alt Hacker NewsTwo responses to this:
- Most participants in the economy are creating very little real value. They're shifting things around or temporarily solving problems that are highly localized to the organization they're in.
- There's a lot of unrealized value stored in the corpus of knowledge that AI companies have ingested— the millions of webpages, the scanned books, wikipedia, the blogs and Q&A sites. So even if AI companies are not creating new insights, just the act of locating, filtering, and summarizing knowledge that was already present somewhere in the world is valuable. Indeed, one could use this same argument to declare that Google in 1999 was creating no value, which is of course obviously untrue.
Google created two kinds of value: content discovery via connection (value to the consumer), and market reachability for advertisers. Oh, and also the world's most inconvenient spell check.
AI proposes to solve: a content supply side problem which does not exist, and an analysis problem which also only maybe exists. Really what it does in the best of cases (assuming everything actually works) is drive the cost to produce content to zero, make discovery less trustworthy, make the discovery problem worse, and launder IP. In the best case it is a net negative economic force.
All that said, I believe the original comment is about the fact that the economy exists to serve market participants and AI is not a market participant. It can act as a proxy, but it doesn't buy or sell things in the economic sense. Through that lens, also in the best case the technology erodes demand by reducing economic power of the consumer.
That said, I'm stoked to hear about the next AI web site generator or spam email campaign manager. Lets setup an SPV to get it backed off-balance sheet.