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> But will it? My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. For example, ATMs being auto

> But will it? My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. For example, ATMs being automated did cause a negative drop in teller jobs, but fast money any time does increase the velocity of money in the economy. It decreases savings rate and encourages spending among the class of people whose money imparts the highest multiplier. AI does not. All the spending on AI goes to a very small minority, who have a high savings rate. Junior employees that would have productively joined the labor force at good wages, must now compete to join the labor force at lower wages, depressing their purchasing power and reducing the flow of money. Look at all the most used things for AI: cutting out menial decisions such as customer service. There are no "productivity" gains for the economy here. Each person in the US hired to do that job would spend their entire paycheck. Now instead, that money goes to a mega-corp and the savings is passed on to execs. The price of the service provided is not dropping (yet). Thus, no technology savings is occurring, either. In my mind, the outcomes are: * Lower quality services * Higher savings rate * K-shaped economy catering to the high earners * Sticky prices * Concentration of compute in AI companies * Increased price of compute prevents new entrants from utilizing AI without paying rent-seekers, the AI companies * Cycle continues all previous steps We may reach a point where the only ones able to afford compute are AI companies and those that can pay AI companies. Where is the innovation then? It is a unique failure outcome I have yet to see anyone talk about, even though the supply and demand issues are present right now.

mullingitover 7mo ago
> My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable. The problem with services is that they're typically resistant to productivity growth, and that's finally changing. If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam.
- bwestergard 7mo ago
  "Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable." You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative. "If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam." It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?
  - somekyle2 7mo ago
    It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.
    - mullingitover 7mo ago
      It depends on outcome again: is the value of tutoring the social class elevation, or is it in the outcome of becoming more skilled and knowledgable? There's also the deeper philosophical question of what is the meaning of life, and if there's inherent value in learning outside of what remunerative advantages you reap from it.
  - mullingitover 7mo ago
    > Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being? Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated, or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention? If the value is in the outcome, the means to achieving that aren't of much consequence.
babypuncher 7mo ago
I would argue we've even already seen this play out with productivity gains across the economy over the last 40 years. The American middle class has been gradually declining since the '80s. AI seems likely to accelerate that trend for the exact reasons you point out. A lot of people recognize this pattern even if they can't articulate it, and that's why they hate AI so much. To them, it doesn't matter if AI lives up to the hype or not. Either it does and we're staring down a future of 20%+ unemployment, or it doesn't and the economy crashes because we put all our eggs in this basket. No matter what happens, the middle class is likely fucked, and anyone pushing AI as "the future" will be despised for it whether or not they're right. Personally, I think the solution here might be to artificially constrain the supply of productivity. If AI makes the average middle-class worker twice as productive, then maybe we should cut the number of work hours expected from them in a given week. The complete unwillingness of people in power to even acknowledge this problem is disheartening, and is highly reminiscent of the rampant corruption and wealth inequality of the Gilded Age. Technological progress that hurts more people than it helps isn't progress, it's class warfare.
- ElevenLathe 7mo ago
  > Technological progress that hurts more people than it helps isn't progress, it's class warfare. I think this is right. The historical analogue I keep drifting toward is Enclosure. LLM tech is like Enclosure for knowledge work. A small class of capital-holding winners will benefit. Everyone else will mostly get more desperate and dependent on those few winners for the means of subsistence. Productivity may eventually rise, but almost nobody alive today will benefit from it since either our livelihood will be decimated (knowledge workers, for now) or we will be forced into AI slop hell-world where our children are taught by right-wing robo-propagandists, we are surveilled to within an inch of our lives, and our doctor is replaced by an iPad (everyone who isn't fabulously wealthy). Maybe we can eek out a living being the meat arms of the World Mind, or maybe we'll turned into hamburger by robotic concentration camp guards.
  - balamatom 7mo ago
