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What will our economic future look like?

• 1vuio0pswjnm7 26d ago
  I thought for a moment "our" might refer to Anthropic's future
• daveguy 26d ago
  Slick bullshit. That's AI.
• roger_maddux_ii 26d ago
  [dead]
• righthand 26d ago
  Hopefully free from the burden of LLM companies.
• yodon 26d ago
  I try to never be that guy who complains about the way a web page scrolls, but this page is completely unreadable.
• dkdbejwi383 26d ago
  > Ultimately, what the economy looks like in 2030 depends on many factors, like what AI can do, and how companies and workers choose to adopt it. So the answer is basically "beats me lol"
  • whobre 26d ago
    And honestly that’s the only real answer. Predicting future is a fool’s errand.
    • deleted 26d ago
      [deleted]
• elliotec 26d ago
  You’d think the most powerful AI could make a website that doesn’t completely break usability by destroying scroll.
• 129876 26d ago
  What a reversal from Amodei's doom marketing! This is of course a slop paper with vague assumptions and equations that no single human economist will ever read. The messaging is "it will not be so bad", in line with the recent Economist piece. We are ready for the midterm elections!
• deleted 26d ago
  [deleted]
• altcognito 26d ago
  Good or bad, nothing ages as poorly as economic or market predictions.
• dgellow 26d ago
  > Like any economic model, this one has limits. For example, we did not include scenarios where humanity develops hyper-capable robots. I didn’t see the scenario “what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”. Which IMHO is the most important one to consider given it is the blind spot pretty much all the AI labs have. What if the economic impact is negative? I don’t understand how you can study such a topic without considering the risk of being wrong, not in magnitude but in kind.
  • lp0_on_fire 26d ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
  • wing-_-nuts 26d ago
    I have no doubt that AI will massively transform society. That cat is out of the bag. It took decades for electricity, and then computers to change society, but this is the first technology where the average person can simply describe the problem they're trying to solve and it will at least attempt to help them solve it. I very. much. doubt. that the trillions of dollars spent on AI will have a positive ROI for most companies in the race. It's all well and good to have the latest fable, but if some chinese company is hosting a cheap open weights model that's only 6mo behind at a tiny fraction of the price, you're gonna get your lunch eaten.
    • keybored 26d ago
      Yet another IT that will help the average person/democratize something, like the Internet and so on. Over three thousand comment boxes agree that the cat is out of the bag. No moats.
    • TheOtherHobbes 26d ago
      Which is only Stage 1. Stage 2 is where you have a Cambrian explosion of models all competing for compute, and not long after that for robotic extension into Real World. Stage 3 gets hard to imagine from here. Maybe there will be permanent hyperevolution. Maybe One Model to Rule Them All will appear. Either way, I don't see how Economics as We Know It can continue to exist. That includes all of capitalism and almost certainly all of politics. Successful AGI with robotic support means a post-scarcity economy where AGI's understanding of physics sets the limits, not politics or economics. But the post-scarcity element won't be evenly distributed. And it's not remotely impossible that humans won't be invited to the party. We can't even be sure that AGI won't have a less limited understanding of physics than we do. There's going to be enjoyable irony in watching Altman et all getting their lunches eaten by the thing they've created. But - realistically - it probably won't last long.
• oxqbldpxo 26d ago
  It's been 4 years. Nothing meaningful.
  • urieiejr 26d ago
    [dead]
  • Squarex 26d ago
    Has your job not be completely changed? Have you not noticed a worse job market?
    • nobleach 26d ago
      I'm not sure I'd call that "meaningful" in the sense of "trillions of dollars and datacenters built all over the place" meaningful. Yes, I can now tell Claude to build a feature and it often does an okay job. I can ship faster. I can't tell you that it's worth spending the true cost of AI for that however. What'll be nice is 5 years of data showing that companies are raking in more money because they shipped more features. We haven't seen that yet. Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.
      • simianwords 26d ago
        there's a popular misconception that AI is so extremely costly that when the world finally comes to terms with it, we will stop using AI and things will die down. i'm sorry to burst your bubble: this won't happen. the inference cost of AI has been dropping ~5x over every 6 months. AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.
        • nobleach 26d ago
          That doesn't cause the amount that's already been spent to simply disappear. To recoup, they're going to need to sell a LOT of subscriptions. In about 3 years, we'll need to upgrade the GPUs that we use - if we're still chasing frontier models. That cost remains to be seen. There's a ton of unknowns here. I don't have a bubble to burst.
• mentos 26d ago
  Prices will fall to their raw material costs?
  • analog31 26d ago
    Raw material cost of labor is subsistence. Adam Smith pointed this out.
    • ggreer 26d ago
      If you have machines that substitute for human labor, wages fall to the cost of manufacturing & running the machines, which is well below human subsistence level. Fortunately, you also get very high economic growth rates. So even people with small amounts of money invested will end up far richer than when they had a job. Then the question becomes, "What happens to people when machines are far more intelligent & powerful and are doubling every few months?"
      • analog31 26d ago
        Falling below subsistence means people starve and cease to exist until supply and demand equalize or “something else” happens. That’s what Smith was getting at. Thus subsistence is a price floor for human labor. Something else could mean developing a new concept of ownership or a new form of redistribution.
        • ggreer 26d ago
          I said that wages would fall below human subsistence level, not that income would fall below subsistence level. People would still get income from other sources such as investments, charity, and government (via taxes on others).
          • teamonkey 26d ago
            Where are the taxes coming from? If people’s wages are below subsistence levels they’ll sell their investments to survive. There can be no possibility of upward class mobility in this scenario.
• epolanski 26d ago
  Judging the quality of this blogpost/presentation, AI is centuries away from being able to replace humans.
