Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

At this point I can't help but conclude that to a certain class of writers, "economic incentives" are a form of benevolent god who will surely, inevitably make things better in directions they care about, and those who believe this also believe the overwhelming and constant evidence to the contrary of their position is just a temporary anomaly

Whatever the hell economics was supposed to do, right now it seems to be causing every industry to produce worse products, lay off more people, and concentrate wealth in an aristocratic subset of the population, and this has been going on for the better part of my entire lifetime. If we're to reverse this trend, we need to stop pretending that economics is a natural force and remember that it is a complex system made of policy decisions that can in fact be the wrong ones

It also assumes free market competition which the AI space is already only in a very limited degree.

The whole business strategy for those companies is to be the one big monopolists that is left standing. That is why they are bleeding money offering token prices well beyond market rate so that they can grow.

Plus they can always lobby the state to ban foreign competition for security reasons.

Economics is a natural force, but it does not specifically optimize for customer satisfaction.

Complex systems having meaningfully describable properties doesn't intrinsically make those properties natural laws

And who knows what the economic incentives are in couple years. Maybe the focus shifts towards one-shotting complex million SLOC codebases which are order of magnitude more sloppy than the current outputs.

But the free market! How could it be possible that the free market does not result in utopian society??? There MUST be a mistake

Whatever system you design (market, regulated, hybrid) it still ends up creating incentives that shape behavior

"I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives. Good code is cheaper to generate and maintain."

This is possibly the dumbest version of an "economic incentives" argument. Current code is the result of current economic incentives. It is a mystery to me why making code generation cheaper will make it more "good" in any way, instead of being either more of what we have now, or worse.

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