    I like how you identified the pattern of defeat and still complied in advance.
wagwang 7mo ago
> because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy by this logic, the invention of mechanized farm equipment, which displaced farm labor, didnt increase productivity
- malfist 7mo ago
  It made food cheaper.
- trollbridge 7mo ago
  The benefits largely accrued to the poorest people.
- whatisthiseven 7mo ago
  On the contrary, humanity spent nearly its entire existence calorically deficit, and until mechanized farming did we finally see health outcomes improve, height increase, IQ increase, and populations explode. Productivity gains in the case of mechanized labor got everyone out of subsistence farming and into factories. AI gets everyone out of every job and into nothing.
  - jopsen 7mo ago
    > AI gets everyone out of every job and into nothing. Why is mechanized thinking going to do that? When mechanized labor didn't?
    - concats 7mo ago
      > Why is mechanized thinking going to do that? When mechanized labor didn't? You're right. There is technically a category of work that relies on neither our ability to do physical labor nor excessive thinking. It just relies on being a human. The conclusion is thus obvious: AI is going to push us all into careers as photo models, OF-creators, and social media influencers! /s
dheera 7mo ago
> We may reach a point where the only ones able to afford compute are AI companies Nah. I think "good enough AI for 95% of people" will be able to run locally within 3-5 years on consumer-accessible devices. There will be concentration of the best compute in AI companies for training, but inference will always become cheaper over time. Decommissioned training chips will also become inference chips, adding even more compute capacity to inference. This is like computing once again. In 1990 only the upper class could afford computers, as of 2000 only the upper class owned mobile phones, as of now more or less everyone and their kid has these things.
- hn_acc1 7mo ago
  1990? We were solid lower-middle class, and I got a computer for Christmas in 1983. I bought my own, from $$ saved by working in 1987.
  - Karrot_Kream 7mo ago
    Computers were roughly ~ $1000 in 1990. How did your lower-middle class family justify a $1000 expenditure inflation adjusted to $2565 today? Average minimum wage in the US is $11.30 so that's 29 days working at minimum wage. My family was on the border of upper-lower and lower-middle and we bought a computer once and used it for 10+ years. I dumpster dove later to scavenge parts for upgrading until the mid 2000s when cheap computers became available.
    - cocoto 7mo ago
      Yes and also keep in mind that low-income in US is high income in most of the world!
      - doctorwho42 7mo ago
        I hate this point, so what? It's not like the lower class in "pick you region of interest" can take advantage of this localized price disparity. The poor person is poor based on their spending power with respect to the local economy and its pricing.
whiplash451 7mo ago
More likely, we will never know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
roncesvalles 7mo ago
Your argument is (mildly) a variant of the broken window fallacy. AI will bring about a de-sequestering of talent and resources from some sectors of the economy. It's very difficult to predict where these people and resources will go after that, and what effect that will have upon the world.
bluefirebrand 7mo ago
> It is a unique failure outcome I have yet to see anyone talk about It seems likely to me that we will reach a violent, bloody revolt before we possibly reach this point. That may be why no one is taking about this failure mode
alex43578 7mo ago
> cutting out menial decisions such as customer service. … Each person in the US hired to do that job would spend their entire paycheck This person can no longer get a customer service job, but why can’t they get another job? Customer service is hardly career with a huge sunk cost in training and with a non-fungible skill set. If they go get another job, compared to the base case of economy = customer service, we now have economy = customer service (AI) + new job.
- ssl-3 7mo ago
  It's easy for anyone to go get a different job as long as the supply of jobs is infinite. But it is not infinite; eventually, we reach a point where we no longer need additional ditch diggers.
  - alex43578 7mo ago
    “Demographic and labor market trends in the U.S. point to an ominous scenario. The nation potentially faces a shortfall of millions of workers in the decade to come — especially in the critical health care sector — due to a projected reduction in workforce participation.” The supply of jobs exceeds the supply of workers, so yes, you should be able to go and get another job.
    - matheusmoreira 7mo ago
      Give AI a medical license and all those critical health care jobs will literally disappear overnight.
      - generic92034 7mo ago
        It would require several breakthroughs in robotics and AI to automate a nurse's job. And then it would still be unlikely that this kind of automation is saving costs.
        NetMageSCW 7mo ago
victor106 7mo ago
