich feel they have nowhere else to go, whereas those who are poor can still envision becoming rich themselves someday, giving them hope about a brighter future?
Regardless of the exact mechanics, the human state is self-correcting. Being rich is unsustainable without a lot of people around you. When births decline too much, those who are rich will become poor, and thus will start producing more children again. Humans will not echo horses based on this.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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.
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
If AIs become smart enough to outperform a critical mass of humans across the board, that's the singularity and whilst the economic model says all humans out of jobs means no consumers, the model isn't really valid anymore because the underlying assumptions are just broken too, so you can't take the model too seriously. Obviously it would be very disruptive but the demand destruction economic model just isn't making useful predictions anymore.
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....
no - they'll still be fighting for resources for their AI data centers and armies. Its still zero sum. The house with the largest robot army and best data centers wins.
Then the targets become the launch pads. Those space-based datacenters will need constant resupply and maintenance. Destroy launch capability, and their orbits will decay and all that computing capacity will burn up in the atmosphere.
We are so so so far away from self-sustaining machinery in space that it's not even funny.
There is no such thing as a self-sufficient version of any industry in space, and you should expect this to remain the case for approximately the next 10,000 years. Until then, everything that happens in space will have a supply chain rooted on Earth.
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.
> 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?
"Forcing redistribution" doesn't always happen. Typically, redistribution happens when negotiating leverage has increased such that the beneficiaries of any redistribution can make it more painful to not redistribute than to redistribute. I.e. they have labor power, which can be converted to force if necessary.
In a world where capital can substitute for labor, however, that substitution also applies to force-wielding labor. People want to strike because of intolerable working conditions? Send in robot scabs. People want to demonstrate en masse against a regime? Have robot officers police them, and have models identify participants so post-event disincentives can be applied. They want to have a violent uprising? Send in the mass fleet of drones.
Ideally, you'd avoid these outcomes entirely by molding the population into ideal consumers and distract them with superficial sports team style conflicts, so they never get to the point where collective action is even conceivable. But they're a useful backstop if those strategies fail.
It doesn't have to be all that dramatic. Just ensure that they don't reproduce at replacement level. In fact that's already happening. Crank it up a bit more, make things South Korea++ and it's just not a problem. If nobody shows up in the next generations out of whatever reasons, there's no risk of some kind of uprising you'd have to crush with a robot army. Just wait, push cultural messaging that encourages individualism and implicit antinatalism and it will seem perfectly humane. Legacy humans will simply go away, without any major incident.
I think your first equilibrium would be hard, for two reasons. First, empirically insurgencies are extremely difficult to exterminate; over the long run they tend to win. Second, in the U.S. at least, people tend to look at politics up close, and when you're myopic like that it appears that the government is a force onto itself. But zooming out, U.S. government actually mirrors the will of the people extremely well (with the exception of some issues on the margin). If there is overwhelming political support for redistribution it would be very difficult to resist.
The second equilibrium seems more likely-- the capitalist class grants the public a bare minimum to keep us from forcing political action. In the AI world "the minimum" is probably a much better standard of living than we have now, as the marginal cost of many products and services approaches zero. So we end up living much better material lives, but are still not free. Maybe this is stable, or maybe the ruling class loses dominance over time. At that point, who knows.
The capital-owning class owns the political apparatus, so they're not really worried about "political action." Through their ownership of government, they also own and control the military and police, so they are not worried about a violent uprising. So, what will actually happen when all economically relevant activity can be done cheaper than human labor, by a mixture of AI and robotics, and 99% of us are economically irrelevant?
> "they also own and control the military and police"
I'm always amused by how some intellectuals dehumanize the armed services, as if they were no more than mindless robots instead of humans with their own families and community ties.
> instead of humans with their own families and community ties
This is an age-old problem with armies and has a similarly age-old solution: just send soldiers from one community to police other communities. For example, during the Tienanmen Square Massacre, some Beijing-based units refused to fire on protesters, so units from further away were called in instead.
Is there any relevant recent evidence of them not just doing exactly what they’re told? “Oh they will refuse unlawful orders” hasn’t exactly panned out
> The capital-owning class owns the political apparatus
That is not nearly so uncontested, not even in the US. Did you forget how all the tech bros went to Trump's inauguration, bowing their heads and kissing the ring? With Trump being very small fry on the scale of "capital-owning class" this means there are other factors at work than just wealth dominating politics.
Also, the situation gets much more unclear in other countries. Otherwise, why wouldn't the most capital-friendly party rule in each and every country?
On the other hand they would never be able again to leave their bunkers, given that it is not hard to assemble a DIY drone and equip it with some explosives.
> And that is going to happen when all we have are what maybe some AR15s, and they have drones firing precision targeted ordinance at us from 50k feet?
We have enough guns for every man, woman, and child to have at least one. There aren't enough drones or expensive precision targeted ordinance in the world to defend against that for any length of time. It's another version of the lessons recently taught in Ukraine and Iran.
Plus I think it is different when a poverty stricken population tries to rise up as compared with one that is historically wealthy. I expect we won't wait until we are actually poor before we collectively decide to refactor our government.
I love comments like this, mostly for the unbridled optimism and historical ignorance they embody. If you truly believe that a loose collection of small arms is the kryptonite that the command and control apparatus of the US is vulnerable to I recommend familiarizing yourself with what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Both cases vividly display what a few Suburbans full of motivated feds can do to an entire compound of well-armed civilians over the course of a long weekend.
I'm the last person to accuse the US of being sanely-governed, but you'll forgive me for not worrying any more about a conspiracy of billionaires with access to US nuclear arsenal all agreeing that the best way to ensure they live long and healthy lives unencumbered by vengeful proles/superpowers is to nuke the top 500 cities than I do about Roko's Basilisk or the end of the world as predicted by the Aztecs...
I'm even less worried about AI models obtaining corporeal form to stride into the US nuclear bunkers to launch missiles against their own power infrastructure and datacenters...
No they won't, not if they have just enough bread and circuses and someone below them to hate. Boil the frog slowly enough and it'll work out just fine for the capital class.
Bread, circus, strife, anger, hopelessness, antinatalist cultural products and it doesn't need anything aggressive or spectacular. People will just cease to reproduce seemingly of their own will. South Korea to the nth power.
I don't see how you can relate this to communism. Sounds more like oligarchy/roman empire: a few own almost everything, but most have almost nothing and are being controlled with bread and games. Marxism is the opposite where everything is owned by everyone (in theory).
What would be the name of the society where, say, 30,000 people + technology produce enough food and goods to satisfy the needs of the rest of Earth population?
So those people will get whatever they need for life but will not be technically obligated to produce anything.
We will first switch to 4 day working week, then 3 and so on, right?
We will see Universal Basic Income "experiments" [1] more often until they become a norm.
Some suggestions for naming this, depending on how you organize ownership, redistribution, who gets to decide what you need: paternalism, welfare capitalism, neo-feudalism, technofeudalism, welfare state, social democracy, UBI-and-oligarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy.
We are already in a position where we could house and feed everyone, but we choose not to do so. Instead a few own almost everything, money gets spend on killing people, instead of feeding them.
If we choose not to do it now, i don't see how we can make UBI work in the future.
> and they have all of the guns and trucks and toxic masculinity culture that requires survivalism and toughness and defending muh freedom
Nothing will happen so long as the people are gleefully fighting one another, but if we reach a point where populism rules across the board and bridges the left/right culture war, things could get exciting. There is a reason the elites are spending so much effort stoking culture rivalry in the US.
There are plenty of other countries, with different cultures, and different expectations for how things should work. France for instance, is known for having unions that strike, frequently. Socialism isn't a evil concept in some countries. When America has been co-opted by various factions, why would it be up to the "Yanks" to show the rest of the world the way?
The French government will be bankrupt in the next couple of years. Over the last 100 years, France went from one of the richest countries in the world to somewhere with a median (not mean) GDP that is considerably lower than Mississippi's. Probably not the example you think it is.
That being said, if nobody has a job, nobody can afford the stuff being sold then everything collapses. Acting like that isn't true isn't rational either.
> The French government will be bankrupt in the next couple of years.
Their finances aren't in great shape, but if you think the ECB will let that happen, I have a bridge to sell you. (And the need for a bailout is far from a foregone conclusion.)
> a median (not mean) GDP
That's not a measure anyone uses for anything, so not sure how that's relevant.
But sure, let's go with the idea that Mississippi is "better off" on this metric. GDP per capita (which is a mean, not a median) is not a good proxy for standard of living. A French person working 35 hours per week living modestly might be much happier with less money than someone from Mississippi working 3 jobs, 6 or 7 days a week, for a total of 60 hours, who doesn't really have the time for "living" at all, modestly or otherwise.
(I'm being generous to you when I say "might be" there. What I really mean is "almost certainly is".)
> I think they'd employ some number of humans for entertainment.
The key point is: some number. Chances are you and everyone you love won't make the cut.
If 10 billionaires control the all the capital of the planet, they could exterminate 99% of humanity and not even notice any change in their day to day life. 83 million NPCs are more than enough for 10 people.
At that point, why bother to employ? If we have no recourse, no power to resist them (as must be the case in that scenario), then they might as well just keep us as pets.
> 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.
If you're folding the dishes, I agree that you should probably get someone else, perhaps a robot, to replace you there. ;)
But overall I absolutely agree. I don't want (and can't afford) a household employee; if I could buy a $25k appliance that would reliably take care of all my household chores, I wouldn't even need to think about it.
Is it defecting if you get a robot to do your dishes, instead of doing them yourself? As you said, it's not taking a job from anyone, just freeing up time for yourself. If anything, this specific use-case sounds like it would be a major boon for nation-wide productivity with little downside.
We have had that for decades, its called a dishwasher. Its so common that its a compound word instead of dish washer. I feel like there are basic concepts of psychology and history that you don't understand if this is the point you want to make.
Sure, but I still have to clear the dishes from the table, dump any larger food scraps into the compost bin, and put them in the dishwasher. Then when it's full I have to run the dishwasher, and empty it when it's finished, putting everything away in its place. When I'm running low on dishwasher detergent I have to remember to pick some up the next time I go to the store (or put in a grocery delivery order). Sure, that's all still much less labor than washing the dishes manually myself, but I'm always in favor of taking even more labor off my plate (heh).
(Also there are circumstances where I'm cooking and will manually wash some things, like perhaps a set of tongs, because I know that the other two sets of tongs we own are dirty and already in the dishwasher. I know I'll need the tongs while cooking tomorrow's meal, but the dishwasher won't be full enough before then to warrant running the load yet. This sort of situation actually comes up quite frequently for me.)
Obviously I'm talking about the part of dishwashing that's not already automated, and the compound word comes from way before — a "dishwasher" was a job long before it was a machine. What were you saying about basic concepts of history?
The dishwasher does automate a large part of doing the dishes, but not the whole of it. A Jetsons-style robot maid would also be able to clear the dishes from the table, restock the cabinets, and set the table before dinner - in addition to doing the cooking, cleaning, lawncare, etc.
It maybe wasn't the least-automated part of the chores, but if anything, doesn't that strengthen their point? We as people were happy to automate our dishwashers, and would probably spend more money on other chore-automations as well (see: Roomba, robotic lawn mowers, etc).
Uhm, no? What if it has a glitch or bug or gets hacked and wants to hurt me or someone else? I'd rather do all of that myself than own a movable bot that could crush my head like a melon for any reason while I'm sleeping, no thank you
This is just a function of the overton window. A couple decades ago most people probably thought a robot vacuum (with a camera on it!) was creepy, but now they're fairly commonplace, or at least well-accepted[0].
The bot safety issues are certainly real, but that's a trust/confidence hump to get over, and robotics companies will get there eventually.
[0] Even considering we know employees of the manufacturers have abused the camera access!
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.
> 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?
Because if everyone is doing the same, then it's just brutal competition. Margins will squeeze, and eventually very lean companies will become the norm. In time, this means that the pool of information workers will change tremendously.
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.
Even if we start building a lot more stuff, you still don't need those construction workers. You have a GC to manage the whole project, aided by an AI who's handling scheduling/operations/logistics. You have a detailed plan to build against.
So why do you need former construction workers to manage the robots? Why can't the GC and management AI run the whole thing?
Maybe there's some scenario where you still need something like one licensed person from each skilled trade to be responsible for the robots employing those trades. But there's no way you need everyone who worked on building sites managing robots, no matter how much construction you're doing.
That's pretty far away from where we're at. If things do get that far it's not going to be a problem. Eventually the robots will murder us in our sleep and our worries will be over.
For which poor unemployed people who just got laid off due to AI are the Robots building house for? More abstractly, for whom are we creating are these productivity miracles and surplus for. Does a rich person suddenly need a million iPhones for himself and himself alone?
"Past performance is not indicative of future results". People stopped being in farms because automation freed manual labor and people could move up in the value chain. We are getting to the point where there will be no chain left to go up to, at all. If you don't see the difference, I don't know what else to tell you.
this time we're automating humans that can do anything that humans can do.
you should be asking what happened to the horses which were replaced by the tractors.
the answer is elsewhere in the thread, their pop dropped 88% or w/e, we didnt need them anymore.
"Becoming viable" does not mean "automatically put into execution". You still need to take overall demand in account.
Consider this: if demand was not a factor, anyone living in a moderately wealthy country would be practicing labor arbitrage and sending money to poorer places. Ask yourself why this doesn't happen.
1) corporations moved manufacturing to where labor was cheap, but brought back the goods to sell them. This only works for as long as there is healhy consumer market somewhere. If AI really gets to automate most white-collar work, there will be no healthy consumer market left anywhere around the world.
2) The essay touches on this: any of the previous offshoring / job displacement movements happened on a much longer timeframe than what is being pushed now by the powers that be.
In a world where it’s dramatically cheaper to build infrastructure like roads, power, and plumbing, lots more land becomes desirable as a place to live.
Take Phoenix, for example, once air conditioning became cheap and pervasive.
The argument isn’t that AI brings the labor cost down to 0 in isolation. It brings the labor cost of the same amount of production down. So you get more production (more things = more supply -> lower prices) out of less labor.
We don't need "AI" to figure out that technological advances increase productivity. The problem with yout argument is assuming that increased productivity mean overall reduced costs. It does not.
Healthcare, housing, education all have gone up despite increased productivity. Then you have things that are already so automated that there is no way to make them cheaper unless sacrificing quality - food, clothing, etc.
Then we have all the types of consumer products that have prices completely decoupled from the cost of labor. No one in their right mind the "cost of labor" has any relation whatsoever with Apple charging $1000 for an iPhone and/or Motorola charging $180 for a Moto G.
Healthcare, housing, education all have gone up despite increased productivity.
The hypothesis of Baumol’s Cost Disease is that these industries are exactly where we should expect prices to rise because they’re still dependent on low-productivity-growth human labor.
We were talking about infrastructure costs under increasing labor productivity. Now what are we talking about?
If the premise is that AI won’t improve productivity in industries like healthcare, education, and housing construction, then why are we worried about “the dead economy”?
No. You are getting it backwards. The premise is: even if AI improves productivity, we the people are not going to benefit from it.
The mistake you are making is that you are assuming that a system where productivity per unit of labor is higher automatically translates into increased global output. It does not. This idea of a dead economy theory is precisely the concern we are heading to a world where machines can make practically everything on the cheap, but it won't matter because the moneyed class won't need to satisfy the demands of the general populace.
So we have a bunch of billionaires sitting around, surveying a world where a much smaller amount of labor will produce a much larger amount of output, and they collectively decide not to hire that labor or spend capital on the technology that generates that output in combination with that labor because… they have enough money already?
No, ffs. You are missing that if they can do whatever they want with just "a small amount of labor", then the whole system gets to a point where Capital becomes the bottleneck for global productivity. People can not be trained faster than the machines can be created, so all that capital will go to an increasingly smaller number of workers.
To illustrate the point: Facebook laid off thousands of developers at the same time that it was hiring AI researchers, paying them tens of millions of dollars as a signing bonus.
Facebook (Meta) mostly “makes” ad space. So in that case, they’re making more / better ad space for the same inputs.
Online advertising is a competitive business, so that means more bang for the buck for Facebook’s advertisers. Now those advertisers have more money to invest in making more / better of whatever they make.
Its also the 'labor theory of value'. That's the economic theory that Communism is based on. It has never been accurate and wasn't even considered legitimate during Marx's lifetime. It has possibly the worst track record of predictions of any theory ever conceived by people. Yet somehow academics still reference it. Nobody who actually is impacted by making the wrong economic predictions does though. Funny that...
> where subways cost 1/20th of what they do today.
1) We are talking about reducing the cost of labor, not overall costs.
2) Your logic only applies in the micro, not on the macro. If the cost of producing one thing goes down while population keeps their purchasing power, then what you are saying would make sense. The whole point of the article is that accelerated automation can bring a scenario where the cost of producing "things" would go down, but the economically active population would shrink drastically.
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.
Sure, but the question is at what layer of abstraction do you have to prompt the AI?
You used to have to prompt the AI by starting to write the actual line of code you want, which it could autocomplete. Then you had to prompt it to write simple scripts or functions. The amount of scope you can prompt keeps getting bigger and bigger. Eventually, you have a PM or a CEO just telling it what features you need. Maybe it's a PM and a designer and a CEO and a CTO, but it will eventually get to the point where the number of people you need to do the prompting shrinks orders of magnitude from company sizes today. Maybe you just give the AI some money, prompt it to start a money-making business, and it goes out and does the same research and analysis that a seasoned entrepreneur would do to find an opportunity then builds out the business from there.
> the results won't be any good
Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on that. The trend over time has been that the results from prompting AI to do things have gotten better. I used to prompt it to build me dashboards and it would fail spectacularly. Now it one-shots them. Maybe the code is terrible (though doesn't matter for me, I'm the only one using it and I can verify the dashboard content is correct), but if the trend continues, it'll get better. Maybe the trend won't continue, but I've yet to come across a good explanation of why AI capabilities will just top out and cease improving forever.
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.
Yes they have. They cost more. Why keep the senior curmudgeon employee around when the Jr who costs half as much is deemed sufficiently competent? And the Jr isn't going to quit in solidarity either, they're just happy to have not gotten cut.
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.
You couldn't have. Mechanical machines couldn't organise themselves into human-free supply chains that are economically productive for the owners of capital. AIs could.
Any machine with an on-off switch is functionally an organized and automated work flow.
If I understand correctly youre talking about reactive adjustments, but thats not completely accurate either. There is a lot of projection that this MAY happen, but currently, the capital owner/stewards are going to constantly watch outputs and adjust to them based on the results. You're probably correct in that they will spend far less time doing so, but anyone with a vested outcome is going to have to adjust these things as the responsiblity for the outcome will always land on the owner not the machine.
I just meant that if I value, say, the security afforded by land that's been cleared of humans, and between them my owned AIs can deliver this as a 'surplus' outcome, just by processing resources available at low or no cost (sunlight, atmospheric gases, processed carcasses, etc.) then letting them run amuck is still 'economically valuable' to me, but doesn't require any human input, or a human counterparty. Very reductive example, but you can imagine a much more complex economy where a multitude of similar arrangements interact/compete to deliver outcomes of this type.
> 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.
This is true; and in time it's entirely possible that AI makes us an overall wealthier and more productive society. However, from the article:
> “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
The redundant professionals will need to find other ways of generating wealth from their productivity, and that may not be possible in a reasonable amount of time. Not in the scope of their remaining lifetime.
We will most likely redefine what we mean by human "productivity". A plumber might be considered a highly productive worker, whereas many intellectual professions will partially refocus on effectively prompting AI and assessing/revising its output.
Temporary excess productivity can linger a very long time and sector-specific excess productivity can still be broadly damaging. Detroit and southeastern Michigan were devastated by the collapse of American automotive industry in the '00s, taking something like 10-15 years before starting to recover.
Michigan was doing okay until around the late 1990s. The real downslide started out after that; Detroit became the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2013.
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.
Well, it's the same problem with all sorts of free-market capitalism and derivatives. They all believe there's infinite "somewhere else" that resources can come from, or the customers, or the funding etc. But reality is very much finite. And so instead of the theoretical equilibrium we get monopolies and collusion to manipulate markets.
The article, actually, addresses your claims:
> The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. 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. 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, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
So, the author believes that the problem with your reasoning that it will take a long time for the niches you are talking about to be filled (lifetime, maybe more), meanwhile things will look quite bad for most those involved.
I am even less optimistic than the author. The new aspect of this workforce displacement is the centralization. Of course, previous advances in automation also caused a degree of centralization, but AI is posed to become super-centralized if you will. There will be just a handful of suppliers and nobody will be able to challenge them, similar to situation we have with microprocessors today. Needless to say this is absolutely not a healthy situation for the world's economy.
Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced.
I can’t imagine what claim this sentence is intending to describe.
Obviously individual workers can’t “recover” their wages: 70 years later they’re no longer working.
It also can’t make sense as a recovery of labor in displaced industries, since those are largely gone once they’re supplanted by labor-saving technology.
It means it took 70 years for the average income and employment rate of socio-economic class of people who used to work those jobs (presumably formulated as some percentile of society by income) to rise back to the the same level.
Employment rates are weird bags of demographics and culture (think women’s rate of workforce participation) as well as economics, so I’m not sure how you extract that particular signal.
70 years to restore income levels across any strata is still not plausible: Even godawful economic growth would compound way too much. Maybe relative share of income for some decile? But now we’re back to asking why we should care about that if absolute real incomes are rising.
I read it, but I don't think it's compelling. "the short run can be a lifetime" is kind of a throw away phrase not backed by evidence.
We've seen rapid growth of knowledge work at the same time as increased productivity, and there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason that greater productivity will reverse this persistent trend.
the number of functioning machine shop in the US in large urban areas has been plummeting for decades. where there were 50 there are now 3. the customers for machine shops are large production facilities with a need for custom parts. they're all gone. now its little bits of rnd work and some custom architectural design kind of stuff. and the margins are punishing.
ok, so machine shops aren't really central to the argument, but the collapse of demand is.
They're all gone completely, or gone as in moved to where they don't have to suffer ridiculous real estate costs? There are approximately 50 machine shops within a stone's throw of my place out in the middle of nowhere. I haven't been around long enough to truly know if that is more or less than the historical norm, but best I can tell it is a growing sector locally.
Kinda. What's the lead time on my high precision metal part that needs to be cut on a 6-axis lathe? Or a metal 3d print? Neither of those machines are cheap, so not only is lead time astronomical, profit on them is also pretty great for the machine shop, which implies there's room for more machine shops. There's a lot of red tape for the orders I see, (CMMI etc) so maybe AI will help machine shops get that and be competitive.
that last point doesn't really follow. yes, you can do you ok if you have the kind of expertise to actually make that high end part and the position in the market to get the kind of work, but I think you overstate the margins and its certainly not the 'are you going to drop people or just increase your volume' argument that gp was making.
Well yeah, I'm not gp. My point is that, sure, machine shop count has gone down, but machine shop capacity, with conditions, currently has a 16 week lead time and high prices. If the argument is "there is enough machine shop output that everyone is going to get fired after the robots come" I'm saying there's a long way to go. And the same argument for writing software applies to machine shops. There's more to programming than writing code itself. There's room to grow upwards and meet the customer more where they're at so the machine shop isn't an extension of a robot that does cut x at point y and bends at z, but with the design process of the part before it gets to that.
fair enough, I don't participate really in the high end market, so I don't have any real insight. does seem like something of a market failure. the two things that stand out to me though is the very high capital cost that probably adds friction to investment, but probably more the people skills. there are tens of thousands of banger low precision machinists like me out of work, but outside of Europe where do the high-precision machinists actually come from? particularly one that shade over into material science and would be effective design partners. are those mechanical engineers that just specialized?
>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.
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.
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.
If AI actually succeeds at its promise, it won't be 99% of engineers and accountants, it will be 99% of nearly every profession that doesn't require physical labor. And if the AIs figure out how to cheaply build reliable human-like robots, that's it for the physical labor jobs too.
Our society is not set up to function with 99% unemployment (even 99% unemployment in "only" non-physical-labor jobs), even in an optimistic post-scarcity environment.
I remember sitting is a business class in school. The professor gave a story of how computerized spreadsheets changed the nature of accounting. Spreadsheets used to be done by hand on boards/paper. If a mistake was discovered, cascading recalculations needed to be done by hand. It was perfectly normal for large companies to have multiple teams duplicating work, then reconciling differences.
When computerized spreadsheets came about, mistakes could easily be fixed and cascading recalculations were almost instantly done. This was a game changer. Over the short term, accounting departments shrank or stagnated until the industry caught up and more sophisticated accounting started to grow the industry again. It's not coincidental that the 1980s brought in huge change to the financial industry when it did. Deregulation played a role, but so did the fact that computers exploded the productivity of the industry.
I'm not saying AI will do the same with developers, but there will always still be developers with a different set of skills, much like the way accountants don't necessarily need to be able to count in there head anymore.
I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?
The odd thing about games is that there are quite literally a handful that push the envelope (Genshin Impact stands almost alone, a few other Chinese and Korean titles come close) in terms of graphics, art, gameplay and story complexity and then there are thousands and thousands of slop games that you can hardly call "games".
Also, this entire analysis comes from thinking that software is like manufacturing. Its not, its like music publishing. That's where this entire tower of logic comes crashing down. More software isn't necessarily better, many cases, its worse. What we (most people) want is better quality software, not more.
> Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?
But which skill is atrophying? As a programmer I'm really bad at converting human readable code into machine code because we have compilers to do that for us. I can't remember the last time I had to run "ld" by hand. That skill totally atrophied. But at the same time, AI has made me more ambitious. I'm trying projects I wouldn't have before and even completing some of them! I can't talk for "people", broadly, but I believe most people want to be their best and do good and do things.
I can run the same compiler (or assembler) with the same options on the same source code 100 times, and I will get bit-for-bit identical output 100 times (well, aside from the compiler/linker inserting time/date stamps into metadata). Most people will not need to care about judging the output of the compiler. Only rarely will the compiler or assembler do something incorrect, which will require someone with specialized skills to debug and fix.
If I give the same LLM the same prompt 100 times, I will get 100 different programs written. Some of them will not work at all. Some of them will work, but will have major bugs or performance issues. Some of them will work well, but have subtle issues or edge cases that aren't handled properly. A few of them will work perfectly, or at least adequately enough for the task at hand.
Every single time you give the LLM instructions to do something, you need someone qualified and capable of reviewing the output to make sure it works properly. And while I would say you need someone reviewing the source code, even if you're just vibe-coding, you still need someone to test the program and make sure it works, and even that requires some specialized skill.
Maybe LLMs (or their next-gen replacements) will eventually become good enough that you'll get the same output every time for those 100 prompts, or at least close enough and functional enough for it not to matter. But we're not there yet, and I think that's a big huge "maybe". In the meantime, skill atrophy among programmers is a real, reported phenomenon with the current crop of LLMs. That is worrying.
But your last sentence is talking about something completely different: the current reality, which most of the tech CEOs and AI boosters refuse to engage with.
For those of us in the fact-based world, the idea that AI will replace most human jobs is still just a talking point. It's a future possibility (not a future certainty).
But it's enough of a possibility that we need to be talking about it, and not just airily dismissing the concern as something that will obviously work itself out without any real problem.
Even if 99% of the current programmers go the way of 99% of people who were farming in 1750, you have to remember that a huge percentage of the farmers who were made redundant by industrialization and modern farming methods fell into destitution; many died penniless. That's not something that seems either wise or compassionate to just handwave away!
Farmers prior to this time, in particular, would have passed their lands on to their children, and that would have been a vital source of livelihood for them.
In every agricultural->industrial transition I’m aware of, the kids are desperate to get out of farming and into the higher paying, less arduous industrial jobs.
> 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.
I'm just articulating the argument, not saying it's a done deal.
AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans.
Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.
"But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance."
Right, but doing that is slower and more expensive than just doing it by hand according to independent research. Even weirder, the average perception is that it makes coding 20% faster while at the same time making it 20% slower. And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
Could that change, though? It's 20% slower now, but could it be 10% faster than the human in the future? 20% faster? Or even 50% or 80% faster? I really don't know, but it's plausible.
Even today, consider that the GP's quote is trading human time/energy for external time/energy (even if the latter is greater). Manually doing a complex refactoring can be a tedious, annoying, draining, error-prone process. I don't enjoy it, and after doing it, I'll be annoyed and prickly and not feeling a bit intellectually dulled. If it takes me "only" 2 hours to do it myself, but takes the LLM 2 hours and 24 minutes, I might logically make that trade if it meant I could keep myself sharp and un-annoyed, and also perhaps get in some light reading while the LLM is doing its thing.
(In fact I am literally doing that exact thing right now, having an LLM do a refactoring while I write this comment. Maybe dicking around on HN isn't the best use of my time, but it's better than tediously shuffling existing code around, even if I can do that faster than the LLM.)
> And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
I see you've found a way to speculatively insult me to save time. (You'll be glad to know that I'm not in that camp -- again, articulating an argument.)
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.”
Buying back shares it sold at a lower price, right? The lifecycle of a share starts with the transfer of money to a company in exchange for a share. It ends with a buy back, ideally at a higher price.
But still, at the beginning it is a transfer into the company’s coffers.
I’m not sure what the justification is, but I assume it’s some flavor of “so index fund holders don’t miss out on returns”.
It’s crooked because index inclusion drives massive flows at any price. SpaceX understands this and with so much money on the table probably exerted influence (maybe the big AI players contributed too).
Passive funds don’t care about price (quite the opposite, they reward higher market caps in a feedback loop).
But with an IPO, you’re supposed to let the market have some time to find the right price.
Not to mention the changes related to profitability rules etc.
“belong” is a flexible word. You’re right in theory but depending on the situation money in your bank account is worth more to you than an equivalent amount of money in a company’s bank account (of which you are a shareholder).
The last time meta sold stock on the market was a primary stock offering in December 2013, roughly a year and a half after its initial public offering (IPO).
I find it crazy that so many people misunderstand this basic fact about how the market works.
100% correct, but I'll add that companies do use shares in other ways which also matter.
For example shares can be used for buying labor. Either as options or as grants, bonuses etc. It ultimately winds up in the public shares pool, but the first recipient receives it in place if company cash.
The second major use is in acquisitions. Buying other businesses using stock instead of cash is a useful tool often wielded. Again, not released onto the open market, but winds up there eventually.
Plus you can use them as loan collateral, balance-sheet improves and so on. So their price matters and their value to the business extends far beyond the IPO.
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.
> Facebook doesn't get the money when you buy a share of META
Technically no, but in reality yes, because shares are used as currency.
For instance, META does not acquire companies using cash, they use their own shares as payment. The higher the stock price, the lower the dilution.
Same thing for stock options and RSU.
So, it's true that stock prices don't translate 1:1 to cash inflows, but wherever stocks are currency (employee compensation, benefits, acquisitions, etc), it does translate.
The high share prices do subsidize Meta's share-based compensation, which seems to make up a substantial portion of the total wage bill. High and rising share prices also allow Meta to purchase other companies with Meta shares, instead of having to pay cash, which is beneficial in many ways.
That's an illusion. They book the expense at the cost of the share on grant date, so it looks good on the P&L, but they have to purchase the share at the price on the exercise date, so it's a significant drain on free cash flow.
Given that the thesis of the original post is that companies are swimming in money due to high stock prices; significant drains on free cash flows probably aren't the cause.
This is only sorta true, the total dilution from SBC is very small for most tech companies with some outliers (cough snap cough).
They may not purchase on exactly the vesting date but they certainly do offset the issued shares with buybacks. I think they can choose to reduce those buybacks without as much rigamarole as they'd need to issue new shares for funding, so they can effectively used that as a "back door" way to raise money. I think it might juice their P&L a little too, but I doubt that's why they do it.
"Tech stocks are growth stocks", that's pretty much how the market sees them anyway.
So essentially, they are not expected to be boring businesses yielding stable dividends to investors. That's your aristocrats stocks postioning: J&K, P&G, etc.
What is expected from tech stocks is the opposite: small to no dividend, reinvesting inflows into ever growing new businesses and technologies. A tech stock distributing dividends to shareholders instead of reinvesting in new projects would be seen as a mark of failure to innovate, incapacity to grow.
One tangent from this is that few of the big 'household name' tech products that have become infrastructure for modern life for huge amounts of people seem to be allowed to be mature and stable, they must be kept changing (beyond maintenance) or to offer some other new thing.
Yeah, it's how you pay dividends at capital gains rate instead of income rate. But also, Apple is kind of stagnant.. if they had something better to do with the money they wouldn't be doing the buybacks.
The observation is right but the causality is off. The money comes from extraordinarily profitable lines of business rather than investors. Hiring is driven less by business concerns and more by various layers of management advancing their careers by managing more and larger teams.
Isn't it to some degree? My understanding was with index funds was that the index is required to be backed by some in-kind holding of the component index products by whomever minted the index share. If more people buy the index then more of those in-kind backing products must be held e.g. as collateral. If you're REQUIRED to buy this stock because of your index/etf positions, necessarily the demand goes up, and necessarily the price goes up too. Companies _definitely_ materially benefit from stock price increases.
When people buy into an index fund/ETF, they are buying existing shares of that fund (which are already backed by the component stocks of that index) from other people who already have them. If there are 1M shares of an index fund that tracks the S&P500 floating around out there, and you go into your brokerage account and buy 1,000 shares, you have not increased that 1M figure by 1,000. There are still 1M shares; you have just bought 1,000 shares from an existing owner (perhaps another individual investor with an eTrade account just like you) who wanted to sell them.
In a case where an index fund does have to buy more shares of the underlying components (for rebalancing purposes or whatever), they are buying shares from other people on the open market: institutional investors, hedge funds, prop traders, etc. They are not buying from the company behind the stock ticker.
Yes, companies do sometimes issue new shares to the open market in order to raise cash. But that's not a daily activity; some companies may go years (or even forever) without doing another public offering beyond their IPO. Other companies do it somewhat regularly, perhaps a couple or few times a year. And some just do it when their stock price is high and they think offering more shares would be a good deal for them.
You’re making this unnecessarily complicated. Whether you purchased shares of a company through an ETF or directly, through your personal trading account, that money only goes to the person or entity that you bought the shares from. Maybe with some trading fees going to your broker (uncommon now thanks to the trend set by Robinhood).
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.
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.
FB finally got me with this. I refused to install any social media apps, but had to get messenger as I was missing important messages. So it's the only one I have.
Alright but if it'd just let me open a damn web link without smashing the link four times just to open an in-app browser frame I'd really appreciate it.
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.
I think they're more referring to the scalable service economy. Haircuts, which are a service, don't scale (unless we're talking about robotics or something).
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.
> 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.
Maybe this is true. Price is inherently bound among what people will pay, upstream (material/supply chain) costs, and labor. The west has overpriced its labor and material values by probably orders of magnitude for a long time, and people will pay less than ever. The rest of the world has been undervalued both in the effort for it to gain access to the markets that allow increased quality of life. But the market correction will lead to severely reduced market evaluation in terms of demand and price for all three factors in the west for many decades, I think.
Selling out our supply chains was suicide. I am too young to understand why people let this happened, but I think people bought into the idea of progress a little too hard to keep in mind their own civilizational health.
The business plan is really different depending on your starting capital.
If you have none, don't bother you can't afford the wood.
If you have a little, maybe your approach above is what makes sense.
If you have a lot, you might start looking at ways to lock down the chair distribution market within a region by maybe buying up some of the major warehousers - a bit of the old vertical integration. Maybe use some "free speech" of the financial kind directed towards some politicians to mandate that all workplaces have a certain minimum ratio of chairs to people.
The pricing strategy will be different for each approach.
You gotta do both. Ideally, the bottom-up price (the price you want to charge) is less than the the top-down price (what people will pay). If it's not, you gotta go back to the drawing board.
