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> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods. If AI

by palmotea 10mo ago

> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods. If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.

BoredPositron 10mo ago
AI probably will end up living up to the hype. It won't be on the generation of hardware they are now mass deploying. We need another tock before we can even start to talk about AGI.
walterbell 10mo ago
> rise to unaffordability Or require non-price mechanisms of payment and social contract.
- hackable_sand 10mo ago
  Yes. Like theft.
torginus 10mo ago
I think living up to the hype needs to be defined. A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation, but lets ignore the most fantastical claims of techno-singularity, and let's focus on what I would consider a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider. Additionally, AI does not seem to be a monopoly, either wrt companies, or geopolitics, so monopoly logic does not apply.
- dartharva 10mo ago
  > Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider. Interesting hypothesis, do you have the math to back it up?
- wickedsight 10mo ago
  > a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on. Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of people who have money to spend on things the advertisers sell. Massive unemployment would mean these companies lose their main revenue stream. Apple and Amazon make most of their money from selling stuff to millions of consumers and are this big because so many people now have a ton of disposable income. Teslas entire market cap is dependent on there being a huge market for robo taxis to drive people to work. Microsoft exists because they sell an OS that knowledge workers use to work on and tools they use within that OS to do the majority of their work with. If the future of knowledge work is just AI running on Linux communicating through API calls, that means MS is gone. All these companies that currently drive stock markets and are a huge part of the value of the SP500 seem to be actively working against their own interests for some reason. Maybe they're all banking on being the sole supplier of the tech that will then run the world, but the moat doesn't seem to exist, so that feels like a bad bet. But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail.
  - andy99 10mo ago
    AI won’t replace knowledge workers, it will just give them different jobs. Pre AI, huge swaths of knowledge workers could just be replaced with nothing, they are a byproduct of bureaucratic bloat. But these jobs continue to exist. Most white collar work is just a kind of game people play, it’s in to way needed, but people still enjoy playing it. Having AI writing reports nobody reads instead of people doing it isn’t going to change anything.
m_mueller 10mo ago
and if you're unlucky to live close to a datacenter, this could include energy and water? I sure hope regulators are waking up as free markets don't really seem equipped to deal with this kind of concentration of power.
- robotnikman 10mo ago
  We are certainly seeing citizens wake up to it. There was a proposal for a new datacenter to be built near where I live which was to be voted on, and a large majority of the people voted against it. No one wants higher power and water bills.
elorant 10mo ago
Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't even play a decent arcade game. Fiber is not universal so that all of this to be transferred to the cloud. We tend to forget that computing is universal and it's not just PCs.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implications of this might have a lot of impact too and I feel is already a big enough financial crisis itself if we think about it coupled with all the other major glaring issues.
  - torginus 10mo ago
    Old devices work just fine. I've upgraded my old iPhone XS last year to the latest and greatest 16 to see what changed (not much), the old one was still fast (in fact faster than a most upper-midrange Androids, its insane how much of a lead Apple has) and the battery was good. I considered selling it, but quickly had to realize it was worth almost nothing. Also, when treated right, computers almost never break. There's so much hand-me-down stuff, that are not much worse than the current stuff, that I think people even in the poorest countries can get an okay computer or smartphone (and most of them do).
    - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
      Well the industries the most impacted by it are homelabbing/datacenters imo. Like in current circumstances, its hard to get a homelab/datacenter so its better to postpone these plans for sometime I agree with your statement overall but I feel like till the years that these ram shortages occur, there is a freeze of all companies providing vps's etc. ie. no new player can enter so I am a bit worried about those raising their prices as well honestly which will impact everyone of us as well for these few years in another form of AI tax
nyc_data_geek1 10mo ago
Nothing ever lives up to the hype, that's why it's called hype.
blitzar 10mo ago
> If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. This hype scenario would be the biggest bust of all for Ai. Without jobs or money then there is nobody to pay Ai to do all the things that it can do, it the power and compute it needs to function will be worth $0.
- bratbag 10mo ago
  Or the value of everything non ai drops to zero, which makes the value of ai infinite by comparison.
  - numpad0 10mo ago
    Either ways it'll be the end of the USD as we know it. But then again such fantasy situations had been "predicted" numerous times and never once came to be a reality.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