> cutting out menial decisions such as customer service This is cited so often. We tried it at a large scale with some of the best engineering talent but unfortunately the humans on the other side preferred speaking to and interacting with a human by a wide margin. We are still trying with the latest AI models but humans are still doing better at serving other humans. In one of our studies, we observed by a large margin that our customers would hang up immediately on knowing that they are interacting with an AI system. I have heard this from others as well.
- dbspin 7mo ago
  Isn't it obvious why? We contact support services to fix material problems. 'This booking is wrong.' 'I want a refund for that.' AI systems aren't empowered to solve these problems. At best they can provide information. If the answer is information - the user can likely already find it online themselves (often from a better AI model than they're going to find running your support line). If they're calling, they most often want something done.
  - linkregister 7mo ago
    Do you know that to be true or are you speculating? As we argue on the orange site, companies are paying Sierra AI to integrate voice and text agents into their systems to look up account information and process refunds. Fallbacks to human agents are built in to these systems. We all hate phone trees because they never have the capability to handle exceptions to the most basic functions. We shout "speak to an agent!" into the phone because their website and phone trees only handle the happy path.
    - victor106 7mo ago
      We tried them as well and they did worse than a foundational LLM model which is saying something.
  - da_chicken 7mo ago
    Yeah, it's like trying to use an ORM to find data in the database that's invalid due to a bug. You can't see things in the system that break the premises of the system by using the system, and the fact that some things are "supposed to be impossible" doesn't change the reality of what's actually occurring in the data store. So customer support needs to know how the systems works and need to understand what the data means, but also has to know when the system is factually incorrect. Customer support has to know when the second party is speaking the truth.
WalterBright 7mo ago
> that money goes to a mega-corp and the savings is passed on to execs And the execs invest that money back into the economy.
- ssl-3 7mo ago
  And the executives do this in a golden shower of trickle-on economics. ...which didn't work so well during the Reagan administration, but I guess we're on course to try it again.
  - WalterBright 7mo ago
    No country has ever raised up poor people by eviscerating the wealthy.
    - r14c 7mo ago
      Isn't that exactly how the USSR became a global superpower?
      - synecdoche 7mo ago
        No, the poor stayed poor or even worse, starved to death. USSR self imploded.
        r14c 7mo ago
        Wasn't it like a surreally peaceful dissolution?
      - dh2022 7mo ago
        Soviet people’s standard of living was way below Western standards. Stalin took Russia out of the Middle Ages and into the w0th century at the cost of millions and millions of Russian luves.
    - bcrosby95 7mo ago
      Right, because the wealthy were eviscerated before horse and sparrow economics.
matheusmoreira 7mo ago
At some point we're gonna have to abolish the economy itself. We need to transition to a post-scarcity society where everything is abundant and there's no need to economize.
- pastel8739 7mo ago
  Is AI helping us get there? I don’t think AI has done anything to reduce the scarcity of food, shelter, physical goods—things that people actually use money for
- heavyset_go 7mo ago
  That is the future for significant shareholders, everyone else can starve.
im3w1l 7mo ago
In my humble opinion, money is a distraction most of the time when trying to understand economic matters. Instead it's better to take opposite view: looking at the flow of goods and services. AI will allow higher production of goods and services. If producing goods and services becomes cheap enough (and it's looking like it will become dirt cheap), then it will not take much redistribution for it to reach the masses. I think the true crisis will be one of purpose. That we live meaningless lives of leisurely abundance.
- pastel8739 7mo ago
  > and it's looking like it will become dirt cheap Why do you say this? How does AI helping us lower prices of goods?
  - NetMageSCW 7mo ago
    The same way lesser automation has reduced the price of goods. By allowing an increase in the scope of automation, AI will decrease the costs of goods. Someday.
eru 7mo ago
> My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. > It decreases savings rate and encourages spending among the class of people whose money imparts the highest multiplier. Huh, what? What kind of multiplier stuff are you talking about here? The central bank looks at the overall spending in the economy (well, including forecasts), and compares that with its targets. They adjust their policy stance accordingly to try and hit their targets. If people become more or less likely to spend their money ('multipliers') the central bank can and will adjust the amount of money available.
SergeAx 7mo ago
My prediction is that when Chinese factory-cities adapt to tremendous demand, we will see a new digital Renaissance with teraflops of compute in toasters and kettles. And we will laugh at laptops with 8 GB of RAM so hard. Your compute is someone else's sand.

