The dead economy theory
owenmcgrann.com
owenmcgrann.com
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.
This is why companies like Anthropic are so scary, they believe AI should be controlled by them alone
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.
Without being too much of a downer, neither can judges in most places. Source: personal experience in a country with "telephone law".
> 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?
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.
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.
Why software companies pay for software instead of making it themselves?
Same reason
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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?
Of course it is. When someone is thinking of suing someone else the first thing that gives them pause is the potential legal costs.
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.
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.
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.
And what happens when the SQL query has some subtle error or is missing data?
With interns, there’s an implicit understanding that you will spend a bit of extra time reviewing their work and mentoring them. With “just AI it bruh,” there is not.
This goes on in the U.S. too, at least in my state.
But like 80% shuts down before reaching 2 years as they run out of money.
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.
They're similar to IT, in that you can be successful as a one-man business.
I don't necessarily agree with that AI is going to be as super productive as people think but if your assumption it is. It is another tool you'll need to be competitive. That last point just doesn't follow if you believe in AI being powerful
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.
That's what people like Rick Rubin (Iovine, the Medici's, etc), deep down, need us to believe. Probably.
"doing shit fast and good enough" seems to be a much better fitness function here
Ok, so you've secured a future employment for 10,000 asethetes.
Congratulations! Then what about the other 8 billion people? Still unemployement, right?
But a post-competence future is ultimately a good thing for humanity. There is no inherent reason why somebody who is talented or skilled in the specific abilities that society deeems necessary should be privileged if those needs can now be automated. It just sounds more like an arbitary class deemed the "skilled" complaining about the loss of their elite status against another, more entrenched elite class relying on wealth. But as a commoner, why should I favour the meritocrats who look down on me over the wealthy who might be more magnanimous in understanding their privilege?
Thinking that multi-millionaires/billionaires will "understand their privilege" or that they will be "magnanimous" is beyond naivite and goes straight to stupidity. Have you read any news in the past decade‽‽
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.
Maybe? We dont really know this right? People have been saying this for 5 years now and the models are still getting better. The companies running the frontier models have already scraped everything on the web, but the models are still getting better, even if it's only marginally better, with each release. Maybe eventually some company will actually achieve AGI/ASI, who knows..
And then they take that model, put it in a billion-dollar datacenter, and kick your desktop cluster's ass with it.
Of course, who knows. There's always another angle you can look at this from
If enough people are out of work they will obviously band together
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 article makes clear, it is describing not a hypothetical future trend, but the trend that we are seeing today, where you don't actually get that much more productivity by replacing people with today's AI, you actually probably lose more than a bit, but it's still a good deal for business anyway, because they would rather pay AI companies than people about the same amount of money to do about the same amount of work.
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.
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.
Reputation, (or lack of it) and the big clients that come with it.
Isn't that obvious?
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
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.
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.
Edit: same for any profession that requires professional accreditation: lawyers, doctors, cpas, professional engineers, etc.
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.
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.
Why doesn't this extend one step further? Many of those "service provider" people no longer are needed? If you're a consultant for domain X, and you used to work at Big Consulting, and they fire you to replace you with AI... soon the customer will hire neither your new provider, or Big Consulting, and just use AI directly, if it's that good.
Certain professions have legal/regulatory protections, but thesis (a) "entrepreneurs replace big incumbent service providers" doesn't seem necessarily more stable compared to thesis (b) "the people who need the knowledge have their AI do it themselves". In order for (a) to be true without (b), the AI tools themselves have to be good enough to make the concentration of specialized knowledge and institutional expertise/history no longer critical; but not good enough that the would-be-entreprenurial-middleman's own specialized knowledge can't also be replaced.
Most consulting is not some flashy 25 year old Ivy grad putting together a slide deck that says “fire people,” it usually involves either gathering (or providing) extensive domain knowledge much of which is in forms not legible to AI (or at least in forms that can’t be encapsulated at a context level that doesn’t cause unacceptable quality drops.) Often there are compliance mandates involved that have real teeth. So again I think there will still be plenty of humans involved.
Lawyers will be fine IMO, they’re a government protected guild whose key outputs have to be human certified, and where error has real consequences + can threaten licensure or lead to civil/criminal liability in the worst cases.
Not to mention that AI dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for filing lawsuits. Courts are already being inundated by pro se filings, mostly from nutters as usual, but some of which will have real merit. And entrepreneurial litigators will eventually figure out how to harness AI properly, some probably already have. All of those lawsuits will require lawyers to handle them. And this is without getting into the complex IP issues that AI raises.