BoredPositron 10mo ago

AI probably will end up living up to the hype. It won't be on the generation of hardware they are now mass deploying. We need another tock before we can even start to talk about AGI.

walterbell 10mo ago

> rise to unaffordability Or require non-price mechanisms of payment and social contract.

hackable_sand 10mo ago
Yes. Like theft.

torginus 10mo ago

I think living up to the hype needs to be defined. A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation, but lets ignore the most fantastical claims of techno-singularity, and let's focus on what I would consider a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider. Additionally, AI does not seem to be a monopoly, either wrt companies, or geopolitics, so monopoly logic does not apply.

dartharva 10mo ago
> Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider. Interesting hypothesis, do you have the math to back it up?
wickedsight 10mo ago
> a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on. Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of people who have money to spend on things the advertisers sell. Massive unemployment would mean these companies lose their main revenue stream. Apple and Amazon make most of their money from selling stuff to millions of consumers and are this big because so many people now have a ton of disposable income. Teslas entire market cap is dependent on there being a huge market for robo taxis to drive people to work. Microsoft exists because they sell an OS that knowledge workers use to work on and tools they use within that OS to do the majority of their work with. If the future of knowledge work is just AI running on Linux communicating through API calls, that means MS is gone. All these companies that currently drive stock markets and are a huge part of the value of the SP500 seem to be actively working against their own interests for some reason. Maybe they're all banking on being the sole supplier of the tech that will then run the world, but the moat doesn't seem to exist, so that feels like a bad bet. But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail.
- andy99 10mo ago
  AI won’t replace knowledge workers, it will just give them different jobs. Pre AI, huge swaths of knowledge workers could just be replaced with nothing, they are a byproduct of bureaucratic bloat. But these jobs continue to exist. Most white collar work is just a kind of game people play, it’s in to way needed, but people still enjoy playing it. Having AI writing reports nobody reads instead of people doing it isn’t going to change anything.

m_mueller 10mo ago

and if you're unlucky to live close to a datacenter, this could include energy and water? I sure hope regulators are waking up as free markets don't really seem equipped to deal with this kind of concentration of power.

robotnikman 10mo ago
We are certainly seeing citizens wake up to it. There was a proposal for a new datacenter to be built near where I live which was to be voted on, and a large majority of the people voted against it. No one wants higher power and water bills.

elorant 10mo ago

Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't even play a decent arcade game. Fiber is not universal so that all of this to be transferred to the cloud. We tend to forget that computing is universal and it's not just PCs.

Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implications of this might have a lot of impact too and I feel is already a big enough financial crisis itself if we think about it coupled with all the other major glaring issues.
- torginus 10mo ago
  Old devices work just fine. I've upgraded my old iPhone XS last year to the latest and greatest 16 to see what changed (not much), the old one was still fast (in fact faster than a most upper-midrange Androids, its insane how much of a lead Apple has) and the battery was good. I considered selling it, but quickly had to realize it was worth almost nothing. Also, when treated right, computers almost never break. There's so much hand-me-down stuff, that are not much worse than the current stuff, that I think people even in the poorest countries can get an okay computer or smartphone (and most of them do).
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    Well the industries the most impacted by it are homelabbing/datacenters imo. Like in current circumstances, its hard to get a homelab/datacenter so its better to postpone these plans for sometime I agree with your statement overall but I feel like till the years that these ram shortages occur, there is a freeze of all companies providing vps's etc. ie. no new player can enter so I am a bit worried about those raising their prices as well honestly which will impact everyone of us as well for these few years in another form of AI tax

nyc_data_geek1 10mo ago

Nothing ever lives up to the hype, that's why it's called hype.

blitzar 10mo ago

> If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. This hype scenario would be the biggest bust of all for Ai. Without jobs or money then there is nobody to pay Ai to do all the things that it can do, it the power and compute it needs to function will be worth $0.

bratbag 10mo ago
Or the value of everything non ai drops to zero, which makes the value of ai infinite by comparison.
- numpad0 10mo ago
  Either ways it'll be the end of the USD as we know it. But then again such fantasy situations had been "predicted" numerous times and never once came to be a reality.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]