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Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

> These debts mean nothing if the US government actually views AI technology as being on par with the Manhattan project. They'll just bail them out or nationalise them.

According to Wikipedia, the Manhattan project only cost $28 billion in 2024 dollars. That's a completely different order of magnitude compared to what we're talking about here. I imagine the size of the investment here would even be hard for the US government to swallow.

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What percentage of the budget was it? I think that's also needed for a meaningful comparison. I've heard about the war taxes being high, but I don't know anything about the economy of the time otherwise.

I didn't have budgets handy, but GDP is another way to normalise its cost to the country; ~$2.2B cost in 1942 with a nominal GDP of $166B, nominal GDP of $29.2T in 2024 puts the Manhattan Project's cost relative to GDP at $386B in 2024.

Nominal GDP from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_statistics_of_the_Uni...

I wasn't actually comparing it in terms of dollars for dollars between the projects, more the national security aspect and the probability of the government pulling whatever levers are necessary to keep it going.

I just made a similar comment further down the chain here, but I frankly think the dollars and cents economics around AI is a moot point. Like the pentagon, they'll just pull money out of thin air, or from other departments, or just write things off like it never existed.

I don't actually think the current administration, or the people behind it, actually care about real world economics anymore.

> I don't actually think the current administration, or the people behind it, actually care about real world economics anymore.

They are aristocrats. They are worried about accumulating more power then their peers, about alliances to gain that power, and about projecting an image of infallibility.

Aristocracy has never been known for caring for economics, technology or practical matters. They just care about power. Ruining nations, building useless vanity projects and going to war is kind of their main thing.

Or, whole program development and per unit costs included, about the equivalent of 14 units of B-2 bombers in 2024 dollars.

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