Hacker News Reader

> Which means there's less workers being paid, less taxes, less money to be spent on the economy, which means less money to pay workers, which means... the logical conclusion is "no economy at all".

Except that's not how the economy works.

Suppose you automate web development. Fewer people get paid for that anymore. Does it increase long-term unemployment? Not really, because it creates surplus. Now everybody else has a little extra money they didn't have to spend on web development, and they'll want to buy something with it, so you get new jobs making whatever it is they want to spend the money on instead.

The only way this actually breaks down is if people stop having anything more they want to buy. But that a) seems pretty unlikely and b) implies that we've now fully automated the production of necessities, because otherwise there would be jobs providing healthcare, growing food, building houses, etc.

Your implicit assumption with the web dev is that this scales. Unfortunately, that may not be the case.

It's not a matter of scale. If people don't have to spend as much on X then they end up with extra money and will spend it on Y. Jobs then shift from X to Y.

This has been happening for centuries. The large majority of people used to work in agriculture. Now we can produce food with a low single digit percentage of the population. Textiles, transportation, etc. are all much less labor intensive than they were in the days of cobblers and ox carts, yet the 20th century was not marked with a 90% unemployment rate.

It's either one of two things. Either post-scarcity is possible because machines that can collect and assemble resources into whatever anybody wants at no cost are possible, and then nobody needs to work because everything is free. Or it isn't, there are still things machines can't do, and then people have jobs doing that.

Look at any non-Western country with a massive population, how is their excess labour faring?

But that implicitly assumes all jobs are comparable financially. Sure there’ll always be jobs to do but x number of web devs or whatever is not the same as x numbers of nursing home care workers.

Also in terms of extra money and spending, the logic also breaks a bit because we know that by age cohorts, older cohorts have more money but tend to have less consumer spending than the 25 - 40 cohort.

> Now everybody else has a little extra money

The flaw is assuming that lower costs “free up” money.

Money isn’t "freed". Money is created. Banks create it when they lend against future income. If automation removes wage income, banks don’t create replacement demand: they redirect credit into assets.

That’s why you can have rising productivity, stagnant wages, booming asset prices, and weak consumption at the same time. The missing variable is where credit is created, not how efficient production is. (Think Japan in the 90s)

If you think the AI threat is real buy real assets now. (not financial IOUs in computer systems)

"How Do Banks Create Money?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N7oD5zrBnc

>Now everybody else has a little extra money they didn't have to spend on web development, and they'll want to buy something with it, so you get new jobs making whatever it is they want to spend the money on instead.

Why assume a business that just boosted profits by reducing headcount would want to spend that surplus on hiring more workers elsewhere? Seems like it would mostly go towards stock buybacks and higher executive pay packages. There might be some leakage into new hiring, but I reckon the overall impact will be intensifying the funneling of money to the top and further hollowing out of the labor market.

It's always hilarious to see lazy, innumerate people claiming that "it’s math" when in reality they just made up numbers and didn't do any calculations.

You're assuming it's even a person when the author admitted they used an LLM for writing this article.

> Apart from being all AI-written

I think nearly 100% of blog posts are run through an LLM now. The author was lazy and went with the default LLM "tone" and so the typical LLM grammar usage and turns of phrase are too readily apparent.

It's really disheartening as I read blogs to get a perspective on what another human thinks and how their thought process works. If I wanted to chat with a LLM, I can open a new tab.

You might be interested in this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069

I never use an LLM for blog posts. Seemed like you need to hear more people telling you that.

Only amateurs and scammers use LLMs for writing.

> It's all just efficiency gains and everyone currently employed stays employed? Not a single AI company wants that.

I disagree with your assertion. Efficiency, production improvements are exactly what many companies are going for. We already have a huge deficit of software that needs to be written that cannot be written with the current Human programming resources available. We have plenty of things, infrastructure and otherwise, that don’t get built because of a lack of human labor to do them. We haven’t colonized the solar system yet due to a lack of resources, etc…

It’s really pessimistic to think that all this tech is going to go to maintaining the current status quo with just much less labor.

100% this. I run a software company and we never run out of new things to build. Our issue is velocity, we would be foolish to lay off employees, rather we must use AI to build things 50% faster if we can. What AI will do is further level the playing field in software, just like tractors allowed farms to expand in size.

> It's all just efficiency gains and everyone currently employed stays employed? Not a single AI company wants that. Not a single tech company wants that. Not only do they want layoffs, they're already happening. So that's not going to work out.

Every single AI company and tech company would be 100% ok with just efficiency gains. They want to make money and proving efficiency is more then enough for that.

> Which means there's less workers being paid, less taxes, less money to be spent on the economy, which means less money to pay workers, which means... the logical conclusion is "no economy at all". Taxes are the last thing to worry about then.

Assuming the hype pans out and we get AGI, the end result won't be "no economy at all," it'll be a really weird one that does nothing to satisfy the common man's needs (because they will be of no economic use to the owners of the technology).

All the world's resources will be harness to satisfy the whims of a very few trillionaires, and there will be no place for you (except perhaps as a cultish sycophant, if you're lucky)

> the logical conclusion is "no economy at all"

Marx called it 150 years ago. Its happening precisely how it said it would.

Exactly. A lot of people think he only wrote about Communism. And he also wrote how capitalism has failed since John Smith first wrote of it.

Is pure communism the right answer? Of course not. But mixing elements would avoid the worst of capitalism and communism.

Billionaires (that REALIZE gains on their investments via loans based on the investments' current value and not the original value)and AI Companies are about representation without taxation, while those that are taxed get their voice drowned out by those same actors.