I don't think we should listen to Piketty for anything: it's a product from the state, by the state, to create state loving persons by hammering them with constant state-loving propaganda since they're a toddler till they're a grown up.

Speaking about "low-productivity job" I think every single job Piketty has been doing its whole life does qualify.

Corruption: yeah, the french state is very good at that. Public spending is, officially, 57% of the french GDP. But unofficially we all know it's above 2/3rd, with many of the "private" companies, like the utility ones, being actual state monopolies. France is nearly a full-on planned economy and crime is on the rise, quality of life in freefall, education level in freefall, the country is closing to defaulting on its public debt and we can all see how many tech companies France created: way to go. Hermes and Champagne are saving the country: go France! (typing this while sipping a "mojito royal" [mojito with champagne instead of sparkling water and wife's got many Hermes scarves: so I'm one of those bringing money to the french state btw... I wonder how finances are going to turn out once we stop buying the "french quality" bullshit).

Really: people should stop listening to that fraud as if what he wrote was the gospel. I could have shat is dumb mega-over-simplistic formula our of my arse too if I had been raised by the state to love state, teach for the state, to create state-loving persons.

And people have called the bogus numbers he used in his main "breakthrough" publication. The explanation have been wonderful too: "Yup my numbers are wrong, but my formula is still correct".

Just stop with Piketty.

P.S: that UBI is fucktarded: we all know. No need to reference a fraud to make that point.

Is it truly fair to place the blame entirely on Dario? He has stated his support for sound new policies designed to mitigate the issues that will arise.

The article itself notes that no one with the power to shape this transition has seriously considered the impact on people alive today, so it is unclear what the author expects Anthropic to have endorsed at this stage.

>This is ahistorical bullshit.

It's ironic to criticize optimists for grounding their expectations in historical precedents while simultaneously dismissing proposed solutions to mass AI displacement due to historical precedents.

Furthermore, "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism" does not provide a strong foundation for the author's argument, as the case study involves numerous confounding factors contributing to rising suicide rates, drug overdoses, and alcoholic liver disease that cannot be attributed solely to a perceived loss of economic purpose.

In reality, people still had economic purpose, even if it was not the specific purpose they desired. The remaining available work often proved inferior: lower in status, less secure, less meaningful, inadequate for supporting a family, and disconnected from respected social roles. Perhaps some of these factors contributed a bit more to the aforementioned negative outcomes than a simple feeling like you're not contributing sufficiently to the economy.

>People don’t want a check. They want work. They want purpose.

While that may well be true, we should first ensure that everyone can meet their basic necessities each month before addressing secondary concerns.

> The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.

The fact that companies seek profite by cutting labor costs, but in cutting labor costs can inadvertently reduce the spending power of their customers in aggregate, is one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch15.htm

Then the other half of the puzzle is just techofetishists having a broken world model. If you replace even 25% of the jobs you will find AI companies taxed into the dirt to pay for UBI or social services. The government will step in and manufacture jobs. The techbros can clutch their Ayn Rand books until their fingers bleed but their fantasy land of the unfettered ubermensch is simply delusional.

Am I in the minority for going online to learn stuff, download stuff and having zero point zero zero zero interest in jousting and co-thinking?

As I'm scanning the rant (and tbh the last two paragraphs hoping for some TL;DR summarization-love) I'm thinking "mans will find universal basic income quite upsetting", then I text-search "universal" and wouldn't you know the assumption was proven correct with a straw-man shaped cherry on top ("They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.")

What's the value -- like the real-ass human satisfaction -- of debating and hand-wringing over inevitabilities to anyone outside of the set of all authors provoking debate and hand-wringing over inevitabilities?

I don’t disagree with the premise, and I appreciate the roasts of the SV pseudophilosophers (he left out Ayn Rand tho).

It's just a grab bag of arguments thrown into one long rant, and as some comments here point out, some very obvious contingencies (which even have supporting data now) have not been considered.

All this and not a single mention of the very obvious thesis that the real problem is Capitalism.