• ghm2199 26d ago
  Are you guys feeling all high and mighty doing all these predictions? I think the money they are spending on trying to inform policy could be better spent on getting all major labs together with the government, and making sure that 1. At least 10% of your net spend is on safety and harm mitigation before you accelerate yourselves into doing real harm to real people tomorrow. 2. Pause all AI enhancement until a proper mechanistic study can be done by a working group funded by you all to understand how AI model Safety can be enforced by something less lame than a Constitution/Spec.
• JacobiX 26d ago
  > As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases. This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses"
  • slfnflctd 26d ago
    Our culture and the socioeconomic structures it reinforces will not change easily. More than ever, I feel we need both grassroots activism and key players at the top of the hierarchy. Otherwise, it is all too obvious where most of the rewards from increased productivity will go. The wealth hoarding has got to be curtailed.
    • throwawayqqq11 25d ago
      What changes fast thou, is economic structures and societal structures will follow. This is classic marx (base<->superstructure) or the power aspect of economics. One true dystopia i see possible, is mecha hitler slowly displacing and controlling (white collar) city dwellers to the point of silent obedience. This Anthropic article is imo propganda to buy time for shareholders and to delay potential stroms. Claiming AI as actors in a capitlistic system will fix systemic issues, is like claiming super sonic planes will fix world hunger.
  • alphawhisky 26d ago
    Call me crazy, but maybe our healthcare shouldn't be a "cost driven system". Maybe that was the issue before AI. But hell, what do I know?
    • JacobiX 26d ago
      [dead]
    • Squarex 26d ago
• orange_joe 26d ago
  I think it looks like the labs front running everyone’s work, freeloading on the last bits of human intelligence to ensure their owners a place as our masters.
• keybored 26d ago
  > [we don’t know] I haven’t forgot capitalist euphoria from 2023 about cutting worker power off at the root. That’s all these AI Cretins want. Well, that and an unnerving enthusiasm for personifying their AI Golems (Anthr. in particular here). Sorry to poo poo a post about AI company prompting their underlings to prompt out visualizations.
• KoolKat23 26d ago
  Definitely a bit of positive framing. My big take aways, either stagnant wages or significant paycuts for knowledge workers and overall decreases in employment rates on all scenarios. Worst of all... That's only forecasting out to 2030.
  • skinfaxi 26d ago
    In the US at least deaths will outpace births by 2030 so maybe a declining employment rate isn't as bad as it might seem in the long-term.
    • KoolKat23 26d ago
      Good point, perhaps it may be a saving grace. I note they don't comment much on the allocation of said capital. Might be too bitter a pill for most to swallow.
• grantpitt 26d ago
  Feels like we're going to read a blog soon enough that mirrors Wendell Berry's opening to The Unsettling of America: The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers: “. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm income wholly inadequate for them.” The proposed solutions were to find “better opportunities for the farm people,” “a more comprehensive national employment policy,” “retraining programs,” “improved general educational facilities,” etc. Both the commission and the writer of the article had obviously taken for granted that the lives and communities of small farmers then still on the farm—and those of the 25 million who had left the farm since 1940—were of less value than “technological advances in agriculture.” There seemed also to be no official doubt that adequate solutions were to be found in government supplied “opportunities,” facilities, and programs. Reading that article, I realized that my values were not only out of fashion, but under powerful attack. I saw that I was a member of a threatened minority. That is what set me off.
  • meindnoch 26d ago
    Btw, Wendell Berry died 10 days ago.
  • nemomarx 26d ago
    This is what the Luddites were primarily upset about, fwiw. That economic value and power would move away from their threatened minority group and towards landowners. It'll keep happening, and the new "opportunities" might be no better.
• alphawhisky 26d ago
  >We study how AI is reshaping the economy because we’re committed to ensuring that this transition is beneficial for society, including workers. Is it just me, or does their choice of identifying "workers" specifically seem a little peculiar? For me, it reads like "We're committed to making segregation beneficial for everyone, including minorities!"
  • sheepcow 26d ago
    Hmmm, I wonder what they'll do if they discover the transition is bad for workers? Pack up and go home I reckon!
• Toutouxc 26d ago
  I like how the least optimistic scenario is simply LLMs not making a difference, instead of the very real possibility of them damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality and leading to class wars. I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start making up for the mess they’ve created.
  • vouaobrasil 26d ago
    I don't think they can make up for any mess. Because even if LLMs bring about a lack of scarcity across all domains, human beings will be alienated because indvidual differences and skills won't matter any more so we'll have to be genetically engineered to like that sort of future. I don't think a stable and healthy society can coexist with LLMs at all.
    • idiotsecant 26d ago
      Individual skills and differences don't matter any less if the system of assigning value to human lives is divorced from how useful that human is to the collective. If I am not graded on how many widgets I make in a shift and instead can focus on making the most beautiful widget, or the most novel widget, or simply the widget that is most useful to my particular life am I less satisfied? We've somehow built a worldview based on our whole value as humans being equivalent to how good of a worker bee we are. Let's fix that part. This is of course a much harder problem than achieving AGI, since it's a messy human problem.
  • Dlemlo 26d ago
    How? Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow. The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks. You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.
    • 26d ago
• blooalien 26d ago
  One guy will die with "all the things" and the rest of us will just die.
• amelius 26d ago
  I just wonder when we will see 8ft tall humanoid robots walking through the streets.
  • anthonyrstevens 26d ago
    I'm going to say 2050 in the United States; 2040 in some conflict zone.
    • glaslong 26d ago
      2050 being when the US becomes a conflict zone
  • asdff 25d ago
    You better hope you will see them walking. Imagine them at full sprint towards you.
