I'd rather just have a world where people move a little slower, care less about efficiency, appreciate the smaller things in life, and stop forcing endless upgrades of every kind on everyone with new phones, new apps, soulless art, and new ways of doing things. But that's just me.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day. The reasons behind this are communication and training overheads. If AI leads to a world where people don't really have to know anything to do their jobs - just provide high-level judgements that LLMs seem farther away from than they are from accuracy, or if they could somehow keep the human beings out of meetings, the forces keeping labor concentrated could abate.
On the other hand, if AI accuracy limitations drive the labor demand even further towards expertise, and if making tasks higher-level raises the communication requirements rather than somehow reducing them, the preference for having a few people work 80-hour weeks while twice as many people remain unemployed will become even stronger.
I'm surprised that someone has pointed this out because it is 100% on point.
The moment your economy is productive enough that it is not necessary to hire every single person, employers start firing people rather than cut the working hours evenly across the population, because each employee represents a fixed cost. Hence you either work full time or you don't work at all.
This is peak utilization of efficiency in the USA. This is what corporations think is acceptable optimization/efficacy looks like if we give them the choice. And then the non-wage slave caste people will complain that this single mother didn't raise her children well enough and call her lazy/a bad parent:
> Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the gains all go to the people at the top.
Taking that at face value, what happened before 40 years ago? There was unimaginable growth in per-person GDP, so people could have plausibly kicked back and relaxed rather than toiling in factories.
If you're asking "what caused the change?" the answer is "Ronald Reagan".
If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible".
Just to expand on that a bit, in case it isn't fully clear:
There is a level of productivity per worker required to support everyone in the society. This level fluctuates some with the overall standard of living, but does not vary with total productivity, population, or GDP. Let's call this level P, for Parity. (And let's assume it's not "just barely enough to support everyone", but "enough to support them comfortably and reliably, with a decent buffer".)
Once the level of productivity per worker passes certain thresholds—multiples of P—the total amount of work required to maintain the society at the same level drops. More work produces surplus. That surplus can be then used in a variety of ways. One of those ways is by reducing the amount of work being done. So, for instance, if the productivity level reaches 2P, then every worker can work half the amount of time they were working before, and still be producing enough to fully provide for everyone. If it reaches 3P, then every worker can work 1/3 the amount of time, and so on.
If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows.
I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. I'd say that at this point, just as a rough estimate, we're probably somewhere between 1.5P and 2P, but that's not really my field of expertise. But because the wealthy have captured approximately all productivity gains above the level we were at in 1980, they have seen their wealth massively increase, while the rest of us have just been scraping by.
>If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible".
>[...] I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. [...]
GDP per capita has been growing exponentially for centuries[1]. Is there some arbitrary GDP per capita level where people should be expected to kick back and relax? Why makes your arbitrary line more or less correct than someone else's arbitrary line? Moreover people's revealed preferences show that for most people, that line hasn't been reached yet. Why should people's revealed preferences be overridden by whatever number you came up with?
>If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows.
Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured. Even if you're some sort of marxist that thinks labor's share of GDP should be 100%, at the very most this means the point at which everyone can kick back and relax is delayed by 40%.
This isn't about GDP in a currency sense. It's about Creating Enough Stuff that people can thrive.
Like I said: there is a threshold of Stuff Created Per Person above which providing a comfortable life for every person is purely a distribution problem. For most of human history, we have not been above that threshold.
"Subsistence farming", for instance, is effectively defined by only being able to meet the much lower threshold of "enough that people can survive".
A post-scarcity society is, broadly speaking, defined by being able to produce enough for everyone to thrive with minimal work from anyone.
We are somewhere between the two, but we are reaching the point where we're closer to the latter than the former. Technological advancements have, for some time, ensured that we have enough food for everyone on earth (again, there's still a distribution problem; that part is nearly 100% about politics, not about scarcity). If the very wealthy had not captured all the productivity increases since 1980, I don't know what else we could have achieved, but it wouldn't have been small.
> Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured.
Look at any graph of income growth by quintile that goes back to the middle of the 20th century or earlier, and you'll see it starts with some roughly parallel lines, and then one line that keeps going up at about the same slope, while the rest stay nearly flat.
The 4 day work week movement continues to move forward, and becomes more likely to succeed as workers gain more power as the prime working age population continues to shrink over decades due to structural demographics (total fertility rates below replacement in most of the world).
Well for one, no computers collating every persons value to the economy to buy and sell as and manipulate through targeted effort
Credit system didn’t exist, which conveniently grandfathered in all the Bloomberg, Trump, and other old money …obviously inheritance made them geniuses who deserved it
Basically Boomers came of age 40 years ago and needed something to do. So the 80-90 year olds of the day handed them all the power.
I mean come on. Do we really need to circumlocute the cause? Why the old rich people writing the rules and always winning is suspicious af still?
All of that might be true, but it doesn't address my core question: why didn't people kick back and relax 50 or even 100 years ago? If people 50, 100, or 200 years ago made the choice to keep working hours constant rather than convert productivity gains into leisure, why is the choice to keep working hours constant today suddenly caused by malign influence of the powers that be?
>The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades.
If you're claiming that people worked fewer hours during the industrial revolution than today, I'll need a citation for that. If you're referencing the claims made by "Original affluent society", that has problems around how working hours are counted.
The criticisms have the same lack of information problems.
So modern anecdotes make the most sense. I grew up in 80s dairyland. None of the farmers worked a 9-5 but they rarely worked 40+ too.
We worked much much less in rural-landia before the last few decades gave rise to "service and knowledge" work with no concrete goal but "make line go up".
Knowledge work comes along with zero concrete termination points. Programmers grinding code 80+ hours are not stopping to see if it's useful or just repetition.
Sure from a physics perspective they're doing "work". From a lived experience, to real needs of biology, economy perspective they're just sitting at a computer juicing their hormones, while exploiting farmers labor, who now works more hours as more knowledge workers contribute less real outputs essential to biology. Same with why carpentry and other trades services are so expensive; supply and demand. Millennials wanted 24/7 office jobs.
While I grew up in farmland I later went into EE, and have a good sense for who is moving the ball. It isn't software people. Their biology is addicted to a stupid loop of zero real productivity. Playing abstract snake games in one's head, to count initialized memory registers and recording their data is some basic bitch work marketed to the point of fostering delusion it's cutting in 2010-2020 to use 1960s style syntaxes to manage machines.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the capacity for the economy to create "bullshit work" (e.g. work which is engaged in zero sum "wealth defense") is unbounded.
For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even let the bottom 50% retire early, society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital. This would probably only happen with violence.
This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market while the efficiency gains which could be realized at the bottom of the pyramid get "burned off" via inflation targeting of 2%. A quirky side effect of this is that the vast efficiency improvements we have seen have not even been allowed to prevent a pensions crisis.
The Economist, serving in its capacity as a dutiful servant to neoliberal capital, frets equally about AI inevitably causing us to "run out of jobs" as it does a demographic crisis inevitably causing us to "run out of workers" (https://archive.ph/6hgYq).
>This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market
That's a seductive narrative, but not backed up by data. The share of GDP that goes to labor is has held relatively stable in the past few decades. It has admittedly fallen, but it's on the order of a few percentage points, whereas the GDP per capita more than tripled.
How do you square these “growing wages” against the zeitgeist which says more and more people are living hand-to-mouth? At what point do these statistics get tossed out because they have little to no bearing on the lived experience of the great mass of people? At what point does one acknowledge that these statistics seem like they’re compiled simply to muddy the waters to make reality seem different than it is?
Famously, one can spin statistics any way they wish. Prove to us this isn’t the case here.
> How do you square these “growing wages” against the zeitgeist which says more and more people are living hand-to-mouth?
Both can be true if the distribution has changed, which seems to be the case:
"Over the last four decades, the income gap between more- and less-educated workers has grown significantly; the study finds that automation accounts for more than half of that increase."
Additionally, necessities like food and fuel seem to have jumped in price, outpacing wage growth over the past few years, while other important goods and services (housing, health care, higher education) have outpaced inflation for decades.
If they weighted nondiscretionary housing, education and healthcare in the inflation basket properly and de-emphasized discretionary electronics and clothes I doubt it would even be flat.
> For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even more wealth (for the bottom 50%), society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital.
And even then, even a small percentage of bad actors who are selfish would likely restructure it back due to technology enabling them to do so! The fact is, the elite at the top is a steady state that is hard to leave if you worship efficiency. Only the Amish and some native tribes have realized that the only way out is not to play.
This seems circular… capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy, and will likely betray any trust or faith placed in them if put under enough pressure.
So society has to depend on something fully independent of any specific person or group and that cannot be changed without leaving behind a long papertrail.
In other words nobody dreams of becoming a banker/accountant/auditor/etc. at 5 year old. Probably even double entry bookkeeping would be superfluous if everyone were virtuous paragons.
>capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy
Not really. It became that way because wealth begets power.
The narrative it tells us is that we should be terrified to change this because nobody else except the owners of capital can be trusted as stewards of our economy and political system (particularly not "government").
> This seems circular… capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy, and will likely betray any trust or faith placed in them if put under enough pressure.
True, but it's also mainly because we have a society that is based on technological innovation with rapid transportation/communication. I was only responding to the other reply that seemed to imply that there was an alternative restructuring that puts less capital at the top.
What's really ironic, based on my understanding, is that the world that you have expressed a desire for, is much likelier in a world where economic growth accelerates based on AI. Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
I sincerely doubt it, because that technology also invades life. It invades the world with more information, not less. More business...when has technology ever slowed things down? AI just seems to make certain tasks more efficient, but I haven't seen anything slow down.
Before technology, even if things were slow, people didn’t have time to do anything with the slowness anyway. I think you’re thinking of some past utopia that never existed. Or maybe you’re thinking of the 90s, idk.
> Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
Which is the scary part of the AI revolution. Devaluing labor always leads to increased inequality in the short-to-mid term until a new equilibrium is met. But what if we have machines that can do most jobs for 10-20k a year? Suddenly we have a hard ceiling for everyone below a certain "skill level", where skill includes things like owning capital, going to the right college, and having the right parents.
In the past, when inequality became too extreme, (the threat of) violent uprisings usually led to reform, but with autonomous weapon systems, drones and droids, manpower becomes less of a concern. The result might be a permanent underclass.
Really? The AI revolution is happening in the West, and mostly in the US. Just imagine it happened in a muslim country, or Russia, or China, or even India. Half of them would immediately use it to start a war. If you think labor is devalued here, it can be SO much worse.
Also I don't understand the entire argument. The thread is about stopping economic growth. You say you don't receive enough of the current economic growth ... so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it? At 0 growth the only way to give you anything would be to take it away from someone else. In other words: you want an extra meal at 0% growth? That can only happen if someone else doesn't get one ...
> so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it?
Personally, I don't want growth to reduce, exactly. I'd prefer it if there were tighter restrictions on the direction of growth, and we spent more time finding creative ways to return to smaller communities where the efforts are spent less on pure money and more on people helping each other. And more time restoring nature. So growth, but not purely in an economic sense.
It only seems like a degrowth thing when you look at from a purely fiscal angle.
There is nothing stopping you from moving to a smaller community, and in the west there's tons of them around. And if you're willing to take the (very low) wages that go with that, you can live there for the rest of your life easily.
Hell, I know people who've done this. Several actually. Well, only one that's still alive (they retired there, wanted to grow old and die there ... and did), but still.
But ... why bother anyone about it? You want others to do this but would never accept doing so yourself?
> But ... why bother anyone about it? You want others to do this but would never accept doing so yourself?
Well, first I already have, so I don't know where you got "never accept doing so yourself", which is something you made up. Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature, which in my opinion is on the same level as actively targeting people. So I do want that to stop.
If nature was not being destroyed and it was just people messing up their own little world, then that would be different.
> Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature
Is it? If you put it this dramatically, it's bullshit. Nature will survive us, rather than the other way around, guaranteed. MAYBE we can kill large animals if we tried, but probably not even that (they'd just shrink and then grow large again, wouldn't be the first, or second, or even the tenth time that happened).
Life on earth is being sustained by the sun and by nuclear reactions inside the earth. Nothing we do makes the tiniest of difference in the long run.