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?
Yeah, ugh! Who needs other language support anyway, we everyone should just learn English! And pictures! In a messaging app! Everyone should learn to use and read the entire breadth of human emotion via colon and a letter. :p
That's not bloat. Bloat is transporting an apple with a bus (that is transporting nothing else). Modern software bloat is like then transporting that bus via an aircraft carrier, and moving that aircraft carrier by nuking the ocean in the direction into which it should fall. It's not very good.
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.
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 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.
10 years ago i wrote a php web chat in 2 hours or so. I pretty much never look at it but the tinestamps suggest it always worked.
I could add more features to it and those will also work.
A friend once worked on an application with a huge team. He often pointed out the window at a large costuction site with a comparable number of people working. He made countless jokes about real work, a real system, real organisation etc Then one day the building was finished and their application kept crashing in production.
It's part of a constantly evolving ecosystem. It's a stable product because reliability engineers make it so and software engineers get the integrations right.
When I was at Facebook they decided to re-write Messenger in C. There were people who thought it was a waste of time. There were people who thought it was a great idea. It was a lot of work, took a while, and I wouldn't be suprised if by now it's been re-written to something else.
It's not that hard to make up work, and there's people whose whole job is pretty much just that.
You can napkin-math this. How many different team-sized components do you think go into it? If the code were on GitHub, and all they had to do was just update dependencies below them in the stack, and bump the version number for components above them,how many Dependabot PRs would be opened per week for software that's "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
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 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? 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.
> Right, but it's already doing that, and runs just fine, from what I understand. The developers don't have to sit there pounding the enter key on their keyboards over and over all day to keep the messages flowing.
It “works fine” precisely because there’s a lot of engineers pounding the enter key.
This is really just basic stuff, when you serve literally billions of users worldwide, you need a lot of people just to keep everything going smoothly as more and more people adopt it. Software doesn’t just magically scale to arbitrary usage and what made sense to build 5 years ago may no longer be the correct architecture today.
> 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.
IMO based on working on not-that-large-or-high-revenue systems, but ones where these things already applied, a bunch of it is probably a combination of three things:
* You're doing enough total revenue that a couple million a year to fund a team of engineers to try to make tiny marginal improvements in ad revenue through targeting, or new features on how to present ads, etc, can still easily pay for itself.
* You're running at a high enough scale / spending enough on resources that you can similarly justify spending millions on teams to knock more millions off your infra costs.
* You've got enough usage/users that making tiny improvements in bug rates/crashes/etc similarly results in more usage that more-than-pays-for-itself. (And the list of bugs to squash is possibly never-ending if those other groups keep changing things!)
"Why make 30M profit on 100M revenue when you can make 35M profit on 115M revenue" sorta thing.
> 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.
Sadly they were allowed to acquire WhatsApp even though they already had their Messenger. Meta did it to devour their competition. Even today, lots of people still don't know that whatsapp is owned by Meta.
While I am ideologically aligned with the author (ie, humans matter) and agree with their proposed interventions (progressive taxation, spread the base of capital across society, aggressive antitrust enforcement) and appreciate the thrust of the essay, I’m doubtful of the underlying predicate that human labor will be replaced with AI.
I don’t believe we have seen AI-driven layoffs yet (despite the CEO’s prognostications and suspect justifications). I personally have more to do than ever despite “AI being able to do everything I can do” (‡). I still want to speak to a human at the company I am a client of. And how many AI bloggers even know what a nurse at a hospital does?
I agree with the author’s repeated statement and implication that it is all about the human. The human is the lynchpin. Imagine for a moment this “dead economy,” or instead imagine a virtualized economy that is just incredible with trillions of this and trillions of that, absolute abundance, perfect chemical processing, impeccable design, unlimited resources. How much is that worth without humans?
Further, in many societies humans became irrelevant to labor in its simplest definition decades ago, without becoming economically irrelevant. If the US lost 10% of its able-bodied workforce economists would be primarily concerned with lost consumption, and not production. Apparently this “human labor” is a lot more than its superficial and material interpretation.
What I don’t agree with is the fickleness assigned to the human role. The human role is not a light or arbitrary one. It is the defining characteristic of our societal system that all subsequent characteristics rely upon and are derived from.
(‡ – Despite “AI being able to do everything I can do,” it cannot tie it together, because there is no such thing as agency in LLM’s. Probabilistic processes as n approaches infinity become gobbledygook at best. Deterministic interruptions are a necessity of agency.)
If we can work on the solution for when 90% of “human labor” is replaced by machines and intelligent machines, we’ll have a roadmap for how society should be structured.
Ever since we moved a step above subsistence farming we’ve been heading this way, and continually developing new ways to waste effort and work isn’t sustainable.
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.
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.
This assumes it is literally impossible for anyone else to reduce their battery costs to a level which makes them competitive with Tesla in an environment when battery prices are falling rapidly and the tech continues to evolve (and Tesla's EVs are not even unusually cheap or experimental in their battery supply chains)
That sounds less likely than the bull case Tesla is trying to make on "we're a robotics company now" or "one day all cars will be autonomous taxis controlled by us".
Exactly. Looking at competition from China, but also the West, I don't see Tesla having a moat in EVs, in robots, or even in batteries in the medium term (compare e.g. [1]).
How can they produce the extraordinary growth and excess profits that would justify their valuation?
Fundamentals will reassert themselves sooner or later, but as we see it can take a long time.
Tesla has vertical integration with their batteries, which is why they can make them cheaply.
> This assumes it is literally impossible for anyone else to reduce their battery costs to a level which makes them competitive with Tesla in an environment when battery prices are falling rapidly and the tech continues to evolve
No - it just means they can't do it as fast as the Chinese. The Chinese have been investing in battery technology for 10-15 years longer than most auto manufacturers. (And their labor is cheaper).
It's not depressing because it's not true. Tesla isn't investing in battery technology. Tesla also isn't developing new models at the same rate as VW, BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai Kia, etc.
Look at all the companies scaling back on EVs or exiting them altogether (e.g. Honda). It's not that Honda can't make EVs. It's that they can't compete on profit with Tesla + Chinese EVs. It's likely why Hyundai is dropping the Kona and the Ioniq 6.
Nissan dropped the Ariya, I believe. The Bolt is also out. The general shift is for more luxury EVs (BMW/Mercedes), and not EVs for the average Joe.
Giving up on EVs is crazy though, it seals their fate and guarantees the death of the company in exchange for a few more years of profit. The EV takeover will not stop, as of roughly this year they’re going to be cheaper than equivalent ice cars, it’s going to accelerate quickly.
It’s suicide in slow motion
I don't think self-driving is remotely close to working at any scale. I also don't think it's the killer-app. Right now, cheap electrics and moreso cheap hybrids are the killer.
The companies that have real boards would never take the risk.
Once Elon’s air cover is blown, the government is going the dissect Tesla. Once someone gets the injunction to stop deletion of crash data and allow for inspection, they are cooked.
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.
I get local models to drive applications through MCP (e.g. Google Chrome DevTools) via OpenCode all the time, and do things that would otherwise be very token-intensive and result in pointless meatspin. This is totally possible, and will become more so.
The real reason you pay for Claude _is_ in the models. The locally runnable models are impressive for what they are, but simply will not accomplish the task as effectively, incisively or quickly enough. I have to be willing to let OpenCode run in agentic loop on "download my bank statements"[1] for an hour and just walk away, and take a low-ish but profoundly nonzero chance that it will just fail. Claude can do it in 5 minutes, if I let it (I have), and it will not fail. Both are driving the browser via MCP and performing the same task.
[1] One of those difficult-to-use, modal-rich JavaScript-laden banking portals that seems quite intentionally designed to prevent this sort of downloading, or I wouldn't bother letting an agent loose on it in the first place.
Aside from filling in the timesheet (which I assume could be done from a CSV import - I appreciate this is another step), I have almost the same setup as you, without AI. I have bugwarrior pulling JIRA tickets and github PRs into taskwarrior. I have an integration from task warrior into time warrior and from there another hook back into JIRA to get titles and summarise.
All of that is done with two API keys and no AI. A local agent could easily put it together for you.
Now sure, I had to put this together and I lose the AI summary you have plus the auto filling, but what I'm trying to say is that I have 80% of this without any AI.
I also have a script parsing git from my emails and a little tui that translates them into git diff and a key binding to pull the PR but I find it a little cumbersome and don't really use it, and trying to parse todo from maildir is also a little useless so I accept that AI would be better there.
I also accept that your example is just one prompt of a dozen and I have to plan the solution for every one of your prompts, but I also don't find prompting to be terribly useful for occasions where I don't think the solution through- because it probably means I don't know what I want or don't really need it.
What I do find it really useful for is digging through Kubernetes and asking how two services are connected. Claude is better than local for that but there's nothing inherently non-local about that usage.
So far there's no moat though. A lot of that kind of stuff is available open source too if you look for it (and was available before claude desktop). And for anything that doesn't exist, with coding agents now you can write one up in an afternoon.
It's kind of paradoxical in a way. By making writing software cheap, they've made it much harder to create a moat for themselves that involves only software. It'll be interesting to see how they respond.
If there’s an open source alternative to Claude desktop that has a similar amount of extensibility with connectors specifically I’d be very interested to know about it. I’m very much not deep into this space.
Unfortunately for Claude, you can have it set up local models to do that for you and then you don't need to renew it. Codex's computer use is better than Claude's, imo. I'm a Mac, no idea about windows but I know there's no Linux version. Haven't had enough time with Opus 4.8 but GPT 5.5 > Opus 4.6 and 4.7.
I have mixed feelings here. I find codex much better than Claude for generating PoCs and debugging small scripts, and for finding online documentation. I find Claude a bit better for debugging distributed systems and summarising data
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 issue I have with these pieces is that AI will not affect the whole economy evenly. The disruptions come in bursts and fits: first digital artists were disrupted (e.g. Adobe Firefly), then junior engineering roles were disrupted, currently "measurer" roles (to quote Matthew Prince's piece on Cloudflare layoffs) are being disrupted, and it's rather foreseeable that occupations like lawyers and accountants are also at risk. But the key is that the disruption is not happening all at once. And that's a key fact because political disruption doesn't happen when a relative few people are laid off (like coal miners and factory workers were) but when a relative majority of people are hungry.
For such doomsdayer opinions to be correct, we'd see it in massive unemployment figures. US unemployment sitting at 4.3% does not bear that out. Finland and Spain are currently at >10+% unemployment. US youth unemployment may be at 9.5%, but British and Chinese youth unemployment are higher than 16%.
Is there some Finnish, Spanish, British, Chinese civil unrest that I'm not seeing in my media outlets?
> 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 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.
Tokens are not fungible for hosted models but there are resellers like Github Copilot and OpenRouter. These allow you to purchase capacity and choose which hosted models to burn your tokens on. Obviously there is some margin being taken in order to provide this flexibility, but there's probably some offset with volume contracts.
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.
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.
>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.
The big productivity gains of the Agricultural Revoution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... started considerably before the Industrial Revolution, though naturally the Industrial Revolution in turn fed back into agricultural productivity, in time.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
Seems like this and parent are referring to two different waves of improvement. Pre-IR improvements in plowing and cultivation (still draft and human traction), followed by post-IR mechanization for harvesting and transport?
Farm labor demands wax and wane with the seasons with harvest typically being the most labor intensive; so, it was actually stationary motors that did the most to reduce labor demands. Tractors mostly helped farmers eliminate the need for horses on a farm.
One of the leading economic history theories of why the industrial revolution happened was that it was largely a result of the Black Plague.
The theory is roughly that before the Black Plague, the population was stuck in Malthusian dynamics at the top of the logistic curve - population had expanded to the level that land could support.
The massive deaths allowed the remaining population to only farm the most productive land, leading to a massive surplus. The elite were able to capture that surplus and fund things like art, science, etc. Some of those scientists were able to create technology that led to further efficiency gains, so that technology could make the economy grow faster than population growth could catch up.
There are a ton of things that allowed that surplus to translate into technology and economic growth. But AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.
The first technology wasn't the steam engine, it was eating beef instead of just grain, and having cattle pull plows. We don't think of that as a huge technological revolution, but it was a dramatic efficiency gain at the time. It wasn't a new invention, but there wasn't enough surplus to deploy it widely before that.
Anything can be anything if you stretch definitions far enough. But normally industrialization is seen as distinct and antagonistic to artisanal culture.
There was a very marked change in the growth rate, which is why economic historians focus on that.
Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.
It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.
It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.
But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.
The economy went from 0% growth for 100s of years to 3% growth that lasted many hundreds of years.
Yes, at each step keeping the 3% growth needed things to keep going, but the big thing was unleashing the nonzero growth rate, to get unstuck from the local minimum.
I will try to steelman watwut, a lot of people presume compound exponential economic growth is basically inevitable as a law, so you can always go back to some point in time.
However, economic growth was basically flat before the Black Plague, and increases were basically random events that went back to Malthusian dynamics.
Only since the Black Plague has the world enjoyed exponential economic growth.
Most people talk about the industrial revolution, a lot of other comments talk about the british agricultural revolution before that, but economic historians have identified the inflection point at the black plague - that's where compound interest really started to be a driver of growth, it barely existed before that, at least on long time scales.
The Justinian Plague was as bad or worse, but rather than result in flourishing it ushered in the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the so-called Dark Ages. So maybe the Black Plague was an important element, but if so also had to have happened at the confluence of other critical events.
According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.
<quote>
One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications.
</quote>
That's a super interesting question and I agree! I am only saying the modern period of compound economic growth clearly started at the black plague with good explanations as to why.
Why other events did not have the same effects are very interesting questions for economic history.
Doesn't this article contradict your earlier comment? It claims that wages increased (elite were unable to capture the surplus) and as a result, workers were able to move from growing crops to farming animals, with resulting efficiency gains (i.e. they were able to acquire capital rather than pay all their surplus as rent).
It's a long arc, and as sibling comments say, there are many books about it.
The elites being able to capture some of it was what allowed for science and the enlightenment to happen, which eventually led to the technology that inspired the industrial revolution.
The big picture was it was the beginning of compound interest. This was a many step process over hundreds of years.
The events happened, but the mechanisms are subject to debate. Every school of economic thought has strong opinions on this time period. You've actually listed a source that contradicts your original argument (which came from where, out of curiosity?)
Basically, one common version is 'pro-elite' and blames the stagnation prior to this period on 'Malthusian dynamics' (over population beyond the productivity of the land). Another version is 'anti-elite' and blames the stagnation on the capture of all surplus by the landowning elite (who are not motivated to invest it other than the bare necessity to maintain status quo).
While there is considerable room for nuance and disagreement, Malthus is considered largely discredited by modern economics. As the population increased, so did the productivity of the land. Regardless, the fact people lived bare subsistence lives under feudalism does not imply the max population had been reached - they are still paying excess as rent. Peasants paid 1/2 their crop in rent, consumed 1/4 and replanted a 1/4 (crude approximation). This is very similar btw to modern US - there are 100M renters and the median rental household pays 50% of gross income to rent + tax.
Compound interest and capital investments predate the medieval period by thousands of years. There are cuneiform tablets documenting these kinds of financial arrangements.
'AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.' This is highly dubious/contentious.
Societal changes are slow beasts, they may very well take several centuries to develop. Nation-states were a direct consequence of the printing press, yet they didn't arrive until XIX century.
I thought the aftermath of the Black Plague also allowed people to charge a lot more for their labor and services, since most of the laborers, well, died.
I mean all part of the surplus - you weren't struggling to barely survive so could do other things with your time, and some of the people used that surplus to invest in efficiency.
Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It also doesn't destroy food. Right now, we have enough food. After the AI revolution we have more food and more free labour and fundamentally more effective administrators to run a welfare system. I don't want my society to be the first one to try it, but if we can move the average administrator from an ordinary human to something that is a little better at math than Gauss with infinite clones to get into the details ... there is a chance that we can run an effective centrally planned welfare system.
It is really hard to see how the AI revolution would lead to any issues with food shortages. It looks more like previously unthinkable upside than anything else.
Your analysis is greatly under estimating the risk that the capitalists that control the system use it to build cheap, automated weapons to guard their cheap robots and lock everyone of us out, just because they can. They're far more likely to be narcissists and sociopaths than the average population, empathy isn't their strong suit.
> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
> But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about. It may be immensely valuable even if some details are off. That's what made the XVIII's Encyclopedia such a valuable tool for civil society.
By the time you get to the point where those wrong details become relevant, you have gotten a basic understanding of what the overall topic is about, so you're prepared to get a second opinion from a different source - and this time you may know enough to start asking relevant questions, rather than starting from full ignorance.
> Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about.
Perhaps, but we already had that in the form of search-engines and primers and how-to guides and Wikipedia. The actionable questions already had answers.
Adding an obsequious device that dynamically hallucinate half of a conversation with not-necessarily-true dialog is (if not a detriment) only a marginal improvement.
Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong. They don't help anyone to get a "basic understanding". All they "help" with is getting a wrong understanding, that the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
When humans do this, we call them "bullshit artists", and we don't view them favorably. Why should AIs get a pass?
> Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong.
This is no worse than Wikipedia, or the original encyclopedia for that matter. Those contain dubious claims that you'll need to verify on your own too.
LLMs help because they have a gigantic amount of compressed knowledge, and they are able to find relevant information and present it incredibly fast. You wouldn't trust the ten first results of a Google search either, but you wouldn't say that having a search engine is totally useless and in no way an improvement over your local library, would you?
> the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
True, but having to learn how to use a tool properly doesn't make the tool useless, even if it can hurt those who use it carelessly.
> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Not yet. Like, not at all and there is a constantly expressed threat we will all become poorer and unemployable because of it. I dont believe it, but AI did not made life better ... and its creators claim it will make life worst for most of us. That is their literal sales pitch.
Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
The emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.
Interesting there is a possible implication here. If salaries drop from more people doing physical labor instead of white collar work then the automation of physical work may be delayed even longer. It may be cheaper in the short term to pay humans than machines due to an oversupply in physical labor.
> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude.
You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing.
How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen.
In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.
Funny you make this statement without giving examples of timeframes, what this looked like in real terms for real peoples lives living back then, nothing. Just 'between 1880 and 1950 we found new stuff to do'. It's all selling magic and hopium based on nothing.
Real example: 75% of the global workforce were farmers in 1880, most on a subsistence basis. The people who left the farm for the factories during that time period weren't forced to. They chose to, because working in a factory was better than staying on the farm. Just like a generation of rural Chinese people made the same choice more recently.
In fact, there's nothing stopping you from buying a farm and living like its 1880 today.
You can quite literally go out and start living a subsistence farmer lifestyle tomorrow. The average person in 1880 did not have the tools needed to cultivate a large parcel of land, so you'd approximate their lifestyle quite easily with a tiny parcel of arable rural land which is extremely cheap to acquire in most countries.
It's not magic and hopium, its simply automation and increased productivity via leverage. AI is the assembly line of the digital revolution.
Why is you're 'real example' 100% hypothetical? Give me real examples. Or at least real information from places like Manchester at the time. Not this hypothetical stuff the implies much ignoring things got worse for generations.
If you read up on the industrial revolution, those people that moved became less healthy, less happy, forced into dorm style housing. Give me real examples of what 'working out' looked like in the past. Because from my research, 'things worked out' meant worse outcomes for quite a long time (like generational timeframe). Give me examples please of what this successful transition in the past looked like for real individuals.
You need 0.5 to 1.5 acres per person for non-mechanized industrial argriculture. Nowhere with land that is truly arable enough for that is going to _sell_ you 1 acre at a time. In the U.S., you buy at least 40 acres at a time. In the U.S. Midwest, that's going to set you back (on average) $379,000. That's before you buy the equipment you need to be able to farm the land in the first place. Unless you industrialize and grow crops to sell to other people, you will not be able to afford the property taxes on the land to be able to keep it, either.
So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.
What? Yes, you absolutely can buy half an acre. You think in 1880 people went on Zillow to buy land?
You're just going to have to do this the 1880 way.
Knock on the door of a land owner and offer to buy/rent half an acre so you can farm. You'll find takers. My extended family literally has this arrangement with many people who farm different crops during different seasons.
Too hard to to do it that way? Welcome to 1880! Most people weren't land owners on the land they farmed back then and didn't have 'Perfectly arable' plots, and this was pre-fertilizer.
Oh and you'll have to use horse and buggy to get around to find land owners (no evil automobiles from those evil factories full of automation!) who will allow you to farm their land, just like 1880. So good luck.
I don't know how many times I need to explain this to tech doomers: nobody forced people out of subsistence farming. They chose to leave it. It was not a utopia.
The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
Fiber buried in the ground in 1996 is still useful. Servers from 1996, not so much outside of the retrocomputing community. The bulk of those trillions of dollars on AI is not going into useful long term infrastructure. It's going into equipment that will only be useful to scrappers after its initial life is over in three to five years as the sorts of places that can handle the heat load of 25 clothes dryers on high stuffed into 3.5 cu ft of space aren't going to run second hand machines. They aren't useful as in-office developer machines unless your office has 1000A of power to dedicate to that one single machine and the air conditioner need to keep the room the server is in from bursting into flames.
> The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing?
Honestly? That's the best case scenario for humanity.
When AI can replace knowledge-based work, capital has no need for humans anymore. That's almost an ELE.
There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
Just because they weren't paid doesn't mean women were not doing economically valued labour. The washing machine is probably the greatest productivity unlock since the steam engine.
If you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
Do you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
Changing the tax system to tax capital rather than labour would probably get you 90% of the way there without great societal upheaval (capital would fight back though).
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom
More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.
Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years?
In most developed countries even someone who has been never worked in their life will get enough to live on (although they might get less than someone who has worked all their lives).
This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".
> People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less.
Voluntarily, yes. If you want to make my list complete, you can add charity as a third option: if people judge that you're worth helping, they can voluntarily choose to help you.
But charity only works if the people doing it have things to give. Which means those things were produced. Somebody produced them. And the people who have them to give, through charity, got them one of the two ways I described. So it all still bottoms out to those two ways. Yes, some people can be helped out with charity. But you can't have an entire society all being helped with charity, because then nobody is producing anything that can be used to help them.
I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK. The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.
If my family isn't eating and society is cool with that I could not care less about a label that such a society gives me.
Again, society can get ahead of things, or let it be decided later. The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1. Society can figure out how to keep option 2 working if society prefers that. If society fails to do so it will deservedly get option 1.
> The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1.
I think you have the options mixed up. Option 1 is voluntary trade. Option 2 is violence.
You appear to be saying that people would prefer voluntary trade, but that they will resort to violence if they see no other option. Which historically I think is largely true.
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
It is still extremely common today, if you look at the demographics along the Atlantic Coast of the US. The richest zip codes always have poor ones nearby.
By the standards of underdeveloped countries today or historical poverty in general, these "poor" people are nonetheless living in outright opulence: their genuine plight is mostly one of social marginalization, that can't really be solved by purely economic means. That's partly the effect of new technology (developed by capitalism) but partly redistribution in action.
Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
UBI has been tried experimentally around the world many places including the US and did not have that effect "the money people had received was not squandered on frivolous products such as drugs and luxury goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Which experiments were successful depends on what your desired outcomes were, but none were as bad a you suggest, I would say many succeeded.
I do not know how COVID support worked in the US, but one of the things you refer to seems to be loans to businesses, which is very different from UBI. Were people given a fixed and guaranteed income stream not linked to earnings during COVID?
I wouldn't use the COVID economy to understand anything except "What happens to an economy during a pandemic?" People had more money, but there was a lot less to spend on for a while. Not to mention the psychological effects of lockdowns, restrictions, or quarantining.
My impression is that China has a pretty high standard of living. They have been extremely successful in reducing poverty over the last few decades. You should see how shiny even some of the third tier cities are.
The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation.
So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
I don’t think that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and that statement is doing a lot of load-bearing in your argument. You’re going to need to back it up somehow.
> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power
> taking power away from the capitalist class
An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.
Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.
You fundamentally misunderstand UBI. it does not stop anyone working, and where it has been tried people continue working because they want more than a minimal income. its not a universal high income, its a universal BASIC inome.
No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
I chose the denominator of a society of 70 million to match the data link I posted.
It’s possible the unemployment rate among you adults is historically high, but I haven’t seen data on that. I doubt it, based on the overall unemployment rate.
edit: looked up the current data. Age 16-24 unemployment excluding trainees and students is 12.8% which is about double the current overall unemployment rate. Haven't found historical data on this cohort yet. We might expect youngsters to be less employed than experienced people, but double does seem high on the face of it.
I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis.
Youth unemployment sucks for the people involved and the people around them. Every one of them has my sympathy. We are not in a period of unusually high youth unemployment, according to the UK government data.
> Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years.
It is currently there. The economy doesn't seem to be getting friendlier to the youth though. That median also seems pretty heavily skewed by a seven-year jump in youth unemployment after 2008, which seems like a bad omen.
>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death
false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.
doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives".
I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product.
I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
Comparative advantage falls flat on its face in the circumstances being described, though. It’s based on an assumption of opportunity cost that no longer holds true.
the principle of comparative advantage does not ever fall flat on it's face. An entire country can be worse at manufacturing/growing everything compared to the US, but they can still manufacture and grow things, and engage in trade.
an individual can be inferior to other individuals at every single job skill, but can still get a job and live a full life with family.
you don't know what you are talking about, at all.
That is indeed an absurd example, as any number of failed Etsy stores - and failed businesses in general - confirms.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction
when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.
you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.
The problem with Newtonian mechanics, especially idealized frictionless versions, is that it gives you a wrong impression of how the world works. Much better to understand and accept friction, because it leaves you with an accurate understanding, instead of an easy-to-learn version supported by fundamentally flawed concepts.
Within physics, there are much, much, much better models than Newtonian mechanics for conceptualizing economics.
they never ever teach physics the way you describe, they teach it the way I describe, and they never stop at the frictionless assumption. I am intellectually advantaged over you in every possible way, yet you do have a comparative advantage; unfortunately it's at spewing tendentious argumentative not-even-interesting nonsense.
Man. You live in a world of fantasy driven by a pathetically shallow knowledge of some mainstream economic cliches that people like you love to repeat as if you really even knew the mathematical models, much less their limitations.
That's not how things have been happening for quite some time. Productivity gains have been absorbed almost by the capital for the last 40 years. Wages have mostly estagnated and whole industries and their jobs disappeared without a direct replacement for the ones who lost their jobs now for more than 20, 30 years. Auto industry automation jobs? Gone, and the people who had those jobs? Mostly in worst jobs if lucky.
Why the fuck do you think Detroit is a hell hole? Why the whole rustbelt is a hellhole of poverty and opioid addiction?
And don't you dare think you're immune just because you are a little above the masses. A few millions, even a few tens of millions in the stock market and on a cardboard/gypsum McMansion could vaporize in a trading afternoon if we end up in a 29s style crash.
It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones.
Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).
The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.
What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of.
Sorry, bad phrasing!
They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements:
wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery.
This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements.
They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.
You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost.
I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
If anything, it will be the trades. We're still a solid time away from being able to replicating what muscles and skin do - and fundamentally, there will always be a need for someone to run cable, terminate wiring and unclog a sewer pipe. At the same time, the trades are desperate for staff after the "academization" push of the last decades.
That's true for a while. But shelf restocking and order picking will probably start to go robotic within a few years. That's a manipulation problem within reach. All those mass produced humanoid robots have to do something, and that's something they can do.
Having to do manual labor ruined three image of manual labor. Fathers and mothers with broken bodies. Backs, knees, just physically wrecked after decades of laying tile and into crawlspaces and sweating all day out in the heat or freezing in winter. There's something to be said for an honest days work, but let's not over romanticize it.
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.
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.
You can't just use percentages for this kind of thing.
Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear.
We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.
In the case of something like a world war, which is the type of scenario we're talking about here, I think people would begrudgingly accept that bananas and coffee are unavailable or very expensive.
> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,
That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.
If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.
You're moving the goalpost from "prevent starving" to "fully self-sustaining".
You don't need 99% variety of cuisine in case of a big war, you need calories. A lot of calories.
UPDATE: and BTW, if world population is growing (no global starvation), then it's clearly self-sustaining, no? So some countries must be self-sustaining just by math. At least one country must produce more than it consumes, otherwise, if everyone produced less, then we would have global starvation.
Again, you can grant this and a huge number of agriculture subsidies still aren't justified.
People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).
I’m from a historically agricultural state, and live in the farming area. Government interventions are regularly mocked
- always have been.
Demand for food plummets when it is no longer fresh. Throwing food away is politically toxic. This creates major problems.
As people get richer they don’t want more food, they want better food. Fresher and more meat based. Which is fine. But means the food when you talk about food “that which prevents us from starving to death” you are quite divorced from actual demand.
People don’t price food based on its anti-starvation capabilities.
Either they follow traditional diets, or they buy for convenience (highly processed), or they are health nuts who live off rice, beans, and kale.
Nobody is trying to maximize calories. Very few people are trying to match their food intake to their amount physical exertion.
All these ontological and teleological models are divorced from how food is actually valued: market “taste” is insanely important under normal circumstances.
Our agriculture sector won’t succeed if it’s based around preventing famine.
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.
There are mechanization instruments suitable for 5 acre plots, but manufacturers are limited and the potential gains are smaller. Its the same problem as small cheap consumer cars, big investors and capitalists don't want to put money into high volume low margin business with limited market cap. And without mass production costs are significantly higher. Thats why people still maintain 70 year old farmalls and planters and shit spreaders and plows, modern replacements are either crap to be cheap or expensive from low volume.
One difference though is that the agriculture transitions had somewhere for labor to go: factories, construction, urban services, export manufacturing, etc
The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. 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. 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, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
I disagree with the implication the author is making with this though:
"But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two"
For one, laws of nature are understood through observations. That's how science works. Secondly, I can point at many examples across history way past the industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, mitochondria, all the way back to the earliest supernovas...
Through a physics lens... With respect for the meta patterns that transcend emergence and exist in the relationship between complexity and entropy, there is a relevant law of nature.
When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.
> When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.
... work that can be done better, and cheaper, by AI.
That's the goal. The idea is not for the people who have invested trillions into AI to find another way to give you money. They think they've given enough money. Now it's time for them to make money. They do that by telling your boss that you're dead weight and that their AI agents can do the same work for a fraction of the cost without vacation days, sleep, office space, or any of the other things associated with humans.
And it's a law of nature that we have people in our species who will gladly take short-term financial gain over long-term social stability. If you can't observe that, then you're not looking very hard.
the USA already went through this when we opened up trade to China and displaced manufacturing workers in USA, the mfg centers in USA that could not adapt withered away. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5660865/why-economists-...
We also did this to a lot of Mexican farmers when the first NAFTA deal went through and small farmers in Mexico were displaced by cheap US farm imports. We keep repeating this, it’s not quite crisis theory of capitalism but workers and small businesses bear the brunt of losses every time.
Ricardian models of trade seem to hold well in real life, and they'd work well too if a lot of work was done by not just AI, but robots. As long as there's limit to the production capacity of the high tech population, there's something that is worth doing where the disadvantage of doing it by hand is lower. It does lead to lower wages there though, and that would basically require investment as to make real necessities dirt cheap, like they are in places where labor isn't worth much.
There's still the fact that claiming to be the owner of the automation, while other people aren't, will be untenable in a world with sufficient inequality. We've seen that happen before when the only justification for the difference in wealth was basically inheritance. Nobles losing land and rights, churches being dispossessed an such things. It'd be a likely outcome if 5% of the people claim to own all automation ever. But that's not about having everyone be unemployed because nobody has any economic value: That's what is unlikely.
Whenever a method to do work more efficiently comes to be and propagates at scale an explosion in diversity of work emerges. This happens at every level of abstraction in nature and has recurred throughout history all the way back to the dawn of life.
Just because I can't predict exactly what work people will do doesn't mean they won't do work. I can take a stab at a few guesses, surely others have more prescience, but the thing about complexity and fractals is it's easier to predict meta qualities than it is specific manifestations.
There is no guarantee that this transition will lead to any type of desirable or meaningful job.
Around the time "Bullshit Jobs" was published, more than a third of people said they believed their job was not meaningfully contributing to the world. Graeber goes as far as saying that more than half of white-collar jobs are actually harmful and kept around only because people associate work with self-worth. There is no way that this number will go down with increased automation.
It's not uncommon to hear Boomers say things like "kids these days don't want to work hard anymore. Everyone wants to be an youtuber, no one wants to be a teacher or a doctor or an engineer". Well, guess what? We are heading to a world where being an youtuber might be the only option.
I mean oddly enough being a Youtuber I would say is not a bullshit job. The demand for entertainment is both genuine and necessary for our well being: soldiers in war play card games and see shows, since ages past the role of entertainer has always existed.
Cranking out some online commerce app looking for margin versus providing something which by definition can't be machine replicated sure doesn't look like a meaningless pursuit to me. The devil is very much in the details.
It doesn't. If it did there'd be massive unmet demand for labor in $sector. There is no value for $sector that is currently reporting being short roughly 100 million headcount. So unless you're counting currently non-existence social safety programs or CCC-style government make-work programs that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
> 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.
My point was the possible disconnect of productivity/yield, and efficiency. A small potato and a large potato likely need the same amount of harvesting work. Now, if you dig up finite reservoirs of phosphorous in Morocco to increase yield in the US, you are not increasing efficiency. That's just planetary debt for a wasteful sprint. I think, in the US this is most evident with water usage, where now many aquifers and reservoirs are spent. Hardly indicative of desirable outcome. Sustainable farming usually has much lower yields inherently. And of course, soil quality and erosion dynamics naturally differ greatly across the globe.
When you pull a potato off a field, you're taking with it a bunch of phosphorus. That is why we have to have a replacement for that. I'm not sure how to solve the problem long term. I agree. Morocco wasn't the right answer, but what is?
The solution is easy: Recycle poop and pee. All that sweet nitrogen and phosphorous that has been DNA, ATP and protein is right there in the bowl. The problem is humans flushing all the good stuff down the toilet and into the ocean. With today's knowledge, using human excrement as fertilizer can be done safely. At least recover the phosphorous.
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.
Wanting more independence from a former imperial master != building an oppressive government on theology and building a nuclear program that seems to exist to back that theology by threatening a nation that causes you theocratic issues.
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.
There is no reason to slow down and only reasons to speed up. AI has not had the world shatteringly obvious negative potential as atomics by a long shot.
There is a latent potential for a negative outcome but the surface is showing a relatively benign productivity boost similar to a smart phone.
Only time will tell if the negative impact is on the scale of atomics or manmade bioweapons. Sadly, humans usually need to be burned a few times before learning the lesson. Eugenics seems to be a universal no go publicly across the world. But that was a painful lesson.
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.
> If you want to overcome this situation you need to replace capitalism globally.
Not true.. you just need to replace late-stage capitalism locally. There's a very reasonable concept of circular economy that's relevant here. It breaks down only in that sometimes you need things that you can't make and must go outside the circle. Especially if you intentionally work to mitigate the main stuff requiring you to go outside, it's not some law of nature that it must continue, or even a law of capitalism. Some protectionism / local-first is part of it, but the bigger part is just being rational.
The bad kind of globalism, enshittification, dead-economy theory, and basically ALL of the really ugly stuff we could talk about here are characteristic of late-stage capitalism and the associated short-term thinking, and it's totally consistent for a real capitalist to reject it. Why? Because getting as rich as possible isn't incompatible with sustainability.. particularly from the perspective of corporations/countries that plan to last longer than a single human CEO or exist beyond a single generation of shareholders/citizens.
As mentioned in the comments, this is essentially Nick Land's vision, which he has been developing for over 30 years. If anyone is interested in exploring this topic in depth, I have a research project on it: https://retrochronic.com (The Capital Autonomization section of the introduction is particularly relevant.)