I’d say that there might be some short term dislocation but demand for lawyers is about to go up, not down. Paralegals without specialized knowledge may be in for a hard time though.
This is beyond naive. We've got plenty of successful businesses in front of our eyes, what makes any of us work for them instead of starting competition? Maybe lack of appetite for risk, lack of means to take on some substantial amount of it, lack of perfect timing, bills, children and parents to support, accumulated momentum in another profession and no skills to run a business, no meaningful connections?
The list goes on and on and to think you could just start a business regardless of your circumstances, and even more so, try to make this hypothetical sound as an answer to the very real issue of increasing job insecurity is just pure malice.
Yes, and there is already preliminary data showing this trend: https://news.linkedin.com/2025/breaking-the-trend--small-bus...
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.
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.
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!).
By the way, GP could very well be investing in the AI behemoths, or some other 'friendly' corporations.
So saving and living below means is a great strategy either way.
My high tech salary, aggressive investment strategy and saving enabled me to not need to work again.
I'm obviously not in the top 0.01%, but you don't need to be.
Currently my quantum computing investments have done quiet well. In the past, Google, Apple, and Cloudflare were big winners for me.
Although, over the long term, my performance with more volatility and less tax efficiency barely better than $SPY (mine: 16.28% vs spy: 15.71% annualized return). Schwab says benchmarks an "aggressive, but diversified" portfolio (more bonds and international) to have 12.57% annualized.
Historically, tech comes out on top, even with the higher volatility.
I had the typical expense-level of a family of four, but I was living as a single adult.
I've traveled to 63 countries, I've had wonderful relationship with people across the globe, and love coding/building services.
I spent ~3 years living in Vietnam, having a more comfortable life than most Americans, while retaining US income levels.
My remote job enabled me to live with my parents longer, earning California-level pay in Florida, helping me save more money and have more time with them.
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?
The hopeful outlook is that AI is also a lever for the working class. It's why I think local models are important.
You're nitpicking. When an individual is a billionaire, they're basically a business entity.
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.
This is the only point I disagree with. Given human history, it’s much more likely that you wind up in a slum, dying of dysentery. Or the third generation trapped in a trailer park cooking meth to get by. Or, maybe, if you’re lucky, being a cleaner, chauffeur, or cook for one of the wealthy.
That part is just an artifact of the tax system. The aim of corporations is to return excess earning to share holders. But because dividends are taxed, corporation essentially return their earnings as high share prices.
If it weren't for this, many more corporations would be hit by corporate raiders eager to unlock those retained earnings.
But overall, yeah, there has a flood of profits that have piled up.
As the concentration of power happens, the people who concentrate it become bigger and bigger targets.
There is no alternative to wealth distribution.
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.
What policies to propose?
> 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
We don't let private capital build nuclear powerplants willy nilly. Energy markets are regulated, key materials are subject to control.
It's not a perfect analogy, there's no fissile uranium to build physical guardrails around with critical technology. But the point is that Big Tech lives more or less in its own world insulated from regulatory and political oversight, and governments have been scared to intervene (lest the big GDP-making machine stop laying golden eggs).
Getting to specifics, windfall taxes and capital gains taxes are on the table. Next step up is mandatory reporting and interoperability. Then there's public–private partnership and public stakes in AI technology.
Strategically, the point is less that these policies are all actively required today. You don't want to over-anticipate, over-regulate, and thus destroy the potential of the technology (or, more destructively, hand the initiative over to undemocratic countries). It's more to get the Overton window moving a bit so our governments don't get caught with their trousers down. Tech must not be untouchable, that applies no matter what level of disruption AI ends up causing.
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...
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.
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.
[0] Really as a continuation of existing trends rather than its own unique thing.
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)
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.
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.
Colonial economies did not require the lowest earners to contribute to demand nor Rome when it transitioned from small farmholders to consolidated farms and slaves, or modern gulf states. The examples are arguably unhealthy as economies long term, but practically they may persist for fairly long periods of time.
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?
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!).
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 is a system for dividing up scarce resources.
"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...
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".
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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?
Open model with affortable computing power can be the alternative, but we don't see it soon.
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 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.
>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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The primary resource needed to build a home is land. Do we have infinite availability of land in desirable areas to build on?
Take Phoenix, for example, once air conditioning became cheap and pervasive.
You can not make things dramatically cheaper by bringing only the cost of labor to zero. Your argument is circular!
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.
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You just solved economics?