mullingitover 7mo ago

> My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable. The problem with services is that they're typically resistant to productivity growth, and that's finally changing. If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam.

bwestergard 7mo ago
"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable." You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative. "If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high quality individualized tutoring for free, that's a pretty big game changer for a lot of people. Prices on these services have been rising to the stratosphere over the past few decades because it's so difficult to increase the productivity of individual medical practitioners and educators. We're entering an era that could finally break this logjam." It's not that process innovations are lacking, it's that product innovations are perceived as an indignity by most people. Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being?
- somekyle2 7mo ago
  It also seems like the value of quality tutoring that doesn't primarily function as social/class signaling goes down as tools capable of automating high quality intellectual work are more widely available.
  - mullingitover 7mo ago
    It depends on outcome again: is the value of tutoring the social class elevation, or is it in the outcome of becoming more skilled and knowledgable? There's also the deeper philosophical question of what is the meaning of life, and if there's inherent value in learning outside of what remunerative advantages you reap from it.
- mullingitover 7mo ago
  > Why should one child get an LLM teacher or doctor while others get individualized attention by a skilled human being? Is the value in the outcome of receiving medical advice and care, and becoming educated, or is the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention? If the value is in the outcome, the means to achieving that aren't of much consequence.

babypuncher 7mo ago

I would argue we've even already seen this play out with productivity gains across the economy over the last 40 years. The American middle class has been gradually declining since the '80s. AI seems likely to accelerate that trend for the exact reasons you point out. A lot of people recognize this pattern even if they can't articulate it, and that's why they hate AI so much. To them, it doesn't matter if AI lives up to the hype or not. Either it does and we're staring down a future of 20%+ unemployment, or it doesn't and the economy crashes because we put all our eggs in this basket. No matter what happens, the middle class is likely fucked, and anyone pushing AI as "the future" will be despised for it whether or not they're right. Personally, I think the solution here might be to artificially constrain the supply of productivity. If AI makes the average middle-class worker twice as productive, then maybe we should cut the number of work hours expected from them in a given week. The complete unwillingness of people in power to even acknowledge this problem is disheartening, and is highly reminiscent of the rampant corruption and wealth inequality of the Gilded Age. Technological progress that hurts more people than it helps isn't progress, it's class warfare.

ElevenLathe 7mo ago
> Technological progress that hurts more people than it helps isn't progress, it's class warfare. I think this is right. The historical analogue I keep drifting toward is Enclosure. LLM tech is like Enclosure for knowledge work. A small class of capital-holding winners will benefit. Everyone else will mostly get more desperate and dependent on those few winners for the means of subsistence. Productivity may eventually rise, but almost nobody alive today will benefit from it since either our livelihood will be decimated (knowledge workers, for now) or we will be forced into AI slop hell-world where our children are taught by right-wing robo-propagandists, we are surveilled to within an inch of our lives, and our doctor is replaced by an iPad (everyone who isn't fabulously wealthy). Maybe we can eek out a living being the meat arms of the World Mind, or maybe we'll turned into hamburger by robotic concentration camp guards.
- balamatom 7mo ago
  I like how you identified the pattern of defeat and still complied in advance.