Increased temperature and increased CO2 and climate change essentially make more chemical and solar energy available in the environment. Life is chemical in nature and is limited by available energy. That means there would be more life, more green, if more energy was available. Life would have to be pretty damn badly designed if this damaged it, rather than what we actually see happening: life is spreading to much more of the planet than even 100 years ago.
So, first, you can rest assured: it is just people messing up their own little world.
Second: it would be seriously unnatural if we stopped. After all competing and using up all available resources is literally the sole goal of all life on earth. And if you compare humans to an average ocean-bound bacterial species, we're not even particularly good at it.
Okay, so we are not destroying all of nature, only enough nature that it will get seriously uncomfortable for us. Great! Your second argument is even stranger. It would be unnatural to stop polluting the environment? Where are you going with this?
Well, I had a high-paying job, six figures. But that six-figures came with less freedom, higher-paced work, life bureacracy, and I wasn't happy. I had no time or mental space to just sit and think. Probably the least happy I was in my entire life. So I quit. Now, I do live a slower-paced life, and earn very little. But I'm the happiest I've ever been.
there are many many 6 figure jobs that don’t require working more than > 40 hours a week. Bureaucracy is hard to avoid though, unless you’re at a startup, but then you’re working all the time lol.
For me personally, lack of money early in my career caused me _far_ greater daily stress than bureaucracy at work. Not needing to budget daily purchases? now that’s low stress.
Out of interest, how much capital did you accrue during that time? Mortgage free and a good pension seems to be the bar for voluntarily adopting a slower pace of life.
Not a lot, lol. I don't even own property, and my pension will be a very small pittance. The goal is to hopefully make enough through independent projects to make it work. And if North American becomes too expensive, then Plan B is to move to a cheaper part of the world, much cheaper. Less infrastructure there, but what're ya going to do? Can't have everything in life, and you've only got one :)
Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
This also leads to higher medical costs, lower productivity, and less satisfaction in life.
So maybe efficiency should be a priority. What do you think?
>Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
>We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
Throwing away food can be efficient. In fact, absent evidence to the contrary, we should expect that throwing away food (or buying/producing more) is the more efficient option out there, given that people aren't putting effort into conserving food. Remember, conservation isn't free. For instance it might be possible to reduce the amount of fruits that are bruised and thrown away, but that requires more packaging and more careful handling, which isn't free. At the household level, proper meal planning and inventory management can probably eliminate all food waste, but nobody wants to spend the mental effort into managing an ERP for their kitchen.
>We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
You got cause and effect mixed up. People live in suburbs and drive around everywhere because they like the suburban lifestyle (eg. cheaper/bigger houses, "safer" and "quieter" neighborhoods), not because they're not too fat to live in 15 minute cities. Remember, suburbanization happened well before the obesity epidemic.
> We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy in terms of carrying that weight.
But it's efficient in terms of working as a slave for the technological system, though. It means less time spent on life, more time spent on thinking about technology.
> We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
In other advanced societies (say New York City), people catch public transport to go to work. Catching public transport usually involves a certain amount on walking, since the bus/metro stop is not usually outside your front door.
Yes I think people become unfit from growing up in a car culture and then become dependent on cars for transportation because they can't conceive of a world where they don't require one for transportation because they're so unfit.
That's not how capitalism measures efficiency. It all comes down to profits. Everything else is bureaucracy and marketing. There just aren't any incentives to drive these macroecononic efficiency goals you mention.
Not exactly. Capitalism is just the optimal solution for technology when the primary driver of growth is people. But AI is likely to change that and then capitalism will be modified and done away with but the destruction will remain.
Not exactly easy, because first you have to make enough money to do so. And to do that, you'll likely be stuck in a grind of competing to be the most efficient. Adn even if you can do that in a short period of time, a sufficient number of people doing that will just fuel the system as usual.
only if you have a real (sane, sustainable, efficient) economy to give the money some value. without a real economy money is a number in a computer/a piece of paper, and growing is constrained by the finite resources of the world
Well you can’t drive money, fly money, surgery money, publish money, build a house out of money that doesn’t melt in the rain…
If you want to put it that way.
But given we agree it is absolutely useless, you should probably periodically trade some of it for food. Etc.
That works out really well, since money doesn’t mold as quickly as food, and doesn’t require refrigeration. So accumulate money, let it work for you in the form of productive capital, but skim it for food purchases.
It is wasteful. But it only is wasteful if you look at it from the valuation of human utility. For technological advancement, the system is quite efficient. It's just that we're not the priority.
Go out and observe and enjoy nature, enjoy good food, the company of lots of friends, etc. I wouldn't mind a world where people had more time to do that, if it meant I had to carry around a Walkman or go to live concerts...
Of course, not all innovation is bad. Banning smoking in restaurants does not require technology to restrict it...
Tons of people do not have anything on that list thanks to the social implants and if we are honest cant have it ever again in a world with 8 billion. So why not stop pretending that the idealizations of the past is a viable alternative. Its empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.
> ts empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.
Alright then, if that's really the foregone conclusion, then what's the point of existence? Should we not try and make things better by any means necessary?
> > ts empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.
> Alright then, if that's really the foregone conclusion, then what's the point of existence? Should we not try and make things better by any means necessary?
That's the pertinent question, and I don't have an answer that can adjudicate the dispute, but I can humbly help you formulate the choice as one between Leviathan or oblivion:
> In his contribution, "Leviathan or Oblivion?", Ophuls wrote on the political and economical implications of environmental problems. His main argument was that "because of the tragedy of the commons, environmental problems cannot be solved through cooperation...and the rationale for government with major coercive powers is overwhelming." According to Ophuls "reforming a corrupt people is a Herculean task," which only leaves us with the choice of becoming a leviathan or oblivion.
> Eckersley (1992) argued that, "...although Ophuls has since moderated his position by placing a greater emphasis on the need for self restraint than on the need for external coercion, he continues to maintain that the latter must be resorted to if calls for the former are unsuccessful."
The sobering realization that others smarter and earlier than I am have seen this change coming over the horizon and have warned us heedlessly leads me to believe that we must be the change we wish to see, and that change must happen socially, culturally, and politically.
Ours must be a human revolution toward society, not withdrawing from it. We must encourage and embrace the humanity in ourselves and in each other, and seek to lift others up more than we seek to tear others down. Hate can't drive out hate; only love can do that. We must love each other more than we hate each other. Love will guide us to our salvation.
Even efficiency improvements only help up to a point. Just because making things more efficient increased propserity at one point, doesn't mean they will continue to do so. In fact, the very crossing of that point of diminishing returns is what fuels the late-stage capitalism you refer to.
Honestly, I would say that the causality is the reverse.
Late-stage capitalism is enabled by the 4+ decades of the very wealthy taking all the gains from increased efficiency, which gives them the power to turn it into a feedback loop.
Our current situation is not an inevitable and natural outgrowth of the improved productivity of the late 20th century: it is specifically caused by policy changes (starting) under Reagan that allowed for more consolidation, less care for the common good, and more focus on personal self-aggrandizement.
Well, you definitely have a point there. The causality is less clear than I implied for sure with regard to the connection between late-stage capitalism and efficiency.
Extremely entitled take, likely coming from someone living in the western world and having virtually no contact/knowledge of how 90% of the remaining population on this planet actually lives out each day, practically in survival mode. Everyone is chasing "efficiency" because it is a way out of poverty, misery and suffering.
I'm in favour of countries regulating US exports, social media, tobacco, weapons, AI, and porn included.
I'm sure those living in the US won't agree with me and will be against such regulations, since they don't benefit their companies and that's fine, everyone has to protect their own interests.
I was echoing the words of EU regulators, who've already imposed heavy regulations on US weapons manufacturers, pharma companies, social media, AI and now porn.
By the way, these goods and services don't represent freedom to the rest of the world. In fact, the US is seen as a protectionist country that promotes neoliberalism while imposing tight regulations to foreign companies.
That world has never existed. People have always been hustling. If you are thinking of some agrarian ideal then you are looking at a world of incredible wealth and power inequality. Given the choice between moving faster and making a better life for you children and living a quiet life under the thumb of a dictator people have always chosen the former.
I think a more important question is not whether AI will make economic growth explode but rather who that economic growth will benefit and in general how those benefits will be distributed.
I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
If AI grabs everything and few consumers are left then it is zero-sum.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Pessimistically, it seems very bubblish.
Your second point about zero-sum growth misses in that in a competitive system, investors and their proxies (management) are certainly not going to miss out on the wealth being created right now in this industry. Long term, economy-wide impacts are not relevant decision criteria. Sort of a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.
AI's are all not going to get along with each other or think the same way or have the same agenda. Just like people. Very different things will emerge.
> I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
I looked for any comments that expressed this sentiment, and as of writing this, I only found one. It's like people don't know or remember history. I mean, look at the French Revolution—look at every other revolution. I kept waiting for the article to mention political changes, but it was only about capital and what to invest in, as if capitalism is something that will survive superintelligence (I mean real superintelligence, not chatbots).
What do these people think—that 99% of the population will just become beggars? Sooner or later, all capital will be overtaken by the state, because the main argument against it - inefficiency, will no longer apply. People will vote on AI-generated proposals for energy distribution, so basically where as society we want to allocate it. Budgets will no longer be about how much money we want to spend, but about how much energy we want to allocate.
Private capital and private companies stop making sense when you have a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
> Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
Isn’t this exactly what has happened all through out history? I don’t really see the future playing out any differently.
I sadly think if the promise of AI happens this is the likely economic outcome. The last century or so was an anomaly from most of human history; a trend created by the "arms race" of needing educated workers. The prisoner's dilemma was if you trained your workers in more efficient tech you could out-compete and take all the profits from competitors which gave those educated workers the means to strike (i.e. leverage). Now it is the "arms race" of educated AI, rather than workers which could invalidate a lot of assumptions our current society takes for granted in its structure.
> a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
This kind of magical thinking still baffles me.
This is sci-fi. There is absolutely zero evidence that such a thing is actually possible to create. Even if we stipulated that LLMs are AGIs, or can become them if we just cram in a few billion more parameters, it's painfully clear that they are not superintelligent, they cannot improve themselves, and there is no credible pathway to them becoming anything of the sort—not to mention they're already guzzling absurd amounts of energy, and taking up massive amounts of hardware, just to do the bad job they do now.
Sure. Then you run even faster into the problem that this is not a real thing.
There is no AI that has consciousness. There is no AI that has human-level intelligence. We have no idea what it would take to build either of these things. Even if we were able to build either of these things, that does not automatically mean it is, or could ever become, superintelligent.
Your whole post is basically equivalent to saying "when the aliens come, and give us their technology, but enslave us all, capitalism will become irrelevant".
It feels truthy to say that we are close to the Singularity, but it's effectively a religious position. It has no basis in fact whatsoever.
I only quoted you and the grandparent. I've made no other comments here. You may have become confused. Taking some time and some breaths might be helpful.
I very much appreciate this reply. You basically perfectly elaborated on what I lazily threw out there.
With that being said, most of my friends are senior software devs and they think the same thing is bound to happen.
We often joke about starting a falafel restaurant or such before it is too late. I think it will take way, way longer for AI to make good falafel than it will take to replace software engineers.
I don't see UBI happening any time soon, although increasingly obvious it would be a good thing overall. because the oligarchs are on a powertrip and prefer to shed the workforce, have "unusuable" people fall by the wayside (through poor health, poor social status, economy);
the oligarchs will be the consumers; they are sort of moving towards a world of them + robots only. you could say "then if robots do everything we all can live the same way" in theory yes, in practice, it is tricky because of the way the system is built.
Agreed. There is very little reason to imagine a future in which the fruits of automation are widely distributed - you don't even need to bring AI into the picture, we already see massive amounts of new automation and historical levels of inequality - that wealth is flowing to a very small number of people. I think the most likely outcome is a techno-feudalist system of massive corporate alliances that own the final means of production - the strong AI, at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
> at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
That would be a second singularity. “Equality” could essentially evaporate as a concept if we have super intelligent, super improving, independent AI’s competing directly with each other.
I see a mad unbound rush for solar system wide resource extraction.
When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive.
Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city.
While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere.
When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. And when driving in comfortable autonomous electric buses is available frequently and cheaply, living outside the city becomes more compelling.
