11 ms·

The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a mistake. If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity, then AI buying up

The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a mistake. If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity, then AI buying up all the electricians and network engineers is a (correct) signal. People will take courses in those things and try to get a piece of the winnings. Same with those memory chips that they are gobbling up, it just tells everyone where to make a living. If it's a flash in a pan, and it turns out to be empty promises, then all those people are wasting their time. What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.

jleyank 8mo ago
They still gotta figure out how their consumers will get the cash to consume. Toss all the developers and a largish cohort of well-paid people head towards the dole.
- oblio 8mo ago
  At some point rich people stop caring about money and only care about power.
  - willis936 8mo ago
    It's a fun thought, but you know what we call those people? Poor. The people who light their own money on fire today are ceding power. The two are the same.
    - catlifeonmars 8mo ago
      1. Some people can afford to light a lot of their money on fire and still remain rich. 2. The trick is to burn other people’s money. Which is a lot more akin to what is going on here. Then, at least in the US, if you’re too big to fail, the fed will just give you more cash effectively diminishing everyone else’s buying power.
      - willis936 8mo ago
        In regards to 2: it's as simple as not letting it be your money being set on fire. Every fiscally responsible individual is making sure they have low exposure to the mag 7.
    - oblio 8mo ago
      At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he lived a better life than the peasants.
      - WarOnPrivacy 8mo ago
        > At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he lived a better life than the peasants. As measured in knowledge utilized during basic living: The lives of lords were much less complex than that of modern poor people.
- rybosworld 8mo ago
  Yeah I don't think this get's enough attention. It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively. Building coherent systems that solve a business problem is an iterative process. I have a hard time seeing how an LLM could climb that mountain on it's own. I don't think there's a way to solve the issue of: one-shotted apps will increasingly look more convincing, in the same way that the image generation looks more convincing. But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production. You could try brute-force vibe iterating until it's exactly what you wanted, but that rarely works for anything that isn't a CRUD app. Ask any of the image generators to build you a sprite sheet for a 2d character with multiple animation frames. I have never gotten one to do this successfully in one prompt. Sometimes the background will be the checkerboard png transparency layer. Except, the checkers aren't all one color (#000000, #ffffff), instead it's a million variations of off-white and off-black. The legs in walking frames are almost never correct, etc. And even if they get close - as soon as you try to iterate on the first output, you enter a game of whack-a-mole. Okay we fixed the background but now the legs don't look right, let's fix those. Okay great legs are fixed but now the faces are different in every frame let's fix those. Oh no fixing the faces broke the legs again, Etc. We are in a weird place where companies are shedding the engineers that know how to use these things. And some of those engineers will become solo-devs. As a solo-dev, funds won't be infinite. So it doesn't seem likely that they can jack up the prices on the consumer plans. But if companies keep firing developers, then who will actually steer the agents on the enterprise plans?
  - KellyCriterion 8mo ago
    esp when it comes down to integration with the rest of the business processes & people aroud this "single apps" :-)
  - throwaw12 8mo ago
    > But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production What if, we change current production environments to fit that blackbox and make it run somehow with 99% availability and good security?
  - mc-0 8mo ago
- mylifeandtimes 8mo ago
  Why do we need people to consume when we have the government? Serious question. As in, we built the last 100 years on "the american consumer", the idea that it would be the people buying everything. There is no reason that needs to or necessarily will continue-- don't get me wrong, I kind of hope it does, but my hopes don't always predict what actually happens. What if the next 100 is the government buying everything, and the vast bulk of the people are effectively serfs. Who HAVE to stay in line otherwise they go to debt prison or tax prison where they become slaves (yes, the US has a fairly large population of prison laborers who are forced to work for 15-50 cents/hour. The lucky ones can earn as much as $1.50/hour. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/ https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/