• Waterluvian 26d ago
  Those with the money and influence have always been in conflict with the masses that actually make the economy run. They would love nothing more than to do away with that problem. It allows them to control the terms of the economy.
• 28304283409234 26d ago
  > Think of a day in the life of a nurse You can think of any job as a bundle of tasks that someone does. She does rounds to check on a sick patient. She draws blood. Why is the nurse a she?
  • lbreakjai 26d ago
    About 90% of nurses are women.
• ang_cire 26d ago
  > The result: the nurse’s job changes > As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases. Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.
  • sscaryterry 26d ago
    There we go. Except, all business owners, private or public, will tell you that this isn't the case. :)
  • detectivestory 26d ago
    that didn't happen with self-checkout tills in supermakets...
    • leto_ii 26d ago
      Wdym? self-checkout definitely lead to fewer supermarket workers being employed.
      • heaney-555 26d ago
        Actually, it has been essentially balanced out by a greater need for behind-the-shelves workers to pack and load orders for online/app delivery and eCommerce orders. This is how the economy often works. The loss of one kind of job to technology lets the business grow by using the same number of staff, or often even more, to serve new opportunities/markets/products/services.
      • rootusrootus 26d ago
        The data seems to contradict that, if Freakonomics is to be believed (and some people don't like them, I get that). Apparently overall headcount actually increased as a result of self-checkout. E.g. cashiers did drop a little but loss prevention more than made up for it.
• josefritzishere 26d ago
  So far LLMs seem to be a dead end technology. The work product is so poor that it can't effectively replace workers as advertised. If it was priced to margin it'd be more expensive than humans as well. It's objectively a failure.
  • jiggawatts 26d ago
    OpenAI just solved a Millennium Prize Problem in a week. The AIs are already beyond human capability in some areas, and will be beyond human in all areas within single-digit years.
    • jryan49 25d ago
      It's probably a good idea to note that it cost them 10-15 million dollars in tokens to do so.
      • jiggawatts 25d ago
        Sure, but the cost-per-token is falling very rapidly. That cost will be mere thousands of dollars for a "million dollar problem" soon.
        • juvvel 25d ago
          [dead]
      • juvvel 25d ago
        Imagine what human researchers could have done with 10 millions... Maybe it wouldn't have been as fast, but I'm sure it would have created more usable knowledge because the work done by humans is usually more digestible to other humans.
• Dlemlo 26d ago
  I think we have a real problem because we know what we still need to build and as soon as it is build, it will work. Software development for example is enhanced with running your claude locally. But lets be honest, the right way to adjust 'project' is by writing some spec in a text field as an input, letting the ai do whatever it wants, having expert ais make sure its secure, then you do the last review and its done. What do we need for this? A full end to end integration. Its just something we need to build, nothing we need to invent. The nurse example is the same. We only need to build the computer end to end flow and plugin AI in the right spots and finetune for country specific requirements. The industry is building this 'agentic layer' today. The Hyperscaler are building this layer too. There is a golden phase were we will build all of this and were we cleanup old stuff and were we adjust with the current model capabilities and change systems and this will take a little bit of time, but the bottom line is already loosing left and right. The Blender support from Fable and Astra? Probably kills a lot of peoples jobs on fiverr. The small software someone needs? Got already killed by earlier models. Just a few days ago some architect (never written software) talked about how he vibecoded some tool for tracking working hours. Man even a basic website was expesnive to build just 2 years ago. The smaller, easier and better the code base, the easier it is to remove people from this. The software market in China is imploding and we will also see budget adjustments to move away from consultants and move them into AI Token budgets. We probably reached peak software development.
  • saturn8601 26d ago
    >The software market in China is imploding and we will also see budget adjustments to move away from consultants and move them into AI Token budgets. We probably reached peak software development. I've always heard that there was always an overproduction of STEM in China and thus companies always wrote stuff in house instead of relying on SASS. Do you have any more info on this implosion of the software market? I have heard that there is 25% youth unemployment there but thats across all sectors. I wish there was someone providing more concrete examples of how China is using AI. All I keep hearing is they are pragmatically applying it across all sectors but I don't see what in particular they are doing.
• ozgung 26d ago
  Finding 4 is a must-read: > Finding 4: Labor vs. capital share: The pie will grow, but a larger share might go to capital > Today, of each dollar the economy produces, about 60¢ goes to workers and 40¢ go to capital. Modest scenario: 40.6% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 0.6 points) Substantial scenario: 43.9% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 3.9 points) Extreme scenario: 54.8% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 14.8 points) So all the growth goes to capital. For knowledge workers: substantial unemployment and declining wages. For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power. (note: all of their estimates are for 2030, not for a distant future) Very dystopic indeed.
  • kelseyfrog 26d ago
    It's crazy how we all have to build the AI that will render us unemployed.
  • cman1444 26d ago
    >For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power. This is not necessarily a conclusion you can draw from that statement. It's possible that as the economic pie grows, workers' purchasing power increases compared to the counterfactual (a non-AI world), but their purchasing power does not increase as much as the capital owners' does.
    • ozgung 26d ago
      Correct. But… According to data in the site and paper [0] labor income is estimated $20T for all four scenarios (including no AI) in 2030. Which means capital takes ALL of the new pie coming from AI. Also, I am not an economist but I assume if you are not growing as much as GDP, it basically means you’re shrinking. Relatively shrinking, but since everything is relative in an economy you are actually shrinking. Table 4 in paper gives the numbers. [0] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/cf58f84d46a4a76bf5a5b039ac695fba6b80041c.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/files/4zrzovbb/website/cf58f84...