There is an interesting book called Scale by Geoffrey West, which speculates about how the scale of things like organisms and cities is bound by spatial networks. Worth a read
If land was taxed (the physically exclusionary resource that should be taxed), but property/development on it was not, the economics of building big and building up would be much cheaper. No more annual wealth tax (on the same value, year after year!) on development.
And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedging instrument of the rich, all that non-functional demand would disappear and land would get cheaper.
Interesting that eliminating a recurrent wealth tax would help the non-rich so much. (Who could also improve their properties without raising their own taxes).
But carefully aligning incentives in the market, in the direction of encouraging not disincentivizing investment on par with other options, I.e. not treating different kinds of investments differently tax wise, usually helps everyone in the end.
Today a wealthy person with one house on 100 acres, pays a significantly lower tax per acre than a regular person with that same house on a fraction of an acre. The poor are subsidizing rich land ownership.
This seems like a system that can only work in a fully urbanized country.
Otherwise, a nonexhaustive list of problems it seems guaranteed to cause:
- Push those currently in rural poverty over the edge into homelessness. Their homes will stand vacant and fall to ruin, leaving large swaths of land dotted with the wreckage of houses, trailers, and even whole villages. Some of it will be highly toxic. Many of the people will die, because the area they're in has precious few services for them, and they're too far from cities, with no means of getting there (because their cars have already been repossessed).
- Destroy green spaces. Parks, wildlife refuges, and even fallow fields are vital for the health of our ecosystems, the conversion of CO2 into oxygen, erosion prevention, temperature mitigation, and even mental health. And that's assuming there are explicit exemptions for farmers.
- Wreck entertainment businesses like theme parks, water parks, etc.
I'm deeply skeptical that a land-value-tax system can be calibrated so that it's sufficient incentive for developers to build up within a city, while not also causing these devastating knock-on effects in rural and suburban areas. And regardless of one's feelings about urban vs suburban vs rural living, I think we can probably all agree we don't actually want to make the entire surface of our planet into skyscrapers.
A steeper land tax, but no development tax, discourages sprawl and incentivizes parsimonious & maximally effective use.
Which would be the opposite dynamic to the one you are concerned about.
An income tax break on food production would be a good way to keep food prices lower, while maintaining a farmers incentive to use land efficiently.
And is good economics: matching a national tax break directly to a real national commons benefit, food security, while maintaining efficiency incentives.
I still don't see how this doesn't punish non-rich people in rural areas.
ETA: You seem to have edited your post after I made mine. However, your edit does not in any way explain how "steeper land tax" does not hurt people in rural areas. I'm not concerned with sprawl; I'm concerned with rural people near the poverty line being taxed out of their homes with no recourse.
Also, "income tax breaks for food production" a) do not scale proportionally with farmer land use, and b) would seem, on first glance, to encourage overfarming, rather than letting fields lie fallow periodically, which would be a short-term gain for long-term losses and damage to the soil.
In total taxes stay the same (for an area), with empty land tax increasing, land with property decreasing (because the property taxes disappear, and land tax increases proportionally to result in the same total tax).
So it will impact different people in an area, with different situations, differently obviously.
But you are clearly right, there will be additional factors that need to be handled.
The umbrella principle, is the law should simply correct a market's oversight of external/commons costs and needs, in proportion to their real value. Then the market can do its job of optimizing resources properly.
Things like farming practices that impact land value, should be incentivized or disincentives in direct proportion to the real value being lost or gained.
(Another addition would be that any tax change impacting investments already made, should transition over a time interval long enough individuals and businesses to realign their private economics, without sudden hardship.)
I don't understand all consequences yet, except one, that the wealthy and powerful object to it because it hurts them and so the Land Value Tax is rarely introduced. Even if it gets introduced, it will abolished soon thereafter.
Yes! He was a very clear thinker. Refreshing when you find someone who manages to see things as they are, right in front of you the whole time, independent of the numbing filter of unexamined cultural momentum.
--
> the wealthy and powerful object to it
The poor, whose property to land ratio is high (even if they individually own very little in absolute terms), subsidize the rich whose property to land ratio is low (even if in absolute terms they own more). And it compounds, because this makes land, like Bitcoin, a place to park money and reap the rewards of other people's growing population demand for something limited, and other people's investment in development. So housing for anyone but the rich becomes more and more of a financial challenge. And market warping mechanisms are tried, like rent freezes, etc. But somehow, simply taxing the precious limited resource (land) more, and dropping the tax on developing useful property on land, which is what is required to increase housing, rarely gets tried. And as you say, quickly gets reversed when it happens.
So many ways the poor, middle class, and not so rich, pay the taxes of the very rich.
And the very rich do a very good job of framing things, so the want-to-be rich believe they need to keep things that way -- to their own, and everyone else's, detriment.
I immediately think of mining. Mining in most countries places little value on miners: it is a dangerous, life shortening occupation very often done by those without much alternative. It's history is one of random deaths and maimings, quite often of large groups of people at once. It is associated with numerous health problems. Pretty much the only thing that has ever improved conditions for miners anywhere is either collective action or paternalistic, labour-sympathetic government. Mining and jobs like it are among the stereotypical situations where people imagine that education for their children will lead to a better life.
All of which is to say, will the most awful jobs actually be automated? Not just awful, either, but poorly paid? Logically it makes more sense to approach knowledge work first: it requires only one kind of investment, namely data centres. There are thousands of niche skills in manual labour that will be awkward to make robots for. I think also of old housing stock that needs to be maintained by plumbers, in particular: legacy stuff built up over decades (or where I live, centuries)
Language models seem to have come a lot further because they can use the generalisable capital of computers. Outside of controlled environments (factories, cities with grid systems) I don't imagine robots will represent such a good investment any time soon. Knowledge work is dying, time to learn a trade. Maybe.
(It would have been great to have been able to learn and practice a profession for a lifetime. Library churn is awful, I suspect what will follow for most of us here will be worse)
"AI", and even robotics, are terrible at construction and maintenance. Most housing-related problems are in that category. It's not at all clear how LLM-type AI can help much. There are at least 18 humanoid robots on YouTube, but we don't see them doing much useful manipulation.
That's the part that needs to scale up.
That YC startup working on robotic construction equipment is a step in the right direction. But it's mostly automatic driving.
About twenty years ago, someone hooked a backhoe up to a force feedback hand input device, so you could dig by making clawing motions with your hand. The neat thing was that you could feel your way around pipes and rocks. Never got beyond a prototype. If AI manipulation gets any good, that sort of thing should be a robot.
In the US at least, most housing-related problems are political, no? There was an article here in the last week talking about manufactured housing in particular and all the regulations that make it infeasible.
"The measured economy becomes dominated by whatever it is that cannot be made more efficiently" Which is why health care support operations are the fastest growing labor category in the US.[1] And why medical care has become such a huge part of the Federal budget. Meanwhile, farming is down below 2% and manufacturing is tiny. That's because those were the areas with the biggest productivity improvements.
AI will come first for those for whom everything they do for income goes in and out over a wire.
I think it's all going more towards implode with the current bubble, and the enormous disconnect between power consumption and what people actually want to spend on it.
Already happening to anything creative, where people would be contracted for doing images and sounds for indie stuff, flyers, translations,... and now companies generate them instead.
Computing, we're reducing team sizes now, first thanks to SaaS managed platforms, now taking yet another blow with AI based automations.
Some weakly held opinions... Cheaper goods and services, more wealth inequality, more power concentration in the hands of a few individuals (and a few nation states), more expensive scarce assets like land, more jobs where humanness is valued, more climate change (in the short-run), better medicine, warfare outcomes even less coupled with population counts, less human casualties in war although bimodally distributed, new arms race between major powers, unpredictable social and civic consequences.
I think two possible effects of AI are often conflated.
On the one hand you can imagine that work gets supercharged, allowing companies to produce 10x the number of widgets at 1/10th the cost. The economy would grow rapidly, wealth inequality would presumably be exacerbated, jobs would be automated, we might need some version of universal basic income, and so on. People debate whether or not this kind of transition is imminent or if it'd take decades.
On the other hand, it's conceivable that not much would happen in the "bulk" of the economy while at the same time the frontier of humanity might be pushed forward. We may see new treatments for diseases, new types of energy production, and so on. In this version of the world, jobs would mostly remain unchanged (at least in the short to intermediate term), perhaps with some small multiplicative efficiency factor, the economy wouldn't grow rapidly, there wouldn't be any mass unemployment, and so on.
In my mind, I'm much more excited about the second kind of impact that AI might have than the first. I guess I don't really feel like I want to have 10x the stuff that I already have while I'm really excited about someone curing cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, and so on.
If stuff is 1/10th as expensive as it is now, you can also work 1/10th as hard for 1x as much stuff as you have now, instead of 1x as hard as you work now for 10x the stuff.
I'm not making a value judgement on how much I would or other people should consume in the first scenario. I'm simply saying that you could have profound effects due to AI without it being evident in the top-level metrics like economic growth, unemployment, and so on. It seems like we often say that either we see explosive economic growth or AI has either no, or at best very minimal impact in our lives. I don't think this dichotomy is correct.
I agree that that dichotomy is not necessarily true, but also you gave your reason for being "more excited" about one side of the dichotomy being that you "don't want 10x the stuff," and my point is that you're undervaluing the flexibility of material abundance.
I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology
I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that.
Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at least 10x (today), if not 100x.
Bio people hate coding. Its not their scene, its not their interest, and they stink at it. They're not going to take a 4 year detour in their career to learn how to code. I've been 13 layers deep in 'if' statements before with colleagues before I've had to up the price of 'help me real quick' from a 6-pack to a case. They really do not care at all for code, let alone anything resembling 'passable' code. They want their results and they want out.
Most of you have probably never worked with MatLab before. It's pseudo-code that complies. The help docs are famously good. Baby's first program level stuff. Its all over bio. And still, the bio people hate it.
And bio these days is just filled with data. There's so much of it being collected and mostly badly processed, if at all. You'll get grad students spending 6 months just trying to code up their experiment and it's results for some stupid solenoid valve pair, a laser, and a diode. It's stupid how much time is just wasted. Just dumb.
Vibe coding has changed all of this.
Yeah, it doesn't work on the bespoke rig the first time out. But it does work, at all, within a week. The code is not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than what was there before. There are comments in the code, at all! They have for loops now! The can ask the LLM how to make it faster or smaller or what the code is doing, bit by literal bit! And the LLM doesn't have a meeting to weasel out to. It's patient! Even at 2am!
Vibe coding is not for programmers, its for the rest of us. Its not going anywhere and it is affecting your health.
My first reaction was, "But what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?" But then, without the AI, what if the bio people generate incorrect code and don't realize it? Can the AI be more accurate than a non-programmer? Probably; in fact arguably they already are.
So I think I buy the parent's point. In fact, I think it's wider than biology. I bet there are a bunch of other fields with non-programmers doing a fair amount of coding. Economics research, say. Business process automation. I'm sure there are others.
Byand large, since bio people just do not like programming, they were commonly generating outright bad code and then spending just months/years trying to figure it all out, hopefully before publication. But not always.
LLMs have democratized passable code. I think it'll be before 2030 that they'll have democratized good code.
If you think being in IT and supporting random Excel spreadsheets you never knew about and random shadow IT projects that you suddenly get ownership of is a pain. I can't imagine all the vibe coded projects about to come IT's way. With zero standardization on frameworks/DBs/languages used, zero written specs/requirements/anything. It should be fun.
> ...what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?
Cynically, there are plenty of people who don't care so long as they can get it published.
Pragmatically, the quality of work is frequently so poor, leading to so much random variation in results, I doubt that frequent errors in AI-produced work would significantly change the quality range in many fields.
Very well put. I expect the same thing is coming in Linguistics, though at a slower rate because linguists are even more tech/math-phobic than biologists.
Here's a thought: what if descendants of today's open models end up refined by proprietary models, resulting in a world in which it is largely impossible to keep AI under private ownership? What if data protection laws give way to data donation laws, permitting people to specifically choose recipient research institutions to train new AI upon? I could easily see a world where OpenAI, Google, Anthropic etc are boycotted in favour of say, a global-membership cooperative. It'd require people to exercise some agency but few predictions about AI seem to imagine people have any. Governments are spoken about as though they're managing people rather than representing them. The likelihood of popular movements or collective endeavours seems to not have been factored in at all.
It's a good thing, sure, but not that great. Personally, I don't see the possibility of it solving many fundamental human problems.