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
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.
ok, so machine shops aren't really central to the argument, but the collapse of demand is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You vastly overestimate how much of the growth would be going to the workers in question. Especially as, before fiat currency and electric communication, prices were (relatively) more stable than today, and hence so were incomes, especially for labour work. Why would some factory owner in the 1800s pay his workers more than he needed to find new workers? Most economic growth was captured by capital owners and what would today be known as the middle class, but back then were merchants, doctors, etc. - basically just the tier below the capital owners in the social hierarchy. The vast majority of people were peasants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say's_law
I can say that people are loathe to do it for various reasons.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
99% of people died penniless in those times...
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.
I'm not sure how that's related, though.
It's still over 43% in India, 20% in China, 2.5% in lots of Europe.
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.
Maybe like work in space tourism industry to Earth-Moon 5 Lagrange points.
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...
If only someone wrote an entire article about this, huh.
Oh well. I guess we'll never know.
/s
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.
That sounds like we'll devolve into wars over resources so houses can build more war-bots and get more resources....
In the voice of worker-bot: "That's your plan?!?!"
Two astronauts meme: "Wait, it's all been over resources?" "Always has been"
We are so so so far away from self-sustaining machinery in space that it's not even funny.
I think they'd employ some number of humans for entertainment.
Or slaves.
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.
[1] "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...", circa 1875
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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".)
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.
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.
Only drones will be able to battle drones, in the general case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humanoids
is even better!
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.
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!
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).
(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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
Because the intelligentsia is being bent over. The people that were jolly of the various rust belts of the world decaying.
I mean, this is a very long article about why, this time, it's qualitatively different...
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.
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 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.
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 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.
That includes representing department in stupid meetings, instead of wasting developers/engineers time.
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...
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.
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.
Software today has gotten too complex and bloated in a lot of cases.
Why not? That's already how our global air travel system works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English
The VMS operating system is only comparable to embedded micro kernels these days.
It would make a refreshing addition to the anon big tech ecosystem.
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.
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.
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.
> …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.
What makes you think it's a simple system to develop at scale?
It’s almost entirely bloat.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't understand the logic behind this.
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.
2025 Apple - 100 billion alphabet - 55 billion Meta - 45 billion
These are roughly 2-2.5% of market cap.
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.
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.”
But still, at the beginning it is a transfer into the company’s coffers.
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.
Unless you're SpaceX [0], then the rules have exceptions...
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/elon-musks...
Agree with you entirely with respect to other indexes including earlier than 6 months.
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.
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.
This makes no sense. The coffers belong to the shareholders.
That’s not how it works? The company doesn’t make money every time someone buys SP500 or a share.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
Has X-Twitter released a single new feature since?
In general though I feel like the less new features it adds, the better.
It might sound like a waste, but at least they weren't finding ways to cram more ads into everything.
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.
He basically killed the Twitter as a business. The only lesson here is that it is really hard to fail having infinite money.
While Twitters competitors were Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr and Mastodon.
> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent.
Signal is also a good example, probably better than Twitter as Signal has done a lot with very few engineers since the beginning
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Once a company gets bloated, it's pretty much impossible for upper management to actually know (or have time to know) where the bloat is
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
The US military is preparing to fix this issue in Cuba's political system.
Why not? Apple, for example, had billions upon billions of dollars in cash. Think about that: That means they gave billions upon billions of dollars worth of stuff to people and never got back anything in return. And there is no sign that they ever plan to get anything in return. They are already quite happy to give their stuff away for free.
And why wouldn't they? When you give people stuff for free, they put you on a pedestal and treat you like a king. Those who lead Apple get to do things and get away with things you and I can only dream of. That's the appeal of still doing it even though you don't get any economic return. Social return is what actually starts to matter once your basic needs are met.
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.
This just means short sellers might have a hard time sinking a hype-category stock with reasoned research because the irrationality keeps it afloat.
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.
What other company is developing self-driving at a level of sophistication as Tesla that you can actually buy in a consumer vehicle?
But people like buying new cars, new models, new designs. Not just features - those are just options.
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.
Waymo, of course, is everywhere here in the Bay Area. The tech works at scale today.
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.
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...
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".
> 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).
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...
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.
I don't believe that's true, anymore.
TSLA is a pure meme stock. No one is investing in it because they believe in the numerous, actionable lies Musk tells. No one is investing because they think the P/E makes sense. They're doing it because they think the memes are fun, or because they think the people who think the memes are fun are bag-holders, or because they think the memes are fun AND Musk is actually still smart and adding value, etc.
It's the clearest, most obvious case for "the markets are not the economy".
My response is this: Over time (say 20 years later) you will have gotten certain dividends, and the firm will be in a new position in terms of price and earnings. If I'm right, and the firm will not have been able to produce large profits and pay them out, then the people who bought today at today's valuation and P/E ratio will have massively overpaid for the dividends they will have gotten, and the only way they could have made capital gains to make up for it is if either the P/E ratio has increased even more, or earnings have really shot up at the end of those 20 years.