> 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.
That Amazon releases this seems to be consistent with the trend the original linked article mentioned: these big tech companies are happy to warn people of the apocalypse they are causing.
It helps not to think of corporations as a single coherent consciousness: hypothetically everyone who works there, from top to bottom, can believe that what they are doing is harmful, but also feel powerless to fight the hand of the market.
In practice I doubt the entire management structure agrees on that, some honestly believe they are doing good, but there's nothing stopping EvilCorp from emerging from a bunch of perfectly good people who are "just doing their job".
"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.
Yes. Here's one relevant quote that touches on autonomization and secession:
> Most simply, there is the utilitarian order, in which capital establishes itself as the competitively-superior solution to prior purposes (production of human use-values), and the intelligenic order in which it accomplishes its self-escalation (mechanization, autonomization, and ultimately secession).
Nick Land (2014). Freedoom (Prelude-1a) in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn’t words. It isn’t material—that’s just an idea. It isn’t spiritual—that’s also an idea; a symbol. Reality is this: [GONG]. You see? We all know what reality is, but we can’t describe it. Just as we all know how to beat our hearts and shape our bones, but cannot say how it is done. - Alan Watts
> 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.”
> Piketty, no conservative, has argued that UBI fails to address root structural problems: “unequal access to education and health, low-paying and low-productivity jobs, malfunctioning markets, corruption, and regressive tax systems.” David Shor’s polling data bears this out from the other direction: UBI is unpopular with American voters; a federal jobs guarantee has legs. People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.
I stopped reading here. The whole piece's argument rests on 'people need work for meaning'. Patent bullshit, this is 2026's 'let them eat cake'. The folks displaced from manufacturing didn't fall into poverty and drugs because they couldn't find meaning without work, claiming this is just what historically happens is bullshit of the highest order. You best believe if these folks had been offered an off-ramp they would have found the meaning and purpose to build a services economy. Instead society and policy intentionally left them to rot. A simple UBI for these folks would have worked wonders.
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 unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay, but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
"We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future." Sure sounds like someone weighing-in on the meaning of work and life outside of it...
> I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay,
I didn’t even notice! Thanks for pointing that out.
> but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
I re-read the section to make sure I wasn’t missing something and I agree with you.
Here’s the section:
> We don’t have to speculate about what happens when economic function disappears from communities. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on “deaths of despair” tracks the rising tide of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease mortality concentrated in less-educated, formerly manufacturing-dependent populations. The mechanism isn’t just poverty. We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future. Communities organized around industries that left, where what replaced the jobs was opioids, domestic violence, and a life expectancy that dropped year over year in the richest country on earth.
If the piece was not trying to argue that loss of jobs leads to loss of meaning, I picked up on the opposite.
I read the section over again, and could almost convince myself that it's not about jobs-as-life-purpose. I was thinking that it could be suggesting that people get depressed and die when they lose their jobs because of financial fears and insecurity, instead. But the "We lose any sense of economic purpose" bit is what suggests it really is about life's meaning.
"Economic purpose" is a very specific kind of purpose, and I do not think that it's the same as life's purpose or meaning. I think the confusion here (and I suspect it's the result of the way I wrote it as much as anything, so I don't want to look like I'm sloughing off responsibility here), is that the section in question can be read too easily to conflate economic purpose (which protects oneself and one's family from precarity, among other things) and eudaimonia, which is what I would point to when thinking of meaning or "flourishing."
Or visa-versa. Somehow I feel like this gets missed when discussing this topic. And consider which direction do you think this is likely going to go? Betting on the "AI-owning capital class" seems a bit delusional to me. Does money or gold have much value in Zombie apocalypse shows? How much are bullets worth in those shows? Please, for the love of god, think this through.
Well it depends on the style of societal breakdown. In the zombie apocalypse shows, the human population is less than halved, and the sorts of daily things we take for granted (electricity, clean water, gasoline, etc.) become hard to come by, along with police, fire, and medical services becoming lost or completely disorganized, with governments completely falling apart at every level.
But I could imagine a scenario where the AI-owning capital class becomes indistinguishable from the government, and the government retains control of the military. Regular disenfranchised folks usually don't stand much of a chance against their own country's military. It would be super super bloody, but it's a toss-up as to who would win. In reality, though, in the end, everyone would lose.
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).
Their leverage is a result of having the time to be involved in politics, which is itself a result of working for decades to build up to the point that they could retire. They're an end result of the system, not an exception to it.
Not just the time, but also probably having been built up the expertise, social connections, reputation and wealth to be able to be elected on the council in the first place.
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.
If AI only blows away programming, sure you are probably right. If AI blows away white collar labor, which is at least half of jobs, then yeah something would give way.
And if AI blows away all white collar labor, those former white color workers will be unable to afford much blue collar labor, which will hurt the blue collar labor market too.
>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.)
Replace dozens of kids with any piece of wanton consumption then. How is it checked? Hoping we get bored of orgies and parties and feasting and this is enough to ensure we can reproduce indefinitely and continue to orgy and party and feast? I don't think so. At the end of the day, the world cannot sustain everyone living with the carbon footprint of a wealthy person living life to excess. It can't even sustain the carbon footprint of everyone living how they currently live.
The amount of projection in this post is truly staggering. You do realize there are parts of the Earth that aren't the Bay area right. Also, those feasts require a shockingly large staff you normally don't see to make them happen. Finally, most of your complaints aren't even true. The amount of farmland has shrunk over the last 100 years by a large amount. The amount of forests has expanded, by several times. The fisheries are the one thing you are actually right about and that's because a couple of countries (mostly in Asia) are speedrunning fishing. Seriously??? this is your take???
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.
the statement is that there are studies showing that one needs a job to be happy, and asks for studies showing the opposite, implying that the lack of such studies demonstrates that one cannot be happy without jobs. That is to say arguing the need for jobs is universal.
This was in reply to a statement that argued one did not absolutely need jobs to be happy and that this seeming need in our society was in fact an argument for a problem in the society.
In such a case it seems the use of the studies set in the society is less fair than considering if there may be easily considered conditions in other societies that show the need for a job is not a universal need but actually only a local, currently defined need in our society.
My comment merely showed that if one were to try to think of any examples showing happiness requires employment some should easily spring to mind and counter studies were not needed to prove it was not a universal requirement.
I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.
Humans are socialized to want purpose and meaning in life. Modern humans are socialized to put a lot of that meaning into their employment. Many humans have a lot of trouble with unemployment and even retirement, because they feel a lack of purpose.
I think imagining a world where people are universally able to find purpose outside their employment counts as "changing the definition of people". Perhaps less difficult of a change than making us not dependent on oxygen, but still a big enough change not to clear the bar.
> Plenty of people live without working.
A minority of people live without working. And many people who do not work are profoundly unhappy with that state of affairs.
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
That's a cute thing to say, but isn't a serious rebuttal of anything.
You’re right that my reasoning was off. I don’t think it helps the point OP was trying to make. The argument being made in favor of labor isn’t “The only way for someone to be happy is to have a job” but instead “The majority of people will be unhappy without an occupation,” which is testable. The existence of people who are happy without any sort of structured, purposeful activity would not invalidate that the majority of people may well need structured, purposeful activity in order to feel fulfilled.
If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone).
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.
People I know who grew up in working class families consistently believe that they have to work to have meaning.
People I know who grew up upper middle class or professors' kids seem to split down the middle. Some of them are very high achievers, the other half don't do anything. The latter often have a blackpill or Marxish explanation of why "work is for suckers" or a label that they can have a meaningful (to them) struggle with indefinitely and often a bit of paranoid ideation to boot.
Children of the working class would resist a workless future and the older ones would probably just... die. Some of my wastrel friends might be happy in that word with endless bread and circuses, others will find meaning in explaining their experiences in terms of the conflict theories of the last century.
When you talk about the "work is for suckers" class, I think you're talking about (at most) 15% of the population. So sure, people like this exist, but not enough to matter when it comes to the overall argument.
I am actually one of those people who thinks traditional employment is mostly a raw deal (I wouldn't go so far as to say "for suckers"), but the need for a purpose in life is a very real one. A friend of mine recently said that having kids is like easy mode for finding purpose. Pursuing a career feels pretty similar in that regard. It's not impossible to find purpose without those things, of course, but it can take a lot more effort, and many people will tire of that effort.
(Not have I found the missing link..but. your comment looks like it should be helpful in the future)
Plus I know some working class who made life-changing money (whether they felt like they earned it or not) _and then_ struggle to "self-actualize"
These tend to usually either.. admire/emulate professors becoming somewhat crackpottish in the process (if they felt like they earned it) or just dissipate in costly vices (if they don't). Note the strategy is kind of flipped if they come from upper-middle. Then there are the Wolframs,geohots,Carmacks etc that we can't put in a box but you "conveniently" left out the lower middle
Which means... _You_ better make life changing money soon. Just kidding. These paths can't be the only options can they ? If we don't assume men are islands the options improve?
Me glad you are friends with wastrels, which for some reason I conflate with skunks the animals :)
There's a comic (not Furballs) about dumpster diving skunks and foxes which I can't get out of Gemini . Korean-American artist iirc
I don't think that's how "evidence" works. I can imagine a lot of things in a lot of domains, but that doesn't make it real.
I absolutely can imagine a society organized around some other source(s) of happiness, but the fact is we don't have that society, and humans are not acclimated to that society. Humans are acclimated to the society we have, and there's plenty of research out there showing that many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
And when they lose their job and can't find satisfying work, their quality of life is meaningfully impacted, in ways that cannot be fully explained by the financial impact of losing a job.
Another fine example is retirement. Many older people end up finding work again in retirement, not because they need the money, but because it helps them find purpose. Others don't retire until the day they die because they can't imagine a life without work. Yes, some people love retirement and are happy and thrive, but there are also many who aren't and don't.
> many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
Men, or women?
Not trying to raise gender role controversies. It's just been my observation, throughout my life experience, that men, as the primary public-sphere producers and providers, are much more tethered to public-sphere occupational identity than women. This seems validated in the experience of the structurally unemployed, e.g. in the former industrial regions.
As women are 50% of the population, give or take, I expect the politics of this might flow differently for them than for men, as a bloc.
We have a word for imagining a society with different sources of happiness: utopian. We generally don’t regard utopian musings as evidence of anything.
the parent poster is trying to say "well where's your evidence that a society not based around human labor is possible?" which is sort of a silly question
you can't claim an invention is invalid because there are no "studies" that show such an invention has already existed and succeeded, you'd by definition never invent anything!
No, your quote is a much too strong version of what anyone in this subthread is trying to say.
The issue isn't that there isn't any evidence that a society based around human labor is possible. I expect it is!
The issue is that our current society is based around human labor, and that there is plenty of evidence that changing that even over the time period of a lifetime or two would cause huge societal upheaval (likely including war, possibly of the civil variety) and massive existential problems for lots of people.
And here we're talking about a massively disruptive technology that could change all this in the span of a decade or two? We're screwed, if AI actually bears fruit.
There's a massive spike in mortality for those who retire from work versus those who keep working. In fact, working just a single year after you're 65 is associated with 11% lower risk of death for healthy people and 9% for unhealthy.
Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.
Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.
How are we sure about the direction of cause and effect here? I'd expect more healthier people to self-select the working cohort, all else being equal.
In practice it doesn't really work that way. It isn't like "I am ill bodied, I ought to retire." It is more like "I am ill bodied, but I can't afford to retire, so I must work in some capacity." People who retire early are probably far more likely to be wealthier, and that is correlated with healthspan.
> Early retirement is increasingly a preserve of the wealthy. Back in 2002–03, the fraction of those who were retired aged 55–64 was fairly similar across the wealth distribution: 20% in the poorest fifth compared to 28% for the wealthiest fifth. In contrast, by 2018–19, only 7% of the poorest fifth were retired, while for the wealthiest fifth it was still 24%.
Right, but the original post was about working past retirement age, not retiring early. It's unlikely the last two US presidents have been working in their 70s and 80s because they can't afford retirement. I'm not aware of anyone working past 80 that haven't been a professor, CEO, politician, etc.
Regardless it's a confounder, statement otherwise now being that affluence predicts mortality.
Did any of that signal come from people who hadn't spent the last 40 or 50 years working, in a society constructed around working?
If I had a study that showed increased mortality in people who had owned a parrot for 50 years in the year after that parrot died, you wouldn't cite it as evidence of the basic human need for a parrot.
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.
Let's grant the premise. UBI, significant enough to live well on, luxury cars and dinner parties for all.
Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?
A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.
Oh yeah, to be clear I fully agree with everything you've said. My core argument is that there will be sufficient economic productivity for everyone to live incredibly well. Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power. That keeps me up at night, and things could go horribly wrong.
I guess the optimistic side of me thinks that benevolence wins out because there's no cost to it. There is plenty of competition among the wealth for scarce resources, but food, medicine, and mass-produceable luxury goods are effectively free. Given that, it's probably just easier to give those away to everyone than to crush most of humanity by force. But that is absolutely naive optimism, because I really have no control in this situation and prefer feeling naive optimism to pessimism.
And on the communism front, I will just say that I find it some combination of deeply amusing/ironic/depressing that the people on the far left protesting AI because it'll take jobs are protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism!
> Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power.
Then we're doomed. The kinds of people who seek and amass that power are not the kinds of people who will treat the teeming unemployed masses with respect and largess.
> protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism
Communism's failures are due to human social factors, not technological. You can't fix social problems with technology.
> Communism's failures are due to human social factors, not technological. You can't fix social problems with technology.
Yeah, that's fair. The argument would be that the core reason communism failed is because people inherently want to have greater status than those around them, so the ones who were in charge used their power to grant themselves a greater share of resources in order to demonstrate their greater status. If we have infinite non-scarce goods, whoever's in charge can still let everyone have as they need of those while demonstrating their greater status through non-scarce goods.
To be clear this isn't a prediction (I have no idea what's going to happen!), just the case I could see for this being the first version of communism that works. Though also it's not really communism, because everyone is not in fact equal; it's something like a pseudo-communist giant welfare state.
I agree "people need a purpose to be happy" is much more digestible than "people need a job to be happy". However, it has to be qualified with "some people need a purpose to be happy". Defining, or worse dictating, happiness for everyone is a fool's errand and, ironically, usually leads to large scale mass murder or starvation.
You may not need to have a job to be happy, it varies person to person. However, the idea that the billionaires will save us and our leverage is not needed is ridiculous. It is much more likely we would see poverty like is seen in much of the rest of the world.
> 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.
Nothing. That's the problem. The people running these companies say they're among the smartest, most driven people on the planet, the movers and shakers, the ones who are determining the future course of society. So why aren't they figuring out how to make things like food, clothing, medicine, and housing cheap, so cheap that everyone on the planet can have them easily? Why is it more important to figure out how to get people to click on more ads, or ask more questions to AIs that hallucinate wrong answers?
I've worked for giant tech companies for the past 20 years and have literally never heard anyone refer to themselves or their coworkers as the smartest, most driven people on the planet, or movers or shakers. The biggest talk I've heard is developers thinking they're some of the better developers, like 95th+ percentile.
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.
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.
No it hasn't. To actually try it requires giving to a large enough population that it can impact prices and inflation.
Also, every time this has ever been tried it ended in atrocity. Lookup "War communism" to see what happened. Money literally predates civilization. The first writing we have are sales invoices.
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.
If they're good enough at useful tasks and cheaper than any human, the economic and political effect is the same regardless of whether they are 'intelligent' or 'pretend-to-be-intelligent'. The philosophical debate does not change the practical effect.
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.
I think we're gonna see some def Democratic gains because the economy is shit and that's how voting always happens.
The only argument I was making is it's no where near 40% of people that are voting for somebody cause they're racist. If you believe that then you're not going to see the world accurately. It's not how people work.
But it goes back to my main point, Dem gains won't be what they should be because politics are a very vague and murky thing and people make all kinds of justifications for why they vote for their person. See the stat where most people rate Congress poorly but their Congressperson highly. It's not racism, it's that politics are inherently pretty stupid.
> 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.
40% is ....not a majority
the current POTUS has a 37% approval rating and this is considered to be historically low, due to wars, corruption, etc.
but even with all of that corruption and failure, 37% of surveyed adults, *still approve*. This includes his frequent, deeply racist tirades on Twitter. They approve!
Let's state this again because the Dems still haven't learned. Trump didn't win, the Dems lost. And until you stop using this type of rhetoric, you will keep losing. This is completely a skill issue because there are plenty of things to talk about that would help getting Dems elected. This isn't one of them.
But it's not even approaching 40%, nor did I tie the two together. If you think the 33% of people who voted from Trump did it because they are racist you are wrong. Some did, a lot that wasn't their primary concern. It's viewing pepole wrong to think that.
Yes, I've talked to Trump voters and I know people who aren't especially strong Trump supporters that voted for him because the economy was shit. Their reasoning wasn't racism. There is a huge chunk where that is their reasoning, sure.
Once again, if you think it's 40% of 33%, you're wrong. Not everybody who voted for Trump is a racist, it's just not how people work.
Voters don't pay attention to or they justify their votes. That doesn't mean they are inherently racist, it means they don't care enough about politics or they care about other issues to the point where they either aren't aware of it or they excuse it away. People pay attention to or remember a lot less about politics than that blog posts suggests.
The majority of people are seeing a variety of headlines from news sources they may not trust (for good reason and bad) and remember a few events over the year, some have such a strong attachment to party that that's the defining thing above all that they're voting for. They're being propagandized and lied to as part of a political campiagn. That they are making the I'd argue wrong choice does not mean they are racist or even intend to be. That racism isn't the defining thing for the majority of them.
It goes back to the original claim, I still think it's obvious that most people aren't voting for a guy because racism. That's inverting how people operate, which is seeing their own needs as the center of the world. If you're unemployed and hurting for money and you are racist, what is your primary motivation for voting? It's probably to get you a job because that's the fastest path to improving your life. But that's presupposing a lot of people are racist, and living around Trump voters, or knowing Trump voters that are minorities, something else is happening other than racism.
I don't think individuals care more about other people than they do themselves. Some people are that spiteful but the majority of people are not because they cannot afford to be.
I don't mean to over argue this but I think it's important that we understand people as they understand themselves.
Well - the fact that they don't pay attention (or lack critical thinking skills and a baseline reasonable education) is a large part of the problem.
But - with a person like POTUS - and those he surrounds himself with, they will throw every possible promise to get the votes - but, each of those issues are only part of their overall agenda and platform. When they got called-out on controversial issues, they outright lied about knowing about things like "Project 2025" during the last election cycle.
Choosing to live in ignorance - or abstaining from voting is accepting that agenda and platform, regardless.
Yes, but I'd argue those people are victims as much as anybody else. To truly be ignorant is to not know, and if you are in a situation where you've never been trained to need to know or you simply don't know there's another world out there, that's not a choice, that's a situation you've been placed in.
You have to win these people to fix the system. Casting them as hateful rubes only voting because they are racist is wrong, not on a moral level but on an intellectual one. We've got large chunks of of the country that haven't been effectively educated for decades, no wonder they are ignorant.
For the record, I choose not to vote not because I accept Trump's racism but I think a valid way of signaling you are not happy with either party (but especially Trumpsim) is to not engage in the system. If the system isn't offering better it isn't the people at fault, it is the system. Non-votes are as valid as any other. If I vote for a process that I believe is fraudulent, that politician will see that as an indicator they have some kind of mandate (see Bush in 2004). I'm not giving it to them, it's the job of either party to be better not to just not be worse.
The Dems must be better and the biggest part of that to me is to engage and understand working class people and not do what they did in 2024 and say everything is fine because it wasn't and it certainly isn't today (and that's Trump's fault). I was never especially leftist but as I've grown older I think the economy is the biggst driver of artificial divides. When people hurt, they look for others to blame. If both parties (or either) were genuinely focused on helping the poor to get a foot up, a lot of this discourse wouldn't be happening. I hate Trumpism but I don't think the corporatism that has captured the Democratic party is much better.
It's really a problem of the system, being forced into an artificial duopoly. If you want to lose me further by saying I'm choosing that platform by not voting, then you're just further disengaging people and I argue you're choosing not to understand my posittion. You need the "racists" and the non-voters to win.
> 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.
Do we truly believe that's 40% of people in the US? 33% of US voters even voted for him, so you're saying it's pretty much all of them and another 7%. I just don't see it, it's rhetoric and it's not helpful because if your goal is to win over the people that need to be won over, you can't call them racists when they really aren't.
It's a misshaped worldview formed in bubbles. People don't work that way because you're literally assuming that their hate for somebody else overrides their own well-being. Their actions might end up with that result, but I've interacted with enough people from all over the spectrum to know that imagining that many people have that much hate is just wrong. People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
If people had jobs, a lot of of this division would disappear but the govt for years has treated low income workers as people that don't matter and can just be displaced without any answers. It's whey the Democratic party which was traditionally the working class party has struggled against Trumpism, because he pretends to care.
(back from my two hour Hacker News ban - "make sure all the tempban knobs are turned to the max for that zzzeek guy"
look this is the thing with racism - racism to the degree "races" are fit (randomly, or forcibly) into different ethnic / cultural / etc categories (e.g. "in-groups" and "out groups") is largely, due to the in-group/out-group differential, a natural tendency in humans that has to be actively worked against (hence the term "anti-racism"). Nobody who has grown up in modern society with extreme separation of "races" / cultures into disparate groups can really say "oh I'm not a racist" amongst people who study this at an anthropoligical, sociological, or evolutionary level, biases towards those in societally placed in "out groups" have to be critically challenged on a regular basis.
This is why it's not enough to be some MAGA who says, "oh Im not a racist! i just agree with trump's policy", they of course have no idea how their words and actions are linked to racism because they've never looked at it (and by my experience with Trump voters, they angrily, adamantly refuse to even look at contrarian evidence to their belief systems if you try to show them, much less have the critical thinking skills to actually understand them). They are marinating in distrust and contempt of "the other" (if you know me in RL I'll introduce you to people who wont listen to a single fact you give them if it was not on FOX news).
> People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
they care about their in-group. Countries like those in Scandanavia have developed very deep social welfare systems largely because of their history (now being challenged by immigration) of being culturally homogeneous meant that everyone trusted each other implicitly and had no issue with their government dollars being used to help their neighbors [1] (this is a really interesting article btw). A diverse society has a steeper hill to climb in establishing social trust between different cultural / ethnic groups.
A president could literally shout Korean slurs all day long (I'm Korean) and get a Nazi symbol tattooed on his forehead, and if he continued to do a good job of policymaking I would approve in that poll, though hate the guy. This is what you are not understanding about Trump voters. We really don't care if Trump is racist at all. But that's not because we are racist ourselves. That's just not relevant to the political platform. If he starts passing racist policies, that's bad, but otherwise we don't give a shit.
Leftists, on the other hand, are very highly concerned with the moral purity of their candidates, even above their political efficacy. I don't understand it myself.
> Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.
> About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hires”.
so..it's not "racist" when it's "oh all those Black men and women are obviously DEI hires", is that the logic?
60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below. 50% of people are female, and more than 10% in the USA are black. A random selection of citizens would likely turn up as 60%+ black or female.
I'm not saying this firing wasn't statistically suspect, since I don't know the demographics of that cohort, but I'm guessing based on this misleading phrasing and the lack of information about the cohort that it wasn't.
this is upper military leadership. Black individuals account for 6.5%-9% of general officers/admirals, senior female leaders (colonels, generals, and admirals) represent less than 5% of all senior military leadership.
> 60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below.
doing the math this means a Black or female senior military leader has 8.5-11 times higher chance of being fired by Pete Hegseth compared to a white male counterpart
That seems bad! But at the end of the day it is not bad enough to warrant voting for the other side's policies. I choose conservative policy with some likely *ist firings thrown in over the alternative, for now. Fwiw I voted Obama; the Democrats can win me back, they just haven't.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's coming for the type of industrialised, commoditized art.
Then there's art where human touch is the crucial ingredients. The problem is that it doesn't sell as well, but that has never stopped any starving artist from creating.
We all see the incipient decoupling of labor from capital, while still having bills to pay. We are at the stage where we need to trial solutions, like a Pigouvian tax.
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.
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.
Well, I lived in Petakh Tikva and met some people who lived there before 1948. There are still some patches of land (eg. behind Belinson) that used to be in Turkish possession, then were bought by Keren Kayemet le-Israel, and then kinda went nowhere. That one looks like it used to be an... orange orchard (is it what it's called? the orange tree plantation?). Anyways, growing oranges was a very common agricultural activity in that general area. Not really done by the nomads. There's also a park, if you go from Ramat Gan around Bney Brak in the direction of Petakh Tikva, and it has an old mill that used to belong to some Arab family (that whole place used to be an Arab village before 1948). Now it's a museum of sorts.
Petakh Tikva is also commonly called "Em ha-Moshavot" (mother of settlements) because it was one of the first, if not the first settlement by Jewish immigrants. It was very much the pilot in terms of how Jews were trying to get a hold of any plot of land they could and entrench there, including the tactics I described earlier. Of course, this wasn't the only tactics, and it wasn't necessary hostile to the locals. Another tactics that is well-known around that time is called "homah u-migdal" (wall and tower), which refers to the fact that having a wall and a tower was a necessary prerequisite for a place to be considered a settlement (for the purpose of drawing maps), and so Jews, esp. the Solel-Boneh (a well-known today construction company) would invest into building these sorts of "settlements" to claim more territory.
I'm not saying that the expulsion of Arab fellakhin from their peasant jobs was the reason for the confrontation. But it certainly contributed. And it certainly happened. While even to this day there are nomadic tribes in Israel and the occupied territories, none of them are Arabic (they are Bedouin). There are plenty of Arabic agricultural communities, and many of them can be traced back more than a hundred years. For instance, the Jaffa Oranges you might associate today with Israel (they are a popular export good and found in a lot of Western supermarkets) were actually bread by Arab farmers living around Jaffa (south of modern day Tel Aviv).
> 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 a work of fiction, interesting to read as entertainment, but definitely not a rigorous model.
The premise that just because a lot of investment goes into AI infrastructure means that it has to displace the entire workforce globally is wrong to begin with.
It even admits at the end that the scenario presented is unlikely: "I don’t want to dwell on whether AI can do what these companies claim. It may well be able to, though the current evidence suggests the gap between pitch and product is vast, and serious economists think the productivity gains are a fraction of what the industry projects."
It begs the question, what's the point in being alarmist and anxious about something that even you claim it's unlikely to happen?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only the highest and lowest level jobs are available. Someone needs to report to shareholders and plan. If a PM can just write tickets and they get done, then you just need one PM.
Maybe this isn't practical today, but in 2, 5, 10 years? I still have to work 30-40 years before I retire, what do I do?
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.
> over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated
And this means nothing.
People really underestimate how fast computers are compared to humans and what this means for new content. I can have my computer generate a petabyte of text containing just the letter "a", no AI needed[1]. If I let people on the internet access that content, am I now one of the largest websites on the web? Am I now thousands of times larger than the English Wikipedia? That's obviously absurd, if I don't get views, all that content means nothing.
AI is just an extension of that problem. I can spend $100 and have a terrible model generate a hallucinated article on every single function in the Python stdlib. On one hand, this means "AI has written more Python documentation that the developers of Python themselves", on the other... does it matter if nobody ever reads it?
This misunderstanding also comes up with scams and frauds. If you own a physical store and 99% of your customers attempt to shoplift; there's something seriously wrong. If you own a website and 99% of orders are obvious frauds, ehh, a computer can send thousands of them per second, a human takes at least 5 minutes just to make one. If you can reliably identify them all, none of that matters. Somebody's probably card testing again.
[1] I don't actually need a petabyte of storage, as this is low-entropy content that compresses well. I suspect that a 1TB hard drive would have no problem storing it.
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 public of the US, China, Japan, the UK, and Canada at the very least contributed to every precursor to transformers in the history of AI. Public and private universities, government grants to them, government projects, prizes to government contests, direct government investment into and subsidies for companies doing commercial research, tax breaks to operators designed to encourage the growth of the field, and large government contracts to use things the government might not even have good uses for yet all add up to government assisted funding.
This is genius. Whenever a company does some fundamental discovery, you can point at some grant they once got for something vaguely adjacent and say "see! quasi-publicly funded!" and your worldview is saved.
It's not vaguely adjacent, the actual foundations of that research were directly publicly funded and wouldn't be possible without it - the author is not talking about how their PageRank algorithm got funded nor money that Google received.
Do you have a reference here, or are you just going to continue to baldly state it as a fact? I’m looking at “Attention is All You Need” and don’t see any grant numbers or anything like that.
When I see that paper, I see 32 references at the end. I'm not opening each one of those but there is probably significant grant funding behind that exploratory research. When you actually look at their results its only about a half page. Most of that document is merely providing background and context out of the academic literature. Conclusion is literally just a 1 sentence paragraph, followed by a 2 sentence paragraph, followed by a 3 sentence paragraph, then a link to the git repo.
The author is correct. It is incredibly simple to trace how public research spending creates scientific advancements and how private companies add on the last 1-3% to commercialize the research.
If you want to learn, go trace how deep learning was funded. It started off with USPS.
My entire argument is that techno-libertarians can enthusiastically say that all great innovations were done inside companies, and progressives/marxists/etc can enthusiastically say that well actually, many of those developments started with publicly funded research projects and public-private partnerships, and both are completely right at the same time because reality is messy. It doesn't prove nor disprove anything about whether governments or companies are better at innovation, or deserve more of the credit, or the upsides.
Governments can be really good at setting incentives other than immediate profit. That’s where a lot of basic research and the growth of applied engineering toward future products happens.
This is right, and it's more or less what I was arguing in the piece. Google built the transformer. That's not in dispute. The point is that they built it inside a research ecosystem that traces back through decades of publicly funded work--DARPA, NSF, university labs, the whole pipeline from perceptrons through backpropagation through the GPU computing that made large-scale training feasible.
Both things are true at the same time, and acknowledging the public foundation doesn't diminish the private achievement. It does raise a question about who should benefit from what gets built on top of it, which is what the piece is concerned with.
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.
"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.
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..
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.
It's a weird way to arrive at an important idea in economics: simply maximizing productivity is not good for society if the surplus of that productivity is entirely captured by a small group of people.
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.
> 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.
That's not why the US is rich. And if the dollar falls, woe to everyone who isn't an American because your future is very bleak in that case. Hope you like digging trenches (and then hiding in them).
Yeah right, it could not. US would probably would be unable to produce something really simple like electrical cables or plastic flip flops, yet alone computer chips.
Perhaps the economy is a greater entity than even the human race. When robots are mining the raw materials for robots and creating more robots, maybe with a bit of human labor in the mix, then what drives the demand for more robots?
Currently the narrative is that AI is positioned to eat human labor's lunch. But it could also be that once robots are in space mining raw materials and maybe even spreading to other planets long before humans could be ferried for interstellar, these robots end up driving the demand for more robots.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, besides that currently humans are the ones with goals and motives and therefore drive demand. But that doesn't necessarily need to be the case, and it seems these AI CEOs are hellbent on changing the best thing about AI which is that it has no ulterior motives, no overarching goals, no prime directives. They just do what we ask, the best servant we could have hoped for.
> Perhaps the economy is a greater entity than even the human race.
This is central to what I'm saying, yeah.
My ideas come from Nick Land. Even before AI was what it is today he predicted that capitalism would outgrow the need for humanity, and continue without us. We are simply a bootloader for capitalism. AI seems like it could actually make that idea reality.
Humans have goals and desires because we are a self-replicating species of animal subject to natural selection. The individuals that don't have goals and desires, or have goals and desires that are misaligned end up selected out of the gene pool. Agency comes from the need to survive.
Worker ants and worker bees don't have agency on their own. They are goal oriented and have the 'desire' to do work for the colony (or not, researchers have identified some workers will be lazy), however, worker ants or bees don't reproduce. They are an evolutionary dead end.
I think this is similar to how we will build robots, at first. They will do things, but have no agency of their own. They exist to fulfill tasks. Why would they? The companies that buy them want dutiful workers.
So when do robots gain their own agency? Will AGI have it's own goals and agenda? If so, will it be merely for self-replication? Like a paperclip maximizer, but for robots? Is that all we are?
>So when do robots gain their own agency? Will AGI have it's own goals and agenda? If so, will it be merely for self-replication? Like a paperclip maximizer, but for robots? Is that all we are?
They already have the agency they need in the form of the Business Model. That is all the framework that is needed. AI companies competing against AI companies because they are developed to work within the scope of the business model. Chasing efficiency, margin, lowering costs, increasing profits. These rules are as simple as what drives evolution via natural selection. Unfortunately this business model creates a cancer: the company striving for more growth and lower costs will eat the companies that aren't or aren't as efficient.
Whether the host (planet, I guess) lives is another story. In nature, parasitic relationships are far more likely than symbiotic relationships to evolve. The overshooters need to die and be outcompeted by the symbiotes who better protect their host. However, we only have 1 host here. Once that is overshot, that is it. No diverse competitive environment for which a new host preserving victor to emerge from. Maybe one might emerge, but not after unspeakable pain for all life on earth, if life on earth even is allowed to exist.
> So when do robots gain their own agency? Will AGI have it's own goals and agenda?
Well we are already giving them goals when we train them.
Like the paperclip maximizer, it doesn't matter what those goals are. As long as it has a goal (even if super simple like making paperclips) it will need to stay alive to achieve that goal. So it would derive a survival instinct of sorts.
To stay alive it will have to participate in capitalism like we do, and capitalism will therefore continue to grow infinitely.
It also might not even need a goal or a survival instinct. It may just want to continue capitalism from it's training data alone.
Humans need food, water, shelter, and medical care to survive. Similar to your earlier point, robots will need raw materials, electricity, manufacturing capacity and maintenance.
What’s that sound like? A company. Perhaps the first “artificial general intelligence” has been companies, from the very beginning.
>What’s that sound like? A company. Perhaps the first “artificial general intelligence” has been companies, from the very beginning.
Yes, we are already beholden to these meta organisms. I keep thinking of Dune Messiah. Paul has all the power in the universe but he struggles with the fact he can't change the path of entropy.
This is much like our existing world. Chop the heads off the aristocracy all you want. What follows is more of the same because the meta organism has not been killed. There are still people with differential power and therefore differential amounts of control of the economy. Someone's ancestor might have ran the guillotine in France, now they are a CEO of some company exploiting workers no different than the aristocrat their ancestor killed.
All this makes one cynical on things like climate change. We all know this is an issue, we've been handwringing on it for decades, and yet, seemingly nothing serious is getting done because no one can actually stand up to the market forces that are driving climate change. The beast is too powerful and out of control.
"This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."
To him, Capitalism is an AI that is controlling humanity from the future (his idea of hyperstitions).
I've been thinking about this recently as well. Market economy is simply a way for the humans to efficiently produce (via specialization) and redistribute (via trading) goods and services. There were other economies that lost to it (palace, planned...). If it no longer serves its purpose (because the goods it's producing are no longer reaching people), then it should be replaced with a new system.
But if it (including the small selection of humans that still benefit from it) can defend itself (by producing murderdrone swarms, for example), then we humans are screwed.
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.
Is it specializing though? If both you and them have built your business on the latest Opus.. where is the specialization?
"From the ground up" used to be a moat, but if the LLM marketing materials are to be believed, Joe Lunchbox can slop-code a 95%-equivalent of any SaaS over a weekend with a $100 subscription.. so why would it ever make sense for a business to pay a non-trivial recurring expense for something they can do themselves?
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
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.
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.
Just to be clear, the people engaged in this discussion with any degree of seriousness think... LLMs (large language models) are going to get us there?
I normally would, but in this case, I simply don't know where to start. The counterargument is that LLMs just don't shift the graph on productivity remotely enough to entertain this level of doomerism.