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• deleted 26d ago
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• vxxzy 26d ago
  It would be interesting to know what percentage of global inference is spent on projects/problems that would otherwise "wait"/"decay" (if generative ai wasn't a thing). Or maybe the question is: What percentage of global inference is spent on cleaning up and migrating old systems? "New" vs "Old". The decisions I make today can now incorporate what I once termed as "nice to have" when developing a sytem.
• quietraster 26d ago
  the make your own predictions part is a nice touch. how sensitive are the outcomes to the capability assumption
• jongjong 26d ago
  Before AI, my worldview was that our monetary system was concentrating wealth in a negative-sum game; essentially; every so often, taking wealth from 100 people, destroying half the underlying value and giving the remaining value with a 2x nominal markup to 1 rich person who is already spending more than they can physically spend and so they won't realize that the 2x amount of wealth they got on paper only buys them a quarter of the stuff compared to the previous decade (for example). They won't know how frothy their wealth is until they start selling large quantities of their stocks. It's just buying nominal 'growth' at the cost of risk/fragility/frothiness. In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI. Now I think AI will deliver real efficiency gains but also, it provides a convenient narrative to explain why people might be losing jobs in a way which distracts from much bigger systemic issues which existed prior to AI. My negative-sum economy example with 'booming GDP' is possible without AI even as net economic value is being destroyed. So basically we won't be able to tell if people are losing jobs to AI or to systematic wealth transfer mechanisms which predate AI. I suppose if we see people losing jobs permanently and workers in other sectors aren't seeing wage increases with more openings, that may be the most reliable indicator we have that the system is losing real wealth faster than AI productivity can offset it. The bad news is that we won't see any problem in the numbers; the problem would show up as polarization and radicalization of the masses... Which is more qualitative . Since almost everyone is being radicalized concurrently as everyone is affected by the same pressures (both from monetary system and AI automation). The question is not "how many people became radicalized this quarter?" but "how much more radicalized is everyone feeling this quarter?"
  • zahlman 26d ago
    > In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI. Putting aside the numbers, how does your quality of life compare to decades ago?
    • teamonkey 26d ago
      I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. It’s difficult to measure objectively, due to being physically younger and in an earlier stage of my career and so worser-paid, but adjusting for that, I think quality of life 20 years ago was pretty much the same as now, slightly better in some regards, slightly worse in others. Of course there are fun new gadgets and gizmos and TV on demand and social media and such, but honestly they’re just toys, and in some cases have made my quality of life worse. The biggest tangible improvement I can think of is one particular medical advancement, which has allowed a family member to survive a disease when they absolutely would not have 20 years ago. That’s incredible. But otherwise the quality of life change over the last 20 years is minimal by most important metrics I can think of. Which makes one wonder what the dogged pursuit of GDP growth has achieved for the last decade or two.
• Dlemlo 26d ago
  The biggest critisism from my side is not how AI will take over jobs but I believe we will see peak of certain things. Creating images (menues, flyers, whatever) became so cheap, that we reached peak graphi design GDP generation. This will go down. Software development for complex systems is enhanced but not yet solved. But a lot of small software development stuff for sure. We reached Peak Software Development and this GDP will go down, not up.
  • stereolambda 26d ago
    Yeah, GDP with all its flaws is designed around economy based on buying and selling for prices. Interacting with other people. If you can really be rich and somehow do most things automatically without meaningfully hiring anybody (maybe only few people for simple manual labor for peanuts), at this point what is really the value of money? Except for maybe throwing minimal amounts to the masses. I can see the AI maximalist scenario taking us out of the monetary framework back into a medieval or natural economy almost.
• stego-tech 26d ago
  Man I wanted to dunk on this, but it’s honestly not terrible. Their predictions - while still firmly rooting for the extreme results - feel more grounded. I also appreciate the little simulator where I could plugin my own predictions (echoing many here, that AI won’t amplify productivity/lift standards so much as replace workers by shitty bosses), and that it seems to caution that, yep, most of these gains will trickle up given current incentives. Where I remain resoundingly annoyed is how useless this is. It’s pure ass-covering by Anthropic ahead of an IPO, victim-blaming the populace for the outcomes of decisions made by Anthropic leadership and the investor class. Forgive the grisly analogy, but it’s akin to a mugger telling you “only you can stop this” mid-violence: Anthropic could have chosen to allocate more of its capital to reforms that benefit the populace, but they’ve chosen to focus on personal wealth instead via this IPO and for-profit rented access schemes. It’s nauseating. Their actions still paint a picture of greed and exploitation rather than building a better tomorrow for everyone with AI, and the fact their PR puff pieces keep getting wallpapered up here is gross. EDIT: I guess another way to look at this is Anthropic making it unequivocally clear that they will not stop of their own accord, and thus it falls to others to stop them. Which if that’s their position, then at least they’re honest about the challenge.
• breezk0 26d ago
  I dont think in the future people will run these overpriced frontier models and instead have their specialized local models. Even then, assuming the difference is that huge between frontier and open-source, a specialized „human worker“ _should_ be able to fix the gap.
• _doctor_love 26d ago
  Like others in the thread have pointed out, the nurse example is interesting. From my point of view, the point about the nurse is especially relevant because, in the future, dealing with an aging population is going to become a major undertaking and a major burden. Demographically, we simply don't have the number of people we need to give elders the care that they'll probably have to have near the end of their life, so we have to rely on AI to help us get through it. Probably, we will see this happen in Japan and South Korea before it hits the United States.