Either way, it's not sustainable. Unless, of course, people are willing to push up the P/E ratio up and up without limit. And I submit that's not going to happen indefinitely.
TL;DR: 20 years later you can see what share holders got for the price they paid 20 years ago (namely 20 yrs of dividends, plus they still have the share). If you thought the shares were cheap and you were right, you got a lot for what you paid. If the shares were overpriced, that'll have come out by then.
(I agree though that it seems to take longer than it used to take for the fundamentals to reassert themselves.)
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.
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.
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.
That’s what’s so great about these programs, really, is that you can just do the thing out of plain language.
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
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.
They won't need to do that if the new rules come into effect.
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.
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.
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.
Big if true but is it true?
Aren’t they though? What about that whole crypto thing.
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.”
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.
"Former British PM Boris Johnson says falling birthrates ‘best news in long time’"
"Mr Johnson said the promised productivity gains from AI should mean less need for population growth"
"They can’t simultaneously complain that machines are making human workers unnecessary while also demanding that we import or create more human beings to do the work.”"
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/babies/former-br...
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...
But also a precipitous drop in life expectancy. Life in industrial towns in 1800s England was grim. Make of that what you will.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
A search engine that just indexes the web and gives me results is of course a great improvement over my local library.
But LLMs are not the same as a search engine. LLMs don't give me links. (Well, sometimes they do, and sometimes the links don't even exist, or if they exist, they don't actually say what the LLM said they say. At least with a search engine it's just the link, with no claims about what I'll find if I click on it.) They give me authoritative-sounding text. That's what they're for. And no, that text is not coming from "compressed knowledge". Text is not knowledge. Knowledge requires connections with the real world. LLMs don't have that. All they have is text.
A comparison I've used before is between LLMs and Wolfram Alpha. If I ask an LLM what's the distance from New York to Tokyo, the LLM has no idea that New York and Tokyo are places on the Earth, that the distance is a physical distance that can be measured, and that there is a right answer to the question. LLMs just generate text based on what their algorithm spits out as the most likely text to follow my prompt. The LLM doesn't even have any concept of what's happening if it gives me a wrong answer and I tell it the answer is wrong. It will spit out text saying, oh, yes, you're right, that's a wrong answer...and then spit out more text that might contain a different wrong answer, or even the same wrong answer. It literally has no concept that I am trying to extract meaning from its text.
Wolfram Alpha, on the other hand, if I ask it what's the distance from New York to Tokyo, figures out that I'm asking for a geographic distance, looks it up in its database of geographic distances (which has been curated by humans using actual geographic data from actual measurements on the actual Earth), and formats the answer in readable text. That's still a very simple connection to the real world outside of text, but at least it's some connection. LLMs have none. And that is what makes them useless as tools for trying to learn actual knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't take his word too seriously. According to him, corporate lawyers, administrative assistants and compliance officers shouldn't exist.
The most valuable non-foundation-model AI companies are...legal apps. This means he was right, not wrong.
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.
So, no, you cannot just go out and buy an acre and garden.
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.
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.
During the DotCom crash, about $5 trillion in market cap disappeared.
NVidia's market cap is currently around $5 trillion.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
People want to overtax Elon, but he doesn't sell his stocks. Its all imaginary numbers propped up by the federal reserve.
is there something structural that prevents it from becoming Norway ??
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Within physics, there are much, much, much better models than Newtonian mechanics for conceptualizing economics.
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.
> 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.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
One million is a lot of people, but that's from a population of ~70 million.
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.
But that would spoil some good click bait for the media, and ad hominem attacks from political opponents.
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.
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?
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).
I think that we need to be clear about what's going on. The post I originally responded to in this subthread (which was not by you) said that whether or not work is done is "completely orthogonal" to whether people starve to death. My point is that it is not: food has to be produced, so somebody has to do the work to produce it. The question you are asking, and the claim I was originally responding to, completely ignore that part of it, and only focus on the person who needs food, not the people who are producing it.
I'll take the US as an example. The US population is well over 300 million by now, but let's take 300 million as a round number. I think about 1 in 20 people in the US are involved in food production in some way. That means 15 million people in the US are producing food.
There are indeed a substantial number of people in the US who have never worked in their lives but who are being given at least some sort of income by the government. I'll take SSI as a rough proxy for that since it's explicitly for people who have no work history. From what I can gather, there are about 6 million people in the US on SSI. That's about 2 people in 1000.
