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So a lot of people might lose their jobs because of AI, right? But the same amount of economic output, probably more, will be produced because of AI. By whom wi

• fnordpiglet 7mo ago
  Because in modern society we equate toil with morality we will toil on ever more meaningless crap tasks for food coupons for food that costs nothing to produce but is withheld through artificial scarcity to ensure meaningless toil occupies our existence because of a philosophy from the 1700’s.
  • ghufran_syed 7mo ago
    I look forward to seeing your company actually producing and selling food for “next to nothing”, given how easy it apparently is
    • CalRobert 7mo ago
      Bulk grains, etc are pretty cheap.
      • ehnto 7mo ago
        That may waver, a main input across the whole chain for farming is crude oil.
      • lanfeust6 7mo ago
        I'm not sure what this is contradicting. People can already get free food through a myriad of different institutions, including the government qua food stamps and welfare. Cheap grains are affordable by basically anyone who earn an income.
    • fennecfoxy 7mo ago
      Turns out, plants have been growing all by themselves for millions of years. Lmao.
      • sulam 7mo ago
        Yeah those idiot farmers with all their machinery and services are really missing out on your trenchant observations.
        • fennecfoxy 7mo ago
          No, what I'm really saying is that the baseline of plat growing is "it works by itself". Anything above letting nature take its course is a force multiplier. As opposed to other technologies; microchips do not grow on trees.
    • fnordpiglet 7mo ago
      We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat, and as more automation sets in, labor costs will decline. We are already at artificial scarcity - other than political animus rooted in racism and toil is moral there’s no reason for anyone anywhere to starve. This trend won’t reverse, but will become increasingly perverse. For example, in my neck of the woods there’s the company Carbon Robotics, which is pretty successful. They develop autonomous tractors and a laser weeding system both of which have good adoption and sales at megafarms. They decrease the cost of herbicide application and labor significantly. That’s just one such company. It’s to the point that farms go fallow, or convert to solar, because the revenue produced farming isn’t enough to justify farming because we would be feeding people for free otherwise. That, my friend, is artificial scarcity. So keep toiling for your food coupons and convince yourself that the market is infallible.
      • dionidium 7mo ago
        > We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat, Who is this "we?" There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth." Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.
      • squeaky-clean 7mo ago
        Producing the food is only 10% of the challenge. How do you deliver it to everyone at no cost without rotting? How do you deal with a delivery of flour if you have no oven? If it's so easy this is ripe for a startup to disrupt. Food is the most necessary thing to human existence. Every living person is a potential customer.
      • grigri907 7mo ago
        I agree, we can - and should - produce enough food for everyone on earth to be happy and healthy. But nobody is saying "people shouldn't eat for free, therefore I won't grow crops." You said it yourself: farms are left fallow because the revenue doesn't justify the cost for the farmer. That, my friend, is basic economics, not artificial scarcity.
  • gruez 7mo ago
    >we will toil on ever more meaningless crap tasks for food coupons for food that costs nothing to produce but is withheld through artificial scarcity Seems dubious given how much agricultural subsidies most western countries engage in. If anything foods are under-priced.
• SequoiaHope 7mo ago
  I agree completely, but you forget that another option is that the powerful will use these tools to make us suffer and we will be powerless to stop them.
  • throwuxiytayq 7mo ago
    Well, we could vote. In some parts of the world, at least.
    • returnInfinity 7mo ago
      And look at what that led to. Democracy is not a panacea.
    • fennecfoxy 7mo ago
      You would vote. Everyone else would vote for "their party" regardless of policy cause tribalism. Plus politics always follows the same old pattern "AI took your jobs? We generate food etc so cheaply now it may as well be free? Our robots could be building human shelters for free? Those are _small_ problems, if I get in I'll stop those dirty immigrants coming in! I'll make it so that men act like men and women act like women and they both use the correct bathroom! I'll get rid of the gays, too!" And it's not even just the right leaning that are tricked. The left get thrown a bone now & then on some trivial thing like getting gay marriage (which shouldn't have even been an argument, more of a realisation) meanwhile nothing is done about corporate tax evasion, improving labour laws etc - or they lean too far into their voterbase and allow rampant immigration, welfare handouts without checks & balances etc. And all of this because managing a large group of human is pretty much impossible. We need to reorganise into smaller groups.
  • dandanua 7mo ago
    That's the default option. Power seeks only more power, sharing is worthless to it, except as a temporary instrument. And AI is a perfect tool to concentrate even more power in tiny hands.
• Moto7451 7mo ago
  Yes-Anding you, if one developer is suddenly 3x more productive and does 40 hours of work in 15 with AI tools, any reasonable manager would still want the same three people to keep working at 3x productivity. I don’t see Keynes’ theory we would all be working drastically fewer hours per week suddenly materializing due to AI. As always we’re just going to try to output more in the same time. The fact I, a manager, can “vibe code” some bugs away between meetings does not mean I will benefit from having one less dedicated engineer.