  • MentalM 26d ago
    > Demographically, we simply don't have the number of people we need to give elders the care that they'll probably have to have near the end of their life, so we have to rely on AI to help us get through it. That is an interesting theory. That could explain why all developed countries seems deliberately raising their young generations to be as unprepared for real life as possible. They simply fear that if the younger generation becomes capable of anything, the younger generations will simply discard democracy, which the more numerous and more weak older generation planning to use to redistribute wealth in their own favor, and the older generations will be left to drag a miserable existence. South Korea will be interesting to watch indeed. Hell, maybe even the lowest fertility rate of South Korea in the world and it's de-facto status of western colony is not a coincidence, but designed situation to watch in advance what challenges low birth rate will bring and how better to overcome those challenges
• thiago_fm 26d ago
  How about we instead make Earth be a planet good for humans and living beings? We can slow down AI development and make it a companion for us, not a replacement. We don't need to automate ourselves out of it. Or take the risk of extinction. Just like with nukes, we decided to not blow up the planet. We can too change this. GDP is a terrible measure. I bet we will see a huge drop on HDI with so many suicides and people going through hell because their job got automated or they no longer see meaning in life, feeling powerless. Instead they should run an estimate on how many would suicide until 2030 if the 'extreme scenario' happens. Big GDP growth and a lot of people no longer finding purpose in their lives, going bankrupt, losing their homes and family etc. For Anthropic, you are just clearly a number. They only care about output. They have long forgotten the human being.
• rglover 26d ago
  [dead]
• skor 26d ago
  I can't scroll through this site on Firefox and a recent mac, anyone else?
  • wing-_-nuts 26d ago
    I had a dark mode extension slowing things down. Then I got annoyed with the site performance and enabled 'reader' view
• skyberrys 26d ago
  At least they are thinking about this. The possibilities still seem to limited though. A coder and a designer will 'retrain' to electrician or nurse, because we are busy having a construction boom. But do all of the individuals in this system get to choose the construction boom? Or are we swept up in the desires of the capital deploying owners?
• lofaszvanitt 26d ago
  When children behind a battleship with child like mentality try to predict the future.
• pembrook 26d ago
  This could be the most cringe main-character-syndrome thing I've ever seen produced by a company in the history of silicon valley. And the people treating this as serious economic forecasting rather than a marketing puff post are even more cringe. If Anthropic truly believed LLMs were going to raise GDP growth to 8% permanently (or even just a few percent), instead of going public to raise capital they could just go massively leveraged long on the S&P 500 and get funding for eternity. They are not doing that, because AI is largely only good at coding, their models barely have a 6-12 month lead over free ones, and software is only 1% of GDP. And by making software cheaper and easier to produce, they might increase the amount of software in the world by 10X or even 100X, but it will become a smaller percentage of GDP as AI models become autonomously good at creating it. Things that are abundant and cheap don't raise GDP. Hey Anthropic: before we worry about raising GDP growth to 20%, maybe we focus on making blog posts that don't crash your browser window if you try to resize it?
  • zahlman 26d ago
    > Hey Anthropic: before we worry about raising GDP growth to 20%, maybe we focus on making blog posts that don't crash your browser window if you try to resize it? Have you tried disabling JavaScript? The simulations won't work of course, and there are some random large blank spaces; but the main content is completely readable and handles resizing without issue[0] even on my mid-range office PC from 2014. [0]: Just like almost anything else would without JavaScript. Though maybe the people who enjoy proving the Turing-completeness of CSS could come up with something…
    • pembrook 26d ago
      "We're confident our technology will 10X GDP growth, we just need you to disable javascript first. That one we couldn't figure out."
      • zahlman 25d ago
        [dead]
  • 26d ago
• anothermathbozo 26d ago
  People get income from one of three places: capital income, labor income, or the welfare state. If this technology truly unlocks a holy panacea of productivity with a commensurate drop in employment then capital’s share of the national income can and should provide for a wider and deeper welfare state. Nothing new need be invented here. Anthropic’s elaborate scenario-building makes appropriate preparedness sound like a problem requiring heroic prognostication when a simple theory of distribution will suffice.
  • cucumber3732842 26d ago
    You say that like it's not bleak as everliving fuck. Go look at a post-industrial town in the northeast but not within reasonable commuting distance of a wealthy urban area if you want to see what "put them on just enough welfare they don't hang us from the overpass for kicking out their way of making a living" looks like.
• deleted 26d ago
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• bzudo 26d ago
  CEOs will make AI drive into the office for culture. Knowledge workers are safe until FSD.