(Of course, we produce many more things than food. But food is the focus of this subthread, so that's what I'll talk about.)
So if 2 people in 1000 are on SSI, i.e., are getting fed at taxpayer expense without ever having worked in their lives, then about 2 in 1000 of the 15 million people producing food in the US, or about 30,000 people, are working to produce the food that those people in SSI eat. So 30,000 people are producing food for 6 million--the same 1 to 20 ratio we saw before.
At this level, of course, it seems obvious that this is not a serious problem. The 30,000 people producing food for the 6 million SSI recipients are getting paid, they're just getting paid by the taxpayers in this case instead of the people consuming the food. (We'll leave aside all the issues about whether they get paid a fair price, the various perverse incentives at work in the US food production system, etc., since those apply to all of us, not just those on SSI.)
But still, it's important to recognize that there are 30,000 people producing food in the US for people who produce nothing in return. We can say that's a small enough number that we can deal with it, and I don't disagree; we as a society have decided that we can afford to support 0.2 percent of us that way, and that's fine. But it's tempting to just round that number to zero, as if the food the SSI recipients eat just appeared by magic, for free, without anyone having to work to produce it. And that temptation needs to be resisted.
Why does it need to be resisted? Because the intuitive sense that "we can afford it" does not scale. We can afford it at 2 people per 1,000. That doesn't mean we can afford it if that percentage goes up. Nor does it mean we can afford it if we keep adding more and more things to the government's largesse, and not just for people who have never worked and can't work.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
AI, it is claimed, will eventually make humans completely unnecessary in the production process. I'll believe it when I see it. AI is an automation tool--possibly a more sophisticated one than previous ones, but still a tool. It will still need humans to be involved.
So if full automation doesn't happen, we have the status quo, which everyone understands already. If it does happen and production decouples from human labor completely, how do we allocate the fruits of that production?
Only with respect to some kinds of production. The article is talking about AI replacing "cognitive labor", which it defines rather vaguely. But, for example, the article does not seem to be claiming (nor are AI proponents claiming) that AI will be able to fix your car or your plumbing or your HVAC when it breaks, or cut your hair, or produce food, or many other things. So it is not talking about AI decoupling all forms of production from humans.
The article does then go on to talk as if the decoupling is for all forms of production, when it talks about the political crisis that would produce. But that just means the article is going way beyond its premise at that point.
There is a better and more realistic premise that the article briefly mentions, but then skates on by:
"[F]irms are deploying...“excessive automation,” using AI to kill jobs without generating significantly lower production costs, while imposing substantial social costs. The technology, in many applications, isn’t good enough to justify the displacement it causes."
In other words, a bubble, that takes up a large enough segment of the economy to cause a serious disruption when it pops. And the pop is not about allocation of what gets produced: it's about production crashing because of misallocation of capital. But the crash in production won't be in the sectors that produce material goods like food: as I said above, AI proponents aren't claiming that AI will decouple that from humans. The crash will be in sectors where a lot of the "value" produced is already questionable anyway. It will cause disruption because there are many people whose on-paper wealth is tied up in the notional value assigned to those things, which could evaporate overnight if it turns it that it was all a bubble and the bubble pops. But there's any easy way to avoid that: don't be one of those people. Or, if you can't avoid being exposed to that risk because of whatever particular area you work in, hedge against it by not having all of your wealth tied up in the notional valuations of those things. Which is a prudent thing to do anyway.
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.
... was not what produced the British Agricultural Revolution.
Maybe you mean this one, Green Revolution.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why other events did not have the same effects are very interesting questions for economic history.
<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>
This would be like saying "well drunk driving doesn't cause accidents because I drive drunk once and didn't get in a crash"
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demograph...
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.
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.
I'm super happy about this idilic AI future my great grandchildren will enjoy...
I'm pretty sure this is incomplete.
It's more like whether people find the work rewarding enough to be worth doing.
In some cases it can be rewarding for reasons other than money. Even when the primary reward is money, there could be a lot of demand for human work that is worse than AI when the AI is significantly more expensive. Some customers may just prefer the human do it for any number of reasons.
It's very possible we can have a rich prosperous economy and culture with lots of AI and people working together. It's just not clear how we get there, and its not popular to take the idea seriously right now. Fear propagates faster and easier than inspiration, at least in this cultural climate.
We're less likely to get what we want if we don't aim for it.
To put it bluntly, if the economic value of human labour drops to zero, or below the value of human sustenance, it is plausible that the consequence of that, from the cold perspective of cosmic logic, would be the extinction of humans. That's not to say there isn't any way to keep the genie in the bottle and create a utopia for ourselves (I very much doubt it), but that would be against the grain of nature. Call me a pessimist, but if we ever get outperformed in our own niche, our days are numbered.