  - smegger001 8mo ago
    where will the government get the money to buy anything if the billionaires and their mega corps have it all and spend sufficient amounts to keep the government from taxing. we have a k shape economy where the capital class is extracting all of the value from the working class who are headed to subsistence levels of income and the low class dies in the ditch.
- nosianu 8mo ago
  Like before - debt! This prevents the consumers from slacking off and enjoying life, instead they have to continue to work work work. They get to consume a little, and work much more (after all, they also have to pay interest, and for consumer credits and credits that the masses get that adds up to a lot). In this scenario, it does not even matter that many are unable to pay off all that debt. As long as the amount of work that is extracted from them significantly exceeds the amount of consumption allowed to them all is fine. The chains that bind used to be metal, but we progressed and became a civilized society. Now it's the financial system and the laws. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” (Anatole France)
forinti 8mo ago
I know that all investments have risk, but this is one risky gamble. US$700 billion could build a lot of infrastructure, housing, or manufacturing capacity.
- unsupp0rted 8mo ago
  What $700 billion can't do is cure cancers, Parkinsons, etc. We know because we've tried and that's barely a sliver of what it's cost so far, for middling results. Whereas $700 billion in AI might actually do that.
  - wolfram74 8mo ago
    Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you, we're getting better and better at dealing with them. [0]https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are-now-living-longer-after-a-cancer-diagnosis.html https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...
    - unsupp0rted 8mo ago
      Yes, we're getting better at treating cancers, but still if a person gets cancer, chances are good the thing they'll die of is cancer. Middling results. Because we're not good at curing cancers, we're just good at making people survive better for longer until the cancer gets them. 5 year survival is a lousy metric but it's the best we can manage and measure. I'm perfectly happy investing roughly 98% of my savings into the thing that has a solid shot at curing cancers, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.
      - beepbooptheory 8mo ago
        Maybe it should give you pause then, that not everyone else is investing 98% of their savings?
112233 8mo ago
"If X is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity" - matches a lot of different X. Maintaining persons health increases productivity. Good education increases productivity. What is playing out now is completely different - it is both irresistible lust for omniscient power provided by this technology ("mirror mirror on the wall, who has recently thought bad things about me?"), and the dread of someone else wielding it. Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things
- mattgreenrocks 8mo ago
  > Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things I'd put intelligence in quotes there, but it doesn't detract from the point. It is astounding to me how willfully ignorant people are being about the massive aggregation of power that's going on here. In retrospect, I don't think they're ignorant, they just haven't had to think about it much in the past. But this is a real problem with very real consequences. Sovereignty must be occasionally be asserted, or someone will infringe upon it. That's exactly what's happening here.
  - fennecbutt 8mo ago
    >massive aggregation of power that's going on here Which has been happening since what at least the bad old IBM days and nobody's done a thing about it? I've given up tbh. It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok fix.
    - luqtas 8mo ago
      > It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok fix. it's much worse. a great demographic of hacker news love gen. AI.. these are usually highly educated people showing their true faces on the plethora of problems this technology violates and generates
somewhereoutth 8mo ago