We could still have war, extreme poverty, starvation, and massive conflicts between different groups... Those stuff probably will continue as today. It could even be exacerbated if the conflicting parties just gain more power…
And this is the predicament that people seem to either not understand or completely (wilfully?) ignore. As is said, problems have solutions; predicaments have outcomes. I think this [0] is worth a read (among many other similar analyses)
Economy is way too much growth, as inequality and inefficiency, pollution, and resource exaustion, being mainly based on finance and speculation and not on -real- economy, for the good of a very small part of humanity. Has to grow in this manner even more? And with the help of AI?
If some rules are not changed and a more equality model is developed, there are no more world at all.
What's your problem with growth? Growth means higher GDP which is correlated with all sorts of good things, including longer lives, and less food scarcity.
i like "all sort of good things" (and more if are really available for -all-) but IMHO relating these to an aeternal even bigger growth is a big misconception, seems to me that now the bigger part of growth is going to benefits very few, and polluting/undermining the rest of the world, vanishing the "good thing" for the rest of us.
I imagine growth more as a consequence of a really sane economy, capable to adapt, expand and even shrink when necessary without devastating markets and real GDP, i cannot think now 'growth' as the foundation of a real sustainable and development in the near future.
Is like 'progress', a word mainly referring to speed and more speed, but never about 'direction'.
Returning to AI, really can these new techs benefits all of us? I doubt. In some sectors AI techs can be a great aid (expert systems, data mining, ) but this growth of LLM things seems a big bubble, more related to speculation than others. just my 5c.
Most GDP growth is just a change in price level - even inflation-adjusted GDP, since prices consistently rise faster than inflation. How does this help anyone?
It's can't without an explosion of energy use. An explosion of economic activity will create an explosion of resource extraction and pollution. Since we are already going beyond many planetary boundaries we likely risk destroying organized human life because we destroyed our ecology.
Assume those loops have maximum force and the economy becomes “information produced by information capital, which is produced by information, which in turn is producing information ever faster every year”, as William Nordhaus, a Nobel laureate in economics, wrote in a paper in 2021. This brings about the “singularity”—a point when output becomes infinite. The singularity is really a counterargument: proof that the model must, eventually, be proved wrong. But even the first step on the journey, a big acceleration in growth, would be a profound event.
Until 1700 the world economy did not really grow—it just stagnated. Over the previous 17 centuries global output had expanded by 0.1% a year on average, a rate at which it takes nearly a millennium for production to double. Then spinning jennies started whirring and steam engines began to puff. Global growth quintupled to 0.5% a year between 1700 and 1820. By the end of the 19th century it had reached 1.9%. In the 20th century it averaged 2.8%, a rate at which production doubles every 25 years. Growth has not just become the norm; it has accelerated.
That's only "real" in that it's inflation adjusted. It's still the same balooney that GDP is inherently.
What this "growth" is based on is the same rent-seeking and money printing credit I mentioned. And of course even people getting paid to dig and then fill in holes would increase the GDP.
My "dismal results" refers to actual state of labor market and quality of jobs, actual purchasing power, actual production, actual innovation, actual infrastructure, actual quality of life changes, etc. Not GDP or stock market or how rich the 0.00001% gets.
>My "dismal results" refers to actual state of labor market and quality of jobs, actual purchasing power, actual production, actual innovation, actual infrastructure, actual quality of life changes, etc. Not GDP or stock market or how rich the 0.00001% gets.
How convenient that your preferred metrics can't objectively be measured and basically give you free reign to define the results however you want! It's the "community adjusted EBITDA"[1] of economic metrics.
Prices rise faster than inflation. You'd have to adjust for prices instead of adjusting for inflation.
Try indexing it to median monthly non-imputed rent per square foot.
Yet the fairy tale that growth not only can continue indefinitely but continually accelerate has to be kept up. It's almost as though word “enough” has been banned from economy altogether.
> It's almost as though word “enough” has been banned from economy altogether.
without growth people will start to notice all the wealth is accruing at the top; its hard to justify such a system if average people aren't getting better while working more and more
You clearly don't understand what growth is and think it is just more of existing things. Or understand just how dysfunctional things would have to be for stasis to occur. Developing new drugs is growth. There is an industrial learning curve from refinement of techniques that dated back to even handmade artisinal goods in ancient times. Even when there were minimal rewards for doing so. Let alone when educated professionals are dedicating their lives to improving and understanding processes, and are rewarded for it.
If we aren't growing despite billions in research and development and people spending their lives on the tasks, the question is what the hell are we doing that is so deeply, unnaturally wrong that we are doing worse than all of history?
>You clearly don't understand what growth is and think it is just more of existing things. Or understand just how dysfunctional things would have to be for stasis to occur. Developing new drugs is growth.
And yet compared to a couple decades ago we have declining infant mortality and life expectancy, record low for life satisfaction metrics, demographic collapse, climate catastrophes piling up, enshittification, but yay! growth!
The attack on humans is coordinated. Vance is pushing for "AI", which is curiously but deservedly under-reported in the US/EU press, so here's an Indian link:
There is no possible outcome where AI makes the world's economic growth explode.
The only thing that will happen under AI is jobs will continue to diminish, and eventually, society will hit a self-sustaining deflationary spiral, sometimes from a hyper-inflation whipsaw collapse, sometimes directly to deflation.
Economies can't move without purchasing power flowing from producer to consumer to producer.
Technological advancements create wealth by increasing efficiency.
Not really sure what deeper explanation you're looking for?
It's no different from the cotton gin or steam engine or railroads.
Obviously, if you don't think AI results in greater efficiency then there wouldn't be more wealth. But that's a tech question, not an econ question. The economic side of things couldn't be simpler.
Efficiency of what exactly? And how do they do that? All of the NFT-turned-AI bros insist that the answers to those questions are “everything” and “by being awesome”, which sounds more like the thinking of someone that’s convinced they’re on the precipice of inventing magic or figuring out how to directly petition god
Looking at e.g. the Solow Model better technology will indeed increase efficiency as the output per worker increases which will lead to economic growth. However I think you are right. This is an oversimplification with regards to AI because in the end its also about which products are being impacted. Also the product quality is left out in that scenario so it gets tricky. E.g. I would personally not like to read even one AI generated book as of today.
Paid services becoming basically free is wealth creation. You have the goods but none of the old cost of production. This is patently obvious, so I assume there’s some well-practiced remarks inspired by or borrowed from early 20th century socialists you would like to share? HN comments wouldn’t be complete with an homage to the class struggle. I would rather take the win and be happy about it.
Will AI make the things that people actually __need__ -- healthy food (not the slop at Walmart), decent housing, affordable health care, affordable education, clean air, clean/healthy environments -- more accessible?
I don't see any major companies using AI for that -- they're focused on diversion and wealth extraction.
AI is just another layer of convenience and "wants" for those who have what they need already.
Sure, GDP might go up, but it doesn't mean a thing if people don't have what they _need_.
Naming LLMs as "AI" is really proving to be a colossal mistake and/or a deliberately misleading strategy that has (very successfully) helped acquire capital. Because it brings in all of the cultural tropes about superintelligent robots and gives them a veneer of respectability; e.g., The Matrix, 2001, The Terminator, etc.
Conflating the two is a massive category error. It's perfectly possible for LLMs / current-generation "AI" to have a massive economic impact without thinking there are going to be digital human replacements in the next 5 years.
The civilization will destroy itself first. States are not addressing what really matters and especially not the multi billion/trillion companies. The US fight against social security and less inequality, the things that wealth should enable. We are destroying jobs that brought purpose, just because some small percentages in margin. We are not training the AIs to solve climate change but to code well. Maybe it’s time for the UN to become the main government of this world, to deal well with the uneven distribution and discrimination of work force. It is too much about egos, too much thinking in cultural groups to protect from outsiders, too much war and destruction, still too much burning fossil fuels, too much destruction of our environment and the nature. Maybe with the appearance of aliens first to have a visible outer enemy first? But I guess it will be the same as always: as long as most find some distraction, some misinformation that calms down fears and anxieties, nothing will change for the common good.
You can have really massive growth in markets along with massively wide inequality at the same time among the human population. You can also now (for the first time in global history) have laws of supply and demand start to service non-human intelligence.
Future transactions can have bots on both ends, running an economy that continually grows to service the needs of (probably more efficient) machine capitalists rather than human capitalists.
Just like when human agriculture and industrialization broke multiple organically forming food webs in the natural world, so could it be with human industry
Is not like Jane and John Doe are going to see any benefits from such an economic explosion. The wealth will trickle up, as always, the poor will be further exploited and discarded.
Yep. That's why we now have much better washing machines, dryers, and refrigerators. Because with a market, competition, and the invisible hand, consumers always benefit.
I'd rather just have a world where people move a little slower, care less about efficiency, appreciate the smaller things in life, and stop forcing endless upgrades of every kind on everyone with new phones, new apps, soulless art, and new ways of doing things. But that's just me.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day. The reasons behind this are communication and training overheads. If AI leads to a world where people don't really have to know anything to do their jobs - just provide high-level judgements that LLMs seem farther away from than they are from accuracy, or if they could somehow keep the human beings out of meetings, the forces keeping labor concentrated could abate.
On the other hand, if AI accuracy limitations drive the labor demand even further towards expertise, and if making tasks higher-level raises the communication requirements rather than somehow reducing them, the preference for having a few people work 80-hour weeks while twice as many people remain unemployed will become even stronger.
I'm surprised that someone has pointed this out because it is 100% on point.
The moment your economy is productive enough that it is not necessary to hire every single person, employers start firing people rather than cut the working hours evenly across the population, because each employee represents a fixed cost. Hence you either work full time or you don't work at all.
This is peak utilization of efficiency in the USA. This is what corporations think is acceptable optimization/efficacy looks like if we give them the choice. And then the non-wage slave caste people will complain that this single mother didn't raise her children well enough and call her lazy/a bad parent:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14908283/hardest-wo...
> Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the gains all go to the people at the top.
Just like they have for 40 years.
>Just like they have for 40 years.
Taking that at face value, what happened before 40 years ago? There was unimaginable growth in per-person GDP, so people could have plausibly kicked back and relaxed rather than toiling in factories.
If you're asking "what caused the change?" the answer is "Ronald Reagan".
If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible".
Just to expand on that a bit, in case it isn't fully clear:
There is a level of productivity per worker required to support everyone in the society. This level fluctuates some with the overall standard of living, but does not vary with total productivity, population, or GDP. Let's call this level P, for Parity. (And let's assume it's not "just barely enough to support everyone", but "enough to support them comfortably and reliably, with a decent buffer".)
Once the level of productivity per worker passes certain thresholds—multiples of P—the total amount of work required to maintain the society at the same level drops. More work produces surplus. That surplus can be then used in a variety of ways. One of those ways is by reducing the amount of work being done. So, for instance, if the productivity level reaches 2P, then every worker can work half the amount of time they were working before, and still be producing enough to fully provide for everyone. If it reaches 3P, then every worker can work 1/3 the amount of time, and so on.
If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows.
I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. I'd say that at this point, just as a rough estimate, we're probably somewhere between 1.5P and 2P, but that's not really my field of expertise. But because the wealthy have captured approximately all productivity gains above the level we were at in 1980, they have seen their wealth massively increase, while the rest of us have just been scraping by.
>If you're asking "why didn't the people before then work less?" the answer is "because productivity gains hadn't yet made that possible".
>[...] I don't know exactly when real-world productivity got enough higher than P that we could realistically start reducing worked hours, but it definitely did so at some point in the last several decades. [...]
GDP per capita has been growing exponentially for centuries[1]. Is there some arbitrary GDP per capita level where people should be expected to kick back and relax? Why makes your arbitrary line more or less correct than someone else's arbitrary line? Moreover people's revealed preferences show that for most people, that line hasn't been reached yet. Why should people's revealed preferences be overridden by whatever number you came up with?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...
>If, instead, the surplus is captured by the wealthy, the workers don't see benefit, and inequality grows.
Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured. Even if you're some sort of marxist that thinks labor's share of GDP should be 100%, at the very most this means the point at which everyone can kick back and relax is delayed by 40%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
This isn't about GDP in a currency sense. It's about Creating Enough Stuff that people can thrive.