On a long enough time scale my opinion is "of course humanity will go extinct", but the interesting and very speculative answers are in exactly how and when. It's highly plausible to me that humanity goes extinct via evolution into something else, and on a long enough time scale that you and I won't have any clue within our lifetimes.
Where I think we still differ is the "outperformed in our niche". Our biology is ridiculously optimized. Like 6-7 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than current day AI/computation stack. It's plausible that AI can never outperform us at what we do best because we are already at the limit. I believe biological brains are around 3-4 orders of magnitude less energy efficient than the theoretical physical limit, but the ~99.9% of energy that's not being used for straight computation is allocated to redundancy and resiliency.
So overall my point is if you zoom out far enough yes humanity may get erased by way of evolutionary pressures, but on the timescale of our lifetimes we don't need to worry about that, and on the timescale of our careers we don't need to worry about an AI driven unemployment apocalypse.
What we do need to worry about now is AI being used in media to manipulate people into doing what's not in their best interest.
I do tend to agree with you on that, but with lesser confidence. It doesn't necessarily matter whether they outperform us at "what we do best" if they perform well at doing things that we didn't evolve to deal with. For example, we drove many animal species to extinction, not because we were better than them at anything they were good at, but because we were a novel threat outside their adaptive range. AI could very well do to us what we did to these animals, by acting aggressively enough in a direction that challenges our capacity for adaptation. Basically we have to both perform in our niche, and maintain the relevance of the niche itself in the face of whatever completely unforeseen BS these new technologies may bring about.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
You'd be surprised how much some crops can yield in small areas. (Oh god, I used to actually like pickles before I realized how many cucumbers we were churning out last year.)
Where it gets space-intensive tend to be grain crops, which we don't currently grow because the ROI is so low, but have space to if life forced it on us. Protein can also be a little tricky depending on what your expectations are, but if you're okay with mostly beans and eggs, you'll be alright on well less than an acre for a small family.
Here's more recent data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4
Appears to me, like neither country is fully self-sufficient.
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 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.
And the granary system regularly still resulted in shortages and famine. While crop subsidization has a bullet proof record of surplus.
I see this transition as more like what would happen to livestock if they banned eating meat.
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'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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
Also, don't forget that even that can be automated away.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
to slow migration from farms
cities can't absorb
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.
It creates a system that diminishes risk, but simultaneously diminishes incentives for improvement.
How that took place may provide more useful info than philosophy.
That is unless 'we all move to south korea 20 years ago' is an option, I suppose!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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 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" as originally written seems to me where this AI "utopia" is leading us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a30284631/amish-sexua...
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 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
IOW why do people still love playing chess
I love playing the piano, but my skill is pretty low. If AI becomes better than me at piano, that's just one other person among millions who are better than me at piano; I couldn't care less.
meaning/satisfaction != advancing the absolute edges of human ability
if you have to be the best to be happy you're missing the point
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.
The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?
If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
"they still do" is just begging the question. Plenty of people live without working. We're ruled by people who don't work.
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.
See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/12/joan-williams-... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b46LtbbZ5JE
(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 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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
https://ifs.org.uk/news/early-retirement-increasingly-concen...
Regardless it's a confounder, statement otherwise now being that affluence predicts mortality.
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.
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.
I do.
People usually need to have a purpose, but it doesn't need to be a job.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
That's the one we live in though, so I guess that seems fair
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 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.
The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.
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.
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.
Have to start making our own steel in the backyard and killing sparrows
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.
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.
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.
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 personally expect plenty of them to get reelected even if they claim that everything is just fine.
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.
> 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!
What's the point of being that pedantic, Mike?
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...
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.
here's some basic reading on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
> 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.
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...
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
I see, so you like large scale warfare then. Did you run out of WWII docs and want some more history for content?
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.
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.
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.
not everyone in charge is a cartoon villain
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.
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.
Like maybe instead of making requirements docs you could pivot to counselling at risk youth... but AI is rapidly improving at that, too.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
Appreciate the give and take here.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
and if you are talking about creating company to make your own car/hardware/farm/restaurant/factory. good luck.
have you heard about government issued bonds? or people working and getting paid from government? or government subsidies? or buy-backs and corporate bailouts?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was a certain other undertaking in those years that went a little beyond infrastructure.
Those of us that work know what you really mean.
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.
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 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?
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.
Errr pretty sure that was Google?
If you want to learn, go trace how deep learning was funded. It started off with USPS.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
The whole economy would be whatever AI/robots need: compute, energy, raw materials, software, data, etc.