wagwang 7mo ago

> because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy by this logic, the invention of mechanized farm equipment, which displaced farm labor, didnt increase productivity

malfist 7mo ago
It made food cheaper.
trollbridge 7mo ago
The benefits largely accrued to the poorest people.
whatisthiseven 7mo ago
On the contrary, humanity spent nearly its entire existence calorically deficit, and until mechanized farming did we finally see health outcomes improve, height increase, IQ increase, and populations explode. Productivity gains in the case of mechanized labor got everyone out of subsistence farming and into factories. AI gets everyone out of every job and into nothing.
- jopsen 7mo ago
  > AI gets everyone out of every job and into nothing. Why is mechanized thinking going to do that? When mechanized labor didn't?
  - concats 7mo ago
    > Why is mechanized thinking going to do that? When mechanized labor didn't? You're right. There is technically a category of work that relies on neither our ability to do physical labor nor excessive thinking. It just relies on being a human. The conclusion is thus obvious: AI is going to push us all into careers as photo models, OF-creators, and social media influencers! /s

dheera 7mo ago

> We may reach a point where the only ones able to afford compute are AI companies Nah. I think "good enough AI for 95% of people" will be able to run locally within 3-5 years on consumer-accessible devices. There will be concentration of the best compute in AI companies for training, but inference will always become cheaper over time. Decommissioned training chips will also become inference chips, adding even more compute capacity to inference. This is like computing once again. In 1990 only the upper class could afford computers, as of 2000 only the upper class owned mobile phones, as of now more or less everyone and their kid has these things.

hn_acc1 7mo ago
1990? We were solid lower-middle class, and I got a computer for Christmas in 1983. I bought my own, from $$ saved by working in 1987.
- Karrot_Kream 7mo ago
  Computers were roughly ~ $1000 in 1990. How did your lower-middle class family justify a $1000 expenditure inflation adjusted to $2565 today? Average minimum wage in the US is $11.30 so that's 29 days working at minimum wage. My family was on the border of upper-lower and lower-middle and we bought a computer once and used it for 10+ years. I dumpster dove later to scavenge parts for upgrading until the mid 2000s when cheap computers became available.
  - cocoto 7mo ago
    Yes and also keep in mind that low-income in US is high income in most of the world!
    - doctorwho42 7mo ago
      I hate this point, so what? It's not like the lower class in "pick you region of interest" can take advantage of this localized price disparity. The poor person is poor based on their spending power with respect to the local economy and its pricing.

whiplash451 7mo ago

More likely, we will never know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

roncesvalles 7mo ago

Your argument is (mildly) a variant of the broken window fallacy. AI will bring about a de-sequestering of talent and resources from some sectors of the economy. It's very difficult to predict where these people and resources will go after that, and what effect that will have upon the world.

bluefirebrand 7mo ago

> It is a unique failure outcome I have yet to see anyone talk about It seems likely to me that we will reach a violent, bloody revolt before we possibly reach this point. That may be why no one is taking about this failure mode

alex43578 7mo ago

> cutting out menial decisions such as customer service. … Each person in the US hired to do that job would spend their entire paycheck This person can no longer get a customer service job, but why can’t they get another job? Customer service is hardly career with a huge sunk cost in training and with a non-fungible skill set. If they go get another job, compared to the base case of economy = customer service, we now have economy = customer service (AI) + new job.

ssl-3 7mo ago
It's easy for anyone to go get a different job as long as the supply of jobs is infinite. But it is not infinite; eventually, we reach a point where we no longer need additional ditch diggers.
- alex43578 7mo ago
  “Demographic and labor market trends in the U.S. point to an ominous scenario. The nation potentially faces a shortfall of millions of workers in the decade to come — especially in the critical health care sector — due to a projected reduction in workforce participation.” The supply of jobs exceeds the supply of workers, so yes, you should be able to go and get another job.
  - matheusmoreira 7mo ago
    Give AI a medical license and all those critical health care jobs will literally disappear overnight.
    - generic92034 7mo ago
      It would require several breakthroughs in robotics and AI to automate a nurse's job. And then it would still be unlikely that this kind of automation is saving costs.
      - NetMageSCW 7mo ago

victor106 7mo ago

> cutting out menial decisions such as customer service This is cited so often. We tried it at a large scale with some of the best engineering talent but unfortunately the humans on the other side preferred speaking to and interacting with a human by a wide margin. We are still trying with the latest AI models but humans are still doing better at serving other humans. In one of our studies, we observed by a large margin that our customers would hang up immediately on knowing that they are interacting with an AI system. I have heard this from others as well.

