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5gff3yesterday at 10:03 PM1 replyview on HN

The reality is, a lot of economic activity is fake in the sense that it is highly-discretionary.

And this will continue to go on and on and on. This means that this idea of large scale AI lay offs is complete delusion.


Replies

polnoneryesterday at 11:53 PM

I think it is because we haven't had a real recession now in a generation.

There is all this accumulated, inefficient structure we are maintaining.

The next recession will have a strong amount of economic autophagy because of the amount of structure to eat through.

I suspect this is how automation materializes too at scale. It materializes in the leanness of companies on the other side of a recession. We are viewing LLMs as not producing this autophagy as proof of something not working. I don't think this is reality.

I think it is related to this childish view of instantaneous market efficiency. A recession is what will perturb the system and start the automation chain reaction. Inside the current economic regime, automation is just a risk and a cost because the tools were derived inside this long expansive regime. Nothing much happens until the shock and regime switch. Then we never come back to this regime.

I woke up everyday thinking how someday I will look back on today with such fond memories of being the good old days. The regime switching is going to be quite miserable.