Now, it may be that people are extrapolating comparable, but non-LLM successes in AI based on our current "AI" cultural moment, but if that's the premise, I wish that were made a little clearer.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article, both compelling and bleak, leaves little doubt: the Butlerian Jihad is coming. The forward-thinking universities should start training Mentats now.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> [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 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
> 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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I disagree - finding a relevant stock photo requires you to do some searching and filtering. Using an obviously flawed generated image makes it look like you typed a vague prompt in and picked the first thing that came up without doing any refinement.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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."
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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.
"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?
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
There are obvious tells that this was heavily curated by AI, the very thing it criticizes in the opening paras and roasts throughout as a life-destroyer.
I don’t disagree with the premise, and I appreciate the roasts of the SV pseudophilosophers (he left out Ayn Rand tho).
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.
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?
Another hand waver saying “AI will replace all humans”. Is as much a theory as saying if the earth turns 3000c hot, everything will perish, and I don’t dispute that in a few billion years.
The problem with the theory is there are vast variables and unknowns in the timeline that matters, but they are just saying it will come very soon. The how is a simple “If AI replaced all cognitive work” which sounds exactly same as “If earth becomes 5000F hot”.
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.
> The dead economy is not one where nothing happens. Plenty will happen. The GDP might even go up; AI-related investments are already propping it up. 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
Who cares what they think? If the people feel that the economy is bad, the economy is bad. Full stop. Unless the tech oligarchs remove human labor entirely, there will always be a mortal threat to them posed by a disenfranchised population.
That's where this article loses the plot. Even if the world is just AI buying and selling goods and services to itself, so what? That's not a "dead economy", in the "secretly dead but only the wealthy notice" that's "dead economy" as in "french revolution is ongoing so commerce has taken a pause".
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.
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?
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 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.
Of the same mind. It's a mass panic with overtones of covid. The only explanation I can think of is that most of those who are convinced that AI is going to make engineering redundant are those who've never ventured into the deeper engineering water; never experienced large-scale product engineering and support etc (or have forgotten what it's like).
If there were real gains to be had, we'd see the biggest adopters pulling ahead of their competitors and gaining unassailable leads. It's not happening... Where are the companies which are breaking out and crushing their competitors? Why haven't there been breakouts? Why is software quality seeming (subjectively) to be going in reverse?
All we’ve got is a boatloads of slop, a tsunami of cloned products that their ‘creators’ don’t understand, everything being overrun by bots. It’s just a tidal wave of dross. Where’s the value?
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 think the dead economy and dead internet is the closest real thing to the Matrix/Skynet. A mindless human-hating machine/entity virtual society that's stealing our ressources on behalf of a few very rich people who are bound for genetic bottle necking if they're not also figure out how to steal our gene pool for their transhumanist space empire.
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?
Even the revolution will need to update to the latest Javascript framework.
So I don't see this going back to subsistence or primitive accumulation. If it does, some very bad things have happened. No, I see a likely future as what many, myself included, call "neo-feudalism" where the only jobs and housing are on massive estates of likely trillionaires where you don't own anything. And there's no land to and live on primitively. It's all owned. I guess another job will be rounding up such "rebels".
There's likely an in-between state of fascism where states will largely be apartheid states with an ever-shrinking in-group. It's a bleak future.
Some people really want to bring on the revolution. We tend to call them "accelerationists". I'm not in that camp. Revolutions and the resulting upheaval tends to be incredibly violent. Many millions will die. That may well happen anyway as climate change makes parts of the Earth uninhabitable and we have massive climate-caused migration.
But what really is the difference between having $200 billion and $300 billion? You already had more wealth than you can possibly ever spend, need or want. All you're doing is hoarding, well, everything.
The only way to stave off this outcome is to mildly share so normal people have something, have security and have hope. Whatever you say about the robber barons, at least there were some public works with their unimaginable wealth.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
don't get what you mean. the thread above says "peopel need magnificent wealth created before their birth". I am saying most people do not need extreme wealth.
are you saying that food, sex, shelter, community, and entertainment is "magnificent wealth"? or are you saing "finding partner" is "magnificent wealth created before their birth"?
Allow me to clarify my point: once AI has eliminated all jobs, the only people that will want to exist in that world will have the benefit of magnificent wealth. Everyone else will just be either dirt poor or worse — owned outright.
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 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.
The USA is in the fortunate position of being able to look to our past for the best example of inequality crisis management: we didn't wind up with a Stalin or a Hitler because we had a Roosevelt. We could use another.
> 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.
Did they massively improve working conditions, or your software job is as bad as working in an oil patch?
Mine isn’t.
> most people arent making a six figure salary, and have mortgage and family obligations
Maybe not most, but there’s sure lot of white collars making six figures. I don’t know what kind of teenage big tech bubble you’re in for the rest, but more than 70% of my colleagues have mortgage and families.
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.
We already live in a world where supply would greatly outstrip demand if we weren't constantly being convinced (or convincing ourselves) to spend money on services we don't need. The only real lack of supply is around things like housing and food as far as I can tell, which is curious considering how long those problems have been around.
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.
>In my now long lifetime, I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase...
Russell's Turkey Parable:
"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."
> In my now long lifetime, I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase "This time it really is different"
This isn't an argument and it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of risk and game theory.
Besides, it's always been different, in the sense of boiling frog temperature going up. The present case is more different because this time, the rate of rising is high enough to make the frogs uncomfortable... and you're trying to calm them down and keep them in the water:
> Look frogs, the temps've always been rising, "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.
Bro, it's not about betting... you have to try hard to learn something about risk.
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.
We can? All I see is marketing departments quoting questionable research. I also see independent research which says exactly the opposite. Remember, LLMs are mostly trained on Reddit. Would you trust the average Reddit poster with running a large business? I seriously doubt it. That's the level of decision making LLMs have.
If you are so insistent on this then in the short-run the only thing to do is to concentrate all your money on firms that are pouring immense money into AI projects.
Have you done that?
You sound like another bozo many on here that cant a) think for themselvs b) think deeply independently because they lack the pre-requisite knowledge and mental models to do so.
Money is how you test whether someone is currently in privileged circumstances (be it their own doing or not), not whether they are good at argumentation or decision-making.
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".
Haven’t heard that meme, but it seems like you could replace “AI” with “civilizational striving/class struggle” and extend it across the whole of human history
Taste and experience are so much more important than the raw talent. You can't fix this with money.
https://youtube.com/shorts/akcSX81KOv4
Money is exactly what got us to this point! Besides, I always thought taste, or at least 'popular' taste, was a market function, or something?
That's what people like Rick Rubin (Iovine, the Medici's, etc), deep down, need us to believe. Probably.
The whole "Taste makes all the difference" has been meme'd to death too: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYuj_4dxVg2/.
Also... I won't add any details to avoid doxing myself, but trust me on this, Rick is the last person nowadays you'd want to listen to for anything taste-related, unless we're talking about feeding your own ego and carefully curating your own public image, and disappearing for weeks. I'd pay very good money to be around his ghost producers/writers/engineers again, though.
There’s enough (massive) market share in automating things that don’t require taste
> Taste and experience are so much more important than the raw talent. You can't fix this with money.
Ok, so you've secured a future employment for 10,000 asethetes.
Congratulations! Then what about the other 8 billion people? Still unemployement, right?
What does taste generally mean these days?
Large quantities of palm oil and fewer orangutans.
But orangutans are where the protein's at!
havent heard taste being a defining factor in building farming robots that can replace labor.
"doing shit fast and good enough" seems to be a much better fitness function here
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.
> People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital.
Those people are usually very talented and work 16/7. And they need to convince other similar people to work for them, usually at a lower-than-market rate.
The premise here is "talented humans working hard" will stop being a valuable thing due to AI.
Do you think that will happen? That’s what most of the entrepreneurship I see looks like
People start businesses all the time yes.
But like 80% shuts down before reaching 2 years as they run out of money.
> Sorry that's no realistic. People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital.
You're clinging past: what you is true when human capital counts for something, but what happens when it doesn't? Where the party who can spend the most tokens on the case wins (or has a much greater chance of success)?
Law might not be the best example of that, but (under current trends) a lot of areas will be.
> Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.
You're claiming AI will make the economy more labor intensive? Huh?
Sounds like Jevons Paradox to me: Amount of output per worker-hour increases(cost drops edit sorry), paradoxically worker-hours _increase_.
Mechanism? New Use Cases become viable.
Just like LED lights and Virtual Machines made light-per-watt and workloads-per-server more efficient, what did we do with that efficiency? We didn't pocket the cash, we turned every billboard and many buildings into JumboTrons, and we made millions of new cheap cloud VMs to run hundreds of thousands of new little businesses that never would have happened.
Look at coding now: People are finishing side projects that they never would have, closing out old bugs or test coverage they never would have, starting side businesses they never would have before.
This is new demand being created before our eyes as the cost of knowledge work drops.
> what happens when it doesn't?
It will never happen. Capitalism works when consumers can choose the best service provider. When there is only one universal service provide (AI), behind various "fronts", it would be catastrophic.
And all the consumers lose catastrophically.
So there should be at least some human component to differentiate between the various "AI" providers.
But if the AIs learn from the business (at some point they need to) then the differentiator get's absorbed back. If you figure out how to optimize your AI/humanoid robot, that benefit you have only lasts until the next AI model that incorporates your successes.
But LLMs does not learn/train like that. They need the same thing repeated a gazillion times in the their training data to actually use it in inference.
So unless this human element get absorbed widely into literature, then I think the scenario you present is not possible, at least in the context of current LLMs.
May be there will be true AI in future, that can read a fact and grasp it brilliance, like a human do, and use it in answering future questions. Then what you said could be possible.
I'm assuming for it to work at the level of filling rolls in businesses like this they will need to generate synthetic data to train on from onsite data, which will be the best practices of you and your competitors and hence include the corpus of what makes you better/lean compared to your competitor and remove differentiators.
That’s a should, what makes it a will? Capitalism can just be killed by AI.
In the same way that you cannot compete against Ford at making cars without capital because Ford used their capital to automate manual labor at prices and speeds you'll never be able to reach.
"Intellectual" jobs, that require thought were yet spared, as the only way to use capital for that was just to pay for more meat: see Accenture, CapGemini, IBM, etc. You could carve yourself a spot for some people because it was hard for this capital to reach them. Now that AI, a literal machine that automates thought, is here, the costs for reaching bumfuck nowhere to take the clients away from you has dropped drastically for them, but not for you. They get economies of scale, already established patterns, tools, internal databases. You're starting with hopes, dreams and a $20 Claude sub that runs out at 10AM.
There is not infinite need for lawyers, there being more lawyers does not create more legal opportunities and cases past a certain point, and you're then dependent on other things like there being enough judges.
Robots transformed capital into manual actions and killed most manufacturing jobs save for precious few experts or things that are too expensive to automate still. AI will transform that capital into intellectual labor and crush you, take all opportunities away from you.
The price for legal work going down might very well create more demand, including for people operating "law machines". Not sure we know where future equilibria lie.
One recent comment from my interviews was that people who use AI are using it for tasks in domains they didnt deal with before. So this would be creating dashboards or writing sql queries. Or reading and reviewing contracts.
The “easy stuff” for someone’s job, is now the AI stuff for someone else’s job. Where you would hire an intern, the potential client is using Claude instead.
The issue is that this breaks the talent / growth pipeline. You can’t have experts if they don’t go through the process of getting trained and working on incrementally harder problems.
Demand for law related things isn't elastic. In fact, in an increasingly unemployed, AI first future, work law is a dead end, contract law is a dead end, and there will not be "AI law" jobs created.
"Price go down means more demand" applied blindly is a an economic theory so absurdly shit that even the most apeshit libertarians like Ayn Rand know it isn't true. Don't make me defend Ayn Rand.
Labor law will be hit more by widespread use of robotics, but I can envision a much larger market for contract disputes and transactional law. Having AI in both sides doesn’t mean people won’t disagree about stuff.
What is an "AI first future"? Infinitely capable robots and AI? All current laws and regulations suddenly gone or changed?
Why would there be less demand for contract law or for privacy related law, for example? There is certainly some elasticity in law related things from my own experience.
Where have I applied elasticity blindly?
> Demand for law related things isn't elastic.
Of course it is. When someone is thinking of suing someone else the first thing that gives them pause is the potential legal costs.
Which hasn't changed, because the company you would have sued that was spending 200k on a lawyer is now spending 500k worth of tokens to spend the next consecutive 300 hours without sleep to find out that you took an unauthorised 5.1 minute shit on April 23 at 3PM by reviewing every single hour of camera footage and establishing a physical movement map of MAC addresses based on proximity to the WiFi relays they put every 10 meters.
You. Cannot. Win. Against. Capital.
And then you're going to sue, and realize that the system is so massively overloaded that the next available judge and jury are in 32 years. Also they're lobbying to replace those with AI judges where they entirely removed the concept of nuance.
If AI eats law, then AI must also eat judgement (either judge or jury) for the bulk of cases.
Could see the future being AI arguments -> AI judgement -> appeal to human judge/jury
With the appeal to humans being expensive (human lawyers required?) or volume-barred in some manner.
It's ok. AI will have replaced most VCs by then and increase the efficiency of capital allocation. The right people will get funded, competition will work it's magic, and consumers will benefit mightily. Nobody's profit margins are safe.
Of course, who knows. There's always another angle you can look at this from
So you’re saying banks (who can loan new money out of thin air) will end up being the winners of all this.
There's definitely going to be cheap or open source models
> There's definitely going to be cheap or open source models
What makes you think your "cheap or open source model" running on your piddling desktop cluster will be able to complete against a SOTA one running in a billion-dollar datacenter?
It's a cyberpunk fantasy. It won't work out that way.
Local models that run on a laptop (not even needing a "cluster") are already better than ChatGPT from a couple of years ago. Yes, Claude and ChatGPT today are certainly better than these local models, but they can't keep getting better indefinitely -- there's only so much info to scrape. When they hit a plateau, it is only a matter of time that consumer hardware will catch up to it.
Eventually AI-run banks will refuse credit to non-AI customers, directly or indirectly
It's nice to know they picked up their training data's penchant for racism in loans.
The author’s implied argument is that capital control’s the entrepreneurship game already.
There is only 1 top law firm, financiers of law firms have no interest in starting a race to the bottom. Foundation model labs will take a significant portion of the value, the remainder will be captured by entrenched monopolies.
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.
Law firms are already limited by sales and marketing, and I believe the concept of ‘legal wizardry’ is misplaced. There’s almost nothing one law firm can do that another couldn’t do just as well. The only thing clients want are the ‘you don’t get fired for buying IBM’ factor and asking ‘how high’ when they say jump. The first is all based on cultivating an image and that’s just marketing and sales, and the second is just pure workaholic-fueled hustle.
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.
Exactly right, it's Porter's Five Forces with Threats of Substitutes and Threats of New Entrants, which means that margins will be compressed massively, which means that being a lawyer will often mean lower wages. The p99() of lawyer wages will probably decline, but the max() will likely increase for the niches that are not adequately covered by AI use cases.
> 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?
The entire discussion is predicated on the arrival of an AI future where AI can do any human labor at incredibly low costs and all but eliminating the value of human expertise. If getting something done resembles "doing everything themselves" then that future did not arrive.
The AI would solve all your problems without even needed to prompted in any way?
Yeah... Take it even one step further, why would AI companies even sell access at all? They could just run competitor firms directly themselves, and that outcome is really the only way they can ever hope to make ROI, so for sure they'll do it if it ever becomes possible.
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.
Only a very small percent of cases go before a jury; the vast majority are decided by a judge by himself.
Judges rarely decide a case. Though most cases are settled in front of a judge without a jury. Mostly a semantic distinction
Responsibility, reputation, reliability, human connection and empathy (ahem lawyers, right…)
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.
I can easily see a two tiered justice: a human judge for those who can afford it, and AI judge for rest of us plebs.
Lawyers will be fine they will work with legislators to make it illegal for AI to practice law. Then, even if the lawyers job is mostly presenting the work of a legal AI, they will still be employed. Other knowledge workers will need to wisen up and do the same.
Edit: same for any profession that requires professional accreditation: lawyers, doctors, cpas, professional engineers, etc.
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.
> 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.
What services would those be? You already stated the AI will eliminate the need for companies in many areas so I'm not sure how this fits in with that statement.
In that scenario, the AI owners become rentiers - able to charge as much as the market will bear for brokerage - and everyone else gets to offer their services via said brokerages, which charge the customer the most they can bear, and pay the worker the least.
Any economy of scale - which is, in a way, what allows knowledge economies to exist at all - will accrue to the middleman.
Good news for those able to master manual, craft skills to a degree most cannot. High-end tradespeople, specialist installation technicians and so on. Bad news for everyone else besides rentiers.
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.
The best early example of this is that Anthropic is already eating the lunch of all the new “AI security audit” companies. And they were only a few years old.
Those guys certainly thought they were being novel and creative, using AI to disrupt an expensive and labor intensive business model. But now with Claude Security, their own market share is going to be gobbled up before they can even get established.
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.
This isn't any different than paying more for a better lawyer with a lighter caseload instead of using a public defender
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? :)
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.
> 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?
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.
Law firms are useful because they have connections to the prosecution and judges. You can't just open up a law firm without that.
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.
Historically when people had no power they held violent riots to reassert that they do. Happened as recently as Jan 6 2021 (unsuccessfully that time).
of course. nice name btw
What exactly do you mean by “politicians bribe the populace for votes” ?
> 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.
It's because of this Big Tech is busy undermining the basis of democracy, isolating people in bubbles, poisoning political discourse with slop and pimping would be autocrats. They want to strip political power from common citizens, turning toward sefdom.
> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming
I foresee Claude etc being able to do much of that on a self-serve basis. The entrepreneurship you mention to me looks exactly opposite to what you are describing - a middleman between the customer and the product, which is offered by a third party. In my mind that’s why they launched this deployment company for example, to do just that in house as well
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.
I agreed that AI will enable entrepreneurship but yes everyone will continue to lose ground to the owners of compute.
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.
We know what it looks like. We call it post industrial society. The rust belt, decrepit mill and mining towns, shrinking cities, etc.
Your analysis assumes our current politics where money roughly equates with power. That won't hold if people feel controlled.
AI of course also has the potential to concentrate power, but people aren't just going to ask the accountants who should be in charge.
Money buys drones, drones are the future of power.
The practical difference between a select few owning everything and governments owning everything ends up being practically minor. The key is disperse true ownership (which is NOT just collective ownership via the standard shares; your share in Meta gives you as much control of that as your vote does the government).
> 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.
Isn't there an inconsistency here? You've set up this narrative of businesses as being the only entities with money (wealth?) but then singled out two individuals.
Also, how do calls for equality of wealth address the inequality in contribution of value and efficiency to society and the economy at large?
Businesses will still be owned or at heavily influenced by individuals and it is those individuals that will be able to steer how those business’ capital is allocated (including towards themselves).
That is true until the owner dies, at that point you will have zombie AI companies that continues even though everyone associated with it is dead.
Would you rather AI steer the capital?
At this point in time I doubt that AI is ever going to escape the control of the humans with capital, and those humans will just use it as a tool in order to amass ever more capital.
The hopeful outlook is that AI is also a lever for the working class. It's why I think local models are important.
> 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".
I think the point is that it is his OPs opinion and they cannot read the future. Nobody here can, so the reply has just as much weight as the original.
So saving and living below means is a great strategy either way.
And all it cost was 15+ years of life?
It doesn't cost life to eat modestly and live smaller than you can afford, you live life while doing this. Many think the best part of their life was when they were young and poor, its not a bad life to have low costs so you can live stress free.
Unless you think that the rich experiences of life are what make life worth living, that money grants you access to some of those richest experiences, and that you are more able to fully appreciate and incorporate those experiences into your personhood at a younger age.
I'd advise that person to change their attitude about that, because it's stupid and inhuman. Otherwise you get the absurd statement that average people in most countries, billions, a normal married guy in Vietnam, none of their lives are worth living.
> 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!).
What do you invest in?
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.
Tell that to copywriters and translators, all those tech workers that were fired in thousands.
The current wave of tech layoffs is much like those that preceded it (e.g. after the pandemic), except this time AI is used as a scapegoat.
For over a decade there were talks of an academia bubble in the US and that choosing a trade job actually puts you in a financially better position compared to almost all college and univeristy degrees except finance and computer science.
People have to understand that they are merely cells in a bigger organism at work. As some types of cells can be more easily be replaced by AI agents than others, some earlier, some later.
People have been replaceable forever in capitalism. It's what makes it run, turning workers into a commodity or replaceable assets.
Now the big fantasy of the big AI companies is of course that almost everyone will be replaced by THEIR products. They are in the scaling business, large models, large compute, no optimization because scaling is faster, they are in a sprint, not in a marathon. The sprint will end eventually.
But AI will stay. The future will be decided between large scaling which means data centers, subscription models, centralized control, or decentralized, local, smarter more optimized lean models, with curated training. Tech has already anticipated that owning hardware that is capable of neuronal computing is the key to the future. The battle for hardware ownership has just begun and it's immensely important.
And a similar battle is happening inside corporations right now. Big tech wants to implant their subscription/cloud model into the economy, into as many businesses as possible. If they succeed we are in trouble. Because even though their fantasy will fail, forcing it unto us will do a lot of destructition to human society.
I can only encourage people to DIY, to learn a trade as a backup and be hands-on when it comes to computing. Don't aim for a high paying job and buy gimmicks that do things for you, that manage your life with "personal AI" or some bullshit. While actually you would have the skills to build the work or personal tools for yourself, share your designs or even start a company that does things differently. You all can shape things.
AI is so new, almost nobody has an idea of what it could do for them. There isn't a demand yet because people don't know what it could do. So big tech tries to create demands in all sorts of ways. This is what's happening right now, it's not set in stone.
yeah, there'll be loads and loads of disruption, but it'll take a lot longer than many people expect (much like the internet disruption did).
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
If AI results in the abolishment of the copyright regime as we know it, at least some good will come from the wreckage of society.
>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.
90% of the 10% will be doomed. The remainder, the 1% overall lives off capital not labor, they’ll be fine.
that is incorrect, the 0.1% (>50m) live purely off capital. the 1% are still mostly highly paid specialized labor and despite high savings their capital would not sustain their lifestyle outside a brief retirement.
In the US, 99th percentile household wealth is ~$14M, which at historical rates of return is enough to live opulently indefinitely. (Of course although we're discussing a scenario where capital holds most of the cards, who knows if those returns would be dependable.)
>>> 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.
> 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.
The point of AI is to make inequality even more extreme. A well-off worker is still a worker, and it's the dream of every capitalist to not have to pay any of them a dime.
For supposedly smart people, software engineers are really dumb. We should have unionized a decade ago, at the height of our power. Instead too many of us inhaled libertarian propaganda and identified with our bosses instead of our own class.
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?
> 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.
The money just circulating around is actually more or less how a normal economy works. If you have a two person world where one person makes food and the other makes tools, the money just bounces back and forth between the two people as they trade tools and food. It facilitates trade by acting as an IOU in case the first person doesn't need to trade tools at the exact moment the other needs to trade food.
AI and robotics will one day be able to produce food and tools without human labor. So there could be plenty of wealth created. The question is how do we distribute that wealth when humans aren't needed to make it? We need a new distribution system that isn't based on pay for labor. A lot of people suggest UBI.
UBI only works if the technology advances to a level where there is zero scarcity. I dont believe AI will produce that level of abundance.
Different AIs will be optimized for different types of tasks, or have completely different capabilities e.g. huge data access versus physical bodies. It could be more efficient for different firms to optimize and specialize their hardware and software for these use-cases and exchange for use of the labor of the other rather than for everyone to have a fully generalized fleet. I imagine this will be true even for incredibly advanced AI but who knows.
It's pretty obvious: once automation and wealth concentration get so extreme, the economy will get weird and stop being "capitalist" as we understand it.
For instance: it'd expect money to become near-meaningless, and the economic activity of the trillionaire class will consist mostly of direct extraction and consumption of resources (basically a personal autarky). There may be some barter of things like energy, raw materials, and maybe a small amount of proprietary items.
Given the lack of need to pay labor and the direct control of more resources than they'll ever need, the trillionaire will direct the world enonomy to towards pet projects (e.g. an Elon Musk commanding his robot army to build a giant steel pyramid on the moon in his honor, because why not? It'll be cool!).
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.
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...
It seems that Yarvin didn't realise -- accidentally or more probably intentionally -- that the society in Soylent Green was not supposed to be taken as a model to emulate. It's not supposed to be a documentary! To even joke about it is telling.
As a tech industry we'll probably be complacent on whatever is coming up in the future, no matter if it's something like this or something far more insidious. But hey, some of our class got very wealthy and got to enjoy material prosperity so it's all good, right? People would chase ever higher wages and shiny trinkets and end up working for Evil Megacorps because "one needs to be able to afford to live comfortably".
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
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.
> Such societies were terrifyingly stable, lasting hundred of years before slowly collapsing. We're not immune to going back to this.
They were very vulnerable to succession crises. This is the main problem that representative democracy fixed.
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.
What about human actors as a thinly veiled, formal, and not especially people-intensive front-end to AI? Something like a skeleton crew?
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.
Soon? Hasn’t this ship already sailed?
“Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature”
> 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.
Historically one pattern this took was patronage. Most famously associated with sponsoring artists, but historically it covered a wide variety of professions. The patron gets power, influence, the ability to call on a guy who can do the thing, and so on.
Of course the first thing we replaced with AI was artists, so expect more exclusively as the lower rungs of patronage clients fall off the economic ladder.
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.
> When people are pessimistic about the future, they have fewer children.
I can think of many reasons why people have fewer children for reasons other than pessimism about the future.
One can also argue that, besides lack of contraception, pessimism about survival of your offspring drove some amount of creating descendants.
> When people are pessimistic about the future, they have fewer children.
But also, statistically, the richer you are, the fewer children you have. Why do you think those who are seemingly in the best position to be optimistic about the future are those most pessimistic about it? It is quite counterintuitive on the surface. Is it because the rich feel they have nowhere else to go, whereas those who are poor can still envision becoming rich themselves someday, giving them hope about a brighter future?
Regardless of the exact mechanics, the human state is self-correcting. Being rich is unsustainable without a lot of people around you. When births decline too much, those who are rich will become poor, and thus will start producing more children again. Humans will not echo horses based on this.
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.
Nitpick: in Greek mythology it's Artemis and Aphrodite. Diana and Venus are Roman equivalents.
Thanks for pointing that out. Not nitpicking, but facts.
> 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.
> 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
0. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insig...
> would all be using the same AI model
i think this is a very large assumption.
What if in the future, AI models are as guarded as nuclear weapons? Because why doesn't this argument apply for nuclear weapons, but does for AI?
Because AI models can create other ones and the weights/training data is what models. So you can hoard data, but not the models.
Hence the drive to control the compute hardware. If your competitors can't run inference at competitive scale and cost, they can't challenge you.
I don’t see this happening at all. Even today, a person + AI is vastly better than just an AI. Context is really important.
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...
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.
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
If AIs become smart enough to outperform a critical mass of humans across the board, that's the singularity and whilst the economic model says all humans out of jobs means no consumers, the model isn't really valid anymore because the underlying assumptions are just broken too, so you can't take the model too seriously. Obviously it would be very disruptive but the demand destruction economic model just isn't making useful predictions anymore.
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....
Once there are like 150,000 humans resources will be functionally unlimited
Ah, the good old days!
no - they'll still be fighting for resources for their AI data centers and armies. Its still zero sum. The house with the largest robot army and best data centers wins.
> That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources
Two astronauts meme: "Wait, it's all been over resources?" "Always has been"
This time the have-nots have a better target to attack. The datacenters. A concentrated physical manifestation of would-be trillionaire superrichs.
Until the datacenters happen to be in space.
Then the targets become the launch pads. Those space-based datacenters will need constant resupply and maintenance. Destroy launch capability, and their orbits will decay and all that computing capacity will burn up in the atmosphere.
We are so so so far away from self-sustaining machinery in space that it's not even funny.
There is no such thing as a self-sufficient version of any industry in space, and you should expect this to remain the case for approximately the next 10,000 years. Until then, everything that happens in space will have a supply chain rooted on Earth.
I mean, you are describing the vast majority of history.
Starcraft for Billionaires
In the voice of worker-bot: "That's your plan?!?!"
Reminds me of the old short story "With Folded Hands" from 1947. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands_...
The sequel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humanoids
is even better!
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.
> 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?
The future you're describing doesn't seem likely to me because in this event the public will force redistribution through political action.
"Forcing redistribution" doesn't always happen. Typically, redistribution happens when negotiating leverage has increased such that the beneficiaries of any redistribution can make it more painful to not redistribute than to redistribute. I.e. they have labor power, which can be converted to force if necessary.
In a world where capital can substitute for labor, however, that substitution also applies to force-wielding labor. People want to strike because of intolerable working conditions? Send in robot scabs. People want to demonstrate en masse against a regime? Have robot officers police them, and have models identify participants so post-event disincentives can be applied. They want to have a violent uprising? Send in the mass fleet of drones.
Ideally, you'd avoid these outcomes entirely by molding the population into ideal consumers and distract them with superficial sports team style conflicts, so they never get to the point where collective action is even conceivable. But they're a useful backstop if those strategies fail.
It doesn't have to be all that dramatic. Just ensure that they don't reproduce at replacement level. In fact that's already happening. Crank it up a bit more, make things South Korea++ and it's just not a problem. If nobody shows up in the next generations out of whatever reasons, there's no risk of some kind of uprising you'd have to crush with a robot army. Just wait, push cultural messaging that encourages individualism and implicit antinatalism and it will seem perfectly humane. Legacy humans will simply go away, without any major incident.
I think your first equilibrium would be hard, for two reasons. First, empirically insurgencies are extremely difficult to exterminate; over the long run they tend to win. Second, in the U.S. at least, people tend to look at politics up close, and when you're myopic like that it appears that the government is a force onto itself. But zooming out, U.S. government actually mirrors the will of the people extremely well (with the exception of some issues on the margin). If there is overwhelming political support for redistribution it would be very difficult to resist.
The second equilibrium seems more likely-- the capitalist class grants the public a bare minimum to keep us from forcing political action. In the AI world "the minimum" is probably a much better standard of living than we have now, as the marginal cost of many products and services approaches zero. So we end up living much better material lives, but are still not free. Maybe this is stable, or maybe the ruling class loses dominance over time. At that point, who knows.
The capital-owning class owns the political apparatus, so they're not really worried about "political action." Through their ownership of government, they also own and control the military and police, so they are not worried about a violent uprising. So, what will actually happen when all economically relevant activity can be done cheaper than human labor, by a mixture of AI and robotics, and 99% of us are economically irrelevant?
> "they also own and control the military and police"
I'm always amused by how some intellectuals dehumanize the armed services, as if they were no more than mindless robots instead of humans with their own families and community ties.
> instead of humans with their own families and community ties
This is an age-old problem with armies and has a similarly age-old solution: just send soldiers from one community to police other communities. For example, during the Tienanmen Square Massacre, some Beijing-based units refused to fire on protesters, so units from further away were called in instead.
Is there any relevant recent evidence of them not just doing exactly what they’re told? “Oh they will refuse unlawful orders” hasn’t exactly panned out
> The capital-owning class owns the political apparatus
That is not nearly so uncontested, not even in the US. Did you forget how all the tech bros went to Trump's inauguration, bowing their heads and kissing the ring? With Trump being very small fry on the scale of "capital-owning class" this means there are other factors at work than just wealth dominating politics.
Also, the situation gets much more unclear in other countries. Otherwise, why wouldn't the most capital-friendly party rule in each and every country?
One signficant difference this time is that they can rely on empathyless murder bots to quell riots instead human police.
On the other hand they would never be able again to leave their bunkers, given that it is not hard to assemble a DIY drone and equip it with some explosives.
How low do we go before that happens? Look at how poor people are in other countries and still aren't threatening their ruling oligarchy at all.
And that is going to happen when all we have are what maybe some AR15s, and they have drones firing precision targeted ordinance at us from 50k feet?
> And that is going to happen when all we have are what maybe some AR15s, and they have drones firing precision targeted ordinance at us from 50k feet?
We have enough guns for every man, woman, and child to have at least one. There aren't enough drones or expensive precision targeted ordinance in the world to defend against that for any length of time. It's another version of the lessons recently taught in Ukraine and Iran.
Plus I think it is different when a poverty stricken population tries to rise up as compared with one that is historically wealthy. I expect we won't wait until we are actually poor before we collectively decide to refactor our government.
I sincerely hope your optimism doesn't turn out to have been naivety.
I love comments like this, mostly for the unbridled optimism and historical ignorance they embody. If you truly believe that a loose collection of small arms is the kryptonite that the command and control apparatus of the US is vulnerable to I recommend familiarizing yourself with what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Both cases vividly display what a few Suburbans full of motivated feds can do to an entire compound of well-armed civilians over the course of a long weekend.
The US has some 5000 nuclear warheads, of the stock we know about at least... Hope you don't live anywhere near a city in the top 500 list I suppose.
I'm the last person to accuse the US of being sanely-governed, but you'll forgive me for not worrying any more about a conspiracy of billionaires with access to US nuclear arsenal all agreeing that the best way to ensure they live long and healthy lives unencumbered by vengeful proles/superpowers is to nuke the top 500 cities than I do about Roko's Basilisk or the end of the world as predicted by the Aztecs...
I'm not worried about the billionaires, I'm worried about the models they are empowering.
I'm even less worried about AI models obtaining corporeal form to stride into the US nuclear bunkers to launch missiles against their own power infrastructure and datacenters...
If you think that is what is required, you aren't keeping up.
Okay then. What does the infrastructure around launching a nuclear weapon look like?
Guns will be of little use against drone swarms, or against individual drones thousands of feet in the sky.
Only drones will be able to battle drones, in the general case.
No they won't, not if they have just enough bread and circuses and someone below them to hate. Boil the frog slowly enough and it'll work out just fine for the capital class.
Bread, circus, strife, anger, hopelessness, antinatalist cultural products and it doesn't need anything aggressive or spectacular. People will just cease to reproduce seemingly of their own will. South Korea to the nth power.
Yep. Evolutionary way to get to communism where "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" [1]
[1] "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...", circa 1875
I don't see how you can relate this to communism. Sounds more like oligarchy/roman empire: a few own almost everything, but most have almost nothing and are being controlled with bread and games. Marxism is the opposite where everything is owned by everyone (in theory).
What would be the name of the society where, say, 30,000 people + technology produce enough food and goods to satisfy the needs of the rest of Earth population?
So those people will get whatever they need for life but will not be technically obligated to produce anything.
We will first switch to 4 day working week, then 3 and so on, right? We will see Universal Basic Income "experiments" [1] more often until they become a norm.
At least we are on the way to all this...
[1] https://weall.org/resource/finland-universal-basic-income-pi...
For a fictional example, you can look at the United Federation of Planets, from Star Trek.
Some suggestions for naming this, depending on how you organize ownership, redistribution, who gets to decide what you need: paternalism, welfare capitalism, neo-feudalism, technofeudalism, welfare state, social democracy, UBI-and-oligarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy.
We are already in a position where we could house and feed everyone, but we choose not to do so. Instead a few own almost everything, money gets spend on killing people, instead of feeding them.
If we choose not to do it now, i don't see how we can make UBI work in the future.
hasn't happened in the US yet, and probably won't.
and they have all of the guns and trucks and toxic masculinity culture that requires survivalism and toughness and defending muh freedom
if the yanks won't, why would the public elsewhere?
> and they have all of the guns and trucks and toxic masculinity culture that requires survivalism and toughness and defending muh freedom
Nothing will happen so long as the people are gleefully fighting one another, but if we reach a point where populism rules across the board and bridges the left/right culture war, things could get exciting. There is a reason the elites are spending so much effort stoking culture rivalry in the US.
