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- Hacker News
- Before AI, my worldview was that our monetary system was concentrating wealth in a negative-sum game; essentially; every so often, taking wealth from 100 people, destroying half the underlying value and giving the remaining value with a 2x nominal markup to 1 rich person who is already spending more than they can physically spend and so they won't realize that the 2x amount of wealth they got on paper only buys them a quarter of the stuff compared to the previous decade (for example). They won't know how frothy their wealth is until they start selling large quantities of their stocks. It's just buying nominal 'growth' at the cost of risk/fragility/frothiness.
In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.
Now I think AI will deliver real efficiency gains but also, it provides a convenient narrative to explain why people might be losing jobs in a way which distracts from much bigger systemic issues which existed prior to AI.
My negative-sum economy example with 'booming GDP' is possible without AI even as net economic value is being destroyed. So basically we won't be able to tell if people are losing jobs to AI or to systematic wealth transfer mechanisms which predate AI.
I suppose if we see people losing jobs permanently and workers in other sectors aren't seeing wage increases with more openings, that may be the most reliable indicator we have that the system is losing real wealth faster than AI productivity can offset it.
The bad news is that we won't see any problem in the numbers; the problem would show up as polarization and radicalization of the masses... Which is more qualitative . Since almost everyone is being radicalized concurrently as everyone is affected by the same pressures (both from monetary system and AI automation). The question is not "how many people became radicalized this quarter?" but "how much more radicalized is everyone feeling this quarter?"
by jongjong - > In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.
Putting aside the numbers, how does your quality of life compare to decades ago?
by zahlman - I think we have a real problem because we know what we still need to build and as soon as it is build, it will work.
Software development for example is enhanced with running your claude locally.
But lets be honest, the right way to adjust 'project' is by writing some spec in a text field as an input, letting the ai do whatever it wants, having expert ais make sure its secure, then you do the last review and its done.
What do we need for this? A full end to end integration. Its just something we need to build, nothing we need to invent.
The nurse example is the same. We only need to build the computer end to end flow and plugin AI in the right spots and finetune for country specific requirements.
The industry is building this 'agentic layer' today. The Hyperscaler are building this layer too.
There is a golden phase were we will build all of this and were we cleanup old stuff and were we adjust with the current model capabilities and change systems and this will take a little bit of time, but the bottom line is already loosing left and right.
The Blender support from Fable and Astra? Probably kills a lot of peoples jobs on fiverr.
The small software someone needs? Got already killed by earlier models. Just a few days ago some architect (never written software) talked about how he vibecoded some tool for tracking working hours.
Man even a basic website was expesnive to build just 2 years ago.
The smaller, easier and better the code base, the easier it is to remove people from this.
The software market in China is imploding and we will also see budget adjustments to move away from consultants and move them into AI Token budgets. We probably reached peak software development.
by Dlemlo - >The software market in China is imploding and we will also see budget adjustments to move away from consultants and move them into AI Token budgets. We probably reached peak software development.
I've always heard that there was always an overproduction of STEM in China and thus companies always wrote stuff in house instead of relying on SASS. Do you have any more info on this implosion of the software market? I have heard that there is 25% youth unemployment there but thats across all sectors. I wish there was someone providing more concrete examples of how China is using AI. All I keep hearing is they are pragmatically applying it across all sectors but I don't see what in particular they are doing.
by saturn8601 - People get income from one of three places: capital income, labor income, or the welfare state. If this technology truly unlocks a holy panacea of productivity with a commensurate drop in employment then capital’s share of the national income can and should provide for a wider and deeper welfare state. Nothing new need be invented here. Anthropic’s elaborate scenario-building makes appropriate preparedness sound like a problem requiring heroic prognostication when a simple theory of distribution will suffice.
- You say that like it's not bleak as everliving fuck.
Go look at a post-industrial town in the northeast but not within reasonable commuting distance of a wealthy urban area if you want to see what "put them on just enough welfare they don't hang us from the overpass for kicking out their way of making a living" looks like.
- > Ultimately, what the economy looks like in 2030 depends on many factors, like what AI can do, and how companies and workers choose to adopt it.
So the answer is basically "beats me lol"
by dkdbejwi383 - And honestly that’s the only real answer. Predicting future is a fool’s errand.by whobre
- It's funny that this is missing the negative effects or the possibility of an economic crisis scenario. Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all. This is why XAI is already renting compute to Anthropic. This goes as well without saying that in few years, compute pricing will drop heavily.
Another effect is increased inequality in the US and other Western countries as software/AI/hardware companies are able to do more with less.
The increase in manual labor wages is not systemic. It affects only the labor used to build data centers.
by aennassiri - It is systemic due to baumolby bloppe
- Wait but then in your scenario wouldn’t the companies going out of business simply sell their data centers to the winning companies?by ViktorRay
- > Only humans can do some tasks
> For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient.
Until there are robots. Or the AI gets creative in an attempt to find a solution to this "problem" and orders a fatal dose of morphine for the patient.
> And new tasks will appear
> Historically, new technologies have also created new tasks for workers. For a nurse, that might be checking how well an AI triages patients, or reviewing an AI-proposed care plan.
You can see where they're going with this.
> At the individual level, it means coders and call service center agents may have to switch to jobs like electrician and nurse, which are less exposed to AI.
It's weird they call nurses "less exposed to AI" when the earlier section discusses how AI could turn nurses into underlings for AI taskmasters.
