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Comment by lukecarr | Hacker News Reader

And famously, the economy never changes course. Something, something, stocks always go up.

Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?

Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?

Doesn't matter how much stock prices move up and down...AI is here to stay and no amount of booing changes our desires to compete.

The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.

I recall all the bemoaning when IT jobs started going overseas... businesses always go with the cheapest labor.

The world is dog eat dog, and those that prepare for the future are better equipped to deal.

> Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?

Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought.

>The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.

It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schmidts, Trumps, Musks, Epsteins. Just not to poorer people.

> Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?

In fact, with well run economy that systematically prevents monopolies, yes it tends to hire people no matter what technological level. Currents state where few super powerful companies are able to push themselves into everything and create monopolies via dumping prices, even as they are not profitable and can count on their friends in administration to bail them out once if all goes pop is the ineffective economy.

I agree with most of your points except the last one.

Probably easier to ask a question than argue a point: How eager are you to use Government services?

Businesses are only well-run if they make profit: hiring the cheapest labor to produce something people will actually spend money on. And the more frictionless that process, the more our economy advances it. AI fits in there very well.

I also want to point out: startups are usually happy to be bought up by the bigger guys.

It's a massive long shot pipe dream, but we might somehow end up with legislators who have backbones and actually represent the people, and they'll enact regulation to reign in the applications of AI, provide a safety net for the millions who will be affected by it, and/or at least find a way to spread the prosperity that comes from AI across the population rather than into the hands of the few. I'm not betting on it, but it theoretically could happen.

I doubt it. There is so little care for monopoly or copyright because AI is a race, as much as it is a tool. And nobody wants to restrict the race. Policy may pass that limits the use of AI for the general public, but the 'whatever it takes' race to 'superintelligence' goes on.

I get it, you think that LLMs are going to fulfill all the threats that it's proponents have been giving us. That's yet to be seen.

If you consider things like Mythos (I know it was partly hype), and cyber security using AI to find old vulnerabilities in open source tools, and others using that information to actively disrupt the economy (this is already happening)....

And governments pushing quantum computing, presumably to be first to crack Internet security: it's easier to imagine some of those future threats.

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