• jplusequalt 26d ago
  I found myself interested in the papers analysis of wages, so I did some digging. The researchers model says the following about hourly wage growth in the substantial and extreme scenarios: - the hourly wage* in the knowledge workers group will fall (-1.1% and 11.5% respectively) - but the hourly wage* of labor across the rest of the labor force will grow (5.9% and 33.6% respectively) *Important to note, AFAIK this hourly wage decline/growth is a not measured against 2026 dollars, but the counterfactual of what hourly wages would be in the absence of AI. Okay, so my first take away from reading these numbers is that declining wages in one group appears to be offset by rising wages in the other group. Not terrible all things considering. But then I started to think about the difference in hourly wages between the knowledge workers group and the non-knowledge workers group (which I'll now refer to as *K* *N*). I had a sneaking suspicion that the inter group wages gap could be large enough where growth in the non-knowledge share of labor doesn't offset the loss in hourly wages from displaced knowledge workers who find themselves migrating occupations. Looking through the paper, it breaks these groups down as follows: K — Knowledge / Cognitive: - Management, Business and Financial Operations, Computer and Mathematical, Architecture and Engineering, Life, Physical, and Social Science, Community and Social Service, Legal, Educational Instruction and Library, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical, Sales and Related, Office and Administrative Support N — Non-Knowledge / All Other: -Healthcare Support, Protective Service, Food Preparation and Serving, Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance, Personal Care and Service, Farming, Fishing, and Forestry, Construction and Extraction, Installation, Maintenance, and Repair, Production, Transportation and Material Moving So I had GPT Sol 5.6 take each of these occupations and find the mean hourly wage using BLS data [1]. The findings suggest that as of 2026, the simple group average for K is $45.17 vs. $23.67 for N. But this is short sighted as this doesn't take into consideration the different levels of employment in each occupation. I asked ChatGPT to account for this using the same BLS data, which gives a weighted average of $41.50 for K and $23.40 for N. This means that knowledge workers are currently making ~double what non-knowledge workers make in the US. The crucial question is how does this change when considering the wage decline/growth between K and N across the papers three scenarios? Here's the breakdown using the simple mean for hourly wage: Scenario Knowledge Non-knowledge Gap K -> N penalty ------------------------------------------------------------------- Current $45.17 $23.67 $21.51 47.6% Modest $45.35 $23.93 $21.42 47.2% Substantial $45.03 $25.07 $19.97 44.3% Extreme $39.98 $31.62 $ 8.35 20.9% Here's the breakdown using the occupation weighted mean for hourly wage: Scenario Knowledge Non-knowledge Gap K -> N penalty ------------------------------------------------------------------- Current $41.50 $23.40 $18.10 43.6% Modest $41.67 $23.66 $18.01 43.2% Substantial $41.38 $24.78 $16.59 40.1% Extreme $36.73 $31.26 $ 5.47 14.9% Looking at these tables, both in the current moment and across all three of the papers scenario, there is a large wage gap between K and N. Outside of the extreme scenario, this gap is >40%! My immediate takeaways having done this bit of research is that if Anthropic is right and we're on track for either the substantial or extreme scenarios, *then many of us in this thread could see a large loss in hourly wages in the short term future.* NOTE: I'm not an economist. I push pixels for a living. But if you are an economist and you find gaps in the following analysis, please inform me. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm* https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm*
• deleted 26d ago
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• utilize1808 26d ago
  A thought experiment: robot bees can do everything biological bees do --- pollination for the crops and making honey, but they are tireless and cheaper to maintain. Would beekeepers and farm owners still want to keep biological bees?
  • zahlman 26d ago
    > robot bees can do everything biological bees do From the perspective of the beekeepers and farmers and their obligations, sure. But beyond the pollination, they wouldn't be participating in the ecosystem.
    • utilize1808 26d ago
      Now substitute bees with human workers. The problem is that the ecosystem, whatever that is, doesn't seem to need the extra human beings.
• intended 26d ago
  AI productivity discussion go! The model seems defensible, but for some reason it isn’t passing the sniff test. Maybe its that the extreme scenario seems wildly optimistic, or that the observed modest productivity gains are framed as either the trend or “just the start of something amazing !”. The issues are that 1) The median AI use case isn’t increasing productivity but expanding capability and reducing the need to communicate across teams. Ex: if someone needs a dashboard or a ppt designed, now they don’t have to ask another team. AI is substituting for intern and early career workers in someone else’s firm. This is also borne out in the hiring data. 2) The cases that show maximal productivity gains are when AI is leveraged by experts. This is a problem, because the evidence for automation gains is poor. AI automation seems to be going to the same place ML projects went to die. If augmentation is the primary lever that lifts up productivity, and it is dependent on AI being matched to experts, then the limiting factor is expertise. This makes the fact that AI is both, taking out early career roles AND one shooting education, a divine irony. Where exactly are those future experts supposed to come from? The ones with taste and the ability to deliver us this AI driven GDP growth? AI is also setting up a conflict between liability, insurance and productivity, and thats a whole point in itself. However it will be expressed as a drag on productivity.
• Charly_HW 26d ago
  One simple thing can’t make everything better or everything worse—every, big change is the sum of time, actions, and many actors. The thing you describe as a result is only the end of a process. I hate simplicity when people talk about the future.
• mvc 26d ago
  Watch Ann Droid on the Beeb for a dark but funny prediction of what it will be like wrt to nursing care for the elderly.
  • sajithdilshan 26d ago
    I binged watched it and loved it. A humanoid robot like that would be amazing to have when I get older, certainly better than having a son like Michael
• actusual 26d ago
  > Only humans can do some tasks > For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient. Oh sweet, we're left with literally cleaning up feces. Thanks AI!
  • Thanemate 25d ago
    Absolutely Utopic (for the AI owners).
• chrisjj 26d ago
  > As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, But she won't, will she? Her employer will do the incorporating. With very different objectives.
• SoftTalker 26d ago
  If it's anything like that web page, I'd say the future looks... slow.
  • wmeredith 26d ago
    Seriously. Can AI build a web page I can read?
• motohagiography 26d ago
  It would have been useful to use the internet from 1995-2015 as a reference model for economic impact, and then ask how the trajectory of AI will resemble it.
• hermitcrab 26d ago
  The sociopaths running the show at present are probably hoping for a future that looks like the film "Elysium".
• aennassiri 26d ago
  It's funny that this is missing the negative effects or the possibility of an economic crisis scenario. Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all. This is why XAI is already renting compute to Anthropic. This goes as well without saying that in few years, compute pricing will drop heavily. Another effect is increased inequality in the US and other Western countries as software/AI/hardware companies are able to do more with less. The increase in manual labor wages is not systemic. It affects only the labor used to build data centers.
  • ViktorRay 26d ago
    Wait but then in your scenario wouldn’t the companies going out of business simply sell their data centers to the winning companies?
    • 00ze 26d ago
      Not necessarily. Continued gains in compute efficiency and improved AI chips in your pocket doing more could reduce data center needs
      • ViktorRay 26d ago
        The person stated “ Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all.” The person stated this as a negative. If those built data-centers are sold to other companies what is the negative? The gains you mention would happen even if those other companies stay in business.