Seriously, go through each point and see how it can be traced to Capitalism. Why do these CEOs keep telling everybody there will be social upheaval and yet continue building this technology? Because Capitalism demands infinite growth in profits, and if they don't build it someone will! Why do people feel lost without a job? Because Capitalism tells them they are worthless without any "productivity" (Hmm, wonder why "starving artists" were a thing. Maybe that's also why they were so derided: the system didn't like people who found self-worth independent of economic "productivity.")

Now, Capitalism is the problem, but also potentially the solution. Here's a dynamic that doesn't seem to have been covered in these discussions:

1. The majority of economic activity is generated in supporting the economy itself. We know what happens when everyone loses a job: the economy shrinks drastically (the "Bust.") TFA claims "plenty will still happen" and "GDP might even grow" but handwaves away what that would be.

2. The wealthiest are so wealthy because they essentially take a cut of the economy. So their wealth depends on the economy growing. They are ruthless capitalists and don't care about us, but Capitalism demands growth and they are monomaniacally driven by it.

3. As such their interests are aligned in keeping the economy growing and labor compensated and spending. Yes, they have their doomsday bunkers just in case, but none of them wants that life (where's the growth?!?) and they know it.

Add to that governments, all influences considered, are also overwhelmingly invested in keeping the population happy.

I don't know what the solution will look like, but all the parties involved -- the people, the elites, and the governments -- are heavily incentivized to keep things stable. Something will get worked out.

I'm far from the first to highlight it either. The Animatrix highlighted it beautifully what one can expect in a civilization where machines replace human labor in a general sense, and where systems haven't been built to preserve human interests prior to their rollout - tax schemes, job programs, collaboration rather than competition. Ghost in the Shell has had multiple story arcs about the consequences of displacing human labor without care for the consequences of said displacement, because the displacing party gets all the money and power while remaining unaccountable (or so they believe until the very end) for their actions. Cyberpunk dystopias have been intensely focused on it in video games for decades: System Shock, Deus Ex, Horizon, you name it. All of them take those next steps of "what happens when automation displaces a plurality of labor" and reached the same conclusions on strife, despair, poverty, and the general collapse of social order.

These effects have been known for centuries. They are not new concepts.

The folks trotting out "people say this about every technological revolution" are those willfully naive to the past historical harms and ignorant of the plight of others in the present. A flimsy excuse to avoid having to stare into the heart of the system and understand its machinations for yourself, to avoid having to accept that yes, you are a part of it too, and therefore bear some degree of blame for how things function. This isn't the loom, or the radio, or the computer coming onto the scene, but generalized intelligence partnered with generalized robotics to replace the entire sum of human labor. This is what the AI firms openly and repeatedly advertise. This is what CEBros continue to do layoffs for, never considering for a single moment what comes after. Excuses of "people need to find meaning outside of work" or "new jobs will be created anyway" are similarly ignorant in narrative, hollow excuses to avoid the most basic of rational thoughts about the system they're defending beyond whatever nugget of faux-intellectualism they can spout out to sound like they have a clue.

General intelligence, with general robotics, to replace general labor.

There is exactly one way that story ends, and it's not for the benefit of humanity, not under the current systems of governance and systemic incentives we've built for ourselves. It doesn't end with infinite leisure or transhumanism or grandiose visions of utopia, but with the wholesale destruction of human civilization in the name of personal power and wealth.

And you can’t get your employees back or go back to how you used to do it, because all of your institutional knowledge is gone.

are you saying that food, sex, shelter, community, and entertainment is "magnificent wealth"? or are you saing "finding partner" is "magnificent wealth created before their birth"?

That is a classic Tragedy Of The Commons.

Two issues:

What is Turn Four, Five, Six, Seven, and Eight? Seems like 4) companies using AI collapse, 5) they no longer pay AI companies, 6) AI companies can no longer continue funding the compute and collapse via a death spiral of raising prices, losing customers, etc., 7) A wrecked global economy has no support for AI (possibly after mass destabilization and worse), and 8) a natural AI-less economy again slowly rises. A lot of noise, harm, destruction, and death for a collective delusion.

