If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty
> A visit to the Soviet Union in 1991 was enough to make him a firm "believe[r] in capitalism, private property and the market"
Ok, that's what he says, but what does he want? Does he want to eliminate social classes (communism)? Eliminate private ownership of the means of production (socialism)?
> His 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, relies on economic data going back 250 years to show that an ever-rising concentration of wealth is not self-correcting. To address this problem, he proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth.
No, looks like he just wants taxes. Case closed: this is instance #54367 of an economic conservative pretending that it's marxism to tax a penny from a billionaire. And you call yourself "pirate"? Sigh.
Why did he decide to make these predictions if his ideas supposedly have no bearing on how predictions are created?
Does economics no longer even have the pretense of being a science, which by its very nature exists to make testable predictions?
Love to see you mix unsubstantiated vitriol with overt lies like this.
I remember first going to a party at an Economics students house 20 years ago, and thinking they all seemed like they were in a cult. Wasn't until fairly recently I figured out it was from propaganda.
junior trader for a bank looses $10 mil. boss asks him what happened. trader says he sold oil because bank economist said oil price will go down. boss fires him. junior asks how could he become a good trader if he's fired on the first losing trade. boss says "no, you idiot, I didn't fire you because you made a losing trade, I fired you because you listened to our economist"
Relevant here: the would we trust a Software engineer, which in general don’t always obtain the mathematical foundation to understand deep learning in the first place, on the trajectory of AI?
Valid point, but it suggests a mathematician who understands the math behind AI is more capable of grasping its trajectory, which is probably not the case.
People who are deep in the inner workings of this stuff day in and day out are the only ones who have a chance at having any real insight.
I see software development as part of a broader science, technology and even ideology of simulation. But I came from a research background too.
What I mainly noticed was, after really understanding my domain, the confidence of the SWEs I was working with despite being incorrect. Now I am a SWE and I try to stay humble.
SWEs I think are more susceptible to this since as you say we often dip in many areas and industries. No, we are not actual SMEs and proper experts (barring exceptions of course, but in any case we usually have a specific view on domain, while proper experts understand many/all views).
Did anyone ever keep track of how often economists turn out to be right about anything? I didn't, but have the feeling that it isn't much better than flipping a coin.
> An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
> If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
It may not have been a nasty name but damn that was brutal.
* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...
A bunch of folks predicted that QE would cause all sorts of bad things:
> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.
* https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke
He took the other side of that and was right. When QE2 came around, Pimco—the famous bond trading folks—predicted certain things would happen and put large amounts of money on those predictions, and again he said it was all wrong, and Pimco turned out wrong:
* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...
This isn't to say he's always right. He has been wrong, but more importantly he admits when he's wrong and tries to figure out why:
> The first thing I want to say, I think most of our audience here, at least the economists, remember the big debates over QE early in the last decade, and all of the economists who predicted dangerous inflation and then refuse to admit that they've been wrong. And I don't want to be one of those guys, so I need to start out by saying that when we had our last discussion I was relaxed about the inflationary outlook and I was wrong, it turns out that inflation is coming way higher than I expected and I think the important thing on stuff like that is to try and figure out why you were wrong and learn from it. It's when you get to the why I was wrong, what's odd is it's not the simple script that I might have expected. For those who remember our earlier debate, that was centered mostly on fiscal policy, which I think is not going to be the case now and it was centered around the American rescue plan, which was a very big slug of money. And Larry was arguing, like a lot of people, that it was just way too big, that it was too much stimulus and that the economy would massively overheat. I was, I agreed that it was a lot of money, but argued that it wasn't designed as stimulus and, in fact, you know that had other purposes, and that it was likely to have low multipliers, so that there wouldn't be that much overheating. […]
* https://bcf.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Webinar...
More generally, if you look at the people Krugman has been arguing against, they've been more wrong, more often, more longer than he probably has, pushing garbage for decades:
* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018
Is there someone(s) else that should be listened to more? (Certainly not Austrians or (Friedman) Monetarists, or anyone putting forward trickle down non-sense (that's basically most folks on the political right).)
* https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accura...
Second place was 82% correct, third was 75%.