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Companies like Nvidia and OpenAI base their answers to any questions on economic risk on their own best interests and a pretty short view of history. They are f

• brookst 1y ago
  I’m very skeptical of claims that all things will always do this and never do that, etc. IMO Jensen and others don’t know where AI is going any more than the rest of us. Your imaginary dystopia is certainly possible, but I would warn against having complete conviction it is the only possible outcome.
  • kbos87 1y ago
    Fair point and I absolutely acknowledge that the future AI will usher in is still very much an unknown. I do think it's worth recognizing that there is one part of the story that is very predictable because it's happened over and over again - the part where some sort of innovation creates new efficiencies and advantages. I think it's fair to debate the extent to which AI will completely disrupt the white collar working class, but to whatever extent it does, I don't think there's much argument about where the benefit will accrue under our current economic system.
    • autobodie 1y ago
      [flagged]
  • danans 1y ago
    > Your imaginary dystopia is certainly possible, but I would warn against having complete conviction it is the only possible outcome. Absent some form of meaningful redistribution of the economic and power gains that come from AI, the techno-feudalist dystopia becomes a more likely outcome (though not a certain outcome), based on a straightforward extrapolation of the last 40 years of increasing income and wealth inequality. That trend could be arrested (as it was just after WW2), but that probably won't happen by default.
• zozbot234 1y ago
  "Massive disruption" of what kind? Current AI abilities make white-collar work more productive and potentially higher-paid, not less.
  • kbos87 1y ago
    Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI? I am already massively more productive at work using AI. I'm not getting paid more, and I'm not working fewer hours. The road we are headed down is one where all of the economic benefits go straight to the owning class.
    • MostlyStable 1y ago
      For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history. It's not universal and it's not instantaneous, but the base level assumption should be that increases in productivity will lead to increases in wages in the long run and we should have specific reasons why it won't happen for a given case to believe otherwise.
      • bluefirebrand 1y ago
        > For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history Historically, increased productivity has almost literally never increased wages or benefits without worker uprisings Seriously look into the history of labor and automation
        • MostlyStable 1y ago
          Cool. What worker uprising occurred in the US in 1995? I (and basically every economist) disagree with your interpretation of historical events. https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370 https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370
          • 1y ago
• hnlmorg 1y ago
  That backlash is already happening. Which is why we are seeing the rise in right wing extremism. People are voting for change. The problem is they’re also voting for the very establishment they’re protesting against.
  • willis936 1y ago
    Surveys aren't revealing that AI legislation is a top 3 issue for constituents on either side. It might as well be under the noise floor politically.
    • hnlmorg 1y ago
      The backlash isn’t about AI specifically but rather about the perceived lack of jobs and the very real gap between the high earners and everyone else. AI is just another excuse for greedy manipulators to push the needle even further in their favour.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    AI doesn’t really register on polls of voter priorities.
    • hnlmorg 1y ago
      The backlash isn’t about AI specifically but rather about the perceived lack of jobs and the very real gap between the high earners and everyone else. AI is just another excuse for greedy manipulators to push the needle even further in their favour.
• zer00eyz 1y ago
  > and a pretty short view of history Great lets see an example! > To claim that all of the benefit isn't going to naturally accrue to a thin layer of people at the top isn't a speculation at this point - it's a bold faced lie. Except that innovation has lead to more jobs, new industries, and more prosperity and fewer working hours. The stark example of this: you arent a farmer: https://modernsurvivalblog.com/systemic-risk/98-percent-of-americans-depend-on-2-percent-who-are-farmers/ https://modernsurvivalblog.com/systemic-risk/98-percent-of-a... Your shirts arent a weeks or a months income: https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt-really-cost-in-the-middle-ages/ https://www.bookandsword.com/2017/12/09/how-much-did-a-shirt... Go back to the 1960's when automation was new. It was an expensive, long running failure for GM to put in those first robotic arms. Today there are people who have CNC shops in their garage. The cost of starting that business up is in the same price range as the pickup truck you might put in there. You no longer need accountants, payroll, and your not spending as much time doing these things yourself its all software. You dont need to have a retail location, or wholesale channels, build your website, app, leverage marketplaces and social media. The reality is that it is cheaper and easier than ever to be your own business... and lots of people are figuring this out and thriving. > Do we really think that most of the American economy is just going to downshift No I think my fellow Americans are going to scream and cry and hold on to dying ways of life -- See coal miners.
  • willis936 1y ago
    I struggle to see how AI innovation falls into the "automate creation of material goods" camp and not the "stratification of wealth" camp.
    • zer00eyz 1y ago
      This is a spurious argument at best: There isnt a line of unemployed draftsmen out there begging for change cause we invented Autocad: https://azon.com/2023/02/16/rare-historical-photos/ https://azon.com/2023/02/16/rare-historical-photos/ What happened to all the switchboard operators. How about the computers, the people who used to do math, at desks, with slide rules, before we replaced them with machines. These are all white colar jobs that we replaced with "automation". Amazon existed before, it was called Sears... it was a catalog so pictures, and printing, and mailing in checks, we replaced all of that with a website and CC processing.
