Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

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Agreed. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing Trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. This is humanity's new agriculture moment; those that are positioned to become the new ruling class are resisting any ideas of slowing down.

Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. Historically, efficiency was driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it an explosion of prosperity. Productivity and wages remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate due to AI. We may already be on the other side of the critical point.

the problem is not efficiency itself, necessarily. The problem is, what are the side effects, what are the negative impacts?

In theory, efficiency in a competitive landscape should bring down production costs which then brings down consumer costs and thus raise material living standards. The problem is, all this efficiency is in bits not atoms. Digital goods are becoming cheaper every year but real products (housing, transportation, utilities, etc) show no improvement over the last 2 to 3 decades), in fact is even getting slightly worse.

Well, second problem is that we don't have any rules for access to the raised material standards for anyone who's not providing inputs to the system elsewhere. In plainer words you need to be employed to have money so you can buy things, because buying things with money is the only option. That is one of the chief negative impacts that looms: a large amount of people being left out of the economy because they don't meet the new efficiency bar.

This isn't the first time humanity has improved productivity. Productivity has already been increased by x10 or x100 in the last 10,000 years and yet the unemployment rate is at record low levels. this latest round of efficiency gains is no different.

This time is different because AI has the potential to have a similar impact on efficiency across all work. In the past, efficiency gains created totally new spaces of economic activity in which the innovation could not further impact. But AI is a ubiquitous force multiplier, there is no productive human activity that AI can't disrupt. There is no analogous new space of economic activity that humanity as a whole can move to in order to stay relevant to the world's economic activity.

We don't know that to be true, though, since it's a speculative prediction about where AI will be at some point in the future. So far, automation has always resulted in more economic activity for humans. We haven't seen anything like AI/Robotics that can replace all foreseeable human activity. Saying it will be different this time is just a guess.

It's not just a guess, its a prediction based on an analysis of LLMs and my understanding of human intellectual activity as information manipulators. AI is fundamentally different than what has come before, and those differences are relevant to how we can expect the economy and society to adjust to the new reality.

But yes, I don't know for sure this is the outcome. But then again, why should we wait around for the man made horrors to be realized before we can react? Why not use our ability to understand and predict the future and avoid these horrors?

> a competitive landscape should bring down production costs which then brings down consumer costs and thus raise material living standards.

It's hard to see how not being able to have a decently-paying job will lead to raised material living standards.

production costs decreasing doesn't mean less wages. A widget worker in a factory who produces twice as many widgets an hour can still make the same amount of money or maybe even more.

Perhaps, but it will halve the number of jobs available. That worker might be earning the same, but there is another worker who will now be earning nothing.

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