I suspect a lot of this is due to large amounts of liquidity sloshing around looking for returns. We are still dealing with the consequences of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and QE (Quantitative Easing) where money to support the economy through the Great Financial Crisis and Covid was largely funneled in to the top, causing the 'everything bubble'. The rich got (a lot) richer, and now have to find something to do with that wealth. The immeasurable returns promised by LLMs (in return for biblical amounts of investment) fits that bill very well.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
mcphage 8mo ago
> What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching. I can’t speak to the economy as a whole, but the tech economy has a long history of bubbles and scams. Some huge successes, too—but gets it wrong more often than it gets it right.
Archelaos 8mo ago
In 2024, global GDP was $111 trillion.[1] Investing 1 or 2 % of that to improve global productivity via AI does not seem exaggerated to me. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  I will put it differently, Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50% more and make top 1% unbelievable rich while everyone else looking for jobs or getting 50 year mortgage, seem very bad idea to me.
  - cheonn638 8mo ago
    >Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50% more What’s your definition of wealth gap? Is it how you feel when you see the name of a billionaire?
    - fennecbutt 8mo ago
      Yes the very fact that billionaires exist mean our species has failed. I do not believe that there is a legitimate billionaire on the planet, in that they haven't engaged in stock manipulation, lobbying, insider trading, corrupt deals, monopolistic practices, dark patterns, corporate tax dodging, personal tax dodging. You could for example say that the latter are technically legal and therefore okay, but it's my belief that they're "technically legal/loopholes" because we have reached a point where the rich are so powerful that they bend the laws to their own ends. Our species is a bit of a disappointment. People would rather focus on trivial tribal issues than on anything that impacts the majority of the members of our species. We are well and truly animals.
    - mjamesaustin 8mo ago
      It's easy to access statistics about wealth and income inequality. It is worse than it has ever been, and continuing to get worse. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
hackable_sand 8mo ago
Your comment doesn't say anything
thefz 8mo ago
> If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity, Thing is, I am still waiting to see where it increases productivity aside from some extremely small niches like speech to text and summarizing some small text very fast.
- sigseg1v 8mo ago
  Serious question, but have you not used it to implement anything at your job? Admittedly I was very skeptical but last sprint in 2 days I got 12 pull requests up for review by running 8 agents on my computer in parallel and about 10 more on cloud VMs. The PRs are all double reviewed and QA'd and merged. The ones that don't have PRs are larger refactors, one 40K loc and the other 30k loc and I just need actual time to go through every line myself and self-test appropriately, otherwise it would have been more stuff finished. These are all items tied to money in our backlog. It would have taken me about 5 times as long to close those items out without this tooling. I also would have not had as much time to produce and verify as many unit tests as I did. Is this not increased productivity?
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - thefz 8mo ago
    So you roll a dice and call yourself a software engineer, basically.
    - sigseg1v 8mo ago
      I have an engineering degree but don't call myself an engineer because it's illegal to do so in my country unless I hold a PEng. That aside, I fail to see how code where I have reviewed every single line, tested all edge cases as normal, had 2 other devs also test this, had a QA test, and had a PO run and approve the behaviour as "rolling the dice" but you're entitled to your opinion.
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  Are you doctor or a farmer? If you are a software engineer you are missing out a lot, literally a lot!
TheDong 8mo ago
There's one additional question we could have here, which is "is AI here to stay and is it net-positive, or does it have significant negative externalities" > What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching. We've so far found two ways in recent memory that our economy massively fails when it comes to externalities. Global Warming continues to get worse, and we cannot globally coordinate to stop it when the markets keep saying "no, produce more oil, make more CO2, it makes _our_ stock go up until the planet eventually dies, but our current stock value is more important than the nebulous entire planet's CO2". Ads and addiction to gambling games, tiktok, etc also are a negative externality where the company doing the advertising or making the gambling game gains profit, but at the expense of effectively robbing money from those with worse impulse control and gambling problems. Even if the market votes that AI will successfully extract enough money to be "here to stay", I think that doesn't necessarily mean the market is getting things right nor that it necessarily increases productivity. Gambling doesn't increase productivity, but the market around kalshi and sports betting sure indicates it's on the rise lately.
