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Comment by aspenmartin | Hacker News Reader

Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.

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I'd argue the economy is propped up on pointless work providing employment. If you throw AI in that it'll contract and it'll either collapse entirely or move to a social care model that no one will foot and rapid class division. You'll end up with burning or unused datacentres that is all.

Any economic model that I've seen leads to failure. The only reason it's popular now is that numbers are going up. People are just edging it.

I’ve never seen these style arguments pass the “show me a good example” phase, at the scale that would be needed to “prop up the economy.”

Well look at my 500 seat company. We laid off 200 people with no measurable productivity impact. And we didn't embrace AI in the process.

We were just keeping the unemployment figures down.

Also look at the large tech companies. Same story.

Current layoffs are more correlated with overhiring during/after Covid. The fed money printer, growing national debt and low interest rates are more to blame.

I’m not in the US

Ok what’s your country’s monetary policy? Most print debt

It's more telling of the state of economy right now than AI.

Capital is simply going from bubble to bubble to pop. It was NFTs and Web3, then the metaverse, now it's AI. You need a new speculative product, market demand be damned. Ultimately the tech itself is inconsequential. Sure, AI is somehow more useful than an hashed png picture of a monkey smoking a joint, but the AI frenzy would've happened anyway.

I can imagine some other alternate universe where it's the turn of something already commonplace instead, like cloud computing; and the same CEOs who are screaming right now that we need to burn the ecosystem to build their new AI data centers would've told us that "The Cloud is inevitable", and that we need to spend 80% of the GDP to finance their AWS competitors.

The product is firing half your workforce. You don't need marketing, that sells itself in the B2B space.

To me I don’t really see this; electricity, the internet, etc: aggregate employment numbers don’t change work just gets shifted around. But your workers at the very least will be way more productive and that’s the sell.

On the other hand horse employment has taken a significant dive from the pre-electrification era.

And in response to this we have a very robust UBI system for horses

AI seems more like a feature than a product.

If you mean the technology diffuses into all products and processes instead of some standalone production that maybe makes sense to me but the models themselves feel like a product

The models themselves feel like a product in the same way weather data/models are a product. Consumers don't buy/interact with them directly. They are built into more consumer facing products that people actually buy and use.

While some weather obsessed people will bemoan the difference between various data providers, most people just see the weather and don't know or care how the data gets there.

With the new Siri that's rolling out, I don't think most users would know or care if it was using Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, or even xAI on the backend. It's mostly trivia when they're all reasonably capable.

Well, they hope they are on such a path.

Yes but what evidence is there that they aren’t? To me, scaling laws and empirical benchmark trends along with high adoption (all of this together, not individually) strongly support this, and also coding agents have become load bearing so it’s sort of already happening I would say.

I think that's an optimistic take; the load bearing portion hasn't permeated traditional development.

Like so many things popular on HN, the tools that are here are great aids for good development processes and practitioners... but they are not actually replacing them in applications that will exist after the AI bubble deflates.

I don't disagree that coding agents have high adoption when it comes to software, but I do disagree that there's high adoption outside of this industry. There's no breakthrough "Claude Code but for non-tech industries" product out there that people are picking up in droves. My brother-in-law isn't using AI to manage his construction business, for example, and my sister isn't using it to run her non-profit daycare.

The most AI usage I've seen from my wife and family is when they take pictures of our/their lawns and houses, then use ChatGPT to reimagine them with different landscaping ideas or paint trims.

~~economy~~fascism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism#Techno-feudalism

This is hitting the nail exactly on the head.

Absolutely, you are right even though many may consider this too snarky. But herein lies the fork in the road.

- consider that right now autonomous drones operate in Ukraine using the latest and greatest frontier models

- consider that fascist or authoritarian governments will now have a kind of access to their citizenry’s deeply personal lives that they’ve only dreamed about before. “Show me everyone who has insulted me” is now feasible to do at scale, today. A system that can monitor, in real time, a global sigint network on every single person equivalent or better than having a dedicated person or team of people monitoring them. Every home has microphones, every square inch of street has satellite imagery, security cameras, etc.

Now, given today where we are: what do we do? Do we regulate ourselves into a situation where people feel better about things like data center construction but that impact our ability to compete, ceding these technologies to other countries that would gain an incredible amount of leverage and power over us? Do we continue unabated, damaging communities and industries in a fervor to be at the top that later down the road we realize is not worth the tradeoff?

> autonomous drones operate in Ukraine using the latest and greatest frontier models

link? Seems infeasible from a latency standpoint.

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