The Turn One, Turn Two, Turn Three and AI apocalypse scenarios are also the biggest selling points for AI — implying LLMs are so powerful the only way to survive as a business is to be on the first group taking advantage of AI (nevermind Turns Two and Three).

Yet the most likely alternative is rarely mentioned.

So far, all signs, studies, and results show AI as being oversold, and yet very useful. Just like every major computer and network revolution before.

Turn One: early adopters get advantage for a while,

Turn Two: no productivity gains showed up in economic statistics,

Turn Three: adoption finally becomes sufficiently widespread and integrated that workflows change and it shows up in productivity improvements,

Turn Four: The workflow changes and productivity improvements change what people do and adopting the technology is no longer an advantage but mere table stakes to play in the new economy.

The question is: when AI turns into table-stakes for the modern business of the 2030s, can the returns repay the investment?

We can likely look back to the early investments in railroads and internet infrastructure for examples. Enormous piles of money were lit on fire to build infrastructure, the technology absolutely became foundational to the new economies, and most of the companies involved lost money and even went bankrupt along the way.

Dispute Owen's claim, the global felony and bullshit markets are bigger.

  The humans are still there, scrolling, but the thing they’re scrolling through has become a performance staged by machines for an audience that hasn’t yet realized the show isn’t for them.

However there is a space in the economy where “good enough” is all that matters, and “perform better” doesn’t really matter, usually because consumers aren’t discerning enough to care.

This is the range of the labor market that is really at risk. The high-end, cyborg one is probably fine, at least in terms of human labor needs.

During the Industrial revolution, 90% of agricultural workers moved to the factories. And the fields kept producing.

Then it came the computer revolution and factory workers moved to offices. And factories kept producing even more.

Then it came the internet revolution and office workers moved back home. And corporations kept producing more than before.

Then it came the AI revolution and home workers moved to the virtual world. And they kept producing even more. slop. but it sells.

We adapt. The economy adapts. Nobody dies.

The problem with the theory is there are vast variables and unknowns in the timeline that matters, but they are just saying it will come very soon. The how is a simple “If AI replaced all cognitive work” which sounds exactly same as “If earth becomes 5000F hot”.

Is the same lazy posit they all make.

will AI displace jobs: yes undoubtly. But it's not equal even across the tech sector. Outsourcing jobs are extremely at risk. Companies have been offshoring to vietnam, india, malaysia, etc for decades because they're cheaper to hire/pay than americans. But guess who is even cheaper then them? AI. so all the back office work will transition to AI. it's just a matter of time.

But it remains to be seen if corporations will downsize significantly due to AI. I dont currently see it. In fact the opposite is happening. The hype around AI is driving job growth not decline: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/data-shows-surprising-rebound...

The premise of this that AI will cause a catastrophic wipe out of jobs everywhere is FUD. In software we are much more likely to see the cambrian explosion of software companies and the de-FAANGing of corporate america as software development because easier. a pizza team of 6 can now create something amazing that might have once required a huge budget and organization. The consolidation of tech that has been happening since the 90s might actually be reversing.

AI is something that is empowering new modes of business. Think about how media has become democratized in the last 20 years and big corporate media conglomerates are struggling to hold the publics attention because its now easier than ever to publish your own movies/news. AI (i believe) will democratize things that are now held in control by guilds/companies/etc. And maybe this isn't such a bad thing.

This automation happened between around 1910 and 1930. With WWI, the great depression, WWII, Communist Russia, failure of the gold standard, etc., some argue that is when civilization died.

The author spends several pages complaining about how the evil masterminds behind AI haven't actually thought through what it'll do to society, haven't proposed any real way to handle its impacts. And then proceeds to not propose any real ways to handle its impacts.

Making fun of billionaires for being fake philosophers is all well and good, but the technology is here, like it or not. So is the proposal to get rid of it? Butlerian Jihad? If it is, just say that. That's genuinely fine! But as is, no such action is actually proposed.