mschuster91 8mo ago
> People will take courses in those things and try to get a piece of the winnings. The problem is boom-bust cycles. Electricians will always be in demand but it takes about 3 years to properly train even a "normal" residential electrician - add easily 2-3 years on top to work on the really nasty stuff aka 50 kV and above. No matter what, the growth of AI is too rapid and cannot be sustained. Even if the supposed benefits of AI all come true - the level of growth cannot be upheld because everything else suffers.
- marcosdumay 8mo ago
  > it takes about 3 years to properly train even a "normal" residential electrician To pass ordinary wire with predefined dimensions in exposed conduits? No way it takes more than a few weeks.
  - mschuster91 8mo ago
    I'm talking about proper German training, not the kind of shit that leads to what Cy Porter (the home inspector legend) exposes on Youtube. Shoddy wiring can hold up for a looong time in homes because outside of electrical car chargers and baking ovens nothing consumes high current over long time and as long as no device develops a ground fault, even a lack of a GFCI isn't noticeable. But a data center? Even smaller ones routinely rack up megawatts of power here, large hyperscaler deployments hundreds of megawatts. Sustained, not peak. That is putting a lot of stress on everything involved: air conditioning, power, communications. And for that to hold up, your neighbor Joe who does all kinds of trades as long as he's getting paid in cash won't cut it.
  - chasd00 8mo ago
    It’s protected by requiring many hours (years) of apprenticeship. These kinds of heavily unionized jobs only reward seniority. Gotta pay your dues buddy!
HardCodedBias 8mo ago
"The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a mistake." The answer to this is two part: 1. Have we seen an increase in capability over the last couple of years? The answer here is clearly yes. 2. Do we think that this increase will continue? This is unknown. It seems so, but we don't know and these firms are clearly betting that it will. 1a. Do we think that with existing capability that there is tremendous latent demand? If so the buildout is still rational if progress stops.
majormajor 8mo ago
AI could be here to stay and "chase a career as an electrician helping build datacenters" could also be a mistake. The construction level could plateau or decline without a bubble popping. That's why it can't just be a market signal "go become an electrician" when the feedback loop is so slow. It's a social/governmental issue. If you make careers require expensive up-front investment largely shouldered by the individuals, you not only will be slow to react but you'll also end up with scores of people who "correctly" followed the signals right up until the signals went away.
- throwaway0123_5 8mo ago
  > you'll also end up with scores of people who "correctly" followed the signals right up until the signals went away. I think this is where we're headed, very quickly, and I'm worried about it from a social stability perspective (as well as personal financial security of course). There's probably not a single white-collar job that I'd feel comfortable spending 4+ years training for right now (even assuming I don't have to pay or take out debt for the training). Many people are having skills they spent years building made worthless overnight, without an obvious or realistic pivot available. Lots and lots of people who did or will do "all the right things," with no benefit earned from it. Even if hypothetically there is something new you can reskill into every five years, how is that sustainable? If you're young and without children, maybe it is possible. Certainly doesn't sound fun, and I say this as someone who joined tech in part because of how fast-paced it was.
  - zozbot234 8mo ago
    > Many people are having skills they spent years building made worthless overnight, without an obvious or realistic pivot available. I'd like to see real examples of this, beyond trivial ones like low-quality copywriting (i.e. the "slop" before there was slop) that just turns into copyediting. Current AI's are a huge force multiplier for most white-collar skills, including software development.
dfedbeef 8mo ago
If