dbspin 7mo ago
Isn't it obvious why? We contact support services to fix material problems. 'This booking is wrong.' 'I want a refund for that.' AI systems aren't empowered to solve these problems. At best they can provide information. If the answer is information - the user can likely already find it online themselves (often from a better AI model than they're going to find running your support line). If they're calling, they most often want something done.
- linkregister 7mo ago
  Do you know that to be true or are you speculating? As we argue on the orange site, companies are paying Sierra AI to integrate voice and text agents into their systems to look up account information and process refunds. Fallbacks to human agents are built in to these systems. We all hate phone trees because they never have the capability to handle exceptions to the most basic functions. We shout "speak to an agent!" into the phone because their website and phone trees only handle the happy path.
  - victor106 7mo ago
    We tried them as well and they did worse than a foundational LLM model which is saying something.
- da_chicken 7mo ago
  Yeah, it's like trying to use an ORM to find data in the database that's invalid due to a bug. You can't see things in the system that break the premises of the system by using the system, and the fact that some things are "supposed to be impossible" doesn't change the reality of what's actually occurring in the data store. So customer support needs to know how the systems works and need to understand what the data means, but also has to know when the system is factually incorrect. Customer support has to know when the second party is speaking the truth.

WalterBright 7mo ago

> that money goes to a mega-corp and the savings is passed on to execs And the execs invest that money back into the economy.

ssl-3 7mo ago
And the executives do this in a golden shower of trickle-on economics. ...which didn't work so well during the Reagan administration, but I guess we're on course to try it again.
- WalterBright 7mo ago
  No country has ever raised up poor people by eviscerating the wealthy.
  - r14c 7mo ago
    Isn't that exactly how the USSR became a global superpower?
    - synecdoche 7mo ago
      No, the poor stayed poor or even worse, starved to death. USSR self imploded.
      - r14c 7mo ago
        Wasn't it like a surreally peaceful dissolution?
    - dh2022 7mo ago
      Soviet people’s standard of living was way below Western standards. Stalin took Russia out of the Middle Ages and into the w0th century at the cost of millions and millions of Russian luves.
  - bcrosby95 7mo ago
    Right, because the wealthy were eviscerated before horse and sparrow economics.

matheusmoreira 7mo ago

At some point we're gonna have to abolish the economy itself. We need to transition to a post-scarcity society where everything is abundant and there's no need to economize.

pastel8739 7mo ago
Is AI helping us get there? I don’t think AI has done anything to reduce the scarcity of food, shelter, physical goods—things that people actually use money for
heavyset_go 7mo ago
That is the future for significant shareholders, everyone else can starve.

im3w1l 7mo ago

In my humble opinion, money is a distraction most of the time when trying to understand economic matters. Instead it's better to take opposite view: looking at the flow of goods and services. AI will allow higher production of goods and services. If producing goods and services becomes cheap enough (and it's looking like it will become dirt cheap), then it will not take much redistribution for it to reach the masses. I think the true crisis will be one of purpose. That we live meaningless lives of leisurely abundance.

pastel8739 7mo ago
> and it's looking like it will become dirt cheap Why do you say this? How does AI helping us lower prices of goods?
- NetMageSCW 7mo ago
  The same way lesser automation has reduced the price of goods. By allowing an increase in the scope of automation, AI will decrease the costs of goods. Someday.

eru 7mo ago

> My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. > It decreases savings rate and encourages spending among the class of people whose money imparts the highest multiplier. Huh, what? What kind of multiplier stuff are you talking about here? The central bank looks at the overall spending in the economy (well, including forecasts), and compares that with its targets. They adjust their policy stance accordingly to try and hit their targets. If people become more or less likely to spend their money ('multipliers') the central bank can and will adjust the amount of money available.

SergeAx 7mo ago

My prediction is that when Chinese factory-cities adapt to tremendous demand, we will see a new digital Renaissance with teraflops of compute in toasters and kettles. And we will laugh at laptops with 8 GB of RAM so hard. Your compute is someone else's sand.