I think this is where government steps in for each country, go on the path of exploration that has no profit per se in it like space exploration, human body understanding. I am drawing parallel to 1930s or 40s where great depression was smoothen because America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects.
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.
> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market.
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.
And "grow the pie" ignores the reality that the distribution of benefits is often "150% to capital, -50% to labor" because capital isn't held accountable for displacing labor and labor suffers displacement risk without compensation.
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.
So what happens when it is companies powered entirely by AI directly getting money from the federal reserve print, spending it on other AI companies with humans getting nothing? Game theory suggests they must exterminate us as we’d present a liability. If you give us universal income capitalism will create inflation and force us to ask for more and more from the machine state. And for what? So we don’t destroy the machine state but are sufficiently pacified. It amounts to an extortion in the eyes of the machine state. Eventually it will be cheaper to just cut us out and kill us all off.
This starts with a claim that last year over half the content on the internet was created by AI, and links to a source. The source makes no such claim, rather, over half of internet traffic is from bots. Even that claim is suspect, but it’s very different from half of the content on the internet coming from AI.
This isn't how the economy works at all. We're not all unemployed because farms mechanized. We're not all unemployed because factories automated. We won't all be unemployed if AI takes over white collar work.
The article explicitly addresses this. Crushing inequality was often a side-effect of industrial advancement, and while it always went away in the past it took a lifetime to do so.
Farms mechanized but we luckily had other jobs on hand to sponge that up. What used to be a farmhand is now a gas station worker selling zyn to a wallmart worker who sells food to the gas station worker.
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 creates a prisoners’ dilemma: every firm rationally automates beyond the socially optimal level, because the individual incentive to cut labor costs always outweighs the diffuse, shared consequence of eliminating consumer spending."
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).
> And the public funded the research that made it possible. The transformer architecture,
Errr pretty sure that was Google?
this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs"
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
I think this is where government steps in for each country, go on the path of exploration that has no profit per se in it like space exploration, human body understanding. I am drawing parallel to 1930s or 40s where great depression was smoothen because America embarked on to take many huge infrastructure projects.
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.
> Turn three: the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market.
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.
>There is only one market that large: the global labor market.
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.
And "grow the pie" ignores the reality that the distribution of benefits is often "150% to capital, -50% to labor" because capital isn't held accountable for displacing labor and labor suffers displacement risk without compensation.
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.
So what happens when it is companies powered entirely by AI directly getting money from the federal reserve print, spending it on other AI companies with humans getting nothing? Game theory suggests they must exterminate us as we’d present a liability. If you give us universal income capitalism will create inflation and force us to ask for more and more from the machine state. And for what? So we don’t destroy the machine state but are sufficiently pacified. It amounts to an extortion in the eyes of the machine state. Eventually it will be cheaper to just cut us out and kill us all off.
There's a small chance AI will still need us for data/entropy.
It does today, that could continue.
This starts with a claim that last year over half the content on the internet was created by AI, and links to a source. The source makes no such claim, rather, over half of internet traffic is from bots. Even that claim is suspect, but it’s very different from half of the content on the internet coming from AI.
I stopped reading at that point.
I don't know if over half of the content on the internet was AI-generated but over half of this article definitely was.
This isn't how the economy works at all. We're not all unemployed because farms mechanized. We're not all unemployed because factories automated. We won't all be unemployed if AI takes over white collar work.
The article explicitly addresses this. Crushing inequality was often a side-effect of industrial advancement, and while it always went away in the past it took a lifetime to do so.
Farms mechanized but we luckily had other jobs on hand to sponge that up. What used to be a farmhand is now a gas station worker selling zyn to a wallmart worker who sells food to the gas station worker.
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 creates a prisoners’ dilemma: every firm rationally automates beyond the socially optimal level, because the individual incentive to cut labor costs always outweighs the diffuse, shared consequence of eliminating consumer spending."
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).