• lend000 1y ago
  Friends and others who have described the details of their non-technical white collar work to me over the last 15 or so years have typically evoked the unspoken response... "Hmm, I could probably automate about 50-80% of your job in a couple weeks." That's pre-AI. And yet years later, they would still have similar jobs with repetitive computer work. So I'm quite confident the future will be similar with AI. Yes, in theory, it could already replace perhaps 90% of the white collar work in the economy. But in practice? It will be a slow, decades-long transition as old-school / less tech savvy employers adopt the new processes and technologies. Junior software engineers trying to break into high paying tech jobs will be hit the hardest hit IMO, since employers are tech savvy, the supply of junior developers is as high as ever, and they simply will take too long to add more value than using Claude unless you have a lot of money to burn on training them.
• timewizard 1y ago
  > base their answers to any questions on economic risk on their own best interests and a pretty short view of history. We used to just call that lying. > When AI finally does cause massive disruption to white collar work It has to exist first. Currently you have a chat bot that requires terabytes of copyrighted data to function and has sublinear increases in performances for exponential increases in costs. These guys genuinely seem to be arguing over a dead end. > what happens then? What happened when gasoline engines removed the need to have large pools of farm labor? It turns out people are far more clever than a "chat bot" and entire new economies became invented. > that we see some form of swift and punitive backlash, politically or otherwise. Or people just move onto the next thing. It's hilarious how small imaginations become when "AI" is being discussed.
• sbierwagen 1y ago
  >Who gets the nice car and the vacation home? AI will crash the price of manufactured goods. Since all prices are relative, the price of rivalrous goods will rise. A car will be cheap. A lakeside cabin will be cheap. A cottage in the Hamptons will be expensive. Superbowl tickets will be a billion dollars each. >meager universal basic income allotment What does a middle class family spend its money on? You don't need a house within an easy commute of your job, because you won't have one. You don't need a house in a good school district, because there's no point in going to school. No need for the red queen's race of extracurriculars that look good on a college application, or to put money in a "college fund", because college won't exist either. The point of AI isn't that it's going to blow up some of the social order, but that it's going to blow up the whole thing.
  • amazingman 1y ago
    The main flaw in your framing is that physical resources are still scarce. All prices are not relative in the sense you're building your projections on.
  • bigbadfeline 1y ago
    > AI will crash the price of manufactured goods. Quite the opposite, persistent inflation has been with us for a long time despite automation, it's not driven by labor cost (even mainstream econ knows it), it's driven by monopolization which corporate AI facilitates and shifts to overdrive. > The point of AI isn't that it's going to blow up some of the social order, but that it's going to blow up the whole thing. AI will blow up only what its controllers tell it to, that control is the crux of the problem. The AI-driven monopolization allows few controllers to keep the multitudes in their crosshairs and do whatever they want, with whomever they want, J. Huang will make sure they have the GPUs they need. > You don't need a house within an easy commute of your job, because you won't have one. Remote work has been a thing for quite some time but remote housing is still rare anyway - a house provides access not only to jobs and school but also to medical care, supply lines and social interaction. There are places in Montana and the Dakotas who see specialist doctors only once a week or month because they fly weekly from places as far away as Florida. > You don't need a house in a good school district, because there's no point in going to school... and college won't exist either. What you're describing isn't a house, it's a barn! Can you lactate? Because if you can't, nobody is going to provide you with a stall in the glorious AI barn.
• bradgessler 1y ago
  I did a thought experiment where, at scale, if each human was given maximum agency over the observable universe, we’d each manage 250 galaxies. That comes out to about 25 trillion stars and 40 trillion planets. Give or take a few orders of magnitude, I’m confident humans will either figure out how to expand into that space or squabble over rationing our remaining resources on earth.
• ben_w 1y ago
  > To claim that all of the benefit isn't going to naturally accrue to a thin layer of people at the top isn't a speculation at this point - it's a bold faced lie. Indeed. > When AI finally does cause massive disruption to white collar work, what happens then? Do we really think that most of the American economy is just going to downshift into living off a meager universal basic income allotment (assuming we could ever muster the political will to create a social safety net?) Who gets the nice car and the vacation home? Completely impossible to forecast, even if not against a backdrop of all the changes due to the very tech that makes people unemployable. For the latter: One task that is currently done by humans, is making robots. Either that continues to be done in part by humans, or it becomes fully automated. If it's fully automated, essentially nothing stops exactly one lone philanthropist (or anarchist hacker) from telling one to recursively make copies of itself until every human on earth has their own. Unfortunately, I suspect the realpolitik of such tech will be horrific in the same way that the trenches of WW1 provided an unexpected and horrific use case for all the chemical industry that was in the process of ending famine in Europe, and likewise the manufacturing industry that was in the process of giving everyone modern conveniences such as "electricity", "indoor plumbing", and "affordable home refrigeration".
• klipklop 1y ago
  > Once people are robbed of what remaining opportunities they have to exercise agency and improve their life, it isn't hard to imagine that we see some form of swift and punitive backlash, politically or otherwise. Now you understand why the government is rushing to implement a surveillance state and deputize tech execs to speed this process up. The "control grid" goes in first and the middle-class job market is snuffed out after.