jleyank 8mo ago

They still gotta figure out how their consumers will get the cash to consume. Toss all the developers and a largish cohort of well-paid people head towards the dole.

oblio 8mo ago
At some point rich people stop caring about money and only care about power.
- willis936 8mo ago
  It's a fun thought, but you know what we call those people? Poor. The people who light their own money on fire today are ceding power. The two are the same.
  - catlifeonmars 8mo ago
    1. Some people can afford to light a lot of their money on fire and still remain rich. 2. The trick is to burn other people’s money. Which is a lot more akin to what is going on here. Then, at least in the US, if you’re too big to fail, the fed will just give you more cash effectively diminishing everyone else’s buying power.
    - willis936 8mo ago
      In regards to 2: it's as simple as not letting it be your money being set on fire. Every fiscally responsible individual is making sure they have low exposure to the mag 7.
  - oblio 8mo ago
    At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he lived a better life than the peasants.
    - WarOnPrivacy 8mo ago
      > At the end the day a medieval lord was poor but he lived a better life than the peasants. As measured in knowledge utilized during basic living: The lives of lords were much less complex than that of modern poor people.
rybosworld 8mo ago
Yeah I don't think this get's enough attention. It still requires a technical person to use these things effectively. Building coherent systems that solve a business problem is an iterative process. I have a hard time seeing how an LLM could climb that mountain on it's own. I don't think there's a way to solve the issue of: one-shotted apps will increasingly look more convincing, in the same way that the image generation looks more convincing. But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production. You could try brute-force vibe iterating until it's exactly what you wanted, but that rarely works for anything that isn't a CRUD app. Ask any of the image generators to build you a sprite sheet for a 2d character with multiple animation frames. I have never gotten one to do this successfully in one prompt. Sometimes the background will be the checkerboard png transparency layer. Except, the checkers aren't all one color (#000000, #ffffff), instead it's a million variations of off-white and off-black. The legs in walking frames are almost never correct, etc. And even if they get close - as soon as you try to iterate on the first output, you enter a game of whack-a-mole. Okay we fixed the background but now the legs don't look right, let's fix those. Okay great legs are fixed but now the faces are different in every frame let's fix those. Oh no fixing the faces broke the legs again, Etc. We are in a weird place where companies are shedding the engineers that know how to use these things. And some of those engineers will become solo-devs. As a solo-dev, funds won't be infinite. So it doesn't seem likely that they can jack up the prices on the consumer plans. But if companies keep firing developers, then who will actually steer the agents on the enterprise plans?
- KellyCriterion 8mo ago
  esp when it comes down to integration with the rest of the business processes & people aroud this "single apps" :-)
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  > But when you peel back the curtain, that output isn't quite correct enough to deploy to production What if, we change current production environments to fit that blackbox and make it run somehow with 99% availability and good security?
- mc-0 8mo ago
mylifeandtimes 8mo ago
Why do we need people to consume when we have the government? Serious question. As in, we built the last 100 years on "the american consumer", the idea that it would be the people buying everything. There is no reason that needs to or necessarily will continue-- don't get me wrong, I kind of hope it does, but my hopes don't always predict what actually happens. What if the next 100 is the government buying everything, and the vast bulk of the people are effectively serfs. Who HAVE to stay in line otherwise they go to debt prison or tax prison where they become slaves (yes, the US has a fairly large population of prison laborers who are forced to work for 15-50 cents/hour. The lucky ones can earn as much as $1.50/hour. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/ https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/
- smegger001 8mo ago
  where will the government get the money to buy anything if the billionaires and their mega corps have it all and spend sufficient amounts to keep the government from taxing. we have a k shape economy where the capital class is extracting all of the value from the working class who are headed to subsistence levels of income and the low class dies in the ditch.
nosianu 8mo ago
Like before - debt! This prevents the consumers from slacking off and enjoying life, instead they have to continue to work work work. They get to consume a little, and work much more (after all, they also have to pay interest, and for consumer credits and credits that the masses get that adds up to a lot). In this scenario, it does not even matter that many are unable to pay off all that debt. As long as the amount of work that is extracted from them significantly exceeds the amount of consumption allowed to them all is fine. The chains that bind used to be metal, but we progressed and became a civilized society. Now it's the financial system and the laws. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” (Anatole France)

forinti 8mo ago

I know that all investments have risk, but this is one risky gamble. US$700 billion could build a lot of infrastructure, housing, or manufacturing capacity.

unsupp0rted 8mo ago
What $700 billion can't do is cure cancers, Parkinsons, etc. We know because we've tried and that's barely a sliver of what it's cost so far, for middling results. Whereas $700 billion in AI might actually do that.
- wolfram74 8mo ago
  Your name is well earned! "can't cure cancers" is impressively counterfactual [0] as 5 year survival of cancer diagnosis is up over almost all categories. Despite every cancer being a unique species trying to kill you, we're getting better and better at dealing with them. [0]https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are-now-living-longer-after-a-cancer-diagnosis.html https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...
  - unsupp0rted 8mo ago
    Yes, we're getting better at treating cancers, but still if a person gets cancer, chances are good the thing they'll die of is cancer. Middling results. Because we're not good at curing cancers, we're just good at making people survive better for longer until the cancer gets them. 5 year survival is a lousy metric but it's the best we can manage and measure. I'm perfectly happy investing roughly 98% of my savings into the thing that has a solid shot at curing cancers, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. I don't understand why all billionaires aren't doing this.
    - beepbooptheory 8mo ago
      Maybe it should give you pause then, that not everyone else is investing 98% of their savings?

112233 8mo ago

"If X is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity" - matches a lot of different X. Maintaining persons health increases productivity. Good education increases productivity. What is playing out now is completely different - it is both irresistible lust for omniscient power provided by this technology ("mirror mirror on the wall, who has recently thought bad things about me?"), and the dread of someone else wielding it. Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things