Like I said: there is a threshold of Stuff Created Per Person above which providing a comfortable life for every person is purely a distribution problem. For most of human history, we have not been above that threshold.
"Subsistence farming", for instance, is effectively defined by only being able to meet the much lower threshold of "enough that people can survive".
A post-scarcity society is, broadly speaking, defined by being able to produce enough for everyone to thrive with minimal work from anyone.
We are somewhere between the two, but we are reaching the point where we're closer to the latter than the former. Technological advancements have, for some time, ensured that we have enough food for everyone on earth (again, there's still a distribution problem; that part is nearly 100% about politics, not about scarcity). If the very wealthy had not captured all the productivity increases since 1980, I don't know what else we could have achieved, but it wouldn't have been small.
> Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured.
Look at any graph of income growth by quintile that goes back to the middle of the 20th century or earlier, and you'll see it starts with some roughly parallel lines, and then one line that keeps going up at about the same slope, while the rest stay nearly flat.
Sure looks like the wealthy have captured an awful lot:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/19...
"Economic statistics shows it hasn't been captured"
Your citation
* Doesn't show how labor compensation is distributed among workers (CEO pay vs. median wages).
* Doesn't account for how capital returns are distributed among different wealth levels.
The 4 day work week movement continues to move forward, and becomes more likely to succeed as workers gain more power as the prime working age population continues to shrink over decades due to structural demographics (total fertility rates below replacement in most of the world).
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...
Well for one, no computers collating every persons value to the economy to buy and sell as and manipulate through targeted effort
Credit system didn’t exist, which conveniently grandfathered in all the Bloomberg, Trump, and other old money …obviously inheritance made them geniuses who deserved it
Basically Boomers came of age 40 years ago and needed something to do. So the 80-90 year olds of the day handed them all the power.
I mean come on. Do we really need to circumlocute the cause? Why the old rich people writing the rules and always winning is suspicious af still?
All of that might be true, but it doesn't address my core question: why didn't people kick back and relax 50 or even 100 years ago? If people 50, 100, or 200 years ago made the choice to keep working hours constant rather than convert productivity gains into leisure, why is the choice to keep working hours constant today suddenly caused by malign influence of the powers that be?
They did.
The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades.
They did not have vague “line go up” motives. They worked to stabilize biological necessity.
Workers today work more because of a large investor class that doesn’t. We’re working for two or more shareholders not our own roof and food.
>The average person worked fewer hours through almost all of recorded history until the last few decades.
If you're claiming that people worked fewer hours during the industrial revolution than today, I'll need a citation for that. If you're referencing the claims made by "Original affluent society", that has problems around how working hours are counted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society#Crit...
The criticisms have the same lack of information problems.
So modern anecdotes make the most sense. I grew up in 80s dairyland. None of the farmers worked a 9-5 but they rarely worked 40+ too.
We worked much much less in rural-landia before the last few decades gave rise to "service and knowledge" work with no concrete goal but "make line go up".
Knowledge work comes along with zero concrete termination points. Programmers grinding code 80+ hours are not stopping to see if it's useful or just repetition.
Sure from a physics perspective they're doing "work". From a lived experience, to real needs of biology, economy perspective they're just sitting at a computer juicing their hormones, while exploiting farmers labor, who now works more hours as more knowledge workers contribute less real outputs essential to biology. Same with why carpentry and other trades services are so expensive; supply and demand. Millennials wanted 24/7 office jobs.
While I grew up in farmland I later went into EE, and have a good sense for who is moving the ball. It isn't software people. Their biology is addicted to a stupid loop of zero real productivity. Playing abstract snake games in one's head, to count initialized memory registers and recording their data is some basic bitch work marketed to the point of fostering delusion it's cutting in 2010-2020 to use 1960s style syntaxes to manage machines.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the capacity for the economy to create "bullshit work" (e.g. work which is engaged in zero sum "wealth defense") is unbounded.
For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even let the bottom 50% retire early, society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital. This would probably only happen with violence.
This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market while the efficiency gains which could be realized at the bottom of the pyramid get "burned off" via inflation targeting of 2%. A quirky side effect of this is that the vast efficiency improvements we have seen have not even been allowed to prevent a pensions crisis.
The Economist, serving in its capacity as a dutiful servant to neoliberal capital, frets equally about AI inevitably causing us to "run out of jobs" as it does a demographic crisis inevitably causing us to "run out of workers" (https://archive.ph/6hgYq).
>This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market
That's a seductive narrative, but not backed up by data. The share of GDP that goes to labor is has held relatively stable in the past few decades. It has admittedly fallen, but it's on the order of a few percentage points, whereas the GDP per capita more than tripled.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
>while the efficiency gains which could be realized at the bottom of the pyramid get "burned off" via inflation targeting of 2%.
But inflation-adjusted wages isn't negative or even flat, it has grown?
How do you square these “growing wages” against the zeitgeist which says more and more people are living hand-to-mouth? At what point do these statistics get tossed out because they have little to no bearing on the lived experience of the great mass of people? At what point does one acknowledge that these statistics seem like they’re compiled simply to muddy the waters to make reality seem different than it is?
Famously, one can spin statistics any way they wish. Prove to us this isn’t the case here.
> How do you square these “growing wages” against the zeitgeist which says more and more people are living hand-to-mouth?
Both can be true if the distribution has changed, which seems to be the case:
"Over the last four decades, the income gap between more- and less-educated workers has grown significantly; the study finds that automation accounts for more than half of that increase."
https://news.mit.edu/2022/automation-drives-income-inequalit...
Additionally, necessities like food and fuel seem to have jumped in price, outpacing wage growth over the past few years, while other important goods and services (housing, health care, higher education) have outpaced inflation for decades.
>That's a seductive narrative, but not backed up by data. The share of GDP that goes to labor is has held relatively stable in the past few decades
If you click that "max" button on your graph it does not show a stable share.
Appeal to status quo is seductive for those who are generally comfortable though, I get it.
>But inflation-adjusted wages isn't negative or even flat, it has grown?
Looks pretty flat to me:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185369/median-hourly-ear...
If they weighted nondiscretionary housing, education and healthcare in the inflation basket properly and de-emphasized discretionary electronics and clothes I doubt it would even be flat.
> For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even more wealth (for the bottom 50%), society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital.
And even then, even a small percentage of bad actors who are selfish would likely restructure it back due to technology enabling them to do so! The fact is, the elite at the top is a steady state that is hard to leave if you worship efficiency. Only the Amish and some native tribes have realized that the only way out is not to play.
This seems circular… capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy, and will likely betray any trust or faith placed in them if put under enough pressure.
So society has to depend on something fully independent of any specific person or group and that cannot be changed without leaving behind a long papertrail.
In other words nobody dreams of becoming a banker/accountant/auditor/etc. at 5 year old. Probably even double entry bookkeeping would be superfluous if everyone were virtuous paragons.
>capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy
Not really. It became that way because wealth begets power.
The narrative it tells us is that we should be terrified to change this because nobody else except the owners of capital can be trusted as stewards of our economy and political system (particularly not "government").
It certainly seems functional more than narrative… a long papertrail is physically costly to fake.
Try comparing Chinese and western industrial capacities.
Ours is a joke compared to theirs and we started off richer. The primary difference is that their government allocates capital.
Wasteful, indeed.
> This seems circular… capital has become such an important gatekeeper in society in the first place because most people aren’t that trustworthy, and will likely betray any trust or faith placed in them if put under enough pressure.
True, but it's also mainly because we have a society that is based on technological innovation with rapid transportation/communication. I was only responding to the other reply that seemed to imply that there was an alternative restructuring that puts less capital at the top.
What's really ironic, based on my understanding, is that the world that you have expressed a desire for, is much likelier in a world where economic growth accelerates based on AI. Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
I sincerely doubt it, because that technology also invades life. It invades the world with more information, not less. More business...when has technology ever slowed things down? AI just seems to make certain tasks more efficient, but I haven't seen anything slow down.
Before technology, even if things were slow, people didn’t have time to do anything with the slowness anyway. I think you’re thinking of some past utopia that never existed. Or maybe you’re thinking of the 90s, idk.
> Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
Which is the scary part of the AI revolution. Devaluing labor always leads to increased inequality in the short-to-mid term until a new equilibrium is met. But what if we have machines that can do most jobs for 10-20k a year? Suddenly we have a hard ceiling for everyone below a certain "skill level", where skill includes things like owning capital, going to the right college, and having the right parents.
In the past, when inequality became too extreme, (the threat of) violent uprisings usually led to reform, but with autonomous weapon systems, drones and droids, manpower becomes less of a concern. The result might be a permanent underclass.
Really? The AI revolution is happening in the West, and mostly in the US. Just imagine it happened in a muslim country, or Russia, or China, or even India. Half of them would immediately use it to start a war. If you think labor is devalued here, it can be SO much worse.
Also I don't understand the entire argument. The thread is about stopping economic growth. You say you don't receive enough of the current economic growth ... so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it? At 0 growth the only way to give you anything would be to take it away from someone else. In other words: you want an extra meal at 0% growth? That can only happen if someone else doesn't get one ...
> so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it?
Personally, I don't want growth to reduce, exactly. I'd prefer it if there were tighter restrictions on the direction of growth, and we spent more time finding creative ways to return to smaller communities where the efforts are spent less on pure money and more on people helping each other. And more time restoring nature. So growth, but not purely in an economic sense.
It only seems like a degrowth thing when you look at from a purely fiscal angle.
There is nothing stopping you from moving to a smaller community, and in the west there's tons of them around. And if you're willing to take the (very low) wages that go with that, you can live there for the rest of your life easily.
Hell, I know people who've done this. Several actually. Well, only one that's still alive (they retired there, wanted to grow old and die there ... and did), but still.
But ... why bother anyone about it? You want others to do this but would never accept doing so yourself?
> But ... why bother anyone about it? You want others to do this but would never accept doing so yourself?
Well, first I already have, so I don't know where you got "never accept doing so yourself", which is something you made up. Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature, which in my opinion is on the same level as actively targeting people. So I do want that to stop.
If nature was not being destroyed and it was just people messing up their own little world, then that would be different.
> Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature
Is it? If you put it this dramatically, it's bullshit. Nature will survive us, rather than the other way around, guaranteed. MAYBE we can kill large animals if we tried, but probably not even that (they'd just shrink and then grow large again, wouldn't be the first, or second, or even the tenth time that happened).
Life on earth is being sustained by the sun and by nuclear reactions inside the earth. Nothing we do makes the tiniest of difference in the long run.
Increased temperature and increased CO2 and climate change essentially make more chemical and solar energy available in the environment. Life is chemical in nature and is limited by available energy. That means there would be more life, more green, if more energy was available. Life would have to be pretty damn badly designed if this damaged it, rather than what we actually see happening: life is spreading to much more of the planet than even 100 years ago.
So, first, you can rest assured: it is just people messing up their own little world.
Second: it would be seriously unnatural if we stopped. After all competing and using up all available resources is literally the sole goal of all life on earth. And if you compare humans to an average ocean-bound bacterial species, we're not even particularly good at it.
Okay, so we are not destroying all of nature, only enough nature that it will get seriously uncomfortable for us. Great! Your second argument is even stranger. It would be unnatural to stop polluting the environment? Where are you going with this?
People say that until they are asked to pay more and earn less.
Well, I had a high-paying job, six figures. But that six-figures came with less freedom, higher-paced work, life bureacracy, and I wasn't happy. I had no time or mental space to just sit and think. Probably the least happy I was in my entire life. So I quit. Now, I do live a slower-paced life, and earn very little. But I'm the happiest I've ever been.
But YMMV I guess.
there are many many 6 figure jobs that don’t require working more than > 40 hours a week. Bureaucracy is hard to avoid though, unless you’re at a startup, but then you’re working all the time lol.
For me personally, lack of money early in my career caused me _far_ greater daily stress than bureaucracy at work. Not needing to budget daily purchases? now that’s low stress.
Out of interest, how much capital did you accrue during that time? Mortgage free and a good pension seems to be the bar for voluntarily adopting a slower pace of life.
Not a lot, lol. I don't even own property, and my pension will be a very small pittance. The goal is to hopefully make enough through independent projects to make it work. And if North American becomes too expensive, then Plan B is to move to a cheaper part of the world, much cheaper. Less infrastructure there, but what're ya going to do? Can't have everything in life, and you've only got one :)
Out of the 2 things asked for: paying more while earning less, paying more is the more critical of them ...
Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
This also leads to higher medical costs, lower productivity, and less satisfaction in life.
So maybe efficiency should be a priority. What do you think?
>Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
>We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
Throwing away food can be efficient. In fact, absent evidence to the contrary, we should expect that throwing away food (or buying/producing more) is the more efficient option out there, given that people aren't putting effort into conserving food. Remember, conservation isn't free. For instance it might be possible to reduce the amount of fruits that are bruised and thrown away, but that requires more packaging and more careful handling, which isn't free. At the household level, proper meal planning and inventory management can probably eliminate all food waste, but nobody wants to spend the mental effort into managing an ERP for their kitchen.
>We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
You got cause and effect mixed up. People live in suburbs and drive around everywhere because they like the suburban lifestyle (eg. cheaper/bigger houses, "safer" and "quieter" neighborhoods), not because they're not too fat to live in 15 minute cities. Remember, suburbanization happened well before the obesity epidemic.
> We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy in terms of carrying that weight.
But it's efficient in terms of working as a slave for the technological system, though. It means less time spent on life, more time spent on thinking about technology.
> We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
Again, quite efficient for the system.
You think people own cars because they’re unfit? Would it be more efficient for them to ditch their car and cycle 4 hours per day to and from work?
They don't cycle.
In other advanced societies (say New York City), people catch public transport to go to work. Catching public transport usually involves a certain amount on walking, since the bus/metro stop is not usually outside your front door.
Yes I think people become unfit from growing up in a car culture and then become dependent on cars for transportation because they can't conceive of a world where they don't require one for transportation because they're so unfit.
It's a wicked problem with no obvious solution.
The most common number of passengers in a car is 1, but nearly all cars are big enough for 4.
That's not how capitalism measures efficiency. It all comes down to profits. Everything else is bureaucracy and marketing. There just aren't any incentives to drive these macroecononic efficiency goals you mention.
So...down with capitalism?
Not exactly. Capitalism is just the optimal solution for technology when the primary driver of growth is people. But AI is likely to change that and then capitalism will be modified and done away with but the destruction will remain.
There should be a new modern-day version of the Amish, where we freeze technology at the 1999 level. Amish 2.0
Oh that's easy, just move to any small Mediterranean island.
Not exactly easy, because first you have to make enough money to do so. And to do that, you'll likely be stuck in a grind of competing to be the most efficient. Adn even if you can do that in a short period of time, a sufficient number of people doing that will just fuel the system as usual.
Those in poverty would rather people expand the economy so they can be lifted out of poverty to have time to focus on the smaller things.
With enough money/capital growing, you can live however reasonably paced you like!
Well, I sincerely doubt I'm going to get much of that capital. Mostly the people at the top will....
only if you have a real (sane, sustainable, efficient) economy to give the money some value. without a real economy money is a number in a computer/a piece of paper, and growing is constrained by the finite resources of the world
Only if you have found an end to old age, sickness and death.
Until this ^ there are no guarantees in life.
You cant eat money
Well you can’t drive money, fly money, surgery money, publish money, build a house out of money that doesn’t melt in the rain…
If you want to put it that way.
But given we agree it is absolutely useless, you should probably periodically trade some of it for food. Etc.
That works out really well, since money doesn’t mold as quickly as food, and doesn’t require refrigeration. So accumulate money, let it work for you in the form of productive capital, but skim it for food purchases.
money gets inflated into monopoly money.
Presumably "money" in this case doesn't mean literal hundred dollar bills stuffed into mattresses. They're being invested.
".....and it's gone." (south park)
... but trinkets! FOMO! Socially-acceptable welfare!
This industry is so wasteful that I'm convinced productivity only matters when looking to fire someone. Otherwise, Animal Farm.
It is wasteful. But it only is wasteful if you look at it from the valuation of human utility. For technological advancement, the system is quite efficient. It's just that we're not the priority.
We achieve... something, to be sure. I maintain it's more 'control' than 'progress'.
Looking at the technological advancement from a human utility perspective... opting out as circumstance allows seems reasonable.
I still live like it's 2004. Computer room and everything. What's an AdTech? /s
And then what? What’s there to do? By that logic we would all be playing pixelated Doom, carrying Walkman around, and smoking inside restaurants.
Go out and observe and enjoy nature, enjoy good food, the company of lots of friends, etc. I wouldn't mind a world where people had more time to do that, if it meant I had to carry around a Walkman or go to live concerts...
Of course, not all innovation is bad. Banning smoking in restaurants does not require technology to restrict it...
Tons of people do not have anything on that list thanks to the social implants and if we are honest cant have it ever again in a world with 8 billion. So why not stop pretending that the idealizations of the past is a viable alternative. Its empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.
> ts empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.
Alright then, if that's really the foregone conclusion, then what's the point of existence? Should we not try and make things better by any means necessary?
> > ts empty appartments, games, drugs and loneliness on UBI, that would be the outcome.
> Alright then, if that's really the foregone conclusion, then what's the point of existence? Should we not try and make things better by any means necessary?
That's the pertinent question, and I don't have an answer that can adjudicate the dispute, but I can humbly help you formulate the choice as one between Leviathan or oblivion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ophuls#Leviathan_or_ob...
> In his contribution, "Leviathan or Oblivion?", Ophuls wrote on the political and economical implications of environmental problems. His main argument was that "because of the tragedy of the commons, environmental problems cannot be solved through cooperation...and the rationale for government with major coercive powers is overwhelming." According to Ophuls "reforming a corrupt people is a Herculean task," which only leaves us with the choice of becoming a leviathan or oblivion.
> Eckersley (1992) argued that, "...although Ophuls has since moderated his position by placing a greater emphasis on the need for self restraint than on the need for external coercion, he continues to maintain that the latter must be resorted to if calls for the former are unsuccessful."
The sobering realization that others smarter and earlier than I am have seen this change coming over the horizon and have warned us heedlessly leads me to believe that we must be the change we wish to see, and that change must happen socially, culturally, and politically.
Ours must be a human revolution toward society, not withdrawing from it. We must encourage and embrace the humanity in ourselves and in each other, and seek to lift others up more than we seek to tear others down. Hate can't drive out hate; only love can do that. We must love each other more than we hate each other. Love will guide us to our salvation.
Thank you for this answer
I feel like this mixes up good things (efficiency improvements -> more prosperity) with bad things (late-stage capitalism stuff like gamified apps)
Even efficiency improvements only help up to a point. Just because making things more efficient increased propserity at one point, doesn't mean they will continue to do so. In fact, the very crossing of that point of diminishing returns is what fuels the late-stage capitalism you refer to.
Honestly, I would say that the causality is the reverse.
Late-stage capitalism is enabled by the 4+ decades of the very wealthy taking all the gains from increased efficiency, which gives them the power to turn it into a feedback loop.
Our current situation is not an inevitable and natural outgrowth of the improved productivity of the late 20th century: it is specifically caused by policy changes (starting) under Reagan that allowed for more consolidation, less care for the common good, and more focus on personal self-aggrandizement.
Well, you definitely have a point there. The causality is less clear than I implied for sure with regard to the connection between late-stage capitalism and efficiency.
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Extremely entitled take, likely coming from someone living in the western world and having virtually no contact/knowledge of how 90% of the remaining population on this planet actually lives out each day, practically in survival mode. Everyone is chasing "efficiency" because it is a way out of poverty, misery and suffering.
I'm in favour of countries regulating US exports, social media, tobacco, weapons, AI, and porn included.
I'm sure those living in the US won't agree with me and will be against such regulations, since they don't benefit their companies and that's fine, everyone has to protect their own interests.
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I was echoing the words of EU regulators, who've already imposed heavy regulations on US weapons manufacturers, pharma companies, social media, AI and now porn.
By the way, these goods and services don't represent freedom to the rest of the world. In fact, the US is seen as a protectionist country that promotes neoliberalism while imposing tight regulations to foreign companies.
You're right, I'll keep buying cheap shit on aliexpress to bring freedom to the Uyghurs child slaves chasing the most efficient way to weave t-shirts
That world has never existed. People have always been hustling. If you are thinking of some agrarian ideal then you are looking at a world of incredible wealth and power inequality. Given the choice between moving faster and making a better life for you children and living a quiet life under the thumb of a dictator people have always chosen the former.
I think a more important question is not whether AI will make economic growth explode but rather who that economic growth will benefit and in general how those benefits will be distributed.
I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
If AI grabs everything and few consumers are left then it is zero-sum.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Pessimistically, it seems very bubblish.
Or setup camps where a lot of people can disappear. The disabled, trans people, the old working class etc. Isn't that where we're at already?
Your second point about zero-sum growth misses in that in a competitive system, investors and their proxies (management) are certainly not going to miss out on the wealth being created right now in this industry. Long term, economy-wide impacts are not relevant decision criteria. Sort of a tragedy of the commons sort of thing.
AI's are all not going to get along with each other or think the same way or have the same agenda. Just like people. Very different things will emerge.
> I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
I looked for any comments that expressed this sentiment, and as of writing this, I only found one. It's like people don't know or remember history. I mean, look at the French Revolution—look at every other revolution. I kept waiting for the article to mention political changes, but it was only about capital and what to invest in, as if capitalism is something that will survive superintelligence (I mean real superintelligence, not chatbots).
What do these people think—that 99% of the population will just become beggars? Sooner or later, all capital will be overtaken by the state, because the main argument against it - inefficiency, will no longer apply. People will vote on AI-generated proposals for energy distribution, so basically where as society we want to allocate it. Budgets will no longer be about how much money we want to spend, but about how much energy we want to allocate.
Private capital and private companies stop making sense when you have a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
> Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
Isn’t this exactly what has happened all through out history? I don’t really see the future playing out any differently.
I sadly think if the promise of AI happens this is the likely economic outcome. The last century or so was an anomaly from most of human history; a trend created by the "arms race" of needing educated workers. The prisoner's dilemma was if you trained your workers in more efficient tech you could out-compete and take all the profits from competitors which gave those educated workers the means to strike (i.e. leverage). Now it is the "arms race" of educated AI, rather than workers which could invalidate a lot of assumptions our current society takes for granted in its structure.
> a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
This kind of magical thinking still baffles me.
This is sci-fi. There is absolutely zero evidence that such a thing is actually possible to create. Even if we stipulated that LLMs are AGIs, or can become them if we just cram in a few billion more parameters, it's painfully clear that they are not superintelligent, they cannot improve themselves, and there is no credible pathway to them becoming anything of the sort—not to mention they're already guzzling absurd amounts of energy, and taking up massive amounts of hardware, just to do the bad job they do now.
> Even if we stipulated that LLMs are AGIs, or can become them
>> (I mean real superintelligence, not chatbots)
Sure. Then you run even faster into the problem that this is not a real thing.
There is no AI that has consciousness. There is no AI that has human-level intelligence. We have no idea what it would take to build either of these things. Even if we were able to build either of these things, that does not automatically mean it is, or could ever become, superintelligent.
Your whole post is basically equivalent to saying "when the aliens come, and give us their technology, but enslave us all, capitalism will become irrelevant".
It feels truthy to say that we are close to the Singularity, but it's effectively a religious position. It has no basis in fact whatsoever.
I only quoted you and the grandparent. I've made no other comments here. You may have become confused. Taking some time and some breaths might be helpful.
Ah, my apologies; I thought you were the grandparent (I'm afraid I didn't check).
Doesn't change the argument, merely its direction! ^_^
I very much appreciate this reply. You basically perfectly elaborated on what I lazily threw out there.
With that being said, most of my friends are senior software devs and they think the same thing is bound to happen.
We often joke about starting a falafel restaurant or such before it is too late. I think it will take way, way longer for AI to make good falafel than it will take to replace software engineers.
> What do these people think—that 99% of the population will just become beggars?
they will just become dead.
I don't see UBI happening any time soon, although increasingly obvious it would be a good thing overall. because the oligarchs are on a powertrip and prefer to shed the workforce, have "unusuable" people fall by the wayside (through poor health, poor social status, economy); the oligarchs will be the consumers; they are sort of moving towards a world of them + robots only. you could say "then if robots do everything we all can live the same way" in theory yes, in practice, it is tricky because of the way the system is built.
