6 ms·

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-singu

by 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.
  - oblio 10mo ago
    > AI won’t replace knowledge workers, it will just give them different jobs. Yeah, and those new jobs will be called "long term structural unemployment", like what happened during deindustrialization to Detroit, the US Rust Belt, Scotland, Walloonia, etc. People like to claim society remodels at will with almost no negative long term consequences but it's actually more like a wrecking ball that destroys houses while people are still inside. Just that a lot of the people caught in those houses are long gone or far away (geographically and socially) from the people writing about those events.
    - andy99 10mo ago
      I’m not saying society will remodel, I’m saying the typical white collar job is already mostly unnecessary busywork anyway, so automating part of that doesn’t really affect the reasons that job exists.
      - theappsecguy 10mo ago
        How do you determine that a typical job is busy work? While there are certainly jobs like that, I don’t really see them being more than a fraction of the total white collar labour force.
        InfamousRece 10mo ago
        Yeah that kind of thinking is known as “doorman fallacy”. Essentially the job whose full value is not immediately obvious to ignorant observer = “useless busy work”.
latexr 10mo ago
> A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation You mean like Sam Altman, who repeatedly claimed AI will cure all cancers and diseases, solve the housing crisis, poverty, and democracy? I was going to add erectile disfunction as a joke, but then realised he probably believes that too. https://youtu.be/l0K4XPu3Qhg?t=60 https://youtu.be/l0K4XPu3Qhg?t=60 It’s hard to point fingers at “AI influencers”, as if they’re a fringe group, when the guy who’s the face of the whole AI movement is the one making the wild claims.
- veegee 10mo ago
  [dead]
- Mountain_Skies 10mo ago
  Elon Musk is in on that game too, promising post scarcity fully automated luxury space communism "in a few years" if we as society give him all of the resources he wants from us to make nirvana happen. No need to work and everything is free, as long as we trust him to make it happen.
  - xorcist 10mo ago
    He says a lot of things. We also need to vote for separatist parties across Europe for that to happen. Not at all clear why, unless someone confused nirvara and apartheid.
marcosdumay 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 The yearly salary of knowledge workers in the US are about 10 times the public OpenAI investment to date, and in the entire world about 70 times...

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.
- oblio 10mo ago
  > AI won’t replace knowledge workers, it will just give them different jobs. Yeah, and those new jobs will be called "long term structural unemployment", like what happened during deindustrialization to Detroit, the US Rust Belt, Scotland, Walloonia, etc. People like to claim society remodels at will with almost no negative long term consequences but it's actually more like a wrecking ball that destroys houses while people are still inside. Just that a lot of the people caught in those houses are long gone or far away (geographically and socially) from the people writing about those events.
  - andy99 10mo ago
    I’m not saying society will remodel, I’m saying the typical white collar job is already mostly unnecessary busywork anyway, so automating part of that doesn’t really affect the reasons that job exists.
    - theappsecguy 10mo ago
      How do you determine that a typical job is busy work? While there are certainly jobs like that, I don’t really see them being more than a fraction of the total white collar labour force.
      - InfamousRece 10mo ago
        Yeah that kind of thinking is known as “doorman fallacy”. Essentially the job whose full value is not immediately obvious to ignorant observer = “useless busy work”.

latexr 10mo ago

> A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation You mean like Sam Altman, who repeatedly claimed AI will cure all cancers and diseases, solve the housing crisis, poverty, and democracy? I was going to add erectile disfunction as a joke, but then realised he probably believes that too. https://youtu.be/l0K4XPu3Qhg?t=60 https://youtu.be/l0K4XPu3Qhg?t=60 It’s hard to point fingers at “AI influencers”, as if they’re a fringe group, when the guy who’s the face of the whole AI movement is the one making the wild claims.

veegee 10mo ago
[dead]
Mountain_Skies 10mo ago
Elon Musk is in on that game too, promising post scarcity fully automated luxury space communism "in a few years" if we as society give him all of the resources he wants from us to make nirvana happen. No need to work and everything is free, as long as we trust him to make it happen.
- xorcist 10mo ago
  He says a lot of things. We also need to vote for separatist parties across Europe for that to happen. Not at all clear why, unless someone confused nirvara and apartheid.

marcosdumay 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 The yearly salary of knowledge workers in the US are about 10 times the public OpenAI investment to date, and in the entire world about 70 times...