  • laughing_man 7mo ago
    You need paying customers for whatever those developers are producing. If your market size is relatively fixed, you don't need three people anymore. Look at it this way: if there really was a 3x market potential, why wouldn't that manager have hired six more people already?
    • kuboble 7mo ago
      One thing could be that there is an extra management cost for each person to manage. It's much easier to manage 3 people with better tools than to manage 9 people even if their output would be the same
    • Moto7451 7mo ago
      No because you have the customers and budget in that moment for three already and I’m not interjecting that more budget is given or any taken away. Restated, I’m not saying we’re hiring more or less because of LLM AI productivity changes. I’m rejecting the idea we need less people for all the previous reasons stated and my own two cents that we’re yet to see the reduced work hours Keynesian economics predicted as output per hour increased. We humans just keep working the same hours even if that hour is massively more productive. This last point is well studied and not my own original thought. I’m just poorly regurgitating college level Macro Economics. My own point I’ll add here is we’re not seeing companies bragging about their two day work weeks. My personal experience with layoffs is that it’s all been financial engineering and the lack of nearly free financing that we had in the 2010s, again in the Pandemic, CapEx tax changes last year, and/or over hiring similar to but not nearly as massive as Google and Facebook. I worked for a European company that hired a dozen Americans to become more “US Tech Company” like and eventually let us all go two years ago once the fun money ran out when rates increased. They did a little bit of the AI babbling but realistically they couldn’t get the financing to keep it all rolling. The companies reducing to one developer for a product are likely not doing this because of LLM AI work but likely will survive better because of it. To your point, I’m actually living it and it’s nothing to do with AI. One of my teams was cut to 25% of its size a year ago and the whole QA team let go. Roughly this was an EBITA play. Basically the only way we get anything done is by doing what I mentioned in my earlier post where the front end dev uses LLMs to build a prototype backend they can use to support their front end expertise and the back end dev does the same for the front end. Eventually they meet in the middle and I can juggle some of the KTLO myself. Is this fun? Absolutely not. If we had the headcount back we’d be able to meet the ‘25-26 roadmap but instead we’re doing 40% of it.
• bryanrasmussen 7mo ago
  >better quality output. that doesn't seem to follow necessarily.
• zarzavat 7mo ago
  > prices will have to come down Prices of services will come down. Prices of things that require natural resources will go up. In a hypothetical world where let's say we have AIs that can do any human job more effectively than a human, rich people who can afford to control the AIs will control society and poor people who have nothing to offer economically will live in poverty. A good proxy for our future is Angola: an upper class who got rich off the oil boom, and a lower class who is dirt poor because they have nothing to offer the oil industry.
  • gmerc 7mo ago
    You forgot monopolies break the “price must come down”.
    • sulam 7mo ago
      I think their assumption is that there will not be enough people with money to pay the prices, monopoly-generated or not.
      • generic92034 7mo ago
        On essential goods the prices can still be high enough to make everyone poor.
  • matheweis 7mo ago
    > Prices of things that require natural resources will go up. This suggests a potential equilibrium sooner rather than later .. few modern technological advances have been as resource hungry as AI
  • nazgul17 7mo ago
    Is it a good proxy, though? My intuition is that many economic effects play out very differently if they are limited to one country vs the whole world. To make this more concrete, tax havens only work because most countries keep producing for real. AI will take all jobs, not just Angolan jobs.
  • 7mo ago
• throwaway290 7mo ago
  > But the same amount of economic output, probably more, will be produced because of AI > Society as a whole will be better off because there is more output > better quality output citation needed > By whom will that output then be consumed? So there's this thing called "waste"... > If people don't have jobs they don't have money to buy and therefore ... prices will have to come down! Yeah, and falling prices and unemployment are sure signs of boom and prosperity... > government that shares the fruits of AI with everybody, by way of progressive taxation. Government, use the taxes you collect to give us free food and you think though that never happened is now possible because?
• laughing_man 7mo ago
  We may very well end up with similar prices, a few stupendously wealthy people, and the rest of us living on the dole.
  • baxtr 7mo ago
    I wouldn’t say it’s impossible but I’d argue from all we know now highly unlikely. Why? Assume a company has a high margin because they used AI and reduced their workforce by 10x. What usually happens is that a new competitor comes in and offers the same for half the price. Since AI is lowering the bar for entry this process should be even faster than previously.
    • Epa095 7mo ago
      What usually happens is that that competitors then gets disappeared. Either by a happy ending (it gets bought up), or it gets squeezed out. Monopolies arise naturally unless we work hard to avoid them.
