alt Hacker News> The greatest tech revolution by far and people on this site are trying to movie their money away from it. I hope y'all will do an honest retrospective in a year or so.
I see this sentiment often, and think it is short-sighted:
1. The tech fails at the goal - profitability is what we see for any tech that augments humans, which isn't anywhere close to satisfying the trillions in debt, busting the market and bleeding trillions from the economy.
OR
2. The tech succeeds at the goal - humans are mostly not needed anymore other than for menial low-paid work. Economy slows, then almost completely stops.
What is the outcome you see that keeps you optimistic? How do you intend to avoid the soup kitchen if this all works out? Because, you see, if this all works out you will have nothing of value to contribute too.
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> The tech succeeds at the goal - humans are mostly not needed anymore other than for menial low-paid work. Economy slows, then almost completely stops.
Economy slows or stops when AI robots are producing goods and services for much lower cost than human workers? Perhaps, but I think the obvious next development would be massive deflation: even on welfare or UBI, you would be able to afford the same quantity of goods/services than with normal wage today, because the stuff produced by robots would be significantly cheaper. Just like stuff produced in factories is much cheaper than hand-made stuff we had before factories were invented.
My general prediction is that we'll see an immense amount of wealth creation and this will naturally trickle everywhere. This is both a continuation and speeding up of the trend we're seeing right now. I think the unusual outcome would be for us to stray from this path.
>you will have nothing of value to contribute too
So perhaps I can finally rest and solely focus on the stuff that I like. For this to be a problem, we need to imagine a dystopian scenario where our systems (and those who run 'em?) are effectively all-powerful and also cartoonishly selfish for no good reason at all.
I think there's a very small needle to thread, where the federal government can buy out the compute/data centers when the economics start to come apart, and the USA becomes for compute like China is for manufacturing. I expect anti-AI sentiment and adoption will trend better when the people feel like they're getting the lion's share of the benefit (which will happen naturally as models commoditize).
In the long term there will be a lot of work that AI _can_ do as well as (or better than) humans, where the human is still nominally doing the work, because of liability and verification requirements (e.g. medicine). Beyond that, I expect influencer/independent media to become the new it job.
Neither is very likely in my opinion.
I think the tech will work well for some tasks where a formal feedback loop exists (such as coding). In other areas it will take many years to adapt business processes and roles to make the best use of this technology. The total productivity boost could be around 1% p.a similar to the industrial revolution of the 19th century.
Stock prices could be at risk not from lack of demand but because the data center buildout is bound to slow dramatically as we come up against some serious bottlenecks like energy, grid, fab capacity, permissions, etc. Not much will have to be written off, but the delays could cause big problems for debt funded projects and companies.
This slowdown will allow the economy and the workforce to evolve away from execution and towards planning, strategy, research and development, idea generation, experimentation, oversight as well as manually handling a million exceptions and gaps left by current AI models.
I don't think there has ever been a tech boom without a tech bust. But that's not the same thing as the tech not working or causing economic collapse. Maybe this time is different. Who knows.