Agreed. There is very little reason to imagine a future in which the fruits of automation are widely distributed - you don't even need to bring AI into the picture, we already see massive amounts of new automation and historical levels of inequality - that wealth is flowing to a very small number of people. I think the most likely outcome is a techno-feudalist system of massive corporate alliances that own the final means of production - the strong AI, at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
> at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
That would be a second singularity. “Equality” could essentially evaporate as a concept if we have super intelligent, super improving, independent AI’s competing directly with each other.
I see a mad unbound rush for solar system wide resource extraction.
The time to “buy a star” is now! /h
I bet if you saw the reality, you wouldn't swap your current life for a life 100 or 200 years ago.
It will likely work the same way industrialization did: first capital owners and then things get crazy cheap and everyone benefits.
The idea that glorified chatbots are going to somehow bootstrap humanity to a Kardashev Type I civilization is sheer insanity.
Yep, we all know that MS Excel will get us at least 60% there. (50% joking).
I think now that we can run python in excel it may be even more likely
AI may improve a tad.
The biggest change I anticipate is larger cities.
When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive.
Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city.
While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere.
When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. And when driving in comfortable autonomous electric buses is available frequently and cheaply, living outside the city becomes more compelling.
> pretty much every one mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive.
This is due to under supply of urban housing due to bad zoning law designed to inflate rents.
> When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city.
Suburbs are financially underwater. People don't want to pay high property taxes to live in some Levittown hellscape.
> Suburbs
Still the "American Dream" for a lot of people, and these copy/pasta McMansions are going up all over the place.
That's because they externalize their costs leading to high builder ROI.
Sure, but they're not sitting empty and people are buying them before they're even finished. 2400-4400sqft homes.
There is an interesting book called Scale by Geoffrey West, which speculates about how the scale of things like organisms and cities is bound by spatial networks. Worth a read
If land was taxed (the physically exclusionary resource that should be taxed), but property/development on it was not, the economics of building big and building up would be much cheaper. No more annual wealth tax (on the same value, year after year!) on development.
And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedging instrument of the rich, all that non-functional demand would disappear and land would get cheaper.
Interesting that eliminating a recurrent wealth tax would help the non-rich so much. (Who could also improve their properties without raising their own taxes).
But carefully aligning incentives in the market, in the direction of encouraging not disincentivizing investment on par with other options, I.e. not treating different kinds of investments differently tax wise, usually helps everyone in the end.
Today a wealthy person with one house on 100 acres, pays a significantly lower tax per acre than a regular person with that same house on a fraction of an acre. The poor are subsidizing rich land ownership.
This seems like a system that can only work in a fully urbanized country.
Otherwise, a nonexhaustive list of problems it seems guaranteed to cause:
- Push those currently in rural poverty over the edge into homelessness. Their homes will stand vacant and fall to ruin, leaving large swaths of land dotted with the wreckage of houses, trailers, and even whole villages. Some of it will be highly toxic. Many of the people will die, because the area they're in has precious few services for them, and they're too far from cities, with no means of getting there (because their cars have already been repossessed).
- Destroy green spaces. Parks, wildlife refuges, and even fallow fields are vital for the health of our ecosystems, the conversion of CO2 into oxygen, erosion prevention, temperature mitigation, and even mental health. And that's assuming there are explicit exemptions for farmers.
- Wreck entertainment businesses like theme parks, water parks, etc.
I'm deeply skeptical that a land-value-tax system can be calibrated so that it's sufficient incentive for developers to build up within a city, while not also causing these devastating knock-on effects in rural and suburban areas. And regardless of one's feelings about urban vs suburban vs rural living, I think we can probably all agree we don't actually want to make the entire surface of our planet into skyscrapers.
Your reversing the effect.
A steeper land tax, but no development tax, discourages sprawl and incentivizes parsimonious & maximally effective use.
Which would be the opposite dynamic to the one you are concerned about.
An income tax break on food production would be a good way to keep food prices lower, while maintaining a farmers incentive to use land efficiently.
And is good economics: matching a national tax break directly to a real national commons benefit, food security, while maintaining efficiency incentives.
I still don't see how this doesn't punish non-rich people in rural areas.
ETA: You seem to have edited your post after I made mine. However, your edit does not in any way explain how "steeper land tax" does not hurt people in rural areas. I'm not concerned with sprawl; I'm concerned with rural people near the poverty line being taxed out of their homes with no recourse.
Also, "income tax breaks for food production" a) do not scale proportionally with farmer land use, and b) would seem, on first glance, to encourage overfarming, rather than letting fields lie fallow periodically, which would be a short-term gain for long-term losses and damage to the soil.
Those are good questions.
In total taxes stay the same (for an area), with empty land tax increasing, land with property decreasing (because the property taxes disappear, and land tax increases proportionally to result in the same total tax).
So it will impact different people in an area, with different situations, differently obviously.
But you are clearly right, there will be additional factors that need to be handled.
The umbrella principle, is the law should simply correct a market's oversight of external/commons costs and needs, in proportion to their real value. Then the market can do its job of optimizing resources properly.
Things like farming practices that impact land value, should be incentivized or disincentives in direct proportion to the real value being lost or gained.
(Another addition would be that any tax change impacting investments already made, should transition over a time interval long enough individuals and businesses to realign their private economics, without sudden hardship.)
That's Henry George.
I don't understand all consequences yet, except one, that the wealthy and powerful object to it because it hurts them and so the Land Value Tax is rarely introduced. Even if it gets introduced, it will abolished soon thereafter.
> That's Henry George.
Yes! He was a very clear thinker. Refreshing when you find someone who manages to see things as they are, right in front of you the whole time, independent of the numbing filter of unexamined cultural momentum.
--
> the wealthy and powerful object to it
The poor, whose property to land ratio is high (even if they individually own very little in absolute terms), subsidize the rich whose property to land ratio is low (even if in absolute terms they own more). And it compounds, because this makes land, like Bitcoin, a place to park money and reap the rewards of other people's growing population demand for something limited, and other people's investment in development. So housing for anyone but the rich becomes more and more of a financial challenge. And market warping mechanisms are tried, like rent freezes, etc. But somehow, simply taxing the precious limited resource (land) more, and dropping the tax on developing useful property on land, which is what is required to increase housing, rarely gets tried. And as you say, quickly gets reversed when it happens.
So many ways the poor, middle class, and not so rich, pay the taxes of the very rich.
And the very rich do a very good job of framing things, so the want-to-be rich believe they need to keep things that way -- to their own, and everyone else's, detriment.
https://archive.is/20OaF
I immediately think of mining. Mining in most countries places little value on miners: it is a dangerous, life shortening occupation very often done by those without much alternative. It's history is one of random deaths and maimings, quite often of large groups of people at once. It is associated with numerous health problems. Pretty much the only thing that has ever improved conditions for miners anywhere is either collective action or paternalistic, labour-sympathetic government. Mining and jobs like it are among the stereotypical situations where people imagine that education for their children will lead to a better life.
All of which is to say, will the most awful jobs actually be automated? Not just awful, either, but poorly paid? Logically it makes more sense to approach knowledge work first: it requires only one kind of investment, namely data centres. There are thousands of niche skills in manual labour that will be awkward to make robots for. I think also of old housing stock that needs to be maintained by plumbers, in particular: legacy stuff built up over decades (or where I live, centuries)
Language models seem to have come a lot further because they can use the generalisable capital of computers. Outside of controlled environments (factories, cities with grid systems) I don't imagine robots will represent such a good investment any time soon. Knowledge work is dying, time to learn a trade. Maybe.
(It would have been great to have been able to learn and practice a profession for a lifetime. Library churn is awful, I suspect what will follow for most of us here will be worse)
"AI", and even robotics, are terrible at construction and maintenance. Most housing-related problems are in that category. It's not at all clear how LLM-type AI can help much. There are at least 18 humanoid robots on YouTube, but we don't see them doing much useful manipulation.
That's the part that needs to scale up.
That YC startup working on robotic construction equipment is a step in the right direction. But it's mostly automatic driving.
About twenty years ago, someone hooked a backhoe up to a force feedback hand input device, so you could dig by making clawing motions with your hand. The neat thing was that you could feel your way around pipes and rocks. Never got beyond a prototype. If AI manipulation gets any good, that sort of thing should be a robot.
In the US at least, most housing-related problems are political, no? There was an article here in the last week talking about manufactured housing in particular and all the regulations that make it infeasible.
"The measured economy becomes dominated by whatever it is that cannot be made more efficiently" Which is why health care support operations are the fastest growing labor category in the US.[1] And why medical care has become such a huge part of the Federal budget. Meanwhile, farming is down below 2% and manufacturing is tiny. That's because those were the areas with the biggest productivity improvements.
AI will come first for those for whom everything they do for income goes in and out over a wire.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...
I think it's all going more towards implode with the current bubble, and the enormous disconnect between power consumption and what people actually want to spend on it.
Hardly, given people being replaced.
Already happening to anything creative, where people would be contracted for doing images and sounds for indie stuff, flyers, translations,... and now companies generate them instead.
Computing, we're reducing team sizes now, first thanks to SaaS managed platforms, now taking yet another blow with AI based automations.
Some weakly held opinions... Cheaper goods and services, more wealth inequality, more power concentration in the hands of a few individuals (and a few nation states), more expensive scarce assets like land, more jobs where humanness is valued, more climate change (in the short-run), better medicine, warfare outcomes even less coupled with population counts, less human casualties in war although bimodally distributed, new arms race between major powers, unpredictable social and civic consequences.
I think two possible effects of AI are often conflated.
On the one hand you can imagine that work gets supercharged, allowing companies to produce 10x the number of widgets at 1/10th the cost. The economy would grow rapidly, wealth inequality would presumably be exacerbated, jobs would be automated, we might need some version of universal basic income, and so on. People debate whether or not this kind of transition is imminent or if it'd take decades.
On the other hand, it's conceivable that not much would happen in the "bulk" of the economy while at the same time the frontier of humanity might be pushed forward. We may see new treatments for diseases, new types of energy production, and so on. In this version of the world, jobs would mostly remain unchanged (at least in the short to intermediate term), perhaps with some small multiplicative efficiency factor, the economy wouldn't grow rapidly, there wouldn't be any mass unemployment, and so on.
In my mind, I'm much more excited about the second kind of impact that AI might have than the first. I guess I don't really feel like I want to have 10x the stuff that I already have while I'm really excited about someone curing cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, and so on.
If stuff is 1/10th as expensive as it is now, you can also work 1/10th as hard for 1x as much stuff as you have now, instead of 1x as hard as you work now for 10x the stuff.
I'm not making a value judgement on how much I would or other people should consume in the first scenario. I'm simply saying that you could have profound effects due to AI without it being evident in the top-level metrics like economic growth, unemployment, and so on. It seems like we often say that either we see explosive economic growth or AI has either no, or at best very minimal impact in our lives. I don't think this dichotomy is correct.
I agree that that dichotomy is not necessarily true, but also you gave your reason for being "more excited" about one side of the dichotomy being that you "don't want 10x the stuff," and my point is that you're undervaluing the flexibility of material abundance.
Oh it’s going to make it explode alright - just not the way they’re thinking.
I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology
I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that.
Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at least 10x (today), if not 100x.
Bio people hate coding. Its not their scene, its not their interest, and they stink at it. They're not going to take a 4 year detour in their career to learn how to code. I've been 13 layers deep in 'if' statements before with colleagues before I've had to up the price of 'help me real quick' from a 6-pack to a case. They really do not care at all for code, let alone anything resembling 'passable' code. They want their results and they want out.
Most of you have probably never worked with MatLab before. It's pseudo-code that complies. The help docs are famously good. Baby's first program level stuff. Its all over bio. And still, the bio people hate it.
And bio these days is just filled with data. There's so much of it being collected and mostly badly processed, if at all. You'll get grad students spending 6 months just trying to code up their experiment and it's results for some stupid solenoid valve pair, a laser, and a diode. It's stupid how much time is just wasted. Just dumb.
Vibe coding has changed all of this.
Yeah, it doesn't work on the bespoke rig the first time out. But it does work, at all, within a week. The code is not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than what was there before. There are comments in the code, at all! They have for loops now! The can ask the LLM how to make it faster or smaller or what the code is doing, bit by literal bit! And the LLM doesn't have a meeting to weasel out to. It's patient! Even at 2am!