There are plenty of other countries, with different cultures, and different expectations for how things should work. France for instance, is known for having unions that strike, frequently. Socialism isn't a evil concept in some countries. When America has been co-opted by various factions, why would it be up to the "Yanks" to show the rest of the world the way?
The French government will be bankrupt in the next couple of years. Over the last 100 years, France went from one of the richest countries in the world to somewhere with a median (not mean) GDP that is considerably lower than Mississippi's. Probably not the example you think it is.
That being said, if nobody has a job, nobody can afford the stuff being sold then everything collapses. Acting like that isn't true isn't rational either.
> The French government will be bankrupt in the next couple of years.
Their finances aren't in great shape, but if you think the ECB will let that happen, I have a bridge to sell you. (And the need for a bailout is far from a foregone conclusion.)
> a median (not mean) GDP
That's not a measure anyone uses for anything, so not sure how that's relevant.
But sure, let's go with the idea that Mississippi is "better off" on this metric. GDP per capita (which is a mean, not a median) is not a good proxy for standard of living. A French person working 35 hours per week living modestly might be much happier with less money than someone from Mississippi working 3 jobs, 6 or 7 days a week, for a total of 60 hours, who doesn't really have the time for "living" at all, modestly or otherwise.
(I'm being generous to you when I say "might be" there. What I really mean is "almost certainly is".)
Through what mechanism? In an oligarchy the ultra-wealthy control the government and the government has a monopoly on the use of violence.
> Strictly speaking, they don't even need us as customers.
I think they'd employ some number of humans for entertainment.
> I think they'd employ some number of humans for entertainment.
The key point is: some number. Chances are you and everyone you love won't make the cut.
If 10 billionaires control the all the capital of the planet, they could exterminate 99% of humanity and not even notice any change in their day to day life. 83 million NPCs are more than enough for 10 people.
they're already replacing actors with AI, mate. Once the slop machine gets better you won't know the difference
There are some types of entertainment which are less audio-visual.
At that point, why bother to employ? If we have no recourse, no power to resist them (as must be the case in that scenario), then they might as well just keep us as pets.
Or slaves.
Gotta feed both, so...
> 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.
> Never have to fold laundry or the dishes again?
If you're folding the dishes, I agree that you should probably get someone else, perhaps a robot, to replace you there. ;)
But overall I absolutely agree. I don't want (and can't afford) a household employee; if I could buy a $25k appliance that would reliably take care of all my household chores, I wouldn't even need to think about it.
Is it defecting if you get a robot to do your dishes, instead of doing them yourself? As you said, it's not taking a job from anyone, just freeing up time for yourself. If anything, this specific use-case sounds like it would be a major boon for nation-wide productivity with little downside.
We have had that for decades, its called a dishwasher. Its so common that its a compound word instead of dish washer. I feel like there are basic concepts of psychology and history that you don't understand if this is the point you want to make.
Sure, but I still have to clear the dishes from the table, dump any larger food scraps into the compost bin, and put them in the dishwasher. Then when it's full I have to run the dishwasher, and empty it when it's finished, putting everything away in its place. When I'm running low on dishwasher detergent I have to remember to pick some up the next time I go to the store (or put in a grocery delivery order). Sure, that's all still much less labor than washing the dishes manually myself, but I'm always in favor of taking even more labor off my plate (heh).
(Also there are circumstances where I'm cooking and will manually wash some things, like perhaps a set of tongs, because I know that the other two sets of tongs we own are dirty and already in the dishwasher. I know I'll need the tongs while cooking tomorrow's meal, but the dishwasher won't be full enough before then to warrant running the load yet. This sort of situation actually comes up quite frequently for me.)
Obviously I'm talking about the part of dishwashing that's not already automated, and the compound word comes from way before — a "dishwasher" was a job long before it was a machine. What were you saying about basic concepts of history?
The dishwasher does automate a large part of doing the dishes, but not the whole of it. A Jetsons-style robot maid would also be able to clear the dishes from the table, restock the cabinets, and set the table before dinner - in addition to doing the cooking, cleaning, lawncare, etc.
It maybe wasn't the least-automated part of the chores, but if anything, doesn't that strengthen their point? We as people were happy to automate our dishwashers, and would probably spend more money on other chore-automations as well (see: Roomba, robotic lawn mowers, etc).
And that, if it's something the homeowner has always done themselves, more automation here doesn't even eliminate a job.
Uhm, no? What if it has a glitch or bug or gets hacked and wants to hurt me or someone else? I'd rather do all of that myself than own a movable bot that could crush my head like a melon for any reason while I'm sleeping, no thank you
This is just a function of the overton window. A couple decades ago most people probably thought a robot vacuum (with a camera on it!) was creepy, but now they're fairly commonplace, or at least well-accepted[0].
The bot safety issues are certainly real, but that's a trust/confidence hump to get over, and robotics companies will get there eventually.
[0] Even considering we know employees of the manufacturers have abused the camera access!
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.
I suppose Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive are a good start.
thanks
> 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?
Because if everyone is doing the same, then it's just brutal competition. Margins will squeeze, and eventually very lean companies will become the norm. In time, this means that the pool of information workers will change tremendously.
> 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.
Even if we start building a lot more stuff, you still don't need those construction workers. You have a GC to manage the whole project, aided by an AI who's handling scheduling/operations/logistics. You have a detailed plan to build against.
So why do you need former construction workers to manage the robots? Why can't the GC and management AI run the whole thing?
Maybe there's some scenario where you still need something like one licensed person from each skilled trade to be responsible for the robots employing those trades. But there's no way you need everyone who worked on building sites managing robots, no matter how much construction you're doing.
That's pretty far away from where we're at. If things do get that far it's not going to be a problem. Eventually the robots will murder us in our sleep and our worries will be over.
For which poor unemployed people who just got laid off due to AI are the Robots building house for? More abstractly, for whom are we creating are these productivity miracles and surplus for. Does a rich person suddenly need a million iPhones for himself and himself alone?
There's not going to be much additional poor unemployed people. They're going to get different jobs.
Doing what, exactly?
Could you have predicted in 1920 that in 2020 that 48% of the country would stop farming and some would be programmers?
"Past performance is not indicative of future results". People stopped being in farms because automation freed manual labor and people could move up in the value chain. We are getting to the point where there will be no chain left to go up to, at all. If you don't see the difference, I don't know what else to tell you.
this time we're automating humans that can do anything that humans can do. you should be asking what happened to the horses which were replaced by the tractors. the answer is elsewhere in the thread, their pop dropped 88% or w/e, we didnt need them anymore.
Labor costs are not the limiting factor on production.
If they were suddenly cut to near zero, a lot of projects that were previous uneconomical become viable.
"Becoming viable" does not mean "automatically put into execution". You still need to take overall demand in account.
Consider this: if demand was not a factor, anyone living in a moderately wealthy country would be practicing labor arbitrage and sending money to poorer places. Ask yourself why this doesn't happen.
I'm sorry, I must be missing your point, because isn't that exactly what's happening with manufacturing having gone to China?
No. It's different in two ways:
1) corporations moved manufacturing to where labor was cheap, but brought back the goods to sell them. This only works for as long as there is healhy consumer market somewhere. If AI really gets to automate most white-collar work, there will be no healthy consumer market left anywhere around the world.
2) The essay touches on this: any of the previous offshoring / job displacement movements happened on a much longer timeframe than what is being pushed now by the powers that be.
What is?
In theory breakeven demand, but ecosystens are basically economies, so termites are break even demand, and that's not good news.
Demand and primary resources go way higher on the list.
Demand and primary resources are effectively infinite.
>primary resources are effectively infinite
You just solved economics?
We need eugenics to weed these people out of the gene pool.
What?!
The primary resource needed to build a home is land. Do we have infinite availability of land in desirable areas to build on?
In a world where it’s dramatically cheaper to build infrastructure like roads, power, and plumbing, lots more land becomes desirable as a place to live.
Take Phoenix, for example, once air conditioning became cheap and pervasive.
> In a world where it’s dramatically cheaper to build infrastructure...
You can not make things dramatically cheaper by bringing only the cost of labor to zero. Your argument is circular!
The argument isn’t that AI brings the labor cost down to 0 in isolation. It brings the labor cost of the same amount of production down. So you get more production (more things = more supply -> lower prices) out of less labor.
> So you get more production out of less labor.
We don't need "AI" to figure out that technological advances increase productivity. The problem with yout argument is assuming that increased productivity mean overall reduced costs. It does not.
Healthcare, housing, education all have gone up despite increased productivity. Then you have things that are already so automated that there is no way to make them cheaper unless sacrificing quality - food, clothing, etc.
Then we have all the types of consumer products that have prices completely decoupled from the cost of labor. No one in their right mind the "cost of labor" has any relation whatsoever with Apple charging $1000 for an iPhone and/or Motorola charging $180 for a Moto G.
Healthcare, housing, education all have gone up despite increased productivity.
The hypothesis of Baumol’s Cost Disease is that these industries are exactly where we should expect prices to rise because they’re still dependent on low-productivity-growth human labor.
Baumol's Cost Disease is about relative costs. We are talking about productivity enabling absolute reduction in costs. Don't mix them up.
We were talking about infrastructure costs under increasing labor productivity. Now what are we talking about?
If the premise is that AI won’t improve productivity in industries like healthcare, education, and housing construction, then why are we worried about “the dead economy”?
No. You are getting it backwards. The premise is: even if AI improves productivity, we the people are not going to benefit from it.
The mistake you are making is that you are assuming that a system where productivity per unit of labor is higher automatically translates into increased global output. It does not. This idea of a dead economy theory is precisely the concern we are heading to a world where machines can make practically everything on the cheap, but it won't matter because the moneyed class won't need to satisfy the demands of the general populace.
So we have a bunch of billionaires sitting around, surveying a world where a much smaller amount of labor will produce a much larger amount of output, and they collectively decide not to hire that labor or spend capital on the technology that generates that output in combination with that labor because… they have enough money already?
No, ffs. You are missing that if they can do whatever they want with just "a small amount of labor", then the whole system gets to a point where Capital becomes the bottleneck for global productivity. People can not be trained faster than the machines can be created, so all that capital will go to an increasingly smaller number of workers.
To illustrate the point: Facebook laid off thousands of developers at the same time that it was hiring AI researchers, paying them tens of millions of dollars as a signing bonus.
Facebook (Meta) mostly “makes” ad space. So in that case, they’re making more / better ad space for the same inputs.
Online advertising is a competitive business, so that means more bang for the buck for Facebook’s advertisers. Now those advertisers have more money to invest in making more / better of whatever they make.
Its also the 'labor theory of value'. That's the economic theory that Communism is based on. It has never been accurate and wasn't even considered legitimate during Marx's lifetime. It has possibly the worst track record of predictions of any theory ever conceived by people. Yet somehow academics still reference it. Nobody who actually is impacted by making the wrong economic predictions does though. Funny that...
Solve the diamond/water paradox?
Enough that it's effectively infinite, yes. Especially if we are imagining a world where subways cost 1/20th of what they do today.
> where subways cost 1/20th of what they do today.
1) We are talking about reducing the cost of labor, not overall costs.
2) Your logic only applies in the micro, not on the macro. If the cost of producing one thing goes down while population keeps their purchasing power, then what you are saying would make sense. The whole point of the article is that accelerated automation can bring a scenario where the cost of producing "things" would go down, but the economically active population would shrink drastically.
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.
Sure, but the question is at what layer of abstraction do you have to prompt the AI?
You used to have to prompt the AI by starting to write the actual line of code you want, which it could autocomplete. Then you had to prompt it to write simple scripts or functions. The amount of scope you can prompt keeps getting bigger and bigger. Eventually, you have a PM or a CEO just telling it what features you need. Maybe it's a PM and a designer and a CEO and a CTO, but it will eventually get to the point where the number of people you need to do the prompting shrinks orders of magnitude from company sizes today. Maybe you just give the AI some money, prompt it to start a money-making business, and it goes out and does the same research and analysis that a seasoned entrepreneur would do to find an opportunity then builds out the business from there.
> the results won't be any good
Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on that. The trend over time has been that the results from prompting AI to do things have gotten better. I used to prompt it to build me dashboards and it would fail spectacularly. Now it one-shots them. Maybe the code is terrible (though doesn't matter for me, I'm the only one using it and I can verify the dashboard content is correct), but if the trend continues, it'll get better. Maybe the trend won't continue, but I've yet to come across a good explanation of why AI capabilities will just top out and cease improving forever.
Eventually all prompts distill to "raise the stock price year-over-year". Once we get CEO-bot, that's all we'll have to tell em.
Always? I mean, that's the hope, but they only have to be good enough to be of use for the rest of us to be unneeded.
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.
Actually you can for entry level jobs. You also shouldn't just look at unemployment but underemployment.
>Overall, 42% of recent college graduates were classified as underemployed, the highest level since 2020.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2026/02/23/unem...
Entry-level jobs are the easiest to get rid of in any layoffs. This doesn't look like anything genuinely new.
Haven't swe layoffs usually targeted more experienced devs?
No
Yes they have. They cost more. Why keep the senior curmudgeon employee around when the Jr who costs half as much is deemed sufficiently competent? And the Jr isn't going to quit in solidarity either, they're just happy to have not gotten cut.
Junior employees are not sufficiently competent.
Competency isn't the layoff criterion, cost is
Competency doesn't matter for corporations.
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.
You couldn't have. Mechanical machines couldn't organise themselves into human-free supply chains that are economically productive for the owners of capital. AIs could.
Any machine with an on-off switch is functionally an organized and automated work flow.
If I understand correctly youre talking about reactive adjustments, but thats not completely accurate either. There is a lot of projection that this MAY happen, but currently, the capital owner/stewards are going to constantly watch outputs and adjust to them based on the results. You're probably correct in that they will spend far less time doing so, but anyone with a vested outcome is going to have to adjust these things as the responsiblity for the outcome will always land on the owner not the machine.
I just meant that if I value, say, the security afforded by land that's been cleared of humans, and between them my owned AIs can deliver this as a 'surplus' outcome, just by processing resources available at low or no cost (sunlight, atmospheric gases, processed carcasses, etc.) then letting them run amuck is still 'economically valuable' to me, but doesn't require any human input, or a human counterparty. Very reductive example, but you can imagine a much more complex economy where a multitude of similar arrangements interact/compete to deliver outcomes of this type.
> 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.
This is true; and in time it's entirely possible that AI makes us an overall wealthier and more productive society. However, from the article:
> “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
The redundant professionals will need to find other ways of generating wealth from their productivity, and that may not be possible in a reasonable amount of time. Not in the scope of their remaining lifetime.
We will most likely redefine what we mean by human "productivity". A plumber might be considered a highly productive worker, whereas many intellectual professions will partially refocus on effectively prompting AI and assessing/revising its output.
Sure, but that redefinition, retraining, and reallocation process could take a lifetime. Sucks to be the people who are unable to adapt in that time.
Temporary excess productivity can linger a very long time and sector-specific excess productivity can still be broadly damaging. Detroit and southeastern Michigan were devastated by the collapse of American automotive industry in the '00s, taking something like 10-15 years before starting to recover.
That collapse happened in the late 1970s. And many would debate if its recovered to this day.
Michigan was doing okay until around the late 1990s. The real downslide started out after that; Detroit became the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2013.
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.
The assumption that (b) happens is known as Say's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law
I can say that people are loathe to do it for various reasons.
Well, it's the same problem with all sorts of free-market capitalism and derivatives. They all believe there's infinite "somewhere else" that resources can come from, or the customers, or the funding etc. But reality is very much finite. And so instead of the theoretical equilibrium we get monopolies and collusion to manipulate markets.
The article, actually, addresses your claims:
> The optimists will tell you this is just productivity gains. 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. 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, and the political consequences included the Chartist movement and widespread social upheaval. As Frey puts it: “Most economists will acknowledge that technological progress can cause some adjustment problems in the short run. What is rarely noted is that the short run can be a lifetime.”
So, the author believes that the problem with your reasoning that it will take a long time for the niches you are talking about to be filled (lifetime, maybe more), meanwhile things will look quite bad for most those involved.
I am even less optimistic than the author. The new aspect of this workforce displacement is the centralization. Of course, previous advances in automation also caused a degree of centralization, but AI is posed to become super-centralized if you will. There will be just a handful of suppliers and nobody will be able to challenge them, similar to situation we have with microprocessors today. Needless to say this is absolutely not a healthy situation for the world's economy.
Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced.
I can’t imagine what claim this sentence is intending to describe.
Obviously individual workers can’t “recover” their wages: 70 years later they’re no longer working.
It also can’t make sense as a recovery of labor in displaced industries, since those are largely gone once they’re supplanted by labor-saving technology.
It means it took 70 years for the average income and employment rate of socio-economic class of people who used to work those jobs (presumably formulated as some percentile of society by income) to rise back to the the same level.
Employment rates are weird bags of demographics and culture (think women’s rate of workforce participation) as well as economics, so I’m not sure how you extract that particular signal.
70 years to restore income levels across any strata is still not plausible: Even godawful economic growth would compound way too much. Maybe relative share of income for some decile? But now we’re back to asking why we should care about that if absolute real incomes are rising.
I guess I have to go find the research.
I read it, but I don't think it's compelling. "the short run can be a lifetime" is kind of a throw away phrase not backed by evidence.
We've seen rapid growth of knowledge work at the same time as increased productivity, and there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason that greater productivity will reverse this persistent trend.
the number of functioning machine shop in the US in large urban areas has been plummeting for decades. where there were 50 there are now 3. the customers for machine shops are large production facilities with a need for custom parts. they're all gone. now its little bits of rnd work and some custom architectural design kind of stuff. and the margins are punishing.
ok, so machine shops aren't really central to the argument, but the collapse of demand is.
They're all gone completely, or gone as in moved to where they don't have to suffer ridiculous real estate costs? There are approximately 50 machine shops within a stone's throw of my place out in the middle of nowhere. I haven't been around long enough to truly know if that is more or less than the historical norm, but best I can tell it is a growing sector locally.
Kinda. What's the lead time on my high precision metal part that needs to be cut on a 6-axis lathe? Or a metal 3d print? Neither of those machines are cheap, so not only is lead time astronomical, profit on them is also pretty great for the machine shop, which implies there's room for more machine shops. There's a lot of red tape for the orders I see, (CMMI etc) so maybe AI will help machine shops get that and be competitive.
that last point doesn't really follow. yes, you can do you ok if you have the kind of expertise to actually make that high end part and the position in the market to get the kind of work, but I think you overstate the margins and its certainly not the 'are you going to drop people or just increase your volume' argument that gp was making.
Well yeah, I'm not gp. My point is that, sure, machine shop count has gone down, but machine shop capacity, with conditions, currently has a 16 week lead time and high prices. If the argument is "there is enough machine shop output that everyone is going to get fired after the robots come" I'm saying there's a long way to go. And the same argument for writing software applies to machine shops. There's more to programming than writing code itself. There's room to grow upwards and meet the customer more where they're at so the machine shop isn't an extension of a robot that does cut x at point y and bends at z, but with the design process of the part before it gets to that.
fair enough, I don't participate really in the high end market, so I don't have any real insight. does seem like something of a market failure. the two things that stand out to me though is the very high capital cost that probably adds friction to investment, but probably more the people skills. there are tens of thousands of banger low precision machinists like me out of work, but outside of Europe where do the high-precision machinists actually come from? particularly one that shade over into material science and would be effective design partners. are those mechanical engineers that just specialized?
>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.
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.
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.
If AI actually succeeds at its promise, it won't be 99% of engineers and accountants, it will be 99% of nearly every profession that doesn't require physical labor. And if the AIs figure out how to cheaply build reliable human-like robots, that's it for the physical labor jobs too.
Our society is not set up to function with 99% unemployment (even 99% unemployment in "only" non-physical-labor jobs), even in an optimistic post-scarcity environment.
Now, my opening "if" is a really huge "if", so...
I remember sitting is a business class in school. The professor gave a story of how computerized spreadsheets changed the nature of accounting. Spreadsheets used to be done by hand on boards/paper. If a mistake was discovered, cascading recalculations needed to be done by hand. It was perfectly normal for large companies to have multiple teams duplicating work, then reconciling differences.
When computerized spreadsheets came about, mistakes could easily be fixed and cascading recalculations were almost instantly done. This was a game changer. Over the short term, accounting departments shrank or stagnated until the industry caught up and more sophisticated accounting started to grow the industry again. It's not coincidental that the 1980s brought in huge change to the financial industry when it did. Deregulation played a role, but so did the fact that computers exploded the productivity of the industry.
I'm not saying AI will do the same with developers, but there will always still be developers with a different set of skills, much like the way accountants don't necessarily need to be able to count in there head anymore.
Whether it "needs to" is its own debate.
I'm just pointing out that even with mobile phones becoming dramatically better over the past decade, that hasn't really led to the transformation of mobile apps (outside of games) that take advantage of those resources. If anything, developers have arguably become more lazy and we are seeing lower quality software being deployed because people now have enough RAM even for your 500mb static webpage. Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?
The odd thing about games is that there are quite literally a handful that push the envelope (Genshin Impact stands almost alone, a few other Chinese and Korean titles come close) in terms of graphics, art, gameplay and story complexity and then there are thousands and thousands of slop games that you can hardly call "games".
Also, this entire analysis comes from thinking that software is like manufacturing. Its not, its like music publishing. That's where this entire tower of logic comes crashing down. More software isn't necessarily better, many cases, its worse. What we (most people) want is better quality software, not more.
> Do we really believe people will start becoming more ambitious with AI or will most suffer from skill atrophy and less agency?
But which skill is atrophying? As a programmer I'm really bad at converting human readable code into machine code because we have compilers to do that for us. I can't remember the last time I had to run "ld" by hand. That skill totally atrophied. But at the same time, AI has made me more ambitious. I'm trying projects I wouldn't have before and even completing some of them! I can't talk for "people", broadly, but I believe most people want to be their best and do good and do things.
I can run the same compiler (or assembler) with the same options on the same source code 100 times, and I will get bit-for-bit identical output 100 times (well, aside from the compiler/linker inserting time/date stamps into metadata). Most people will not need to care about judging the output of the compiler. Only rarely will the compiler or assembler do something incorrect, which will require someone with specialized skills to debug and fix.
If I give the same LLM the same prompt 100 times, I will get 100 different programs written. Some of them will not work at all. Some of them will work, but will have major bugs or performance issues. Some of them will work well, but have subtle issues or edge cases that aren't handled properly. A few of them will work perfectly, or at least adequately enough for the task at hand.
Every single time you give the LLM instructions to do something, you need someone qualified and capable of reviewing the output to make sure it works properly. And while I would say you need someone reviewing the source code, even if you're just vibe-coding, you still need someone to test the program and make sure it works, and even that requires some specialized skill.
Maybe LLMs (or their next-gen replacements) will eventually become good enough that you'll get the same output every time for those 100 prompts, or at least close enough and functional enough for it not to matter. But we're not there yet, and I think that's a big huge "maybe". In the meantime, skill atrophy among programmers is a real, reported phenomenon with the current crop of LLMs. That is worrying.
Those with high agency may have even greater agency, but I can also see the inverse effect.
The world average is 25% work on farms. In 24 countries the percentage is greater than 50%.
It's still over 43% in India, 20% in China, 2.5% in lots of Europe.
They'll do some other engineering like thing...
Maybe like work in space tourism industry to Earth-Moon 5 Lagrange points.
But your last sentence is talking about something completely different: the current reality, which most of the tech CEOs and AI boosters refuse to engage with.
For those of us in the fact-based world, the idea that AI will replace most human jobs is still just a talking point. It's a future possibility (not a future certainty).
But it's enough of a possibility that we need to be talking about it, and not just airily dismissing the concern as something that will obviously work itself out without any real problem.
Even if 99% of the current programmers go the way of 99% of people who were farming in 1750, you have to remember that a huge percentage of the farmers who were made redundant by industrialization and modern farming methods fell into destitution; many died penniless. That's not something that seems either wise or compassionate to just handwave away!
> many died penniless.
99% of people died penniless in those times...
That's...really not true.
Farmers prior to this time, in particular, would have passed their lands on to their children, and that would have been a vital source of livelihood for them.
In every agricultural->industrial transition I’m aware of, the kids are desperate to get out of farming and into the higher paying, less arduous industrial jobs.
Sure?
I'm not sure how that's related, though.
Inheriting that farm from Dad was not “vital” to their livelihoods.
> 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."
I'm just articulating the argument, not saying it's a done deal.
AI can actually make decisions based on open ended information, and if it gets good enough it can fully replace humans.
Will that happen? I don't know. But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance.
"But I will say there's an AI agent that is doing my job for me right now and it's able to now do complex refactorings, rebasing, etc. with minimal guidance."
Right, but doing that is slower and more expensive than just doing it by hand according to independent research. Even weirder, the average perception is that it makes coding 20% faster while at the same time making it 20% slower. And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
Could that change, though? It's 20% slower now, but could it be 10% faster than the human in the future? 20% faster? Or even 50% or 80% faster? I really don't know, but it's plausible.
Even today, consider that the GP's quote is trading human time/energy for external time/energy (even if the latter is greater). Manually doing a complex refactoring can be a tedious, annoying, draining, error-prone process. I don't enjoy it, and after doing it, I'll be annoyed and prickly and not feeling a bit intellectually dulled. If it takes me "only" 2 hours to do it myself, but takes the LLM 2 hours and 24 minutes, I might logically make that trade if it meant I could keep myself sharp and un-annoyed, and also perhaps get in some light reading while the LLM is doing its thing.
(In fact I am literally doing that exact thing right now, having an LLM do a refactoring while I write this comment. Maybe dicking around on HN isn't the best use of my time, but it's better than tediously shuffling existing code around, even if I can do that faster than the LLM.)
> And that's not nearly as weird as wanting it to actually work. If you are in that camp, there a basic concepts about society and people that you clearly don't understand.
I see you've found a way to speculatively insult me to save time. (You'll be glad to know that I'm not in that camp -- again, articulating an argument.)
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.”
Well, when the company issues shares, then the money goes into their account, right?
Meta was a $26 Bn net purchaser (opposite of issuer)
Buying back shares it sold at a lower price, right? The lifecycle of a share starts with the transfer of money to a company in exchange for a share. It ends with a buy back, ideally at a higher price.
But still, at the beginning it is a transfer into the company’s coffers.
The life cycle of a share starts at IPO. The S&P 500 does not add companies to its index until at least 12 months after IPO.
Also, Meta issued 180 MM new shares at $38/share at IPO. That’s ~$7 Bn. Which is less than 1/4th of what they repurchased just last year.
Between share repurchases and dividends, S&P 500 companies are putting money into the markets, not pulling it out.
> The S&P 500 does not add companies to its index until at least 12 months after IPO.
Unless you're SpaceX [0], then the rules have exceptions...
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/elon-musks...
Markets can and do change rules from time to time. This rule change would apply to any new listing, not just SpaceX.
Yes, but it was done for spacex and it’s crooked
Why is it crooked? Do you understand why the rules are being changed?
I’m not sure what the justification is, but I assume it’s some flavor of “so index fund holders don’t miss out on returns”. It’s crooked because index inclusion drives massive flows at any price. SpaceX understands this and with so much money on the table probably exerted influence (maybe the big AI players contributed too). Passive funds don’t care about price (quite the opposite, they reward higher market caps in a feedback loop). But with an IPO, you’re supposed to let the market have some time to find the right price. Not to mention the changes related to profitability rules etc.
Companies buy back shares as a different way than dividends to enrich their shareholders.
Exactly: enrich shareholders at the expense of their own coffers.
> enrich shareholders at the expense of their own coffers.
This makes no sense. The coffers belong to the shareholders.
“belong” is a flexible word. You’re right in theory but depending on the situation money in your bank account is worth more to you than an equivalent amount of money in a company’s bank account (of which you are a shareholder).
In big tech’s case it’s mostly to offset massive stock compensation of executives and insiders
yes, if it sells them on the market.
The last time meta sold stock on the market was a primary stock offering in December 2013, roughly a year and a half after its initial public offering (IPO).
I find it crazy that so many people misunderstand this basic fact about how the market works.
100% correct, but I'll add that companies do use shares in other ways which also matter.
For example shares can be used for buying labor. Either as options or as grants, bonuses etc. It ultimately winds up in the public shares pool, but the first recipient receives it in place if company cash.
The second major use is in acquisitions. Buying other businesses using stock instead of cash is a useful tool often wielded. Again, not released onto the open market, but winds up there eventually.
Plus you can use them as loan collateral, balance-sheet improves and so on. So their price matters and their value to the business extends far beyond the IPO.
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.
> Facebook doesn't get the money when you buy a share of META
Technically no, but in reality yes, because shares are used as currency.
For instance, META does not acquire companies using cash, they use their own shares as payment. The higher the stock price, the lower the dilution.
Same thing for stock options and RSU.
So, it's true that stock prices don't translate 1:1 to cash inflows, but wherever stocks are currency (employee compensation, benefits, acquisitions, etc), it does translate.
The high share prices do subsidize Meta's share-based compensation, which seems to make up a substantial portion of the total wage bill. High and rising share prices also allow Meta to purchase other companies with Meta shares, instead of having to pay cash, which is beneficial in many ways.
That's an illusion. They book the expense at the cost of the share on grant date, so it looks good on the P&L, but they have to purchase the share at the price on the exercise date, so it's a significant drain on free cash flow.
Given that the thesis of the original post is that companies are swimming in money due to high stock prices; significant drains on free cash flows probably aren't the cause.
Absolutely not.
For RSUs companies do not purchase at exercise date, they issue new shares (or use previous buybacks).
And for stock options, the employee pays the strike, so it's even a positive cash flow.
This is only sorta true, the total dilution from SBC is very small for most tech companies with some outliers (cough snap cough).
They may not purchase on exactly the vesting date but they certainly do offset the issued shares with buybacks. I think they can choose to reduce those buybacks without as much rigamarole as they'd need to issue new shares for funding, so they can effectively used that as a "back door" way to raise money. I think it might juice their P&L a little too, but I doubt that's why they do it.
In the past Facebook bought back enough shares to cover RSU's. Their AI spend has changed this.
I think this is basically right, but I'd phrase it as "capital allocation theater" rather than just stupidity
Which feels like a longer way of saying 'stupidity'.
If we call it "stupidity" then a lot of money simply vaporizes overnight.
Which ironically illustrates just how stupid the system really is.
> 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.
"Tech stocks are growth stocks", that's pretty much how the market sees them anyway.
So essentially, they are not expected to be boring businesses yielding stable dividends to investors. That's your aristocrats stocks postioning: J&K, P&G, etc.
What is expected from tech stocks is the opposite: small to no dividend, reinvesting inflows into ever growing new businesses and technologies. A tech stock distributing dividends to shareholders instead of reinvesting in new projects would be seen as a mark of failure to innovate, incapacity to grow.
One tangent from this is that few of the big 'household name' tech products that have become infrastructure for modern life for huge amounts of people seem to be allowed to be mature and stable, they must be kept changing (beyond maintenance) or to offer some other new thing.
How much buybacks do tech stocks do?
2025 Apple - 100 billion alphabet - 55 billion Meta - 45 billion
These are roughly 2-2.5% of market cap.
Yeah, it's how you pay dividends at capital gains rate instead of income rate. But also, Apple is kind of stagnant.. if they had something better to do with the money they wouldn't be doing the buybacks.
Correct or not, and I'm sure it is, it seems fucking insane to me. We're still just apes.
When you start breaking capitalism down into small chunks like this, it _is_ insane.
The observation is right but the causality is off. The money comes from extraordinarily profitable lines of business rather than investors. Hiring is driven less by business concerns and more by various layers of management advancing their careers by managing more and larger teams.
> 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.
Isn't it to some degree? My understanding was with index funds was that the index is required to be backed by some in-kind holding of the component index products by whomever minted the index share. If more people buy the index then more of those in-kind backing products must be held e.g. as collateral. If you're REQUIRED to buy this stock because of your index/etf positions, necessarily the demand goes up, and necessarily the price goes up too. Companies _definitely_ materially benefit from stock price increases.
No, that's not correct, in general.
When people buy into an index fund/ETF, they are buying existing shares of that fund (which are already backed by the component stocks of that index) from other people who already have them. If there are 1M shares of an index fund that tracks the S&P500 floating around out there, and you go into your brokerage account and buy 1,000 shares, you have not increased that 1M figure by 1,000. There are still 1M shares; you have just bought 1,000 shares from an existing owner (perhaps another individual investor with an eTrade account just like you) who wanted to sell them.
In a case where an index fund does have to buy more shares of the underlying components (for rebalancing purposes or whatever), they are buying shares from other people on the open market: institutional investors, hedge funds, prop traders, etc. They are not buying from the company behind the stock ticker.
Yes, companies do sometimes issue new shares to the open market in order to raise cash. But that's not a daily activity; some companies may go years (or even forever) without doing another public offering beyond their IPO. Other companies do it somewhat regularly, perhaps a couple or few times a year. And some just do it when their stock price is high and they think offering more shares would be a good deal for them.
You’re making this unnecessarily complicated. Whether you purchased shares of a company through an ETF or directly, through your personal trading account, that money only goes to the person or entity that you bought the shares from. Maybe with some trading fees going to your broker (uncommon now thanks to the trend set by Robinhood).
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.
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.
FB finally got me with this. I refused to install any social media apps, but had to get messenger as I was missing important messages. So it's the only one I have.
> that keeps users in the platform
Alright but if it'd just let me open a damn web link without smashing the link four times just to open an in-app browser frame I'd really appreciate it.
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.
I think they're more referring to the scalable service economy. Haircuts, which are a service, don't scale (unless we're talking about robotics or something).
So things like fintech, telemedicine, Bolt/Uber?
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.
> 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.
Maybe this is true. Price is inherently bound among what people will pay, upstream (material/supply chain) costs, and labor. The west has overpriced its labor and material values by probably orders of magnitude for a long time, and people will pay less than ever. The rest of the world has been undervalued both in the effort for it to gain access to the markets that allow increased quality of life. But the market correction will lead to severely reduced market evaluation in terms of demand and price for all three factors in the west for many decades, I think.
Selling out our supply chains was suicide. I am too young to understand why people let this happened, but I think people bought into the idea of progress a little too hard to keep in mind their own civilizational health.
The business plan is really different depending on your starting capital.
If you have none, don't bother you can't afford the wood.
If you have a little, maybe your approach above is what makes sense.
If you have a lot, you might start looking at ways to lock down the chair distribution market within a region by maybe buying up some of the major warehousers - a bit of the old vertical integration. Maybe use some "free speech" of the financial kind directed towards some politicians to mandate that all workplaces have a certain minimum ratio of chairs to people.
The pricing strategy will be different for each approach.
You gotta do both. Ideally, the bottom-up price (the price you want to charge) is less than the the top-down price (what people will pay). If it's not, you gotta go back to the drawing board.
WhatsApp managed both Android and iOS App along with backend serving half a billion customers with only 40 engineers.
And that was at a time they had to fix a lot of things and scabbily issues by themselves. Now FreeBSD, Erlang, CPU, SSD, RAM babe all improved a lot.
I honestly struggle to see why they need many floors of developers just for messenger.
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!
Good managers are like firewalls: they shield from negative outside influences and let good or important information and tasks pass.
That includes representing department in stupid meetings, instead of wasting developers/engineers time.
Insulating developers from the rest of the business or other engineering teams is a hallmark of a poor manager, not a great one.
Kelly Johnson would disagree, and his management style is taught around the world.
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...
But that's core product. That's how they make money. Whatever it's a good idea to make money that way is a different story.
> 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.