mattgreenrocks 8mo ago
> Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things I'd put intelligence in quotes there, but it doesn't detract from the point. It is astounding to me how willfully ignorant people are being about the massive aggregation of power that's going on here. In retrospect, I don't think they're ignorant, they just haven't had to think about it much in the past. But this is a real problem with very real consequences. Sovereignty must be occasionally be asserted, or someone will infringe upon it. That's exactly what's happening here.
- fennecbutt 8mo ago
  >massive aggregation of power that's going on here Which has been happening since what at least the bad old IBM days and nobody's done a thing about it? I've given up tbh. It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok fix.
  - luqtas 8mo ago
    > It's like the apathetic masses want the billionaires to become trillionaires as long as they get their tiktok fix. it's much worse. a great demographic of hacker news love gen. AI.. these are usually highly educated people showing their true faces on the plethora of problems this technology violates and generates

somewhereoutth 8mo ago

I suspect a lot of this is due to large amounts of liquidity sloshing around looking for returns. We are still dealing with the consequences of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and QE (Quantitative Easing) where money to support the economy through the Great Financial Crisis and Covid was largely funneled in to the top, causing the 'everything bubble'. The rich got (a lot) richer, and now have to find something to do with that wealth. The immeasurable returns promised by LLMs (in return for biblical amounts of investment) fits that bill very well.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

mcphage 8mo ago

> What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching. I can’t speak to the economy as a whole, but the tech economy has a long history of bubbles and scams. Some huge successes, too—but gets it wrong more often than it gets it right.

Archelaos 8mo ago

In 2024, global GDP was $111 trillion.[1] Investing 1 or 2 % of that to improve global productivity via AI does not seem exaggerated to me. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD

throwaw12 8mo ago
I will put it differently, Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50% more and make top 1% unbelievable rich while everyone else looking for jobs or getting 50 year mortgage, seem very bad idea to me.
- cheonn638 8mo ago
  >Investing 1 or 2% of global GDP to increase wealth gap 50% more What’s your definition of wealth gap? Is it how you feel when you see the name of a billionaire?
  - fennecbutt 8mo ago
    Yes the very fact that billionaires exist mean our species has failed. I do not believe that there is a legitimate billionaire on the planet, in that they haven't engaged in stock manipulation, lobbying, insider trading, corrupt deals, monopolistic practices, dark patterns, corporate tax dodging, personal tax dodging. You could for example say that the latter are technically legal and therefore okay, but it's my belief that they're "technically legal/loopholes" because we have reached a point where the rich are so powerful that they bend the laws to their own ends. Our species is a bit of a disappointment. People would rather focus on trivial tribal issues than on anything that impacts the majority of the members of our species. We are well and truly animals.
  - mjamesaustin 8mo ago
    It's easy to access statistics about wealth and income inequality. It is worse than it has ever been, and continuing to get worse. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

hackable_sand 8mo ago

Your comment doesn't say anything

thefz 8mo ago

> If AI is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity, Thing is, I am still waiting to see where it increases productivity aside from some extremely small niches like speech to text and summarizing some small text very fast.

sigseg1v 8mo ago
Serious question, but have you not used it to implement anything at your job? Admittedly I was very skeptical but last sprint in 2 days I got 12 pull requests up for review by running 8 agents on my computer in parallel and about 10 more on cloud VMs. The PRs are all double reviewed and QA'd and merged. The ones that don't have PRs are larger refactors, one 40K loc and the other 30k loc and I just need actual time to go through every line myself and self-test appropriately, otherwise it would have been more stuff finished. These are all items tied to money in our backlog. It would have taken me about 5 times as long to close those items out without this tooling. I also would have not had as much time to produce and verify as many unit tests as I did. Is this not increased productivity?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- thefz 8mo ago
  So you roll a dice and call yourself a software engineer, basically.
  - sigseg1v 8mo ago
    I have an engineering degree but don't call myself an engineer because it's illegal to do so in my country unless I hold a PEng. That aside, I fail to see how code where I have reviewed every single line, tested all edge cases as normal, had 2 other devs also test this, had a QA test, and had a PO run and approve the behaviour as "rolling the dice" but you're entitled to your opinion.
throwaw12 8mo ago
Are you doctor or a farmer? If you are a software engineer you are missing out a lot, literally a lot!