      • baxtr 7mo ago
        Monopolies stay stable only with a sustainable competitive advantage, eg through network effects or patents. With no barriers, margins get squeezed out rapidly.
    • bluefirebrand 7mo ago
      > Assume a company has a high margin because they used AI and reduced their workforce by 10x. What usually happens is that a new competitor comes in and offers the same for half the price. Wouldn't you need 10x the number of competitors to get back to the same amount of employees, assuming they are running with similar workforces?
      • baxtr 7mo ago
        Yes, true for existing companies. On the other hand we still don’t know which new companies will be created that couldn’t be be created before due to unfavorable economics.
• intended 7mo ago
  Eh, the line of better quality output is suspect. I’ve been looking at AI productivity gains, and the idea that it’s better quality output is the weakest claim that can be made. There ARE more software project starts, yes. This also means it’s a more crowded field to be noticed in. Also productivity gains are HIGHLY variable. I see some people being 2x more effective, most people publicly willing to claim 30% efficiency gains, and a more likely 15% gain for most people. At the same time, I hear of cases in content and media where it’s essentially a wipeout. I know of a story where a firm went to an advertisement agency with an AI generated video they wanted, and only wanted the animations cleaned up. When they got the quote for the costs to have it done professionally, they decided to just go with the AI generated video. Fraud is another area which is seeing a boom. The degree of information pollution we are seeing has also seen a step change. This matters because all the rosy eyed theories of productivity gains from AI do not account for changes to our shared information commons. The business cases that come to mind are Fast Fashion, and Coke vs Pepsi, and Tobacco.
• csomar 7mo ago
  I like your optimistic view. The reality is that AI concentrates power and when power concentrates, the rulers can dictate. Democracy is not just voting but also a productive populace that has a voice in the production process. The people on the top are not going to share sh*t. That's just not how greed works.
• gosub100 7mo ago
  > We can do this, in a democracy. In a democracy where corporations have 0 representation, I would agree with you. However, they do have representation in a way that is invisible to see and impossible to quantify. And it goes beyond citizens united. There is an invisible hand pressing on the scales.
• overfeed 7mo ago
  > If people don't have jobs they don't have money to buy and therefore ... prices will have to come down Here's the one trick the oligarchs will not tell you: they intend to bill the government directly, they won't care if unemployment rises to 80%. They'll keep it up for however long the taxes and debt will last, and then jet off to their bunkers to usher in what comes next - or wait out the chaos.
• Epa095 7mo ago
  Progressive taxes hit wage earners, while its the owners who will reap the benefits of AI. We won't get a share of the fruits without solving how to properly tax wealth(in a world where money is power, and its trivial for rich people to move to a different tax regime), which unfortunately seems tabu in large parts of the western world.
  • BrenBarn 7mo ago
    That's true, although "progressive taxes" can be construed more broadly. Taxes on unrealized capital gains would be a start.
    • slikc 7mo ago
      Great, i don'trust the government with my pension retirement. Put all my life savings(that i already paid taxes on) on an investment portfolio. Now the government wants a cut on my unrealized gains as well. Do you realize each time the money changes hands it gets taxed? Do you trust the gov to be as effective and as efficent with that money att all?
    • sofixa 7mo ago
      > Taxes on unrealized capital gains would be a start A start to what? There is no way of taxing unrealised capital gains that makes sense. You're taxing theoretical value that may or may not actually exist. Rebates (e.g. you're taxed on theoretical current value, but when you realise the actual gain, you get back the difference if there is any) just moves the problem around, makes everything complicated, and penalises attempting growth.
      • Scarblac 7mo ago
        It's not hard. Tax the amount the stocks are valued at at january 1. Make exceptions for investments in illiquid things.
        • sofixa 7mo ago
          Ok, and on the 2nd the price crashes, company goes bankrupt, stock is worth zero. You were taxes on theoretical value that you can't sell at to pay that tax. What then?
• bandrami 7mo ago
  As of now, at least, nobody is actually seeing an increase of productivity from AI that shows up in any measurements anybody is making. So some of this talk is really getting ahead of the facts on the ground.
• libertine 7mo ago
  Prices don't have to come down, in fact I doubt they will ever come down. Maybe you will have a class that can afford things and services, and another class who can only afford services and service based things. Some one own things, others will rent them fractionally.
• xbmcuser 7mo ago
  The problem is not type of government but rather the type of economic system people in the west especially in the US have been brainwashed into conflating democracy with capitalism. Europe was able to keep some socialist values for a few decades after world war 2 but capitalists were able to wipe a lot of in the last 20-30 years.
• laffOr 7mo ago
  Rich people will consume most of the output. This is how life worked for most of the last 10k years, didn't it?
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]