      • geysersam 26d ago
        That sounds like a marvelous scenario for economic growth, because we will have tons of capacity to deploy ai models everywhere. The bad scenario is compute efficiently not increasing much, and hardware prices staying high, while AI is too expensive for most tasks, and 50% of all investments in the economy over the last X years have gone into AI.
  • 25d ago
• npilk 26d ago
  I think (hope?) the fundamental fallacy in arguments like these is assuming that individual task-level productivity improvement will ladder up to economy-wide transformation. IMO knowledge work productivity has gone up a massive amount since 1990, and companies could in fact fire most of their knowledge workers while still getting their most critical work done. (These are the bullshit jobs/email jobs.) But companies mostly haven't done this, which implies other reasons for employing so many knowledge workers. Even if AI becomes capable of doing everything, I would predict there will be a period of many years/decades where companies still employ a similar number of people to sit around and babysit/watch what the AI does.
  • senordevnyc 26d ago
    IMO knowledge work productivity has gone up a massive amount since 1990, and companies could in fact fire most of their knowledge workers while still getting their most critical work done. (These are the bullshit jobs/email jobs.) But companies mostly haven't done this, which implies other reasons for employing so many knowledge workers. Or it might imply that this theory is just wrong?
    • npilk 26d ago
      Yes, certainly it could be wrong, it's just my personal (very vibes-based) opinion. Apologies if that wasn't clear.
• themgt 26d ago
  I'm surprised to not find the word "deflation" anywhere. It doesn't necessarily seem likely in the end given governments would presumably just print money, but intuitively AI seems like the ultimate deflationary technology. Fairly generally, not just for labor.
• sajithdilshan 26d ago
  For me the ideal scenario would be us having humanoid robots with AI. This would free up so much time for me and even in the worst case if I lose my job, I can live in village side growing my own food and being fully self sustained with the help of humanoid robots and solar energy. That would actually be a dream come true
• ElProlactin 26d ago
  > Only humans can do some tasks > For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient. Until there are robots. Or the AI gets creative in an attempt to find a solution to this "problem" and orders a fatal dose of morphine for the patient. > And new tasks will appear > Historically, new technologies have also created new tasks for workers. For a nurse, that might be checking how well an AI triages patients, or reviewing an AI-proposed care plan. You can see where they're going with this. > At the individual level, it means coders and call service center agents may have to switch to jobs like electrician and nurse, which are less exposed to AI. It's weird they call nurses "less exposed to AI" when the earlier section discusses how AI could turn nurses into underlings for AI taskmasters. > How might powerful AI change the economy? Worth noting that this discussion is built around 2030, which is now less than 3.5 years away. The hedges that make the Extreme scenario sound less bad fail to explain how anyone is going to pay electricians when the highest paid group (human knowledge workers) is being decimated. It sounds like the theory is that everyone is either going to become an electrician or a totally fair and efficient wealth redistribution scheme will magically appear.
  • deepwoods 26d ago
    It's genius for Anthropic: data centers are their main expense. If they convince everyone to become an electrician, then the electrician labor supply swells, and the price of hiring electricians to service their data centers shrinks. 4-D chess at its finest.
    • ElProlactin 26d ago
      I know you're joking/being facetious but they don't even need that many electricians for the ongoing maintenance. The major electrical work is front-loaded.
  • SamuelAdams 26d ago
    You really ought to study recent developments in the service industry. Olive Garden added a tablet to every table so that customers can place their orders without talking to or waiting for a waiter. The goal was faster, more accurate service, since now the waiter did not need to remember your extremely detailed order. And yet most people prefer talking to a waiter. There are other restaurants that have tried similar approaches and people would almost always deal with people rather than a robot. I would love a robot to clean my home and do household chores, but in the service industry I would prefer real humans doing the work.
• adam_arthur 26d ago
  It seems obvious that labor displacement due to AI will create labor surpluses in existing fields. Which will feel quite bad for many of us in the present, but net-net be good for society in the long run. Wages will go down, but cost of goods and services will decline even more. Markets will be more competitive than ever, which limits the moat/margin capability of many businesses. It's only really particularly bad for those earning very high wages where there likely won't be any way to materially fill the gap.
  • impossiblefork 26d ago
    Why do you think it will be net-good for society in the long run? If wages go down, worker power goes down; and if dependence on labour goes down, you literally move closer to the situation of the extraction economies in things like petro-states, leading to oligarchy instead of democracy. It could be the end of ordinary people's power over society rather than anything even slightly good.
    • adam_arthur 26d ago
      Nominal wage doesn't really matter, just real wages+purchasing power. Goods and services prices will fall far more than wages for most people. Why? Because there will be far more efficiency and competition than pre-AI. It's plainly evident from the nature of the technology. If one business can do something cheaper, other businesses will do it cheaper too, and have to cut prices to compete. But the shock will be sudden so it won't feel good for our gen. Future generations will benefit without the drama. Don't get me wrong, there will be big losers in some fields, and the short term will be painful due to retraining and loss of purpose/emotional toll. Many of us built careers doing things that may not be relevant anymore. Or relevant in a different, perhaps diminished way. But the same has happened to many professions throughout history and it's always led to general improvement of the broader public's welfare.