> How might powerful AI change the economy?
Worth noting that this discussion is built around 2030, which is now less than 3.5 years away.
The hedges that make the Extreme scenario sound less bad fail to explain how anyone is going to pay electricians when the highest paid group (human knowledge workers) is being decimated. It sounds like the theory is that everyone is either going to become an electrician or a totally fair and efficient wealth redistribution scheme will magically appear.
by ElProlactin - You really ought to study recent developments in the service industry. Olive Garden added a tablet to every table so that customers can place their orders without talking to or waiting for a waiter. The goal was faster, more accurate service, since now the waiter did not need to remember your extremely detailed order.
And yet most people prefer talking to a waiter. There are other restaurants that have tried similar approaches and people would almost always deal with people rather than a robot.
I would love a robot to clean my home and do household chores, but in the service industry I would prefer real humans doing the work.
by SamuelAdams - It's genius for Anthropic: data centers are their main expense. If they convince everyone to become an electrician, then the electrician labor supply swells, and the price of hiring electricians to service their data centers shrinks. 4-D chess at its finest.by deepwoods
- Feels like we're going to read a blog soon enough that mirrors Wendell Berry's opening to The Unsettling of America:
The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers: “. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm income wholly inadequate for them.” The proposed solutions were to find “better opportunities for the farm people,” “a more comprehensive national employment policy,” “retraining programs,” “improved general educational facilities,” etc. Both the commission and the writer of the article had obviously taken for granted that the lives and communities of small farmers then still on the farm—and those of the 25 million who had left the farm since 1940—were of less value than “technological advances in agriculture.” There seemed also to be no official doubt that adequate solutions were to be found in government supplied “opportunities,” facilities, and programs. Reading that article, I realized that my values were not only out of fashion, but under powerful attack. I saw that I was a member of a threatened minority. That is what set me off.
by grantpitt - Btw, Wendell Berry died 10 days ago.by meindnoch
- This is what the Luddites were primarily upset about, fwiw. That economic value and power would move away from their threatened minority group and towards landowners. It'll keep happening, and the new "opportunities" might be no better.by nemomarx
- > Like any economic model, this one has limits. For example, we did not include scenarios where humanity develops hyper-capable robots.
I didn’t see the scenario “what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”. Which IMHO is the most important one to consider given it is the blind spot pretty much all the AI labs have. What if the economic impact is negative? I don’t understand how you can study such a topic without considering the risk of being wrong, not in magnitude but in kind.
by dgellow - I think the main limit of their model is that it was prompted and with LLMs you get what you prompt for. It's as truthful as any complex models. Could be good, could be bad, could be meh.by pllbnk
- Based on the current quality of AI/LLMs, this a very weird take tbh?
What are your points?
The value of AI is real and AI already is responsible for people getting fired or no additional jobs.
Ask basic graphics designers, website developers and co. Ask educational book writers or developer advocates.
by Dlemlo - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."by lp0_on_fire
- Wrong in the sense that it has less of an impact than they are claiming (e.g. "AI is in an overvalued hype bubble") or less (AI is going to be even more transformative than the hypers say)?
In the former case, isn't it just business as usual? (well, with a huge, nasty recession - but the economy at least continues on in some recognizable form)
It makes sense to me to focus on weird possible futures if we already have the "happy path" somewhat known and barely under control.
by throw10920 - Because this is MARKETING, not research. You are viewing marketing copy for anthropic.
What is their methodology by which they determined ANY of these numbers? This is pure marketing fluff, just like every single other thing this company does that's not releasing models and infringing on copyright.
- These aren't genuine studies, but are instead marketing materials that resemble studies.
- I have no doubt that AI will massively transform society. That cat is out of the bag. It took decades for electricity, and then computers to change society, but this is the first technology where the average person can simply describe the problem they're trying to solve and it will at least attempt to help them solve it.
I very. much. doubt. that the trillions of dollars spent on AI will have a positive ROI for most companies in the race. It's all well and good to have the latest fable, but if some chinese company is hosting a cheap open weights model that's only 6mo behind at a tiny fraction of the price, you're gonna get your lunch eaten.
by wing-_-nuts - Finding 4 is a must-read:
> Finding 4: Labor vs. capital share: The pie will grow, but a larger share might go to capital
> Today, of each dollar the economy produces, about 60¢ goes to workers and 40¢ go to capital.
Modest scenario: 40.6% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 0.6 points)
Substantial scenario: 43.9% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 3.9 points)
Extreme scenario: 54.8% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 14.8 points)
So all the growth goes to capital. For knowledge workers: substantial unemployment and declining wages. For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power. (note: all of their estimates are for 2030, not for a distant future)
Very dystopic indeed.
by ozgung - IOW, "What economic future?"by fuzzfactor
- How do we fight that ?
I'm thinking on this topic a lot lately - how do we change the system so that the bigger the company, the harder it becomes ? It's more of a political / societal issue. Similarly to housing - I believe it should be cheap to buy your first home, more expensive to buy a second one, and very expensive afterwards.
by TheAlchemist - It's crazy how we all have to build the AI that will render us unemployed.by kelseyfrog
- >For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power.
This is not necessarily a conclusion you can draw from that statement. It's possible that as the economic pie grows, workers' purchasing power increases compared to the counterfactual (a non-AI world), but their purchasing power does not increase as much as the capital owners' does.
by cman1444