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.
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?
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.
"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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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?
Well ya, if you don't need labor, why keep 8 billion laborers around polluting your planet?
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.
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?
I’m not sure on the quality of work though
This isn't entirely accurate. I can think of Norway as an example of a small economy that after discovery of large gas and oil repositories managed to responsibly invest and distribute wealth across it's populous.
But I admit it's going to be hard to do the same at world scale and at speed
The point here is that human labor is the economic engine and without it, things like this cease to exist or matter.
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.
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..
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The farmer, rather than feeding his livestock so they can keep producing milk/eggs/etc, decides to greedily eat all the corn himself.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Shareholders see you as useless meat to dispose, the ideal number of employees to them is ZERO.
And guess what: stock prices going down is just reallocating capital somewhere else.
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?
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.
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.
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.
this turkey has been watching chickens, pigs, cows in line. now is time for Thanksgiving. and we are the turkey.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Unless the bubble pops and destroys all these companies, I don’t think the leaders of AI companies will die natural deaths.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Every page was the same AI garbage that provided lots of wordy paragraphs … no real information.
Sad state.
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.
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.
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.
Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?
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."
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.
> 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
It is only when human labor was needed at a large scale when we started caring about people living long healthy lives.
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.
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.
as AI become more agentic i think this will be gradually replaced by AI buying stuff from other AI...
either people + AI is better so people just merge with AI or pure AI is better and AI takes over
> 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.
No, this is good. Cyberspace led to — primarily enabled — sociocultural collapse. The machines destroying cyberspace would be the most merciful outcome.
AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans
https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...
I can see a world where these tools stay popular but I don't think they'll be able to be used without someone holding responsibility for their output.
Just fyi: I am not poor but thinking the above from a poor person's perspective.
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.
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.
When the material takes more of their time to read than it took you to create it, it’s an affront to the reader.
Who is the customer for this stuff?
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.
Now, it's true that for many goods, their consumption is mass consumption: The rich can't eat 20x or 10x the calories to cover the production of foodstuffs. But those are generally the cheap products.
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?
A bit of touching grass may be warranted.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
Seeing how US economy is K-shaped, the answer is the rich. Assuming of course the service is right.
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.
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?
And yeah - there have been a number of events that have occurred in the last 5-6 years that remind one of this. The Covid conspiracy theories. The mass drone sighting delusions. Things like that. I think it’s all coming from the over-connectedness of social media and mass communication in general. Fantasies are allowed to spread and become “truth” with zero filter or critical thought. Once this on comes back down to earth, who knows what the next thing will be? Like I said before, I think we have our eyes on the wrong danger here. It’s not AI, but it is the propagation of increasingly convincing mass delusions. A society and a country are a collection of people with shared beliefs. So what happens when no one knows what to believe anymore?
And when people are gripped by these crowd-following delusions it definitely leads to the baffling blindness to reality...
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).
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.
Many ideologies are so 'hard won' (the price was so high) that they don't die easily.
You can see this concretely in the Middle East especially. In theory everyone could just start thinking and believing differently and achieve peace. The problem is it often only takes a single person to reopen old wounds.
Chinese and Russian and Americans are all the same - individually people are wonderful and have limited control over our day to day government activities. Have traveled the globe and know this - the individuals you talk to are amazing, even if you disagree.
Conflict can be repaired in the mind of the individual - it is the crowd's spirit that must be changed, and that is much harder.
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).
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.
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.
[1] By this, I meant, if UBI just results in inflation that makes the total cost of basic survival go up by approximately $UBI_AMOUNT, we have completely failed and UBI is just a much more unmanageable version of our current welfare state.
seems to me this will effect countries who rely on mid market exports over raw or high end exports way more then others.
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.
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.
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?
Traffic != AI generated content.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
Don’t threaten with good time.
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?
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.
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".
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.
And yes, that's more or less the endgame.
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.
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.
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.
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.
herein lies the rub
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.
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.
Dispute Owen's claim, the global felony and bullshit markets are bigger.
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.
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.
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.
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.
will AI displace jobs: yes undoubtly. But it's not equal even across the tech sector. Outsourcing jobs are extremely at risk. Companies have been offshoring to vietnam, india, malaysia, etc for decades because they're cheaper to hire/pay than americans. But guess who is even cheaper then them? AI. so all the back office work will transition to AI. it's just a matter of time.
But it remains to be seen if corporations will downsize significantly due to AI. I dont currently see it. In fact the opposite is happening. The hype around AI is driving job growth not decline: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/data-shows-surprising-rebound...