TheDong 8mo ago

There's one additional question we could have here, which is "is AI here to stay and is it net-positive, or does it have significant negative externalities" > What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching. We've so far found two ways in recent memory that our economy massively fails when it comes to externalities. Global Warming continues to get worse, and we cannot globally coordinate to stop it when the markets keep saying "no, produce more oil, make more CO2, it makes _our_ stock go up until the planet eventually dies, but our current stock value is more important than the nebulous entire planet's CO2". Ads and addiction to gambling games, tiktok, etc also are a negative externality where the company doing the advertising or making the gambling game gains profit, but at the expense of effectively robbing money from those with worse impulse control and gambling problems. Even if the market votes that AI will successfully extract enough money to be "here to stay", I think that doesn't necessarily mean the market is getting things right nor that it necessarily increases productivity. Gambling doesn't increase productivity, but the market around kalshi and sports betting sure indicates it's on the rise lately.

mschuster91 8mo ago

> People will take courses in those things and try to get a piece of the winnings. The problem is boom-bust cycles. Electricians will always be in demand but it takes about 3 years to properly train even a "normal" residential electrician - add easily 2-3 years on top to work on the really nasty stuff aka 50 kV and above. No matter what, the growth of AI is too rapid and cannot be sustained. Even if the supposed benefits of AI all come true - the level of growth cannot be upheld because everything else suffers.

marcosdumay 8mo ago
> it takes about 3 years to properly train even a "normal" residential electrician To pass ordinary wire with predefined dimensions in exposed conduits? No way it takes more than a few weeks.
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  I'm talking about proper German training, not the kind of shit that leads to what Cy Porter (the home inspector legend) exposes on Youtube. Shoddy wiring can hold up for a looong time in homes because outside of electrical car chargers and baking ovens nothing consumes high current over long time and as long as no device develops a ground fault, even a lack of a GFCI isn't noticeable. But a data center? Even smaller ones routinely rack up megawatts of power here, large hyperscaler deployments hundreds of megawatts. Sustained, not peak. That is putting a lot of stress on everything involved: air conditioning, power, communications. And for that to hold up, your neighbor Joe who does all kinds of trades as long as he's getting paid in cash won't cut it.
- chasd00 8mo ago
  It’s protected by requiring many hours (years) of apprenticeship. These kinds of heavily unionized jobs only reward seniority. Gotta pay your dues buddy!

HardCodedBias 8mo ago

"The real question is whether the boom is, economically, a mistake." The answer to this is two part: 1. Have we seen an increase in capability over the last couple of years? The answer here is clearly yes. 2. Do we think that this increase will continue? This is unknown. It seems so, but we don't know and these firms are clearly betting that it will. 1a. Do we think that with existing capability that there is tremendous latent demand? If so the buildout is still rational if progress stops.

majormajor 8mo ago

AI could be here to stay and "chase a career as an electrician helping build datacenters" could also be a mistake. The construction level could plateau or decline without a bubble popping. That's why it can't just be a market signal "go become an electrician" when the feedback loop is so slow. It's a social/governmental issue. If you make careers require expensive up-front investment largely shouldered by the individuals, you not only will be slow to react but you'll also end up with scores of people who "correctly" followed the signals right up until the signals went away.

throwaway0123_5 8mo ago
> you'll also end up with scores of people who "correctly" followed the signals right up until the signals went away. I think this is where we're headed, very quickly, and I'm worried about it from a social stability perspective (as well as personal financial security of course). There's probably not a single white-collar job that I'd feel comfortable spending 4+ years training for right now (even assuming I don't have to pay or take out debt for the training). Many people are having skills they spent years building made worthless overnight, without an obvious or realistic pivot available. Lots and lots of people who did or will do "all the right things," with no benefit earned from it. Even if hypothetically there is something new you can reskill into every five years, how is that sustainable? If you're young and without children, maybe it is possible. Certainly doesn't sound fun, and I say this as someone who joined tech in part because of how fast-paced it was.
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  > Many people are having skills they spent years building made worthless overnight, without an obvious or realistic pivot available. I'd like to see real examples of this, beyond trivial ones like low-quality copywriting (i.e. the "slop" before there was slop) that just turns into copyediting. Current AI's are a huge force multiplier for most white-collar skills, including software development.

dfedbeef 8mo ago