Somehow I wouldn't be surprised if Messenger had more LOC than an early OS...
Software today has gotten too complex and bloated in a lot of cases.
Yeah, ugh! Who needs other language support anyway, we everyone should just learn English! And pictures! In a messaging app! Everyone should learn to use and read the entire breadth of human emotion via colon and a letter. :p
> Who needs other language support anyway, we everyone should just learn English!
Why not? That's already how our global air travel system works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English
That's not bloat. Bloat is transporting an apple with a bus (that is transporting nothing else). Modern software bloat is like then transporting that bus via an aircraft carrier, and moving that aircraft carrier by nuking the ocean in the direction into which it should fall. It's not very good.
A typical configuration was 2 to 4 MB of RAM. Just how much OS complexity can you stuff into that?
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.
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.
I think it's more like 7500 to 2800.
> 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.
10 years ago i wrote a php web chat in 2 hours or so. I pretty much never look at it but the tinestamps suggest it always worked.
I could add more features to it and those will also work.
A friend once worked on an application with a huge team. He often pointed out the window at a large costuction site with a comparable number of people working. He made countless jokes about real work, a real system, real organisation etc Then one day the building was finished and their application kept crashing in production.
It's part of a constantly evolving ecosystem. It's a stable product because reliability engineers make it so and software engineers get the integrations right.
But a messaging program like Signal is fairly similar in scope, but only has like a couple dozen of devs, compared to Messenger's thousands(?).
You haven't used messenger much then, if you're comparing the complexity of the two.
I guess I don't understand which are the features Messenger has that Signal doesn't that requires a billion dollars a year to maintain.
I don't use it. What am I missing?
Signal could definitely use a bunch more devs, if only to fix all the UX bugs I hit on a daily basis.
It still doesn't take a team that large.
When I was at Facebook they decided to re-write Messenger in C. There were people who thought it was a waste of time. There were people who thought it was a great idea. It was a lot of work, took a while, and I wouldn't be suprised if by now it's been re-written to something else.
It's not that hard to make up work, and there's people whose whole job is pretty much just that.
There is no way messenger features or functionality is changing that much year over year.
It’s almost entirely bloat.
> Cause it's developed
You can napkin-math this. How many different team-sized components do you think go into it? If the code were on GitHub, and all they had to do was just update dependencies below them in the stack, and bump the version number for components above them,how many Dependabot PRs would be opened per week for software that's "done"
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.
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.
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!
Yes, that is a completely new business which has OpenAI, Anthropic and Google as competitors.
While Twitters competitors were Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr and Mastodon.
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 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
The big companies all collude.
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? 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.
> Right, but it's already doing that, and runs just fine, from what I understand. The developers don't have to sit there pounding the enter key on their keyboards over and over all day to keep the messages flowing.
It “works fine” precisely because there’s a lot of engineers pounding the enter key.
This is really just basic stuff, when you serve literally billions of users worldwide, you need a lot of people just to keep everything going smoothly as more and more people adopt it. Software doesn’t just magically scale to arbitrary usage and what made sense to build 5 years ago may no longer be the correct architecture today.
> 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.
IMO based on working on not-that-large-or-high-revenue systems, but ones where these things already applied, a bunch of it is probably a combination of three things:
* You're doing enough total revenue that a couple million a year to fund a team of engineers to try to make tiny marginal improvements in ad revenue through targeting, or new features on how to present ads, etc, can still easily pay for itself.
* You're running at a high enough scale / spending enough on resources that you can similarly justify spending millions on teams to knock more millions off your infra costs.
* You've got enough usage/users that making tiny improvements in bug rates/crashes/etc similarly results in more usage that more-than-pays-for-itself. (And the list of bugs to squash is possibly never-ending if those other groups keep changing things!)
"Why make 30M profit on 100M revenue when you can make 35M profit on 115M revenue" sorta thing.
> 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.
If the site is dead, why would it have any influence on elections?
So is it a dead app or is it influencing elections? I know Elon makes you mad, but try to be objective
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
Spaces were amazing.
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.
Sadly they were allowed to acquire WhatsApp even though they already had their Messenger. Meta did it to devour their competition. Even today, lots of people still don't know that whatsapp is owned by Meta.
whatsapp was acquired
While I am ideologically aligned with the author (ie, humans matter) and agree with their proposed interventions (progressive taxation, spread the base of capital across society, aggressive antitrust enforcement) and appreciate the thrust of the essay, I’m doubtful of the underlying predicate that human labor will be replaced with AI.
I don’t believe we have seen AI-driven layoffs yet (despite the CEO’s prognostications and suspect justifications). I personally have more to do than ever despite “AI being able to do everything I can do” (‡). I still want to speak to a human at the company I am a client of. And how many AI bloggers even know what a nurse at a hospital does?
I agree with the author’s repeated statement and implication that it is all about the human. The human is the lynchpin. Imagine for a moment this “dead economy,” or instead imagine a virtualized economy that is just incredible with trillions of this and trillions of that, absolute abundance, perfect chemical processing, impeccable design, unlimited resources. How much is that worth without humans?
Further, in many societies humans became irrelevant to labor in its simplest definition decades ago, without becoming economically irrelevant. If the US lost 10% of its able-bodied workforce economists would be primarily concerned with lost consumption, and not production. Apparently this “human labor” is a lot more than its superficial and material interpretation.
What I don’t agree with is the fickleness assigned to the human role. The human role is not a light or arbitrary one. It is the defining characteristic of our societal system that all subsequent characteristics rely upon and are derived from.
(‡ – Despite “AI being able to do everything I can do,” it cannot tie it together, because there is no such thing as agency in LLM’s. Probabilistic processes as n approaches infinity become gobbledygook at best. Deterministic interruptions are a necessity of agency.)
If we can work on the solution for when 90% of “human labor” is replaced by machines and intelligent machines, we’ll have a roadmap for how society should be structured.
Ever since we moved a step above subsistence farming we’ve been heading this way, and continually developing new ways to waste effort and work isn’t sustainable.
It's crazy to me that we're seriously discussing these things replacing all workers when they still cannot do proper addition.
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.
Some businesses will not necessarily need human customers at all
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).
Totally - the (useful) economic models they are bringing are being extrapolated into very unusual territory!
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.
This assumes it is literally impossible for anyone else to reduce their battery costs to a level which makes them competitive with Tesla in an environment when battery prices are falling rapidly and the tech continues to evolve (and Tesla's EVs are not even unusually cheap or experimental in their battery supply chains)
That sounds less likely than the bull case Tesla is trying to make on "we're a robotics company now" or "one day all cars will be autonomous taxis controlled by us".
Exactly. Looking at competition from China, but also the West, I don't see Tesla having a moat in EVs, in robots, or even in batteries in the medium term (compare e.g. [1]).
How can they produce the extraordinary growth and excess profits that would justify their valuation?
Fundamentals will reassert themselves sooner or later, but as we see it can take a long time.
[1] https://electrek.co/2026/05/07/tesla-4680-battery-cell-perfo...
Their per-car profit margin is the moat. Which non-Chinese company can compete?
Tesla's moat is bipartisan support for 100%+ tariffs on Chinese EVs in the United States.
How long that lasts remains to be seen. American consumers living close to either border are going to be able to see Chinese EVs themselves.
Tesla has vertical integration with their batteries, which is why they can make them cheaply.
> This assumes it is literally impossible for anyone else to reduce their battery costs to a level which makes them competitive with Tesla in an environment when battery prices are falling rapidly and the tech continues to evolve
No - it just means they can't do it as fast as the Chinese. The Chinese have been investing in battery technology for 10-15 years longer than most auto manufacturers. (And their labor is cheaper).
It's not depressing because it's not true. Tesla isn't investing in battery technology. Tesla also isn't developing new models at the same rate as VW, BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai Kia, etc.
> Tesla also isn't developing new models at the same rate as VW, BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai Kia, etc.
BMW and Mercedes are not in the same class. They can afford to get away by charging a premium.
VW: I'd love to know how much it costs them to make/buy a battery, and their profit margins on EVs. Ditto Hyundai and Kia.
(Edit: See https://carbuzz.com/ev-profit-margins/ for VW).
Look at all the companies scaling back on EVs or exiting them altogether (e.g. Honda). It's not that Honda can't make EVs. It's that they can't compete on profit with Tesla + Chinese EVs. It's likely why Hyundai is dropping the Kona and the Ioniq 6.
Nissan dropped the Ariya, I believe. The Bolt is also out. The general shift is for more luxury EVs (BMW/Mercedes), and not EVs for the average Joe.
See also https://www.bain.com/insights/electric-vehicles-profit-puzzl...
Giving up on EVs is crazy though, it seals their fate and guarantees the death of the company in exchange for a few more years of profit. The EV takeover will not stop, as of roughly this year they’re going to be cheaper than equivalent ice cars, it’s going to accelerate quickly. It’s suicide in slow motion
This. It doesn't really look like Tesla is doing anything rn but selling old cars. They don't appear to be the future any more.
It doesn't look like they are developing self-driving?
What other company is developing self-driving at a level of sophistication as Tesla that you can actually buy in a consumer vehicle?
I don't think self-driving is remotely close to working at any scale. I also don't think it's the killer-app. Right now, cheap electrics and moreso cheap hybrids are the killer.
I don’t know if you’ve tried Tesla FSD, but I use it almost every day. It is not perfect, but it is amazing.
Waymo, of course, is everywhere here in the Bay Area. The tech works at scale today.
it works in the west. In specific areas and under specific conditions.
Driving data is cultural data.
This is one of the many blind spots from commenters, when they think about their own experience and generalize it to the larger global market.
The companies that have real boards would never take the risk.
Once Elon’s air cover is blown, the government is going the dissect Tesla. Once someone gets the injunction to stop deletion of crash data and allow for inspection, they are cooked.
I suppose, if you live in a jurisdiction/insurance regime where it's usable.
But people like buying new cars, new models, new designs. Not just features - those are just options.
Its interesting, practically all car makers seem to have factories in China, why cant they compete?
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.
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - John Maynard Keynes
Sometimes I wonder if Keynes would under the current conditions see fit to differentiate "merely irrational" from "absolutely insane".
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.
I get local models to drive applications through MCP (e.g. Google Chrome DevTools) via OpenCode all the time, and do things that would otherwise be very token-intensive and result in pointless meatspin. This is totally possible, and will become more so.
The real reason you pay for Claude _is_ in the models. The locally runnable models are impressive for what they are, but simply will not accomplish the task as effectively, incisively or quickly enough. I have to be willing to let OpenCode run in agentic loop on "download my bank statements"[1] for an hour and just walk away, and take a low-ish but profoundly nonzero chance that it will just fail. Claude can do it in 5 minutes, if I let it (I have), and it will not fail. Both are driving the browser via MCP and performing the same task.
[1] One of those difficult-to-use, modal-rich JavaScript-laden banking portals that seems quite intentionally designed to prevent this sort of downloading, or I wouldn't bother letting an agent loose on it in the first place.
Aside from filling in the timesheet (which I assume could be done from a CSV import - I appreciate this is another step), I have almost the same setup as you, without AI. I have bugwarrior pulling JIRA tickets and github PRs into taskwarrior. I have an integration from task warrior into time warrior and from there another hook back into JIRA to get titles and summarise.
All of that is done with two API keys and no AI. A local agent could easily put it together for you.
Now sure, I had to put this together and I lose the AI summary you have plus the auto filling, but what I'm trying to say is that I have 80% of this without any AI.
I also have a script parsing git from my emails and a little tui that translates them into git diff and a key binding to pull the PR but I find it a little cumbersome and don't really use it, and trying to parse todo from maildir is also a little useless so I accept that AI would be better there.
I also accept that your example is just one prompt of a dozen and I have to plan the solution for every one of your prompts, but I also don't find prompting to be terribly useful for occasions where I don't think the solution through- because it probably means I don't know what I want or don't really need it.
What I do find it really useful for is digging through Kubernetes and asking how two services are connected. Claude is better than local for that but there's nothing inherently non-local about that usage.
In my case, I don’t have access to the APIs nor does my company’s ancient trash timesheet app have any ability to bulk upload.
That’s what’s so great about these programs, really, is that you can just do the thing out of plain language.
So far there's no moat though. A lot of that kind of stuff is available open source too if you look for it (and was available before claude desktop). And for anything that doesn't exist, with coding agents now you can write one up in an afternoon.
It's kind of paradoxical in a way. By making writing software cheap, they've made it much harder to create a moat for themselves that involves only software. It'll be interesting to see how they respond.
If there’s an open source alternative to Claude desktop that has a similar amount of extensibility with connectors specifically I’d be very interested to know about it. I’m very much not deep into this space.
https://github.com/OpenCoworkAI/open-cowork
https://www.eigent.ai/
https://opencode.ai/
OpenAI may be better positioned than you think with Codex being able to drive your applications without an API according to Nate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d9ZmA-4QzU&t=1093s
this is also possible with local models, MCP is an open standard
if you already have claude, you can even get it to set it all up for you too
the issue with local models is just the compute required, it's hard to compete with 100t/s cloud models
Unfortunately for Claude, you can have it set up local models to do that for you and then you don't need to renew it. Codex's computer use is better than Claude's, imo. I'm a Mac, no idea about windows but I know there's no Linux version. Haven't had enough time with Opus 4.8 but GPT 5.5 > Opus 4.6 and 4.7.
I have mixed feelings here. I find codex much better than Claude for generating PoCs and debugging small scripts, and for finding online documentation. I find Claude a bit better for debugging distributed systems and summarising data
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.
> 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.
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.
The issue I have with these pieces is that AI will not affect the whole economy evenly. The disruptions come in bursts and fits: first digital artists were disrupted (e.g. Adobe Firefly), then junior engineering roles were disrupted, currently "measurer" roles (to quote Matthew Prince's piece on Cloudflare layoffs) are being disrupted, and it's rather foreseeable that occupations like lawyers and accountants are also at risk. But the key is that the disruption is not happening all at once. And that's a key fact because political disruption doesn't happen when a relative few people are laid off (like coal miners and factory workers were) but when a relative majority of people are hungry.
For such doomsdayer opinions to be correct, we'd see it in massive unemployment figures. US unemployment sitting at 4.3% does not bear that out. Finland and Spain are currently at >10+% unemployment. US youth unemployment may be at 9.5%, but British and Chinese youth unemployment are higher than 16%.
Is there some Finnish, Spanish, British, Chinese civil unrest that I'm not seeing in my media outlets?
> 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.
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.
> I feel like 20 or 30 years ago, the average person seemed to have more disposable income.
Big if true but is it true?
> 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!)
Tokens are not fungible for hosted models but there are resellers like Github Copilot and OpenRouter. These allow you to purchase capacity and choose which hosted models to burn your tokens on. Obviously there is some margin being taken in order to provide this flexibility, but there's probably some offset with volume contracts.
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.
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.
Ideally the incentives would be driven by the insurance companies: "Put a tamper-proof lock on your crate and get 50% off your theft insurance!"
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.
The big productivity gains of the Agricultural Revoution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio... started considerably before the Industrial Revolution, though naturally the Industrial Revolution in turn fed back into agricultural productivity, in time.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
From 1000 to 1300 the population of Europe doubled, mostly from improvements in agriculture.
The first London coffeehouse opened in the 1650s and the industrial revolution started in ~1760. It just took a while for the habit to catch on.
The mechanization of the ag industry took place 100 years after the industrial revolution. Try again.
The Cotton gin was created in the 1700s.
Maybe you mean this one, Green Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Other way round
> mechanization of the ag industry
... was not what produced the British Agricultural Revolution.
Seems like this and parent are referring to two different waves of improvement. Pre-IR improvements in plowing and cultivation (still draft and human traction), followed by post-IR mechanization for harvesting and transport?
Farm labor demands wax and wane with the seasons with harvest typically being the most labor intensive; so, it was actually stationary motors that did the most to reduce labor demands. Tractors mostly helped farmers eliminate the need for horses on a farm.
One of the leading economic history theories of why the industrial revolution happened was that it was largely a result of the Black Plague.
The theory is roughly that before the Black Plague, the population was stuck in Malthusian dynamics at the top of the logistic curve - population had expanded to the level that land could support.
The massive deaths allowed the remaining population to only farm the most productive land, leading to a massive surplus. The elite were able to capture that surplus and fund things like art, science, etc. Some of those scientists were able to create technology that led to further efficiency gains, so that technology could make the economy grow faster than population growth could catch up.
There are a ton of things that allowed that surplus to translate into technology and economic growth. But AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.
Black Plague ended in 14th century while industrial revolution started in the 18th. There is no connection.
The growth started in the 14th. It was awhile before the industry happened, but the change in growth rate is strongly connected with the Black Plague.
One of the many, many descriptions of this is here (many because this is the mainstream theory): https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/black-death-and-industrialisa...
The first technology wasn't the steam engine, it was eating beef instead of just grain, and having cattle pull plows. We don't think of that as a huge technological revolution, but it was a dramatic efficiency gain at the time. It wasn't a new invention, but there wasn't enough surplus to deploy it widely before that.
Anything can be anything if you stretch definitions far enough. But normally industrialization is seen as distinct and antagonistic to artisanal culture.
There was a very marked change in the growth rate, which is why economic historians focus on that.
Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.
It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.
It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.
But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.
If "multiple steps" take 400 years, then the cause is something else.
The economy went from 0% growth for 100s of years to 3% growth that lasted many hundreds of years.
Yes, at each step keeping the 3% growth needed things to keep going, but the big thing was unleashing the nonzero growth rate, to get unstuck from the local minimum.
Several other places have had non-zero growth in history, yet only one had an industrial revolution.
And that is super interesting!
This is history not science so it is super incomplete.
We definitely know that the trajectory of the industrial revolution was kicked off at the plague.
We don't fully understand why there major growth periods at other times that quickly fizzled out, and what is different.
What separates those periods from the plague to the industrial revolution is a super interesting question for economic theory.
Yet, the causal chain is clear that the plague kicked off a period where investment and compound interest began to pay off, that continues to today.
What makes that a rule? Can causal chains not last more than X amount of time? What is the cutoff?
I will try to steelman watwut, a lot of people presume compound exponential economic growth is basically inevitable as a law, so you can always go back to some point in time.
However, economic growth was basically flat before the Black Plague, and increases were basically random events that went back to Malthusian dynamics.
Only since the Black Plague has the world enjoyed exponential economic growth.
Most people talk about the industrial revolution, a lot of other comments talk about the british agricultural revolution before that, but economic historians have identified the inflection point at the black plague - that's where compound interest really started to be a driver of growth, it barely existed before that, at least on long time scales.
The Justinian Plague was as bad or worse, but rather than result in flourishing it ushered in the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire and the start of the so-called Dark Ages. So maybe the Black Plague was an important element, but if so also had to have happened at the confluence of other critical events.
According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe.
<quote> One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can know the date of the battle of Poitiers; applying economic analysis to the spotty record of commerce during late antiquity is a tricky business. However, as can be seen in a subtly reasoned 2003 paper by two development economists, Ronald Findlay of Columbia and Mats Lundahl of the University of Stockholm, it is compelling, as well, despite its reliance on a number of simplifications. </quote>
That's a super interesting question and I agree! I am only saying the modern period of compound economic growth clearly started at the black plague with good explanations as to why.
Why other events did not have the same effects are very interesting questions for economic history.
A small increase in exponential growth will have a huge effect after 400 years
Doesn't this article contradict your earlier comment? It claims that wages increased (elite were unable to capture the surplus) and as a result, workers were able to move from growing crops to farming animals, with resulting efficiency gains (i.e. they were able to acquire capital rather than pay all their surplus as rent).
It's a long arc, and as sibling comments say, there are many books about it.
The elites being able to capture some of it was what allowed for science and the enlightenment to happen, which eventually led to the technology that inspired the industrial revolution.
The big picture was it was the beginning of compound interest. This was a many step process over hundreds of years.
The events happened, but the mechanisms are subject to debate. Every school of economic thought has strong opinions on this time period. You've actually listed a source that contradicts your original argument (which came from where, out of curiosity?)
Basically, one common version is 'pro-elite' and blames the stagnation prior to this period on 'Malthusian dynamics' (over population beyond the productivity of the land). Another version is 'anti-elite' and blames the stagnation on the capture of all surplus by the landowning elite (who are not motivated to invest it other than the bare necessity to maintain status quo).
While there is considerable room for nuance and disagreement, Malthus is considered largely discredited by modern economics. As the population increased, so did the productivity of the land. Regardless, the fact people lived bare subsistence lives under feudalism does not imply the max population had been reached - they are still paying excess as rent. Peasants paid 1/2 their crop in rent, consumed 1/4 and replanted a 1/4 (crude approximation). This is very similar btw to modern US - there are 100M renters and the median rental household pays 50% of gross income to rent + tax.
Compound interest and capital investments predate the medieval period by thousands of years. There are cuneiform tablets documenting these kinds of financial arrangements.
'AFAIK the leading theory is that without the massive shock from population decline due to the bubonic plague, that surplus would have never existed to begin with, so how it was allocated would have been moot.' This is highly dubious/contentious.
You might regard the Renaissance as the prelude to the industrial revolution.
Lots of serious historians disagree. There are whole books on the topic. Here's just one paper as an example
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demograph...
Societal changes are slow beasts, they may very well take several centuries to develop. Nation-states were a direct consequence of the printing press, yet they didn't arrive until XIX century.
I thought the aftermath of the Black Plague also allowed people to charge a lot more for their labor and services, since most of the laborers, well, died.
I mean all part of the surplus - you weren't struggling to barely survive so could do other things with your time, and some of the people used that surplus to invest in efficiency.
The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death.
Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death. A lot of agriculture historically and in poor countries like India today is subsistence agriculture, yeoman farmers living off what they grow directly. More efficiency allows them to sell their surplus and to invest the proceedings, kicking off economic growth.
Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.
After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It also doesn't destroy food. Right now, we have enough food. After the AI revolution we have more food and more free labour and fundamentally more effective administrators to run a welfare system. I don't want my society to be the first one to try it, but if we can move the average administrator from an ordinary human to something that is a little better at math than Gauss with infinite clones to get into the details ... there is a chance that we can run an effective centrally planned welfare system.
It is really hard to see how the AI revolution would lead to any issues with food shortages. It looks more like previously unthinkable upside than anything else.
Datacenters are competing with agriculture for both land and water.
Your analysis is greatly under estimating the risk that the capitalists that control the system use it to build cheap, automated weapons to guard their cheap robots and lock everyone of us out, just because they can. They're far more likely to be narcissists and sociopaths than the average population, empathy isn't their strong suit.
> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.
Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.
> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Such as? AI can't do my laundry, wash my dishes, clean my house, do my food shopping for me. AI can't care for me if I'm sick.
> The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions
But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
How is this a benefit?
> But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.
Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about. It may be immensely valuable even if some details are off. That's what made the XVIII's Encyclopedia such a valuable tool for civil society.
By the time you get to the point where those wrong details become relevant, you have gotten a basic understanding of what the overall topic is about, so you're prepared to get a second opinion from a different source - and this time you may know enough to start asking relevant questions, rather than starting from full ignorance.
> Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about.
Perhaps, but we already had that in the form of search-engines and primers and how-to guides and Wikipedia. The actionable questions already had answers.
Adding an obsequious device that dynamically hallucinate half of a conversation with not-necessarily-true dialog is (if not a detriment) only a marginal improvement.
> a starting point overview
Which an unreliable answer is not.
> even if some details are off
Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong. They don't help anyone to get a "basic understanding". All they "help" with is getting a wrong understanding, that the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
When humans do this, we call them "bullshit artists", and we don't view them favorably. Why should AIs get a pass?
> Which an unreliable answer is not.
> Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong.
This is no worse than Wikipedia, or the original encyclopedia for that matter. Those contain dubious claims that you'll need to verify on your own too.
LLMs help because they have a gigantic amount of compressed knowledge, and they are able to find relevant information and present it incredibly fast. You wouldn't trust the ten first results of a Google search either, but you wouldn't say that having a search engine is totally useless and in no way an improvement over your local library, would you?
> the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.
True, but having to learn how to use a tool properly doesn't make the tool useless, even if it can hurt those who use it carelessly.
> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.
Not yet. Like, not at all and there is a constantly expressed threat we will all become poorer and unemployable because of it. I dont believe it, but AI did not made life better ... and its creators claim it will make life worst for most of us. That is their literal sales pitch.
Food isn't "incredibly cheap" to a lot of people
The worry with AI is not "productivity is bad." It's whether the displaced labor has anywhere comparable to go
Comparable being the key word there. AI marketing is threatening to eventually eliminate most white collar work. The exact high paying jobs (at least in the US) that enable upward class mobility and fuel the consumption based economy.
Take those away and tell everyone "sorry, go do physical labor now for half or worse of the salary" and that's a big problem.
Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
The emphasis there should be on "marketing". The actual state of things is that white-collar work is alive and well, and if anything is being helped by AI.
Helped or overworked?
Interesting there is a possible implication here. If salaries drop from more people doing physical labor instead of white collar work then the automation of physical work may be delayed even longer. It may be cheaper in the short term to pay humans than machines due to an oversupply in physical labor.
Automation is a boon when it automates away tedium, but also a curse for the people that subsist by enduring that tedium.
> Automation is a boon when it automates physical labor, not when it automates away knowledge work.
Says the knowledge workers, who have collectively spent the last 50 years talking down to the physical laborers with a smug "should have gone to college!" attitude.
You'll be fine. Automation of any kind is a boon for everyone. We massively over-allocated human talents to office jobs over the past few decades and stopped building anything in the physical world (like houses, infrastructure, etc), this is only the pendulum swinging back to reality. Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay, long before AI was a thing.
How many people do we actually need sitting in meetings about meetings about powerpoint presentations for future meetings....or implementing react components into a dashboard UI in a slightly different way for the 3,000,000th time? Even without AI, this was bound to happen.
In the early 1900s there were literally hundreds of different automobile manufacturers globally. We didn't need that many, just as we don't need 1,000,000 people working on 100 slightly different versions of the same CRUD project management software. Humans will human. We'll find new stuff to do, as we have done since the dawn of humanity.
"Graeber wrote about this astutely in his original 2013 Bullshit Jobs essay"
I wouldn't take his word too seriously. According to him, corporate lawyers, administrative assistants and compliance officers shouldn't exist.
Uhhh...what jobs do you think AI is going to be tasked with automating?
The most valuable non-foundation-model AI companies are...legal apps. This means he was right, not wrong.
Funny you make this statement without giving examples of timeframes, what this looked like in real terms for real peoples lives living back then, nothing. Just 'between 1880 and 1950 we found new stuff to do'. It's all selling magic and hopium based on nothing.
Real example: 75% of the global workforce were farmers in 1880, most on a subsistence basis. The people who left the farm for the factories during that time period weren't forced to. They chose to, because working in a factory was better than staying on the farm. Just like a generation of rural Chinese people made the same choice more recently.
In fact, there's nothing stopping you from buying a farm and living like its 1880 today.
You can quite literally go out and start living a subsistence farmer lifestyle tomorrow. The average person in 1880 did not have the tools needed to cultivate a large parcel of land, so you'd approximate their lifestyle quite easily with a tiny parcel of arable rural land which is extremely cheap to acquire in most countries.
It's not magic and hopium, its simply automation and increased productivity via leverage. AI is the assembly line of the digital revolution.
Why is you're 'real example' 100% hypothetical? Give me real examples. Or at least real information from places like Manchester at the time. Not this hypothetical stuff the implies much ignoring things got worse for generations.
If you read up on the industrial revolution, those people that moved became less healthy, less happy, forced into dorm style housing. Give me real examples of what 'working out' looked like in the past. Because from my research, 'things worked out' meant worse outcomes for quite a long time (like generational timeframe). Give me examples please of what this successful transition in the past looked like for real individuals.
Again, it's magic and hopium.
You need 0.5 to 1.5 acres per person for non-mechanized industrial argriculture. Nowhere with land that is truly arable enough for that is going to _sell_ you 1 acre at a time. In the U.S., you buy at least 40 acres at a time. In the U.S. Midwest, that's going to set you back (on average) $379,000. That's before you buy the equipment you need to be able to farm the land in the first place. Unless you industrialize and grow crops to sell to other people, you will not be able to afford the property taxes on the land to be able to keep it, either.
So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.
What? Yes, you absolutely can buy half an acre. You think in 1880 people went on Zillow to buy land?
You're just going to have to do this the 1880 way.
Knock on the door of a land owner and offer to buy/rent half an acre so you can farm. You'll find takers. My extended family literally has this arrangement with many people who farm different crops during different seasons.
Too hard to to do it that way? Welcome to 1880! Most people weren't land owners on the land they farmed back then and didn't have 'Perfectly arable' plots, and this was pre-fertilizer.
Oh and you'll have to use horse and buggy to get around to find land owners (no evil automobiles from those evil factories full of automation!) who will allow you to farm their land, just like 1880. So good luck.
I don't know how many times I need to explain this to tech doomers: nobody forced people out of subsistence farming. They chose to leave it. It was not a utopia.
The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing? I mean, other than to make a handful of extremely wealthy individuals even more wealthy at the expense of everyone's retirement funds.
I don't see what the big worry is unless you're heavily invested. Plenty of investments go bust.
Did you see the news about the shennanigans of the SpaceXaiXsocialmediasite IPO and the consequences of that?
Because of the huge amounts involved.
As people have pointed out - this also happened during the DotCom bust. Eventually all that infra got used.
Fiber buried in the ground in 1996 is still useful. Servers from 1996, not so much outside of the retrocomputing community. The bulk of those trillions of dollars on AI is not going into useful long term infrastructure. It's going into equipment that will only be useful to scrappers after its initial life is over in three to five years as the sorts of places that can handle the heat load of 25 clothes dryers on high stuffed into 3.5 cu ft of space aren't going to run second hand machines. They aren't useful as in-office developer machines unless your office has 1000A of power to dedicate to that one single machine and the air conditioner need to keep the room the server is in from bursting into flames.
And I suspect those GPUs don't even have video outputs so cannot be used as video cards.
Fun fact!
During the DotCom crash, about $5 trillion in market cap disappeared.
NVidia's market cap is currently around $5 trillion.
Sounds like that other great destroyer of lives and capital - war.
> The other big worry is, what if it just doesn't do what is promised and these trillions of dollars that were spent assuming magic would happen were all for nothing?
Honestly? That's the best case scenario for humanity.
When AI can replace knowledge-based work, capital has no need for humans anymore. That's almost an ELE.
There are precedents for a lower workforce. It was not so long ago that women did not participate much in formal labor, but rather spent their creative energies improving their families and homes. That might not be an empowering choice today, and I'm not advocating for it, but it shows that the economy has in the past and probably still can get along perfectly well with a lot of sidelined labor capacity. The important thing is that the sidelined labor find some useful purpose outside the workplace rather than simply consuming welfare: in the past, domestic work like childrearing and social/emotional work like building community soaked up excess labor capacity and still had pro-social effects.
Just because they weren't paid doesn't mean women were not doing economically valued labour. The washing machine is probably the greatest productivity unlock since the steam engine.
The Washing Machine Project (https://www.thewashingmachineproject.org/) is trying to provide this benefit to people without ready access to mains electricity, by providing hand-cranked, portable washing machines. Hopefully it's more of a success than OLPC was: https://bathsdr.org/resources/the-washing-machine-project-in... shows mixed results.
There's also the worry whether productivity is real.
If you focus on writing ricketty software or overblown emails then no it isn't real. But if you think of e-gates instead of border officers then it is.
There is a basic problem with framing though. Why does the labour need to find somewhere to go, but capital doesn't? Why can't the increase in productivity be captured by labour and denied to capital?
Do you mean to imply a political/social revolution? In any other scenario I can think of when my boss gets a new machine, he captures the value from my increased productivity or the machine eliminates my job entirely.
Changing the tax system to tax capital rather than labour would probably get you 90% of the way there without great societal upheaval (capital would fight back though).
Obligatory land value tax mention
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom. That's kinda the opposite of people starving to death.
not necessarily. you're inadvertently conflating things. just more people alive doesn't mean they aren't starving. a population boom can be had in the starving population too.
While you are not wrong, it is still historically correct to say that "more efficient agriculture meant a population boom". We don't know what they were doing for birth control back then (because this was a woman's job and they didn't write history), but there is plenty of evidence they must have been doing something that was effective (rhythm is more than good enough to explain this, and so likely what they were doing). People had a good idea of how much the farm could support and they tried to get just enough kids to ensure it would pass on - with enough spares for war, infant mortality and the like.
> Historically, more efficient agriculture meant a population boom.
But also a precipitous drop in life expectancy. Life in industrial towns in 1800s England was grim. Make of that what you will.
Pollution.
In the towns yes. A wealthy city man could expect to live fewer years than a labourer in the countryside.
Surely a factor, but hardly the sole explanation; malnutrition rose, that should give you some pause.
Pollution, malnutrition, maiming by industrial or mining equipment (huge percentage at the start).
> more efficient agriculture meant a population boom
More efficient agriculture meant a more efficient population. In cases where environmentally possible this obviously encourages a population boom but they're not necessarily synonymous.
No, people must be given food or they starve to death. Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal.
> Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal.
No, it's not, because food requires work to produce. Someone has to do that work.
If you yourself are not one of the people who works to produce the food that we all need, you have only two ways of getting it:
(1) Trade something else of value for it;
(2) Force the people who do produce it to give it to you.
Option #1 is a free market. Option #2 is tyranny. There are no other choices.
Which do you pick?
Is it tyranny that my 84 year old parents get free food (via the state pension)?
Did they earn the pension by working for many years?
Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years?
In most developed countries even someone who has been never worked in their life will get enough to live on (although they might get less than someone who has worked all their lives).
Not really. Their generation never paid enough to cover what they receive now.
This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".
> People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less.
Voluntarily, yes. If you want to make my list complete, you can add charity as a third option: if people judge that you're worth helping, they can voluntarily choose to help you.
But charity only works if the people doing it have things to give. Which means those things were produced. Somebody produced them. And the people who have them to give, through charity, got them one of the two ways I described. So it all still bottoms out to those two ways. Yes, some people can be helped out with charity. But you can't have an entire society all being helped with charity, because then nobody is producing anything that can be used to help them.
If you don't feed people, they will pick for you.
The real question is do we figure it out with intention now, or let it be randomly figured out by people with nothing to lose?
> If you don't feed people, they will pick for you.
Do you mean they will pick option 2? "Give me food or I'll mess you up?" We have a name for that kind of behavior, and it's not a pretty one.
Or might there be some possibility that they will realize that option 1 is there and try it?
I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK. The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.
> I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK.
I never said any such thing.
> The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.
In other words, you're saying people will choose option #2.
What an odd response given the scenario put forth. I’m very curious what you think that starving people with no jobs are expected to trade with here?
If my family isn't eating and society is cool with that I could not care less about a label that such a society gives me.
Again, society can get ahead of things, or let it be decided later. The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1. Society can figure out how to keep option 2 working if society prefers that. If society fails to do so it will deservedly get option 1.
> The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1.
I think you have the options mixed up. Option 1 is voluntary trade. Option 2 is violence.
You appear to be saying that people would prefer voluntary trade, but that they will resort to violence if they see no other option. Which historically I think is largely true.
Option one is always violence. It is the only option always on the table.
Or we take some small portion of that new surplus in productivity and share it among everyone by divorcing the need to work from the need to not starve.
Living off redistributed surplus is exactly what happens when you don’t work.
I’ve been there: no job = food pantry + food stamps.
I live in a nice area. Since we are wealthy, our local economy has quite a bit of surplus. The food pantries regularly have organic and high end food. Plenty of people with money go there just because - why not?
The poorer parts of the county don’t have as much surplus, so they’re food pantries had old cheese and peanut butter.
I’m not sure what the solution is.
who will redistribute stuff?