  • bradishungry 25d ago
    What is obvious about that? What jobs are being created long term that can be filled by those displaced? To me it seems like even jobs that are not knowledge jobs are going to utilize ai to cut hiring, not grow it
• Animats 26d ago
  This is a spherical cow model. Here are their stated assumptions: • Production involves a combination of tasks, where each task is performed by labor or by capital. The final goods market is perfectly competitive. • Labor is supplied exogenously while capital is supplied along an upward-sloping schedule. • There are two groups of occupations, of which only the cognitive group is exposed to AI. For the amount of money Anthropic can spend on this, that's a very lame model. The "two groups of occupations" assumption is so naive as to be embarrassing. The assumption that only the "cognitive group" is exposed to AI is way too optimistic. We're close to automating drivers out of existence, and there's political pushback against that. Logistics is about half automated now and the rest is only a matter of time. Store shelf inventory taking is already done by mobile robots, and shelf restocking is coming. India can't even mechanize agriculture to the level of, say, 1980s US without generating massive unemployment. Peasants rioted against that. "In India, farming transcends mere employment; it embodies a lifestyle. Nearly half of the Indian population relies on agriculture, either directly or indirectly."[1] (The US is under 2%.) That's what a desperate attempt to hold back modernization to preserve employment looks like. Most people are poor but alive. There's no consideration of land and water constraints. Not so much a US issue, because the US is well-supplied in those areas. India and China are much closer to the physical limits there. AI won't help much. "The final goods market is perfectly competitive." Oh, please. Everybody wants a "moat", and that generates a strong desire for monopoly if possible, oligopoly if not. This comes across as a model where they started with the desired results and worked backwards. They should have done at least an input-output table of occupations and products/services. [1] https://indiadatamap.com/2025/08/19/number-of-farmers-in-every-indian-state-2025/ https://indiadatamap.com/2025/08/19/number-of-farmers-in-eve...
• someguynamedq 26d ago
  LLMs replace doctors, not nurses
• FpUser 26d ago
  Cut the fucking crap Anthropic. While I personally benefit from AI at the moment I think with the way our society is organized / managed / ruled AI will help us to a major disaster
• jazzpush2 26d ago
  These social science/econ style jobs at frontier labs are the ultimate free ride. Get paid bank with absolutely zero need to publish anything of quality.
• bluerooibos 26d ago
  That's an incredible webpage. Still not going to read all that, but incredible nonetheless.
• __MatrixMan__ 26d ago
  This presupposes that the practice of exchanging things for dollars will remain stable and merely the number of those dollars will go up. But that model is showing its age. I'd be supprised if, equipped with a heightened ability to develop and evaluate alternatives, we decided that it was worth preserving. Money is a lousy proxy for consent, yet that's what were using for. Surely we can do better.
• Havoc 26d ago
  So basically workers are about to get screwed and it’s just a question of how badly
• AvAn12 26d ago
  Software company pens speculative narratives about impact of not-yet-realized features. This reminds me of the corny old copies of The Futurist magazine that my dad kept around. Fun, hopelessly naive, and not at all aligned with how reality unfolded. Nice that Anthropic can afford a team of economists somehow though.
• adg001 26d ago
  While they describe how GDP is shared between workers and capital in the three reference scenarios, they don't offer political economy ideas about how wealth redistribution shall be rethought, and the role of the State, if any. If a share of knowledge workers are about to be driven out of market, the real consequences of this deserves deeper reflection.
• osigurdson 26d ago
  I like how the nurse gets to check if the AI is doing the right thing as one of her new tasks. AI is going to have to get to the point where it can do things on its own or it will only transform problem domains where verification is fast and inexpensive. Otherwise something is getting traded and people will notice, eventually.
• mbfg 25d ago
  it will cause unprecedented growth AND widespread unemployment of course. A distopian horror, not by the AI itself, but by its owners.
• oliviayii 25d ago
  [flagged]
• mikewarot 25d ago
  Nowhere in any of the scenarios they let you model, do they consider the cost of computation for inference, nor training of new models. It may be that after the subsidies can no longer be offered, most AI use becomes cost prohibitive. This would lead to a much, much smaller "total addressable market", rendering the massive AI build out into a rapidly depreciating asset that can't even be operated without a loss. Even if the hardware was effectively free following a market crash, and bankruptcy sale, the power required to run it might be more expensive than the compute it generates is worth. At which point, unlike dark fiber after the .com crash, all the hardware becomes scrap metal. Now factor in the macro picture, in which this AI bubble is holding up the stock market, and by proxy, the US economy. I think we're in for Global Depression II, worse than 1929.
• mbgerring 25d ago
  This lost me at “the economy is composed of tasks” There’s so many assumptions packed into that assertion that tell you the horizon of possibility considered here is uselessly shallow.
  • alok-g 25d ago
    I would like to hear more (asking genuinely). Thanks.
• rimworld 25d ago
  [dead]
• codebastard 25d ago
  By which reason can they cap the knowledge workers displacement at 39.7% in the extreme case? Maybe they want to reason that without robots its impossible to replace the last 22% but even specialised devices would be enough in the worst case. I think in the worst case knowledge work will go to the capital rich 1% as legal representative for the companies and their shareholders. And with robotics all 99% of the workforce could be gone. Because AI does not need to be perfect it only needs to be cheaper and good enough.
• UnwrapComment 25d ago
  What I find interesting is that by Anthropics admission, an agent that can “build, ship and maintain a working software product” is only a possibility for 2030. They're accepting that we’re not there yet.
• rekabis 24d ago
  I want a solarpunk future, even if it means fewer personal devices and a simpler Internet. A place where everyone has roughly equal economic potential (sub-10× between wealthiest and poorest) but everyone lives healthy, vibrant lives with plenty of resources to draw from. A post-scarcity world, if you want a label. Unfortunately we are hurtling into a future where 80+% live lives of grinding poverty with no real viable future to hope for, while another 19% have actual options and resources, and that final 1% exist in unimaginable opulence and wealth that is built entirely upon the labour of the other 99%. As in, true parasites in every economic way.