The premise of this that AI will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs everywhere is FUD. In software we are much more likely to see the cambrian explosion of software companies and the de-FAANGing of corporate america as software development because easier. a pizza team of 6 can now create something amazing that might have once required a huge budget and organization. The consolidation of tech that has been happening since the 90s might actually be reversing.
AI is something that is empowering new modes of business. Think about how media has become democratized in the last 20 years and big corporate media conglomerates are struggling to hold the publics attention because its now easier than ever to publish your own movies/news. AI (i believe) will democratize things that are now held in control by guilds/companies/etc. And maybe this isn't such a bad thing.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hbbY!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Like what is this?
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.
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?
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.
-------------------
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.
Don’t be the last buggy whip maker.
AI can’t take payment in cash or barter.
It does today, that could continue.
I stopped reading at that point.
Agree, from my experience around 70% is generated by bots.
I don't think the dead internet theory is something that is particularly novel at this point.
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.
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".
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.
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
Silicon Valley wants to reframe this as "AI threatens white-collar jobs"
Not quite. No evidence
AI slop article complaining about AI slop. 364 comments and 269 points. Are the comments here all bots, too?
Am I a bot?
one thing it missses, birth rates. soon there will be no humans left to participate on either side of the economy.
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.
Is it truly fair to place the blame entirely on Dario? He has stated his support for sound new policies designed to mitigate the issues that will arise.
The article itself notes that no one with the power to shape this transition has seriously considered the impact on people alive today, so it is unclear what the author expects Anthropic to have endorsed at this stage.
>This is ahistorical bullshit.
It's ironic to criticize optimists for grounding their expectations in historical precedents while simultaneously dismissing proposed solutions to mass AI displacement due to historical precedents.
Furthermore, "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism" does not provide a strong foundation for the author's argument, as the case study involves numerous confounding factors contributing to rising suicide rates, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease that cannot be attributed solely to a perceived loss of economic purpose.
In reality, people still had economic purpose, even if it was not the specific purpose they desired. The remaining available work often proved inferior: lower in status, less secure, less meaningful, inadequate for supporting a family, and disconnected from respected social roles. Perhaps some of these factors contributed a bit more to the aforementioned negative outcomes than a simple feeling like you're not contributing sufficiently to the economy.
>People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.
While that may well be true, we should first ensure that everyone can meet their basic necessities each month before addressing secondary concerns.
> 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
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.
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?
I don’t disagree with the premise, and I appreciate the roasts of the SV pseudophilosophers (he left out Ayn Rand tho).
It's just a grab bag of arguments thrown into one long rant, and as some comments here point out, some very obvious contingencies (which even have supporting data now) have not been considered.
All this and not a single mention of the very obvious thesis that the real problem is Capitalism.
Seriously, go through each point and see how it can be traced to Capitalism. Why do these CEOs keep telling everybody there will be social upheaval and yet continue building this technology? Because Capitalism demands infinite growth in profits, and if they don't build it someone will! Why do people feel lost without a job? Because Capitalism tells them they are worthless without any "productivity" (Hmm, wonder why "starving artists" were a thing. Maybe that's also why they were so derided: the system didn't like people who found self-worth independent of economic "productivity.")
Now, Capitalism is the problem, but also potentially the solution. Here's a dynamic that doesn't seem to have been covered in these discussions:
1. The majority of economic activity is generated in supporting the economy itself. We know what happens when everyone loses a job: the economy shrinks drastically (the "Bust.") TFA claims "plenty will still happen" and "GDP might even grow" but handwaves away what that would be.
2. The wealthiest are so wealthy because they essentially take a cut of the economy. So their wealth depends on the economy growing. They are ruthless capitalists and don't care about us, but Capitalism demands growth and they are monomaniacally driven by it.
3. As such their interests are aligned in keeping the economy growing and labor compensated and spending. Yes, they have their doomsday bunkers just in case, but none of them wants that life (where's the growth?!?) and they know it.
Add to that governments, all influences considered, are also overwhelmingly invested in keeping the population happy.
I don't know what the solution will look like, but all the parties involved -- the people, the elites, and the governments -- are heavily incentivized to keep things stable. Something will get worked out.
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.
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.
what really happenign is elites lost the plot. we are on airplaine falling down without a captain. nobody is in the control room.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
most people arent making a six figure salary, and have mortgage and family obligations
> 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.
The trajectory of the West has been good for a long time and the rate of improvement is increasing.
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.
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...
Who are you projecting your views with such force on others?
What have you achieved?
I bet you are nobody of substance.
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 we test whether someone really means what they say. Put your money up or shut up.