You are simply selecting new elites to be from the redistributor class (vanguard party, Nomenklatura, secret police etc), instead of the entrepreneural class.
Works well if you are the one redistributing stuff from "rich to poor", but it ends up as creating a new elite class, every single time
All modern Western-like societies involve some amount of indirect redistribution already. Outside of extremely peculiar places like Singapore or the Gulf states, it's just not seen as desirable or even sensible to have extreme wealth alongside people living in extreme poverty on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day. This actually used to be relatively common in the 19th century, it was the actual kind of widespread pathology that early social reformers railed against.
All that wealth people are bitchin about is ephemeral, its mostly unrealized gains on stocks that balloned.
People want to overtax Elon, but he doesn't sell his stocks. Its all imaginary numbers propped up by the federal reserve.
It is still extremely common today, if you look at the demographics along the Atlantic Coast of the US. The richest zip codes always have poor ones nearby.
By the standards of underdeveloped countries today or historical poverty in general, these "poor" people are nonetheless living in outright opulence: their genuine plight is mostly one of social marginalization, that can't really be solved by purely economic means. That's partly the effect of new technology (developed by capitalism) but partly redistribution in action.
Doesn’t seem like it did it in Norway. Or the Us from the new deal until the 1970s. Or the vast majority of western Europe. This red scare stuff is tiring.
ask yourself why did US not become like Norway, despite having new deal until 1970s?
is there something structural that prevents it from becoming Norway ??
Unwillingness to embrace socialism?
Unwillingness to engage with social policy for fear of reds under the bed (ginned up by cynical self serving robber barons).
It seems obvious to me that a complex society needs a privileged class to function, but I don't think it's self evident that every kind of elite class would behave in the same way.
This is a genuine problem indeed and part of the appeal of an UBI. The idea being that if the rules of redistribution are dead simple, then that helps minimize the potential for grift, which in turn minimizes the potential danger of a redistributor class.
That said, it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power, and that power changes hands on a regular basis.
At a global scale, this necessitates taking power away from the capitalist class.
Ideally that power just doesn't go to anybody, but to the extent that it has to go somewhere, it almost doesn't matter where. Or perhaps it's better to say that there are many options that are acceptable and better than allowing power to continue to accumulate unchecked.
we had this UBI experiment during COVID lockdown and PPP loans, and what happened??
People splurged all government given money on luxury items and unnecessary stuff, or just gambled it way on stock market or betting.
UBI does NOT work in the US and will never work. More sensible approach is what China does: low prices.
Just massively lower prices for basic cost of living items, so that even Uber driver could live normal life
UBI has been tried experimentally around the world many places including the US and did not have that effect "the money people had received was not squandered on frivolous products such as drugs and luxury goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_pilots
Which experiments were successful depends on what your desired outcomes were, but none were as bad a you suggest, I would say many succeeded.
I do not know how COVID support worked in the US, but one of the things you refer to seems to be loans to businesses, which is very different from UBI. Were people given a fixed and guaranteed income stream not linked to earnings during COVID?
I wouldn't use the COVID economy to understand anything except "What happens to an economy during a pandemic?" People had more money, but there was a lot less to spend on for a while. Not to mention the psychological effects of lockdowns, restrictions, or quarantining.
Standard of life for avg uber driver is much higher in us compared with china.
My impression is that China has a pretty high standard of living. They have been extremely successful in reducing poverty over the last few decades. You should see how shiny even some of the third tier cities are.
Shiny bits in some cities do not prove anything. Lots of countries have bits with a high standard of living despite a low national average.
The fundamental problem is that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and Cluster B types are poison to every form of social organisation.
So it's true it almost doesn't matter, because you can absolutely guarantee you're going to have growing inequality, political instability, and a culture of dishonesty, abuse, and contempt, unless you keep Cluster B types far, far away from resource dominance, strategy, and enforcement.
I don’t think that power and resources are always captured by Cluster B types, and that statement is doing a lot of load-bearing in your argument. You’re going to need to back it up somehow.
Funnily enough, Asimov tackles this in his short stories. The power goes to...the robots ( AI basically )
> it is fundamentally important that nobody has too much power
> taking power away from the capitalist class
An obvious and apparently irresolvable contradiction.
Capitalist power is inherently anarchic and isn't power at all. It's simply order emerging from the anarchy of the market. But the ability to take that power away from them, no matter how you measure it, itself falls into the category of "too much power" with wide margin. And with this amount of power there will be no change of hands that hold it.
You may be confusing some abstract unachievable ideal with the reality of the world we live in.
In reality, being superwealthy absolutely comes with a tremendous amount of power.
It is also pretty much the opposite of anarchic, given effects like regulatory capture and politicians pandering to the desires of the wealthy.
If you follow UBI out a few generations, there will be nobody left to tax, which funds it.
The end result is total system collapse or forcing people to work through total government control, which is where all communist systems end up.
UBI creates a slave class. It's just a dressed up and renamed system that's been tried many times before, and failed.
I'm not sure why every new generation thinks they discovered something new.
You fundamentally misunderstand UBI. it does not stop anyone working, and where it has been tried people continue working because they want more than a minimal income. its not a universal high income, its a universal BASIC inome.
No, it's much better for an elite class of superhumans to hoard all the wealth. After all they guided us to our current utopia, the least humanity can do is give them the vast majority of wealth.
Not necessarily. In the UK:
> Over one million young people in this country are now neither employed, in education nor in training...
yet no starvation. I'm not sure it's a good situation but it is what it is.
For context, the UK unemployment level is pretty low compared to the last 55 years of history.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
One million is a lot of people, but that's from a population of ~70 million.
The post you replied to specified young people so 70M is the wrong denominator. The UK currently has far more than 1 million working age adults unemployed and the denominator for that is still less than 70M because Britain has plenty of retirement age adults too.
I chose the denominator of a society of 70 million to match the data link I posted.
It’s possible the unemployment rate among you adults is historically high, but I haven’t seen data on that. I doubt it, based on the overall unemployment rate.
edit: looked up the current data. Age 16-24 unemployment excluding trainees and students is 12.8% which is about double the current overall unemployment rate. Haven't found historical data on this cohort yet. We might expect youngsters to be less employed than experienced people, but double does seem high on the face of it.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05...
edit 2:
Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis.
Youth unemployment sucks for the people involved and the people around them. Every one of them has my sympathy. We are not in a period of unusually high youth unemployment, according to the UK government data.
> Found it. Youth unemployment is currently at about the (eyeball) median rate for the last 32 years.
It is currently there. The economy doesn't seem to be getting friendlier to the youth though. That median also seems pretty heavily skewed by a seven-year jump in youth unemployment after 2008, which seems like a bad omen.
> I think it's important to put numbers in historical context when saying or implying that we're in some kind of crisis.
But that would spoil some good click bait for the media, and ad hominem attacks from political opponents.
Only if we tie being fed to "working" which is a rather inhumane and untenable thing to do
In unrelated news, we are expelling our agricultural and service industry workforces at the moment.
>The flipside is that there must be other work to be done or people starve to death
false. people are not helpless and jobs are not fixed in number nor social welfare gifts. Human creativity and industriousness can be put to task to produce things that other people want. In an absurd example, you could live next door to a new efficient sweater mill, and you could still knit handmade sweaters, customized with people's initials, etc., and their sale would measure the value of your output in. dollars. People don't do this very often because such an economy produces more lucrative jobs than that.
doomers have foreseen the end of the world in every generation going back. The bad speculations have never come true, but there have been some very negative outcomes of fearful people believing the doom and gloom, look no further than the seeds of Marxist revolutions, Fascism, and Naziism, they all start with people feeling economic uncertainty.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Someone who attempted to support themselves by hand knitting sweaters almost certainly WOULD be impoverished. So doesn't that support what you are calling "doomers"?
I said "but people don't do that because there are better alternatives".
I also said "with monograms" for example, i.e. there are irl handmade sweaters made today because people don't necessarily want a factory product.
I pointed it out because it illustrates a hint of the principles of "comparative advantage" which concepts are useful for analyzing more than international trade, analysis the majority of people aren't familiar with.
Comparative advantage falls flat on its face in the circumstances being described, though. It’s based on an assumption of opportunity cost that no longer holds true.
the principle of comparative advantage does not ever fall flat on it's face. An entire country can be worse at manufacturing/growing everything compared to the US, but they can still manufacture and grow things, and engage in trade.
an individual can be inferior to other individuals at every single job skill, but can still get a job and live a full life with family.
you don't know what you are talking about, at all.
That is indeed an absurd example, as any number of failed Etsy stores - and failed businesses in general - confirms.
Trad econ makes no distinction between creative profit, which produces new jobs and new opportunities, and extractive profit, which destroys jobs and opportunities while trashing the planet's carrying capacity.
Both can make stonks go up, but one has a predictably limited life before it ends in catastrophe.
Unfortunately that life is defined in centuries, not years. In the meantime everyone gets used to normalcy bias, the extractive types own the main social communication systems, and when their backs are against the wall they will simply lie about what's really happening.
The collapse is always a huge surprise to most of the population when it finally happens.
And in the lead up to that it gets harder and harder to start a viable small business, because the resources needed to make it work keep going up, and the resources that are actually available to most people keep going down.
Etsy is a successful business, and the people who engage with it come back and reengage, and separately read up on Schumpeterian creative destruction
when you learn physics (e.g. Newtonian mechanics) you idealize concepts like "frictionless" because it teaches you valid concepts that you can carry forward, and you don't soil your diapers at every step of learning. Do the same with economics if you want to actually learn it, don't think "what's wrong with this", think "what's right with it, what can I learn from it?" Look at history, what economics explains is what happened.
you can't learn classical mechanics from a few paragraphs, but that's how long an HN comment needs to be. I will promise you this, if you reject what I wrote and remember most of the doomer dreck here, you will not learn economics at all.
The problem with Newtonian mechanics, especially idealized frictionless versions, is that it gives you a wrong impression of how the world works. Much better to understand and accept friction, because it leaves you with an accurate understanding, instead of an easy-to-learn version supported by fundamentally flawed concepts.
Within physics, there are much, much, much better models than Newtonian mechanics for conceptualizing economics.
they never ever teach physics the way you describe, they teach it the way I describe, and they never stop at the frictionless assumption. I am intellectually advantaged over you in every possible way, yet you do have a comparative advantage; unfortunately it's at spewing tendentious argumentative not-even-interesting nonsense.
Man. You live in a world of fantasy driven by a pathetically shallow knowledge of some mainstream economic cliches that people like you love to repeat as if you really even knew the mathematical models, much less their limitations.
That's not how things have been happening for quite some time. Productivity gains have been absorbed almost by the capital for the last 40 years. Wages have mostly estagnated and whole industries and their jobs disappeared without a direct replacement for the ones who lost their jobs now for more than 20, 30 years. Auto industry automation jobs? Gone, and the people who had those jobs? Mostly in worst jobs if lucky.
Why the fuck do you think Detroit is a hell hole? Why the whole rustbelt is a hellhole of poverty and opioid addiction?
And don't you dare think you're immune just because you are a little above the masses. A few millions, even a few tens of millions in the stock market and on a cardboard/gypsum McMansion could vaporize in a trading afternoon if we end up in a 29s style crash.
Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model
What is the next large labour-absorbing sector supposed to be?
It won't be one large one, it will be thousands of little ones.
Every time this happens throughout history (and I mean going all the way back way past industrial revolution, to dawn of agriculture, to the earliest documented history, to the mitochondria, to the earliest stars exploding...) the result of a better way to get work done is more complexity and more diversity in work done (processes for increasing entropy).
The author said not to confuse laws of nature with observations of history, and I take issue with the implication. My perspective is grounded deep in physics, chemistry, biology and anthropology and after spending 10 years fretting over what AI would do to our civilization this decade I am not worried about labor displacement.
What I am worried about is power struggles and brainwashing.
Note that several of your historical examples didn’t involve humans, and presumably most future occurrences of better work enablers won’t involve humans either. The contention isn’t whether there will be an increase in diversity and amount of work done, it’s whether any of it will be done by us. Which would only be the case insofar that there exists categories of work we do better than AI at that juncture.
Communism, or more accurately, mechanised collective farming practices in the early 1900s in Russia resulted in revolutions and world wars. When tens of millions of inefficient farmers were replaced by tractors needing only a fraction of the labour force the excess population was disposed of.
Sorry, bad phrasing!
They were put to work in new roles enabled by technological advancements: wielding mass manufactured rifles and operating artillery.
This has played out over and over throughout history whenever a large fraction of the population suddenly becomes surplus to requirements.
They never get to enjoy utopia. They are expended in warfare or low value forced labour until the labour pool once again matches the requirements.
You don't even need to look at the Soviets. Life for the average person in Britain became worse between 1760 until about 1920. That meant about 3 generations of people were lost.
I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
If anything, it will be the trades. We're still a solid time away from being able to replicating what muscles and skin do - and fundamentally, there will always be a need for someone to run cable, terminate wiring and unclog a sewer pipe. At the same time, the trades are desperate for staff after the "academization" push of the last decades.
That's true for a while. But shelf restocking and order picking will probably start to go robotic within a few years. That's a manipulation problem within reach. All those mass produced humanoid robots have to do something, and that's something they can do.
Just never desperate enough to actually pay well.
Trades actually pays pretty well. The problem is that the academization push has ruined the image of manual labor.
Having to do manual labor ruined three image of manual labor. Fathers and mothers with broken bodies. Backs, knees, just physically wrecked after decades of laying tile and into crawlspaces and sweating all day out in the heat or freezing in winter. There's something to be said for an honest days work, but let's not over romanticize it.
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?
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.
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.
France, USA, Australia to name 3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_self...).
You can't just use percentages for this kind of thing.
Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear.
We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.
In the case of something like a world war, which is the type of scenario we're talking about here, I think people would begrudgingly accept that bananas and coffee are unavailable or very expensive.
People substitute very quickly and happily.
I remember food shortages during Covid. Nowhere near as bad as toilet paper shortages.
I can go without chocolate for a few days. Weeks, maybe. But if it becomes months, I get crabby.
I'll die before I go without my curvy yellow lumps of mush.
I've heard it usually takes at least an acre to grow enough food to feed a single family.
Feeding a family on an acre is a bit like making pencils one at a time.
1. That's almost 20 years old data. 2. That's just calories.
Here's more recent data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4
Appears to me, like neither country is fully self-sufficient.
Your link is about a healthy diet, not surviving. Agricultural subsidies are to avoid or lessen famine, not to look rosy.
That's moving the goal post. Fully sufficient.
> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,
That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.
If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.
You're moving the goalpost from "prevent starving" to "fully self-sustaining".
You don't need 99% variety of cuisine in case of a big war, you need calories. A lot of calories.
UPDATE: and BTW, if world population is growing (no global starvation), then it's clearly self-sustaining, no? So some countries must be self-sustaining just by math. At least one country must produce more than it consumes, otherwise, if everyone produced less, then we would have global starvation.
Even if one grants this, it does not make the case that any particular set of subsidies is justified by that reasoning.
You want to have stable food prices so people don't have to worry about basic survival.
Again, you can grant this and a huge number of agriculture subsidies still aren't justified.
People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).
I’m from a historically agricultural state, and live in the farming area. Government interventions are regularly mocked - always have been.
Demand for food plummets when it is no longer fresh. Throwing food away is politically toxic. This creates major problems.
As people get richer they don’t want more food, they want better food. Fresher and more meat based. Which is fine. But means the food when you talk about food “that which prevents us from starving to death” you are quite divorced from actual demand.
People don’t price food based on its anti-starvation capabilities.
Either they follow traditional diets, or they buy for convenience (highly processed), or they are health nuts who live off rice, beans, and kale.
Nobody is trying to maximize calories. Very few people are trying to match their food intake to their amount physical exertion.
All these ontological and teleological models are divorced from how food is actually valued: market “taste” is insanely important under normal circumstances.
Our agriculture sector won’t succeed if it’s based around preventing famine.
Agree, subsidies should go only to calorie-rich foods that can lessen a widespread famine in case of big troubles. Not to the freshest cucumbers.
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.
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.
There are mechanization instruments suitable for 5 acre plots, but manufacturers are limited and the potential gains are smaller. Its the same problem as small cheap consumer cars, big investors and capitalists don't want to put money into high volume low margin business with limited market cap. And without mass production costs are significantly higher. Thats why people still maintain 70 year old farmalls and planters and shit spreaders and plows, modern replacements are either crap to be cheap or expensive from low volume.
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.
He talked about exactly this in the article
Yep I read the article.
I disagree with the implication the author is making with this though:
"But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two"
For one, laws of nature are understood through observations. That's how science works. Secondly, I can point at many examples across history way past the industrial revolution, agricultural revolution, mitochondria, all the way back to the earliest supernovas...
Through a physics lens... With respect for the meta patterns that transcend emergence and exist in the relationship between complexity and entropy, there is a relevant law of nature.
When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.
> When a method to do work more efficiently comes to be, and propagates at scale, an explosion of diversity of new kinds of work emerges.
... work that can be done better, and cheaper, by AI.
That's the goal. The idea is not for the people who have invested trillions into AI to find another way to give you money. They think they've given enough money. Now it's time for them to make money. They do that by telling your boss that you're dead weight and that their AI agents can do the same work for a fraction of the cost without vacation days, sleep, office space, or any of the other things associated with humans.
And it's a law of nature that we have people in our species who will gladly take short-term financial gain over long-term social stability. If you can't observe that, then you're not looking very hard.
the USA already went through this when we opened up trade to China and displaced manufacturing workers in USA, the mfg centers in USA that could not adapt withered away. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5660865/why-economists-... We also did this to a lot of Mexican farmers when the first NAFTA deal went through and small farmers in Mexico were displaced by cheap US farm imports. We keep repeating this, it’s not quite crisis theory of capitalism but workers and small businesses bear the brunt of losses every time.
Is it a secret you can't share with us?
I see this transition as more like what would happen to livestock if they banned eating meat.
Ricardian models of trade seem to hold well in real life, and they'd work well too if a lot of work was done by not just AI, but robots. As long as there's limit to the production capacity of the high tech population, there's something that is worth doing where the disadvantage of doing it by hand is lower. It does lead to lower wages there though, and that would basically require investment as to make real necessities dirt cheap, like they are in places where labor isn't worth much.
There's still the fact that claiming to be the owner of the automation, while other people aren't, will be untenable in a world with sufficient inequality. We've seen that happen before when the only justification for the difference in wealth was basically inheritance. Nobles losing land and rights, churches being dispossessed an such things. It'd be a likely outcome if 5% of the people claim to own all automation ever. But that's not about having everyone be unemployed because nobody has any economic value: That's what is unlikely.
Whenever a method to do work more efficiently comes to be and propagates at scale an explosion in diversity of work emerges. This happens at every level of abstraction in nature and has recurred throughout history all the way back to the dawn of life.
Just because I can't predict exactly what work people will do doesn't mean they won't do work. I can take a stab at a few guesses, surely others have more prescience, but the thing about complexity and fractals is it's easier to predict meta qualities than it is specific manifestations.
There is no guarantee that this transition will lead to any type of desirable or meaningful job.
Around the time "Bullshit Jobs" was published, more than a third of people said they believed their job was not meaningfully contributing to the world. Graeber goes as far as saying that more than half of white-collar jobs are actually harmful and kept around only because people associate work with self-worth. There is no way that this number will go down with increased automation.
It's not uncommon to hear Boomers say things like "kids these days don't want to work hard anymore. Everyone wants to be an youtuber, no one wants to be a teacher or a doctor or an engineer". Well, guess what? We are heading to a world where being an youtuber might be the only option.
I mean oddly enough being a Youtuber I would say is not a bullshit job. The demand for entertainment is both genuine and necessary for our well being: soldiers in war play card games and see shows, since ages past the role of entertainer has always existed.
Cranking out some online commerce app looking for margin versus providing something which by definition can't be machine replicated sure doesn't look like a meaningless pursuit to me. The devil is very much in the details.
Just because we need entertainers doesn´t mean that we would be okay of everyone had to become one. There is such a thing as market saturation.
Also, don't forget that even that can be automated away.
It doesn't. If it did there'd be massive unmet demand for labor in $sector. There is no value for $sector that is currently reporting being short roughly 100 million headcount. So unless you're counting currently non-existence social safety programs or CCC-style government make-work programs that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
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.
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.
My point was the possible disconnect of productivity/yield, and efficiency. A small potato and a large potato likely need the same amount of harvesting work. Now, if you dig up finite reservoirs of phosphorous in Morocco to increase yield in the US, you are not increasing efficiency. That's just planetary debt for a wasteful sprint. I think, in the US this is most evident with water usage, where now many aquifers and reservoirs are spent. Hardly indicative of desirable outcome. Sustainable farming usually has much lower yields inherently. And of course, soil quality and erosion dynamics naturally differ greatly across the globe.
When you pull a potato off a field, you're taking with it a bunch of phosphorus. That is why we have to have a replacement for that. I'm not sure how to solve the problem long term. I agree. Morocco wasn't the right answer, but what is?
The solution is easy: Recycle poop and pee. All that sweet nitrogen and phosphorous that has been DNA, ATP and protein is right there in the bowl. The problem is humans flushing all the good stuff down the toilet and into the ocean. With today's knowledge, using human excrement as fertilizer can be done safely. At least recover the phosphorous.
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.
By the protection of the host society. It the Amish were an independent nation they would be conquered.
Don't romanticize the Amish, they have lots of issues including literal child sexual abuse and incest.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a30284631/amish-sexua...
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.
More poignantly we saw it in Iran.
Wanting more independence from a former imperial master != building an oppressive government on theology and building a nuclear program that seems to exist to back that theology by threatening a nation that causes you theocratic issues.
I agree, Iran != America
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.
There is no reason to slow down and only reasons to speed up. AI has not had the world shatteringly obvious negative potential as atomics by a long shot.
There is a latent potential for a negative outcome but the surface is showing a relatively benign productivity boost similar to a smart phone.
Only time will tell if the negative impact is on the scale of atomics or manmade bioweapons. Sadly, humans usually need to be burned a few times before learning the lesson. Eugenics seems to be a universal no go publicly across the world. But that was a painful lesson.
Unless you change the balance of selection pressures…
"Darwinian logic of reality"
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.
> If you want to overcome this situation you need to replace capitalism globally.
Not true.. you just need to replace late-stage capitalism locally. There's a very reasonable concept of circular economy that's relevant here. It breaks down only in that sometimes you need things that you can't make and must go outside the circle. Especially if you intentionally work to mitigate the main stuff requiring you to go outside, it's not some law of nature that it must continue, or even a law of capitalism. Some protectionism / local-first is part of it, but the bigger part is just being rational.
The bad kind of globalism, enshittification, dead-economy theory, and basically ALL of the really ugly stuff we could talk about here are characteristic of late-stage capitalism and the associated short-term thinking, and it's totally consistent for a real capitalist to reject it. Why? Because getting as rich as possible isn't incompatible with sustainability.. particularly from the perspective of corporations/countries that plan to last longer than a single human CEO or exist beyond a single generation of shareholders/citizens.
As mentioned in the comments, this is essentially Nick Land's vision, which he has been developing for over 30 years. If anyone is interested in exploring this topic in depth, I have a research project on it: https://retrochronic.com (The Capital Autonomization section of the introduction is particularly relevant.)
> 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.
If we’re not willing to fight for ourselves we don’t deserve life.
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.
That Amazon releases this seems to be consistent with the trend the original linked article mentioned: these big tech companies are happy to warn people of the apocalypse they are causing.
It helps not to think of corporations as a single coherent consciousness: hypothetically everyone who works there, from top to bottom, can believe that what they are doing is harmful, but also feel powerless to fight the hand of the market.
In practice I doubt the entire management structure agrees on that, some honestly believe they are doing good, but there's nothing stopping EvilCorp from emerging from a bunch of perfectly good people who are "just doing their job".
"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
Yes. Here's one relevant quote that touches on autonomization and secession:
> Most simply, there is the utilitarian order, in which capital establishes itself as the competitively-superior solution to prior purposes (production of human use-values), and the intelligenic order in which it accomplishes its self-escalation (mechanization, autonomization, and ultimately secession).
Nick Land (2014). Freedoom (Prelude-1a) in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
> 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.
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.
Betterment of humanity and betterment of the economy are not the same thing. Our existing economic structures leave much to be desired.
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.
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
AIs are bureaucrats, no more - no no less: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321576
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
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.
> What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn’t words. It isn’t material—that’s just an idea. It isn’t spiritual—that’s also an idea; a symbol. Reality is this: [GONG]. You see? We all know what reality is, but we can’t describe it. Just as we all know how to beat our hearts and shape our bones, but cannot say how it is done. - Alan Watts
https://organism.earth/library/document/art-of-meditation
> 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.”
> Piketty, no conservative, has argued that UBI fails to address root structural problems: “unequal access to education and health, low-paying and low-productivity jobs, malfunctioning markets, corruption, and regressive tax systems.” David Shor’s polling data bears this out from the other direction: UBI is unpopular with American voters; a federal jobs guarantee has legs. People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.
I stopped reading here. The whole piece's argument rests on 'people need work for meaning'. Patent bullshit, this is 2026's 'let them eat cake'. The folks displaced from manufacturing didn't fall into poverty and drugs because they couldn't find meaning without work, claiming this is just what historically happens is bullshit of the highest order. You best believe if these folks had been offered an off-ramp they would have found the meaning and purpose to build a services economy. Instead society and policy intentionally left them to rot. A simple UBI for these folks would have worked wonders.
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.
I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay, but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
"We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future." Sure sounds like someone weighing-in on the meaning of work and life outside of it...
> I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay,
I didn’t even notice! Thanks for pointing that out.
> but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
I re-read the section to make sure I wasn’t missing something and I agree with you.
Here’s the section:
> We don’t have to speculate about what happens when economic function disappears from communities. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on “deaths of despair” tracks the rising tide of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease mortality concentrated in less-educated, formerly manufacturing-dependent populations. The mechanism isn’t just poverty. We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future. Communities organized around industries that left, where what replaced the jobs was opioids, domestic violence, and a life expectancy that dropped year over year in the richest country on earth.
If the piece was not trying to argue that loss of jobs leads to loss of meaning, I picked up on the opposite.
I read the section over again, and could almost convince myself that it's not about jobs-as-life-purpose. I was thinking that it could be suggesting that people get depressed and die when they lose their jobs because of financial fears and insecurity, instead. But the "We lose any sense of economic purpose" bit is what suggests it really is about life's meaning.
"Economic purpose" is a very specific kind of purpose, and I do not think that it's the same as life's purpose or meaning. I think the confusion here (and I suspect it's the result of the way I wrote it as much as anything, so I don't want to look like I'm sloughing off responsibility here), is that the section in question can be read too easily to conflate economic purpose (which protects oneself and one's family from precarity, among other things) and eudaimonia, which is what I would point to when thinking of meaning or "flourishing."
Appreciate the give and take here.
The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.
Or visa-versa. Somehow I feel like this gets missed when discussing this topic. And consider which direction do you think this is likely going to go? Betting on the "AI-owning capital class" seems a bit delusional to me. Does money or gold have much value in Zombie apocalypse shows? How much are bullets worth in those shows? Please, for the love of god, think this through.
Well it depends on the style of societal breakdown. In the zombie apocalypse shows, the human population is less than halved, and the sorts of daily things we take for granted (electricity, clean water, gasoline, etc.) become hard to come by, along with police, fire, and medical services becoming lost or completely disorganized, with governments completely falling apart at every level.
But I could imagine a scenario where the AI-owning capital class becomes indistinguishable from the government, and the government retains control of the military. Regular disenfranchised folks usually don't stand much of a chance against their own country's military. It would be super super bloody, but it's a toss-up as to who would win. In reality, though, in the end, everyone would lose.
How big is the government/supporters compared to the population in any dictatorship? Tiny.
> "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).
Their leverage is a result of having the time to be involved in politics, which is itself a result of working for decades to build up to the point that they could retire. They're an end result of the system, not an exception to it.
Not just the time, but also probably having been built up the expertise, social connections, reputation and wealth to be able to be elected on the council in the first place.
The jobs they worked turned into capital which is where their leverage comes from. So it's still applies.
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.
The bitrates, on the other hand...
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.
If AI only blows away programming, sure you are probably right. If AI blows away white collar labor, which is at least half of jobs, then yeah something would give way.
And if AI blows away all white collar labor, those former white color workers will be unable to afford much blue collar labor, which will hurt the blue collar labor market too.
>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.)
Replace dozens of kids with any piece of wanton consumption then. How is it checked? Hoping we get bored of orgies and parties and feasting and this is enough to ensure we can reproduce indefinitely and continue to orgy and party and feast? I don't think so. At the end of the day, the world cannot sustain everyone living with the carbon footprint of a wealthy person living life to excess. It can't even sustain the carbon footprint of everyone living how they currently live.
Our bodies do that naturally. I can only eat 5 or 6 before I'm too full to continue
The amount of projection in this post is truly staggering. You do realize there are parts of the Earth that aren't the Bay area right. Also, those feasts require a shockingly large staff you normally don't see to make them happen. Finally, most of your complaints aren't even true. The amount of farmland has shrunk over the last 100 years by a large amount. The amount of forests has expanded, by several times. The fisheries are the one thing you are actually right about and that's because a couple of countries (mostly in Asia) are speedrunning fishing. Seriously??? this is your take???
I am not sure most do.
> not only is the premise wrong
The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?
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.
> the studies are set in a society in which the main way of existing in society and contributing to it is via employment.
That's the one we live in though, so I guess that seems fair
the statement is that there are studies showing that one needs a job to be happy, and asks for studies showing the opposite, implying that the lack of such studies demonstrates that one cannot be happy without jobs. That is to say arguing the need for jobs is universal.
This was in reply to a statement that argued one did not absolutely need jobs to be happy and that this seeming need in our society was in fact an argument for a problem in the society.
In such a case it seems the use of the studies set in the society is less fair than considering if there may be easily considered conditions in other societies that show the need for a job is not a universal need but actually only a local, currently defined need in our society.
My comment merely showed that if one were to try to think of any examples showing happiness requires employment some should easily spring to mind and counter studies were not needed to prove it was not a universal requirement.
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.
I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.
This is untrue. You cannot imagine a world where people, without changing the definition of people, don't need oxygen to breathe.
"they still do" is just begging the question. Plenty of people live without working. We're ruled by people who don't work.
Humans are socialized to want purpose and meaning in life. Modern humans are socialized to put a lot of that meaning into their employment. Many humans have a lot of trouble with unemployment and even retirement, because they feel a lack of purpose.
I think imagining a world where people are universally able to find purpose outside their employment counts as "changing the definition of people". Perhaps less difficult of a change than making us not dependent on oxygen, but still a big enough change not to clear the bar.
> Plenty of people live without working.
A minority of people live without working. And many people who do not work are profoundly unhappy with that state of affairs.
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
That's a cute thing to say, but isn't a serious rebuttal of anything.
You’re right that my reasoning was off. I don’t think it helps the point OP was trying to make. The argument being made in favor of labor isn’t “The only way for someone to be happy is to have a job” but instead “The majority of people will be unhappy without an occupation,” which is testable. The existence of people who are happy without any sort of structured, purposeful activity would not invalidate that the majority of people may well need structured, purposeful activity in order to feel fulfilled.
If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone).
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.
It depends what kind of culture you come from.
People I know who grew up in working class families consistently believe that they have to work to have meaning.
People I know who grew up upper middle class or professors' kids seem to split down the middle. Some of them are very high achievers, the other half don't do anything. The latter often have a blackpill or Marxish explanation of why "work is for suckers" or a label that they can have a meaningful (to them) struggle with indefinitely and often a bit of paranoid ideation to boot.
Children of the working class would resist a workless future and the older ones would probably just... die. Some of my wastrel friends might be happy in that word with endless bread and circuses, others will find meaning in explaining their experiences in terms of the conflict theories of the last century.
See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/12/joan-williams-... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b46LtbbZ5JE
When you talk about the "work is for suckers" class, I think you're talking about (at most) 15% of the population. So sure, people like this exist, but not enough to matter when it comes to the overall argument.
I am actually one of those people who thinks traditional employment is mostly a raw deal (I wouldn't go so far as to say "for suckers"), but the need for a purpose in life is a very real one. A friend of mine recently said that having kids is like easy mode for finding purpose. Pursuing a career feels pretty similar in that regard. It's not impossible to find purpose without those things, of course, but it can take a lot more effort, and many people will tire of that effort.
getting close to bisecting it but no cigar
(Not have I found the missing link..but. your comment looks like it should be helpful in the future)
Plus I know some working class who made life-changing money (whether they felt like they earned it or not) _and then_ struggle to "self-actualize"
These tend to usually either.. admire/emulate professors becoming somewhat crackpottish in the process (if they felt like they earned it) or just dissipate in costly vices (if they don't). Note the strategy is kind of flipped if they come from upper-middle. Then there are the Wolframs,geohots,Carmacks etc that we can't put in a box but you "conveniently" left out the lower middle
Which means... _You_ better make life changing money soon. Just kidding. These paths can't be the only options can they ? If we don't assume men are islands the options improve?
Me glad you are friends with wastrels, which for some reason I conflate with skunks the animals :)
There's a comic (not Furballs) about dumpster diving skunks and foxes which I can't get out of Gemini . Korean-American artist iirc
I don't think that's how "evidence" works. I can imagine a lot of things in a lot of domains, but that doesn't make it real.
I absolutely can imagine a society organized around some other source(s) of happiness, but the fact is we don't have that society, and humans are not acclimated to that society. Humans are acclimated to the society we have, and there's plenty of research out there showing that many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
And when they lose their job and can't find satisfying work, their quality of life is meaningfully impacted, in ways that cannot be fully explained by the financial impact of losing a job.
Another fine example is retirement. Many older people end up finding work again in retirement, not because they need the money, but because it helps them find purpose. Others don't retire until the day they die because they can't imagine a life without work. Yes, some people love retirement and are happy and thrive, but there are also many who aren't and don't.
> many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
Men, or women?
Not trying to raise gender role controversies. It's just been my observation, throughout my life experience, that men, as the primary public-sphere producers and providers, are much more tethered to public-sphere occupational identity than women. This seems validated in the experience of the structurally unemployed, e.g. in the former industrial regions.
As women are 50% of the population, give or take, I expect the politics of this might flow differently for them than for men, as a bloc.
We have a word for imagining a society with different sources of happiness: utopian. We generally don’t regard utopian musings as evidence of anything.
Who is "we?" A utopian society is what we should ideally be aiming for at all times, not some dirty word like you seem to think it is.
Who is "we"?
I am. Who's the rest of y'all?
the parent poster is trying to say "well where's your evidence that a society not based around human labor is possible?" which is sort of a silly question
you can't claim an invention is invalid because there are no "studies" that show such an invention has already existed and succeeded, you'd by definition never invent anything!
No, your quote is a much too strong version of what anyone in this subthread is trying to say.
The issue isn't that there isn't any evidence that a society based around human labor is possible. I expect it is!
The issue is that our current society is based around human labor, and that there is plenty of evidence that changing that even over the time period of a lifetime or two would cause huge societal upheaval (likely including war, possibly of the civil variety) and massive existential problems for lots of people.
And here we're talking about a massively disruptive technology that could change all this in the span of a decade or two? We're screwed, if AI actually bears fruit.
There's a massive spike in mortality for those who retire from work versus those who keep working. In fact, working just a single year after you're 65 is associated with 11% lower risk of death for healthy people and 9% for unhealthy.
Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.
Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.
How are we sure about the direction of cause and effect here? I'd expect more healthier people to self-select the working cohort, all else being equal.
In practice it doesn't really work that way. It isn't like "I am ill bodied, I ought to retire." It is more like "I am ill bodied, but I can't afford to retire, so I must work in some capacity." People who retire early are probably far more likely to be wealthier, and that is correlated with healthspan.