Vibe coding is not for programmers, its for the rest of us. Its not going anywhere and it is affecting your health.
My first reaction was, "But what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?" But then, without the AI, what if the bio people generate incorrect code and don't realize it? Can the AI be more accurate than a non-programmer? Probably; in fact arguably they already are.
So I think I buy the parent's point. In fact, I think it's wider than biology. I bet there are a bunch of other fields with non-programmers doing a fair amount of coding. Economics research, say. Business process automation. I'm sure there are others.
Yeah, just the stats got so bad in the less hard sciences that they released statcheck to help automatically combat it:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7540394/
Byand large, since bio people just do not like programming, they were commonly generating outright bad code and then spending just months/years trying to figure it all out, hopefully before publication. But not always.
LLMs have democratized passable code. I think it'll be before 2030 that they'll have democratized good code.
If you think being in IT and supporting random Excel spreadsheets you never knew about and random shadow IT projects that you suddenly get ownership of is a pain. I can't imagine all the vibe coded projects about to come IT's way. With zero standardization on frameworks/DBs/languages used, zero written specs/requirements/anything. It should be fun.
> ...what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?
Cynically, there are plenty of people who don't care so long as they can get it published.
Pragmatically, the quality of work is frequently so poor, leading to so much random variation in results, I doubt that frequent errors in AI-produced work would significantly change the quality range in many fields.
Very well put. I expect the same thing is coming in Linguistics, though at a slower rate because linguists are even more tech/math-phobic than biologists.
Here's a thought: what if descendants of today's open models end up refined by proprietary models, resulting in a world in which it is largely impossible to keep AI under private ownership? What if data protection laws give way to data donation laws, permitting people to specifically choose recipient research institutions to train new AI upon? I could easily see a world where OpenAI, Google, Anthropic etc are boycotted in favour of say, a global-membership cooperative. It'd require people to exercise some agency but few predictions about AI seem to imagine people have any. Governments are spoken about as though they're managing people rather than representing them. The likelihood of popular movements or collective endeavours seems to not have been factored in at all.
It's a good thing, sure, but not that great. Personally, I don't see the possibility of it solving many fundamental human problems.
We could still have war, extreme poverty, starvation, and massive conflicts between different groups... Those stuff probably will continue as today. It could even be exacerbated if the conflicting parties just gain more power…
Only energy consumption will explode
And this is the predicament that people seem to either not understand or completely (wilfully?) ignore. As is said, problems have solutions; predicaments have outcomes. I think this [0] is worth a read (among many other similar analyses)
[0] https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-ene...
Economy is way too much growth, as inequality and inefficiency, pollution, and resource exaustion, being mainly based on finance and speculation and not on -real- economy, for the good of a very small part of humanity. Has to grow in this manner even more? And with the help of AI?
If some rules are not changed and a more equality model is developed, there are no more world at all.
What's your problem with growth? Growth means higher GDP which is correlated with all sorts of good things, including longer lives, and less food scarcity.
i like "all sort of good things" (and more if are really available for -all-) but IMHO relating these to an aeternal even bigger growth is a big misconception, seems to me that now the bigger part of growth is going to benefits very few, and polluting/undermining the rest of the world, vanishing the "good thing" for the rest of us. I imagine growth more as a consequence of a really sane economy, capable to adapt, expand and even shrink when necessary without devastating markets and real GDP, i cannot think now 'growth' as the foundation of a real sustainable and development in the near future. Is like 'progress', a word mainly referring to speed and more speed, but never about 'direction'.
Returning to AI, really can these new techs benefits all of us? I doubt. In some sectors AI techs can be a great aid (expert systems, data mining, ) but this growth of LLM things seems a big bubble, more related to speculation than others. just my 5c.
Most GDP growth is just a change in price level - even inflation-adjusted GDP, since prices consistently rise faster than inflation. How does this help anyone?
Higher GDP means, on average, better living conditions for the people that live in that country. This is a good thing.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index-v...
It's can't without an explosion of energy use. An explosion of economic activity will create an explosion of resource extraction and pollution. Since we are already going beyond many planetary boundaries we likely risk destroying organized human life because we destroyed our ecology.
Practically speaking, there are no hard planetary boundaries.
The paroxysmal science
Assume those loops have maximum force and the economy becomes “information produced by information capital, which is produced by information, which in turn is producing information ever faster every year”, as William Nordhaus, a Nobel laureate in economics, wrote in a paper in 2021. This brings about the “singularity”—a point when output becomes infinite. The singularity is really a counterargument: proof that the model must, eventually, be proved wrong. But even the first step on the journey, a big acceleration in growth, would be a profound event.
Until 1700 the world economy did not really grow—it just stagnated. Over the previous 17 centuries global output had expanded by 0.1% a year on average, a rate at which it takes nearly a millennium for production to double. Then spinning jennies started whirring and steam engines began to puff. Global growth quintupled to 0.5% a year between 1700 and 1820. By the end of the 19th century it had reached 1.9%. In the 20th century it averaged 2.8%, a rate at which production doubles every 25 years. Growth has not just become the norm; it has accelerated.
Real growth has stalled for decades and is only propped up with rent-seeking and money printing credit - hence the results we see...
> Real growth has stalled for decades
The world economy is not bigger than a few decades ago? That’s self-evidently false.
Here's a chart of real growth over the past few decades:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1
That's only "real" in that it's inflation adjusted. It's still the same balooney that GDP is inherently.
What this "growth" is based on is the same rent-seeking and money printing credit I mentioned. And of course even people getting paid to dig and then fill in holes would increase the GDP.
My "dismal results" refers to actual state of labor market and quality of jobs, actual purchasing power, actual production, actual innovation, actual infrastructure, actual quality of life changes, etc. Not GDP or stock market or how rich the 0.00001% gets.
>My "dismal results" refers to actual state of labor market and quality of jobs, actual purchasing power, actual production, actual innovation, actual infrastructure, actual quality of life changes, etc. Not GDP or stock market or how rich the 0.00001% gets.
How convenient that your preferred metrics can't objectively be measured and basically give you free reign to define the results however you want! It's the "community adjusted EBITDA"[1] of economic metrics.
[1] https://qz.com/1685919/wework-ipo-community-adjusted-ebitda-...
>How convenient that your preferred metrics can't objectively be measured
"Would you believe your own lying eyes over the statistics based on a KPI widely understood to be a crap metric?"
Prices rise faster than inflation. You'd have to adjust for prices instead of adjusting for inflation. Try indexing it to median monthly non-imputed rent per square foot.
Yet the fairy tale that growth not only can continue indefinitely but continually accelerate has to be kept up. It's almost as though word “enough” has been banned from economy altogether.
You clearly don't understand what growth is and think it is just more of existing things. Or understand just how dysfunctional things would have to be for stasis to occur. Developing new drugs is growth. There is an industrial learning curve from refinement of techniques that dated back to even handmade artisinal goods in ancient times. Even when there were minimal rewards for doing so. Let alone when educated professionals are dedicating their lives to improving and understanding processes, and are rewarded for it.
If we aren't growing despite billions in research and development and people spending their lives on the tasks, the question is what the hell are we doing that is so deeply, unnaturally wrong that we are doing worse than all of history?
>You clearly don't understand what growth is and think it is just more of existing things. Or understand just how dysfunctional things would have to be for stasis to occur. Developing new drugs is growth.
And yet compared to a couple decades ago we have declining infant mortality and life expectancy, record low for life satisfaction metrics, demographic collapse, climate catastrophes piling up, enshittification, but yay! growth!
You know what else is called a "growth"?
1995-2000: The Economist warns about the bubble.
2024-2025: The Economist fuels the bubble.
The attack on humans is coordinated. Vance is pushing for "AI", which is curiously but deservedly under-reported in the US/EU press, so here's an Indian link:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/vic...
There is no possible outcome where AI makes the world's economic growth explode.
The only thing that will happen under AI is jobs will continue to diminish, and eventually, society will hit a self-sustaining deflationary spiral, sometimes from a hyper-inflation whipsaw collapse, sometimes directly to deflation.
Economies can't move without purchasing power flowing from producer to consumer to producer.
I am yet to see any strong micro econ or macro econ mechanistic explanation detailing how AI is going to create more wealth.
Technological advancements create wealth by increasing efficiency.
Not really sure what deeper explanation you're looking for?
It's no different from the cotton gin or steam engine or railroads.
Obviously, if you don't think AI results in greater efficiency then there wouldn't be more wealth. But that's a tech question, not an econ question. The economic side of things couldn't be simpler.
> by increasing efficiency
Efficiency of what exactly? And how do they do that? All of the NFT-turned-AI bros insist that the answers to those questions are “everything” and “by being awesome”, which sounds more like the thinking of someone that’s convinced they’re on the precipice of inventing magic or figuring out how to directly petition god
Looking at e.g. the Solow Model better technology will indeed increase efficiency as the output per worker increases which will lead to economic growth. However I think you are right. This is an oversimplification with regards to AI because in the end its also about which products are being impacted. Also the product quality is left out in that scenario so it gets tricky. E.g. I would personally not like to read even one AI generated book as of today.
Efficiency in terms of dollars per app or page of filler content.
Robots make stuff. Or in econ speak the cost of production declines.
Paid services becoming basically free is wealth creation. You have the goods but none of the old cost of production. This is patently obvious, so I assume there’s some well-practiced remarks inspired by or borrowed from early 20th century socialists you would like to share? HN comments wouldn’t be complete with an homage to the class struggle. I would rather take the win and be happy about it.
Will AI make the things that people actually __need__ -- healthy food (not the slop at Walmart), decent housing, affordable health care, affordable education, clean air, clean/healthy environments -- more accessible?
I don't see any major companies using AI for that -- they're focused on diversion and wealth extraction.
AI is just another layer of convenience and "wants" for those who have what they need already.
Sure, GDP might go up, but it doesn't mean a thing if people don't have what they _need_.
Naming LLMs as "AI" is really proving to be a colossal mistake and/or a deliberately misleading strategy that has (very successfully) helped acquire capital. Because it brings in all of the cultural tropes about superintelligent robots and gives them a veneer of respectability; e.g., The Matrix, 2001, The Terminator, etc.
Conflating the two is a massive category error. It's perfectly possible for LLMs / current-generation "AI" to have a massive economic impact without thinking there are going to be digital human replacements in the next 5 years.
The civilization will destroy itself first. States are not addressing what really matters and especially not the multi billion/trillion companies. The US fight against social security and less inequality, the things that wealth should enable. We are destroying jobs that brought purpose, just because some small percentages in margin. We are not training the AIs to solve climate change but to code well. Maybe it’s time for the UN to become the main government of this world, to deal well with the uneven distribution and discrimination of work force. It is too much about egos, too much thinking in cultural groups to protect from outsiders, too much war and destruction, still too much burning fossil fuels, too much destruction of our environment and the nature. Maybe with the appearance of aliens first to have a visible outer enemy first? But I guess it will be the same as always: as long as most find some distraction, some misinformation that calms down fears and anxieties, nothing will change for the common good.
Japan is the economy to idealize.
Almost no growth.
Yet people are mostly happy.
Government makes mostly wise decisions.
There’s not too much poverty.
They have not devalued and destroyed their own culture.
So yeah, growth maybe isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The price is too high. It benefits mainly politicians, corporations and the rich.
Japan has the highest suicide rate of any OECD country.
>They have not devalued and destroyed their own culture.
I feel like this is the only point you really care about.
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44685031
What if your tumor replaced functioning organs?
You can have really massive growth in markets along with massively wide inequality at the same time among the human population. You can also now (for the first time in global history) have laws of supply and demand start to service non-human intelligence.
Future transactions can have bots on both ends, running an economy that continually grows to service the needs of (probably more efficient) machine capitalists rather than human capitalists.
Just like when human agriculture and industrialization broke multiple organically forming food webs in the natural world, so could it be with human industry
It really is a brave new world.
And growing inequality …
What if it also redistributed more wealth to the billionaires who own and control AI?
Is not like Jane and John Doe are going to see any benefits from such an economic explosion. The wealth will trickle up, as always, the poor will be further exploited and discarded.
Innovation and efficiency gains also benefit consumers, provided there's any industry competition.
Yep. That's why we now have much better washing machines, dryers, and refrigerators. Because with a market, competition, and the invisible hand, consumers always benefit.