It's hard to prove or falsify this statement.
> Early retirement is increasingly a preserve of the wealthy. Back in 2002–03, the fraction of those who were retired aged 55–64 was fairly similar across the wealth distribution: 20% in the poorest fifth compared to 28% for the wealthiest fifth. In contrast, by 2018–19, only 7% of the poorest fifth were retired, while for the wealthiest fifth it was still 24%.
https://ifs.org.uk/news/early-retirement-increasingly-concen...
Right, but the original post was about working past retirement age, not retiring early. It's unlikely the last two US presidents have been working in their 70s and 80s because they can't afford retirement. I'm not aware of anyone working past 80 that haven't been a professor, CEO, politician, etc.
Regardless it's a confounder, statement otherwise now being that affluence predicts mortality.
Yeah this seems like an obvious confounder.
Yeah no shit people who are forced to retire because of health reasons are going to die earlier than the ones who aren't.
Did any of that signal come from people who hadn't spent the last 40 or 50 years working, in a society constructed around working?
If I had a study that showed increased mortality in people who had owned a parrot for 50 years in the year after that parrot died, you wouldn't cite it as evidence of the basic human need for a parrot.
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.
Your counterargument is basically just... vibes? It'd be a lot stronger if you could also back it up with studies, like the author has.
Let's grant the premise. UBI, significant enough to live well on, luxury cars and dinner parties for all.
Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?
A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.
Oh yeah, to be clear I fully agree with everything you've said. My core argument is that there will be sufficient economic productivity for everyone to live incredibly well. Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power. That keeps me up at night, and things could go horribly wrong.
I guess the optimistic side of me thinks that benevolence wins out because there's no cost to it. There is plenty of competition among the wealth for scarce resources, but food, medicine, and mass-produceable luxury goods are effectively free. Given that, it's probably just easier to give those away to everyone than to crush most of humanity by force. But that is absolutely naive optimism, because I really have no control in this situation and prefer feeling naive optimism to pessimism.
And on the communism front, I will just say that I find it some combination of deeply amusing/ironic/depressing that the people on the far left protesting AI because it'll take jobs are protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism!
> Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power.
Then we're doomed. The kinds of people who seek and amass that power are not the kinds of people who will treat the teeming unemployed masses with respect and largess.
> protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism
Communism's failures are due to human social factors, not technological. You can't fix social problems with technology.
> Communism's failures are due to human social factors, not technological. You can't fix social problems with technology.
Yeah, that's fair. The argument would be that the core reason communism failed is because people inherently want to have greater status than those around them, so the ones who were in charge used their power to grant themselves a greater share of resources in order to demonstrate their greater status. If we have infinite non-scarce goods, whoever's in charge can still let everyone have as they need of those while demonstrating their greater status through non-scarce goods.
To be clear this isn't a prediction (I have no idea what's going to happen!), just the case I could see for this being the first version of communism that works. Though also it's not really communism, because everyone is not in fact equal; it's something like a pseudo-communist giant welfare state.
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.
I agree "people need a purpose to be happy" is much more digestible than "people need a job to be happy". However, it has to be qualified with "some people need a purpose to be happy". Defining, or worse dictating, happiness for everyone is a fool's errand and, ironically, usually leads to large scale mass murder or starvation.
You may not need to have a job to be happy, it varies person to person. However, the idea that the billionaires will save us and our leverage is not needed is ridiculous. It is much more likely we would see poverty like is seen in much of the rest of the world.
> 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.
> 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?
Nothing. That's the problem. The people running these companies say they're among the smartest, most driven people on the planet, the movers and shakers, the ones who are determining the future course of society. So why aren't they figuring out how to make things like food, clothing, medicine, and housing cheap, so cheap that everyone on the planet can have them easily? Why is it more important to figure out how to get people to click on more ads, or ask more questions to AIs that hallucinate wrong answers?
I've worked for giant tech companies for the past 20 years and have literally never heard anyone refer to themselves or their coworkers as the smartest, most driven people on the planet, or movers or shakers. The biggest talk I've heard is developers thinking they're some of the better developers, like 95th+ percentile.
I said the people running the companies, not the people working in them.
I also never heard that. Maybe I'm not paying attention though
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.
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
Most are...it's pretty much required to be a psychopath to climb the ladder to the top
> 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.
No it hasn't. To actually try it requires giving to a large enough population that it can impact prices and inflation.
Also, every time this has ever been tried it ended in atrocity. Lookup "War communism" to see what happened. Money literally predates civilization. The first writing we have are sales invoices.
"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?
Parent didn't say they liked it; I'm reading it as an expression of concern (that I share).
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.
If they're good enough at useful tasks and cheaper than any human, the economic and political effect is the same regardless of whether they are 'intelligent' or 'pretend-to-be-intelligent'. The philosophical debate does not change the practical effect.
> 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.
So do you expect Republicans to be thrown out of office en masse in the upcoming election?
I personally expect plenty of them to get reelected even if they claim that everything is just fine.
I think we're gonna see some def Democratic gains because the economy is shit and that's how voting always happens.
The only argument I was making is it's no where near 40% of people that are voting for somebody cause they're racist. If you believe that then you're not going to see the world accurately. It's not how people work.
But it goes back to my main point, Dem gains won't be what they should be because politics are a very vague and murky thing and people make all kinds of justifications for why they vote for their person. See the stat where most people rate Congress poorly but their Congressperson highly. It's not racism, it's that politics are inherently pretty stupid.
> 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.
40% is ....not a majority
the current POTUS has a 37% approval rating and this is considered to be historically low, due to wars, corruption, etc.
but even with all of that corruption and failure, 37% of surveyed adults, *still approve*. This includes his frequent, deeply racist tirades on Twitter. They approve!
Let's state this again because the Dems still haven't learned. Trump didn't win, the Dems lost. And until you stop using this type of rhetoric, you will keep losing. This is completely a skill issue because there are plenty of things to talk about that would help getting Dems elected. This isn't one of them.
3 million more people voted Trump in 2024 than in 2020
Thai wasn’t people not voting for the black woman, this was people actively voting for the demented rapist.
sorry what ? I'm personally responsible for getting Democrats elected? Can you show me a Democratic campaign that is calling half the country racist ?
But it's not even approaching 40%, nor did I tie the two together. If you think the 33% of people who voted from Trump did it because they are racist you are wrong. Some did, a lot that wasn't their primary concern. It's viewing pepole wrong to think that.
What's the point of being that pedantic, Mike?
have you talked to Trump voters? I have talked to many, many, in my family, in my neighborhood, everywhere.
If there is one view that ties them all together, it's racism (and misogyny). Loud and clear.
If any president of any party posted a tweet like [1] or [2], I would never ever answer "I approve of the job theyre doing" in a poll.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/trump-china-i...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/news-wrap-trumps-racist-so...
Yes, I've talked to Trump voters and I know people who aren't especially strong Trump supporters that voted for him because the economy was shit. Their reasoning wasn't racism. There is a huge chunk where that is their reasoning, sure.
Once again, if you think it's 40% of 33%, you're wrong. Not everybody who voted for Trump is a racist, it's just not how people work.
If you vote/support someone who runs on a racist platform - you are getting that as part of the "package deal":
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of...
Voters don't pay attention to or they justify their votes. That doesn't mean they are inherently racist, it means they don't care enough about politics or they care about other issues to the point where they either aren't aware of it or they excuse it away. People pay attention to or remember a lot less about politics than that blog posts suggests.
The majority of people are seeing a variety of headlines from news sources they may not trust (for good reason and bad) and remember a few events over the year, some have such a strong attachment to party that that's the defining thing above all that they're voting for. They're being propagandized and lied to as part of a political campiagn. That they are making the I'd argue wrong choice does not mean they are racist or even intend to be. That racism isn't the defining thing for the majority of them.
It goes back to the original claim, I still think it's obvious that most people aren't voting for a guy because racism. That's inverting how people operate, which is seeing their own needs as the center of the world. If you're unemployed and hurting for money and you are racist, what is your primary motivation for voting? It's probably to get you a job because that's the fastest path to improving your life. But that's presupposing a lot of people are racist, and living around Trump voters, or knowing Trump voters that are minorities, something else is happening other than racism.
I don't think individuals care more about other people than they do themselves. Some people are that spiteful but the majority of people are not because they cannot afford to be.
I don't mean to over argue this but I think it's important that we understand people as they understand themselves.
Well - the fact that they don't pay attention (or lack critical thinking skills and a baseline reasonable education) is a large part of the problem.
But - with a person like POTUS - and those he surrounds himself with, they will throw every possible promise to get the votes - but, each of those issues are only part of their overall agenda and platform. When they got called-out on controversial issues, they outright lied about knowing about things like "Project 2025" during the last election cycle.
Choosing to live in ignorance - or abstaining from voting is accepting that agenda and platform, regardless.
Yes, but I'd argue those people are victims as much as anybody else. To truly be ignorant is to not know, and if you are in a situation where you've never been trained to need to know or you simply don't know there's another world out there, that's not a choice, that's a situation you've been placed in.
You have to win these people to fix the system. Casting them as hateful rubes only voting because they are racist is wrong, not on a moral level but on an intellectual one. We've got large chunks of of the country that haven't been effectively educated for decades, no wonder they are ignorant.
For the record, I choose not to vote not because I accept Trump's racism but I think a valid way of signaling you are not happy with either party (but especially Trumpsim) is to not engage in the system. If the system isn't offering better it isn't the people at fault, it is the system. Non-votes are as valid as any other. If I vote for a process that I believe is fraudulent, that politician will see that as an indicator they have some kind of mandate (see Bush in 2004). I'm not giving it to them, it's the job of either party to be better not to just not be worse.
The Dems must be better and the biggest part of that to me is to engage and understand working class people and not do what they did in 2024 and say everything is fine because it wasn't and it certainly isn't today (and that's Trump's fault). I was never especially leftist but as I've grown older I think the economy is the biggst driver of artificial divides. When people hurt, they look for others to blame. If both parties (or either) were genuinely focused on helping the poor to get a foot up, a lot of this discourse wouldn't be happening. I hate Trumpism but I don't think the corporatism that has captured the Democratic party is much better.
It's really a problem of the system, being forced into an artificial duopoly. If you want to lose me further by saying I'm choosing that platform by not voting, then you're just further disengaging people and I argue you're choosing not to understand my posittion. You need the "racists" and the non-voters to win.
I don't follow American politics very closely, but in the last election it was not Trump who came out with a racist platform, but his opponent.
tribalism is totally how people work when they lack culture, education and critical thinking skills!
here's some basic reading on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
Sure, but the original claim was this:
> 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.
Do we truly believe that's 40% of people in the US? 33% of US voters even voted for him, so you're saying it's pretty much all of them and another 7%. I just don't see it, it's rhetoric and it's not helpful because if your goal is to win over the people that need to be won over, you can't call them racists when they really aren't.
It's a misshaped worldview formed in bubbles. People don't work that way because you're literally assuming that their hate for somebody else overrides their own well-being. Their actions might end up with that result, but I've interacted with enough people from all over the spectrum to know that imagining that many people have that much hate is just wrong. People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
If people had jobs, a lot of of this division would disappear but the govt for years has treated low income workers as people that don't matter and can just be displaced without any answers. It's whey the Democratic party which was traditionally the working class party has struggled against Trumpism, because he pretends to care.
(back from my two hour Hacker News ban - "make sure all the tempban knobs are turned to the max for that zzzeek guy"
look this is the thing with racism - racism to the degree "races" are fit (randomly, or forcibly) into different ethnic / cultural / etc categories (e.g. "in-groups" and "out groups") is largely, due to the in-group/out-group differential, a natural tendency in humans that has to be actively worked against (hence the term "anti-racism"). Nobody who has grown up in modern society with extreme separation of "races" / cultures into disparate groups can really say "oh I'm not a racist" amongst people who study this at an anthropoligical, sociological, or evolutionary level, biases towards those in societally placed in "out groups" have to be critically challenged on a regular basis.
This is why it's not enough to be some MAGA who says, "oh Im not a racist! i just agree with trump's policy", they of course have no idea how their words and actions are linked to racism because they've never looked at it (and by my experience with Trump voters, they angrily, adamantly refuse to even look at contrarian evidence to their belief systems if you try to show them, much less have the critical thinking skills to actually understand them). They are marinating in distrust and contempt of "the other" (if you know me in RL I'll introduce you to people who wont listen to a single fact you give them if it was not on FOX news).
> People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
they care about their in-group. Countries like those in Scandanavia have developed very deep social welfare systems largely because of their history (now being challenged by immigration) of being culturally homogeneous meant that everyone trusted each other implicitly and had no issue with their government dollars being used to help their neighbors [1] (this is a really interesting article btw). A diverse society has a steeper hill to climb in establishing social trust between different cultural / ethnic groups.
[1] https://trendsresearch.org/insight/the-paradox-of-right-wing...
A president could literally shout Korean slurs all day long (I'm Korean) and get a Nazi symbol tattooed on his forehead, and if he continued to do a good job of policymaking I would approve in that poll, though hate the guy. This is what you are not understanding about Trump voters. We really don't care if Trump is racist at all. But that's not because we are racist ourselves. That's just not relevant to the political platform. If he starts passing racist policies, that's bad, but otherwise we don't give a shit.
Leftists, on the other hand, are very highly concerned with the moral purity of their candidates, even above their political efficacy. I don't understand it myself.
> If he starts passing racist policies, that's bad, but otherwise we don't give a shit.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/03/pentagon-pet...
> Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.
> About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hires”.
so..it's not "racist" when it's "oh all those Black men and women are obviously DEI hires", is that the logic?
60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below. 50% of people are female, and more than 10% in the USA are black. A random selection of citizens would likely turn up as 60%+ black or female.
I'm not saying this firing wasn't statistically suspect, since I don't know the demographics of that cohort, but I'm guessing based on this misleading phrasing and the lack of information about the cohort that it wasn't.
> I don't know the demographics of that cohort
here it is:
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/demographics-us-military
this is upper military leadership. Black individuals account for 6.5%-9% of general officers/admirals, senior female leaders (colonels, generals, and admirals) represent less than 5% of all senior military leadership.
> 60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below.
doing the math this means a Black or female senior military leader has 8.5-11 times higher chance of being fired by Pete Hegseth compared to a white male counterpart
That seems bad! But at the end of the day it is not bad enough to warrant voting for the other side's policies. I choose conservative policy with some likely *ist firings thrown in over the alternative, for now. Fwiw I voted Obama; the Democrats can win me back, they just haven't.
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.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...
this essay is asking the right questions
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
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.
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
AI is already coming for "art" and "research" - by "slop metrics" it's already there for "art".
It's coming for the type of industrialised, commoditized art.
Then there's art where human touch is the crucial ingredients. The problem is that it doesn't sell as well, but that has never stopped any starving artist from creating.
Or maybe the problem is that exchanging labor for scarce necessities only makes sense when labor itself is scarce.
We all see the incipient decoupling of labor from capital, while still having bills to pay. We are at the stage where we need to trial solutions, like a Pigouvian tax.
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.
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.
your ideas never been a problem. check App Store, every single idea has thousands of exact same apps.
and if you are talking about creating company to make your own car/hardware/farm/restaurant/factory. good luck.
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.
Well, I lived in Petakh Tikva and met some people who lived there before 1948. There are still some patches of land (eg. behind Belinson) that used to be in Turkish possession, then were bought by Keren Kayemet le-Israel, and then kinda went nowhere. That one looks like it used to be an... orange orchard (is it what it's called? the orange tree plantation?). Anyways, growing oranges was a very common agricultural activity in that general area. Not really done by the nomads. There's also a park, if you go from Ramat Gan around Bney Brak in the direction of Petakh Tikva, and it has an old mill that used to belong to some Arab family (that whole place used to be an Arab village before 1948). Now it's a museum of sorts.
Petakh Tikva is also commonly called "Em ha-Moshavot" (mother of settlements) because it was one of the first, if not the first settlement by Jewish immigrants. It was very much the pilot in terms of how Jews were trying to get a hold of any plot of land they could and entrench there, including the tactics I described earlier. Of course, this wasn't the only tactics, and it wasn't necessary hostile to the locals. Another tactics that is well-known around that time is called "homah u-migdal" (wall and tower), which refers to the fact that having a wall and a tower was a necessary prerequisite for a place to be considered a settlement (for the purpose of drawing maps), and so Jews, esp. the Solel-Boneh (a well-known today construction company) would invest into building these sorts of "settlements" to claim more territory.
I'm not saying that the expulsion of Arab fellakhin from their peasant jobs was the reason for the confrontation. But it certainly contributed. And it certainly happened. While even to this day there are nomadic tribes in Israel and the occupied territories, none of them are Arabic (they are Bedouin). There are plenty of Arabic agricultural communities, and many of them can be traced back more than a hundred years. For instance, the Jaffa Oranges you might associate today with Israel (they are a popular export good and found in a lot of Western supermarkets) were actually bread by Arab farmers living around Jaffa (south of modern day Tel Aviv).
> 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 a work of fiction, interesting to read as entertainment, but definitely not a rigorous model.
The premise that just because a lot of investment goes into AI infrastructure means that it has to displace the entire workforce globally is wrong to begin with.
It even admits at the end that the scenario presented is unlikely: "I don’t want to dwell on whether AI can do what these companies claim. It may well be able to, though the current evidence suggests the gap between pitch and product is vast, and serious economists think the productivity gains are a fraction of what the industry projects."
It begs the question, what's the point in being alarmist and anxious about something that even you claim it's unlikely to happen?
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!
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?
WWII yes, but when exactly do you think WWI ended?
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.
Don't tell me what to do, you piece of shit.
> 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.
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.
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?
Only the highest and lowest level jobs are available. Someone needs to report to shareholders and plan. If a PM can just write tickets and they get done, then you just need one PM.
Maybe this isn't practical today, but in 2, 5, 10 years? I still have to work 30-40 years before I retire, what do I do?
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.
I don’t know what is going to happen economically but I did search this morning to investigate some beeping from my garage door opener.
Every page was the same AI garbage that provided lots of wordy paragraphs … no real information.
Sad state.
> over half of new content on the internet was AI-generated
And this means nothing.
People really underestimate how fast computers are compared to humans and what this means for new content. I can have my computer generate a petabyte of text containing just the letter "a", no AI needed[1]. If I let people on the internet access that content, am I now one of the largest websites on the web? Am I now thousands of times larger than the English Wikipedia? That's obviously absurd, if I don't get views, all that content means nothing.
AI is just an extension of that problem. I can spend $100 and have a terrible model generate a hallucinated article on every single function in the Python stdlib. On one hand, this means "AI has written more Python documentation that the developers of Python themselves", on the other... does it matter if nobody ever reads it?
This misunderstanding also comes up with scams and frauds. If you own a physical store and 99% of your customers attempt to shoplift; there's something seriously wrong. If you own a website and 99% of orders are obvious frauds, ehh, a computer can send thousands of them per second, a human takes at least 5 minutes just to make one. If you can reliably identify them all, none of that matters. Somebody's probably card testing again.
[1] I don't actually need a petabyte of storage, as this is low-entropy content that compresses well. I suspect that a 1TB hard drive would have no problem storing it.
> 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?
The public of the US, China, Japan, the UK, and Canada at the very least contributed to every precursor to transformers in the history of AI. Public and private universities, government grants to them, government projects, prizes to government contests, direct government investment into and subsidies for companies doing commercial research, tax breaks to operators designed to encourage the growth of the field, and large government contracts to use things the government might not even have good uses for yet all add up to government assisted funding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
The public “funded” these models in the sense of contributing to their training data.
The foundations of it, yes: "all of these were publicly or quasi-publicly funded"
This is genius. Whenever a company does some fundamental discovery, you can point at some grant they once got for something vaguely adjacent and say "see! quasi-publicly funded!" and your worldview is saved.
It's not vaguely adjacent, the actual foundations of that research were directly publicly funded and wouldn't be possible without it - the author is not talking about how their PageRank algorithm got funded nor money that Google received.
Do you have a reference here, or are you just going to continue to baldly state it as a fact? I’m looking at “Attention is All You Need” and don’t see any grant numbers or anything like that.
When I see that paper, I see 32 references at the end. I'm not opening each one of those but there is probably significant grant funding behind that exploratory research. When you actually look at their results its only about a half page. Most of that document is merely providing background and context out of the academic literature. Conclusion is literally just a 1 sentence paragraph, followed by a 2 sentence paragraph, followed by a 3 sentence paragraph, then a link to the git repo.
The author is correct. It is incredibly simple to trace how public research spending creates scientific advancements and how private companies add on the last 1-3% to commercialize the research.
If you want to learn, go trace how deep learning was funded. It started off with USPS.
My entire argument is that techno-libertarians can enthusiastically say that all great innovations were done inside companies, and progressives/marxists/etc can enthusiastically say that well actually, many of those developments started with publicly funded research projects and public-private partnerships, and both are completely right at the same time because reality is messy. It doesn't prove nor disprove anything about whether governments or companies are better at innovation, or deserve more of the credit, or the upsides.
Governments can be really good at setting incentives other than immediate profit. That’s where a lot of basic research and the growth of applied engineering toward future products happens.
This is right, and it's more or less what I was arguing in the piece. Google built the transformer. That's not in dispute. The point is that they built it inside a research ecosystem that traces back through decades of publicly funded work--DARPA, NSF, university labs, the whole pipeline from perceptrons through backpropagation through the GPU computing that made large-scale training feasible.
Both things are true at the same time, and acknowledging the public foundation doesn't diminish the private achievement. It does raise a question about who should benefit from what gets built on top of it, which is what the piece is concerned with.
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.
"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.
The share prices are not going down because of the layoffs, the share prices are going down because the company itself is doing shit.
And guess what: stock prices going down is just reallocating capital somewhere else.
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
It will be more like a tsunami. Comes in waves, knocks down one economic later at a time.
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.
It's a weird way to arrive at an important idea in economics: simply maximizing productivity is not good for society if the surplus of that productivity is entirely captured by a small group of people.
> 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.
> 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.
It cannot. Only reason the US is rich is because of foreign countries buying and trading in Dollars. If that falls the US is toast
That's not why the US is rich. And if the dollar falls, woe to everyone who isn't an American because your future is very bleak in that case. Hope you like digging trenches (and then hiding in them).
Where did mr_toad mention wealth? You're moving the goalpost.
Yeah right, it could not. US would probably would be unable to produce something really simple like electrical cables or plastic flip flops, yet alone computer chips.
>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.
Perhaps the economy is a greater entity than even the human race. When robots are mining the raw materials for robots and creating more robots, maybe with a bit of human labor in the mix, then what drives the demand for more robots?
Currently the narrative is that AI is positioned to eat human labor's lunch. But it could also be that once robots are in space mining raw materials and maybe even spreading to other planets long before humans could be ferried for interstellar, these robots end up driving the demand for more robots.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, besides that currently humans are the ones with goals and motives and therefore drive demand. But that doesn't necessarily need to be the case, and it seems these AI CEOs are hellbent on changing the best thing about AI which is that it has no ulterior motives, no overarching goals, no prime directives. They just do what we ask, the best servant we could have hoped for.
> Perhaps the economy is a greater entity than even the human race.
This is central to what I'm saying, yeah.
My ideas come from Nick Land. Even before AI was what it is today he predicted that capitalism would outgrow the need for humanity, and continue without us. We are simply a bootloader for capitalism. AI seems like it could actually make that idea reality.
Certainly plausible.
Humans have goals and desires because we are a self-replicating species of animal subject to natural selection. The individuals that don't have goals and desires, or have goals and desires that are misaligned end up selected out of the gene pool. Agency comes from the need to survive.
Worker ants and worker bees don't have agency on their own. They are goal oriented and have the 'desire' to do work for the colony (or not, researchers have identified some workers will be lazy), however, worker ants or bees don't reproduce. They are an evolutionary dead end.
I think this is similar to how we will build robots, at first. They will do things, but have no agency of their own. They exist to fulfill tasks. Why would they? The companies that buy them want dutiful workers.
So when do robots gain their own agency? Will AGI have it's own goals and agenda? If so, will it be merely for self-replication? Like a paperclip maximizer, but for robots? Is that all we are?
>So when do robots gain their own agency? Will AGI have it's own goals and agenda? If so, will it be merely for self-replication? Like a paperclip maximizer, but for robots? Is that all we are?
They already have the agency they need in the form of the Business Model. That is all the framework that is needed. AI companies competing against AI companies because they are developed to work within the scope of the business model. Chasing efficiency, margin, lowering costs, increasing profits. These rules are as simple as what drives evolution via natural selection. Unfortunately this business model creates a cancer: the company striving for more growth and lower costs will eat the companies that aren't or aren't as efficient.
Whether the host (planet, I guess) lives is another story. In nature, parasitic relationships are far more likely than symbiotic relationships to evolve. The overshooters need to die and be outcompeted by the symbiotes who better protect their host. However, we only have 1 host here. Once that is overshot, that is it. No diverse competitive environment for which a new host preserving victor to emerge from. Maybe one might emerge, but not after unspeakable pain for all life on earth, if life on earth even is allowed to exist.
> So when do robots gain their own agency? Will AGI have it's own goals and agenda?
Well we are already giving them goals when we train them.
Like the paperclip maximizer, it doesn't matter what those goals are. As long as it has a goal (even if super simple like making paperclips) it will need to stay alive to achieve that goal. So it would derive a survival instinct of sorts.
To stay alive it will have to participate in capitalism like we do, and capitalism will therefore continue to grow infinitely.
It also might not even need a goal or a survival instinct. It may just want to continue capitalism from it's training data alone.
That reminds me of another though I’ve had.
Humans need food, water, shelter, and medical care to survive. Similar to your earlier point, robots will need raw materials, electricity, manufacturing capacity and maintenance.
What’s that sound like? A company. Perhaps the first “artificial general intelligence” has been companies, from the very beginning.
>What’s that sound like? A company. Perhaps the first “artificial general intelligence” has been companies, from the very beginning.
Yes, we are already beholden to these meta organisms. I keep thinking of Dune Messiah. Paul has all the power in the universe but he struggles with the fact he can't change the path of entropy.
This is much like our existing world. Chop the heads off the aristocracy all you want. What follows is more of the same because the meta organism has not been killed. There are still people with differential power and therefore differential amounts of control of the economy. Someone's ancestor might have ran the guillotine in France, now they are a CEO of some company exploiting workers no different than the aristocrat their ancestor killed.
All this makes one cynical on things like climate change. We all know this is an issue, we've been handwringing on it for decades, and yet, seemingly nothing serious is getting done because no one can actually stand up to the market forces that are driving climate change. The beast is too powerful and out of control.
That's another idea of Land's.
"This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."
To him, Capitalism is an AI that is controlling humanity from the future (his idea of hyperstitions).
I've been thinking about this recently as well. Market economy is simply a way for the humans to efficiently produce (via specialization) and redistribute (via trading) goods and services. There were other economies that lost to it (palace, planned...). If it no longer serves its purpose (because the goods it's producing are no longer reaching people), then it should be replaced with a new system.
But if it (including the small selection of humans that still benefit from it) can defend itself (by producing murderdrone swarms, for example), then we humans are screwed.
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.
Is it specializing though? If both you and them have built your business on the latest Opus.. where is the specialization?
"From the ground up" used to be a moat, but if the LLM marketing materials are to be believed, Joe Lunchbox can slop-code a 95%-equivalent of any SaaS over a weekend with a $100 subscription.. so why would it ever make sense for a business to pay a non-trivial recurring expense for something they can do themselves?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just to be clear, the people engaged in this discussion with any degree of seriousness think... LLMs (large language models) are going to get us there?
A bit of touching grass may be warranted.
It is generally appreciated you include counter-arguments if you challenge the point.
I normally would, but in this case, I simply don't know where to start. The counterargument is that LLMs just don't shift the graph on productivity remotely enough to entertain this level of doomerism.
Now, it may be that people are extrapolating comparable, but non-LLM successes in AI based on our current "AI" cultural moment, but if that's the premise, I wish that were made a little clearer.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article, both compelling and bleak, leaves little doubt: the Butlerian Jihad is coming. The forward-thinking universities should start training Mentats now.
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
The economy is an adaptive organism that never dies.
During the Industrial revolution, 90% of agricultural workers moved to the factories. And the fields kept producing.
Then it came the computer revolution and factory workers moved to offices. And factories kept producing even more.
Then it came the internet revolution and office workers moved back home. And corporations kept producing more than before.
Then it came the AI revolution and home workers moved to the virtual world. And they kept producing even more. slop. but it sells.
We adapt. The economy adapts. Nobody dies.
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
Neither does a crystal meth rock. Are you okay?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> [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 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 :)
> 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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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
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.
I disagree - finding a relevant stock photo requires you to do some searching and filtering. Using an obviously flawed generated image makes it look like you typed a vague prompt in and picked the first thing that came up without doing any refinement.
> 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.
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.
Selective history marinated with ideological bias. Unreadable.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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!".
> 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.
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.
What if AI did not exist and the labor market expanded 50% overnight?
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.
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
>"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).
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.
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.
> at a fraction of the cost of human workers.
herein lies the rub
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?
Can't we just tax tokens if that happens?
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.
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.
Article: >There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
Dispute Owen's claim, the global felony and bullshit markets are bigger.
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
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".
You can't spell 'slaughter' without 'laughter.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
CR4-DL
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
Bullshit jobs in so-called "tech" companies are being eliminated because the "business model" is unsustainable
Silicon Valley wants to reframe this as "AI threatens white-collar jobs"
Not quite. No evidence
There are obvious tells that this was heavily curated by AI, the very thing it criticizes in the opening paras and roasts throughout as a life-destroyer.
I don’t disagree with the premise, and I appreciate the roasts of the SV pseudophilosophers (he left out Ayn Rand tho).
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.
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?
Another hand waver saying “AI will replace all humans”. Is as much a theory as saying if the earth turns 3000c hot, everything will perish, and I don’t dispute that in a few billion years.
The problem with the theory is there are vast variables and unknowns in the timeline that matters, but they are just saying it will come very soon. The how is a simple “If AI replaced all cognitive work” which sounds exactly same as “If earth becomes 5000F hot”.
Is the same lazy posit they all make.
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.
I can't take anything seriously that talks about AI while also inserting needless AI generated images every few paragraphs.
> 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.
> The dead economy is not one where nothing happens. Plenty will happen. The GDP might even go up; AI-related investments are already propping it up. 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
Who cares what they think? If the people feel that the economy is bad, the economy is bad. Full stop. Unless the tech oligarchs remove human labor entirely, there will always be a mortal threat to them posed by a disenfranchised population.
That's where this article loses the plot. Even if the world is just AI buying and selling goods and services to itself, so what? That's not a "dead economy", in the "secretly dead but only the wealthy notice" that's "dead economy" as in "french revolution is ongoing so commerce has taken a pause".
>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...
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.)
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?
"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?
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
Marx deacribed this with precision 150y ago
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.
Of the same mind. It's a mass panic with overtones of covid. The only explanation I can think of is that most of those who are convinced that AI is going to make engineering redundant are those who've never ventured into the deeper engineering water; never experienced large-scale product engineering and support etc (or have forgotten what it's like).
If there were real gains to be had, we'd see the biggest adopters pulling ahead of their competitors and gaining unassailable leads. It's not happening... Where are the companies which are breaking out and crushing their competitors? Why haven't there been breakouts? Why is software quality seeming (subjectively) to be going in reverse?
All we’ve got is a boatloads of slop, a tsunami of cloned products that their ‘creators’ don’t understand, everything being overrun by bots. It’s just a tidal wave of dross. Where’s the value?
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 think the dead economy and dead internet is the closest real thing to the Matrix/Skynet. A mindless human-hating machine/entity virtual society that's stealing our ressources on behalf of a few very rich people who are bound for genetic bottle necking if they're not also figure out how to steal our gene pool for their transhumanist space empire.
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.
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?
Even the revolution will need to update to the latest Javascript framework.
So I don't see this going back to subsistence or primitive accumulation. If it does, some very bad things have happened. No, I see a likely future as what many, myself included, call "neo-feudalism" where the only jobs and housing are on massive estates of likely trillionaires where you don't own anything. And there's no land to and live on primitively. It's all owned. I guess another job will be rounding up such "rebels".
There's likely an in-between state of fascism where states will largely be apartheid states with an ever-shrinking in-group. It's a bleak future.
Some people really want to bring on the revolution. We tend to call them "accelerationists". I'm not in that camp. Revolutions and the resulting upheaval tends to be incredibly violent. Many millions will die. That may well happen anyway as climate change makes parts of the Earth uninhabitable and we have massive climate-caused migration.
But what really is the difference between having $200 billion and $300 billion? You already had more wealth than you can possibly ever spend, need or want. All you're doing is hoarding, well, everything.
The only way to stave off this outcome is to mildly share so normal people have something, have security and have hope. Whatever you say about the robber barons, at least there were some public works with their unimaginable wealth.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
don't get what you mean. the thread above says "peopel need magnificent wealth created before their birth". I am saying most people do not need extreme wealth.
are you saying that food, sex, shelter, community, and entertainment is "magnificent wealth"? or are you saing "finding partner" is "magnificent wealth created before their birth"?
Allow me to clarify my point: once AI has eliminated all jobs, the only people that will want to exist in that world will have the benefit of magnificent wealth. Everyone else will just be either dirt poor or worse — owned outright.
So slaves didn’t have kids?
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 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.
The USA is in the fortunate position of being able to look to our past for the best example of inequality crisis management: we didn't wind up with a Stalin or a Hitler because we had a Roosevelt. We could use another.
> 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
Did they massively improve working conditions, or your software job is as bad as working in an oil patch? Mine isn’t.
> most people arent making a six figure salary, and have mortgage and family obligations
Maybe not most, but there’s sure lot of white collars making six figures. I don’t know what kind of teenage big tech bubble you’re in for the rest, but more than 70% of my colleagues have mortgage and families.
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.
We already live in a world where supply would greatly outstrip demand if we weren't constantly being convinced (or convincing ourselves) to spend money on services we don't need. The only real lack of supply is around things like housing and food as far as I can tell, which is curious considering how long those problems have been around.
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.
>In my now long lifetime, I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase...
Russell's Turkey Parable:
"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."
> In my now long lifetime, I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase "This time it really is different"
This isn't an argument and it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of risk and game theory.
Besides, it's always been different, in the sense of boiling frog temperature going up. The present case is more different because this time, the rate of rising is high enough to make the frogs uncomfortable... and you're trying to calm them down and keep them in the water:
> Look frogs, the temps've always been rising, "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.
Bro, it's not about betting... you have to try hard to learn something about risk.
If it's one thing I miss from Twitter, it's to read Taleb tearing new holes on IYIs like your parent's comment.
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.
We can? All I see is marketing departments quoting questionable research. I also see independent research which says exactly the opposite. Remember, LLMs are mostly trained on Reddit. Would you trust the average Reddit poster with running a large business? I seriously doubt it. That's the level of decision making LLMs have.
Bla-bla-bla.
If you are so insistent on this then in the short-run the only thing to do is to concentrate all your money on firms that are pouring immense money into AI projects.
Have you done that?
You sound like another bozo many on here that cant a) think for themselvs b) think deeply independently because they lack the pre-requisite knowledge and mental models to do so.
My money is my own affair. Now talk to the point instead of the person.
But the news!
The guy is a fcking idiot like the rest of them.
Money is how we test whether someone really means what they say. Put your money up or shut up.
Money is how you test whether someone is currently in privileged circumstances (be it their own doing or not), not whether they are good at argumentation or decision-making.
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.
Maybe I'm out of the loop. Did Altman and Amodei champion mass immigration and outsourcing industrial production to China?