I'm not expecting random bloggers to just solve what might be the defining issue of our generation, but come on, I'm really starting to get tired of this format of post that doesn't even try, while simultaneously complaining about and making fun of any existing "solutions". Yeah, I don't think UBI or the "leisure economy" is going to happen soon either, and if it does it's certainly got all the flaws that were mentioned, but it's better than literally nothing.

Can we at least admit that it's a genuinely hard problem, and beyond either managing to pull off the aforementioned worldwide Butlerian Jihad, or getting lucky and it turns out AI actually sucks and can't replace anyone's job, we don't really have any good solutions for it? Or would that be too uncomfortably close to admitting that between the "fake philosopher" tech bro bloggers and the ones that, I guess, did philosophy in undergrad, neither have any workable solutions to the problem?

We see that as soon as companies can, they will drop support for end consumers like us and focus on B2B.

The only way to sustain some level of revenue is by turning into aggression levels which is ineffective, and obviously, imoral and unacceptable.

The way things are going we all be dead by hunger. This seems by design made up to seem unavoidable.

-------------------

Social control is foundational in human societies. Religions once told the poor that they would be rewarded in the afterlife for a lifetime of hard work and obedience to princes. Now politicians tell us to venerate billionaires for the jobs they create the the social programs their taxes fund. Produce. Consume. Obey.

If billionaires automate away all the jobs, dodge their taxes, and prevent politicians from picking up the slack with redistributive social programs, social control will break down. No sane billionaire should want to find out what that will be like.

Don’t be the last buggy whip maker.

AI can’t take payment in cash or barter.

I stopped reading at that point.

Even taxing might be enough to tilt the scale in favour of labor. If whole countries have their socio-economic fabric damaged because the means of production are locked elsewhere this constitutes a sovereignty issue and it will be dealt with.

The Industrial Revolution had the same pains, and it took a few centuries to get societies where we are today.

Power generation is also instrumental to almost all labor produced today, and thus utilities were born.

I think the pope is right and the AI bros are wrong. I am currently rooting for the open weights to give the power back to the people. For teachers and artists to work for their neighbourhoods and communities.

Because it knows the current business model is not likely going to stand the test of time. Reality has returned. While it was suspended, Silicon Valley went on an incredible run and was able to stockpile absurd amounts of cash

As so-called "tech" companies now shrink in face of reality, Silicon Valley wants people to believe this is because of "AI", not because of the unsustainability of their data collection, surveillance and ad services "business model", and that the same fate awaits non-"tech" businesses and professionals

Perhaps SillyCon Valley can keep reality away for a while with supersized spending and borrowing and 24/7 marketing. People will certainly go along for the ride. Bankers and lawyers are making a fortune, for example

But eventually reality will return

Will Silicon Valley have found a new business model. Time will tell

Meantime, the so-called "tech" industry is being downsized

AI slop article complaining about AI slop. 364 comments and 269 points. Are the comments here all bots, too?

Am I a bot?

one thing it missses, birth rates. soon there will be no humans left to participate on either side of the economy.

It's a bit like discovering when a corrupt country is not purely corrupt due to its leadership but the whole thing is a fabric throughout society.

It all starts from individual decisions and it applies to small companies and consumers alike. If a small company needs translations, and AI is good enough to do it, they won't hire someone from the goodness of their hearts for human dignity reasons. If you're a regular person and want to do taxes or want fina cial advice or have some accounting tasks and it's way cheaper to do with AI than hiring someone, you won't hire accountants out os solidarity. Just like you don't buy artisanal shoes and handmade furniture.

We see this in many other things too, such as abundant entertainment and food delivery replacing social connections. People will take the path of least resistance.

Everyone wants to be needed and to have purpose, but also everyone in actual preferences do accept the machine version in the end if its more convenient and cheaper.

I don't see anything inevitable about "new jobs" or everyone discovering artistic passions to spend their time. That has not happened either when the Internet opened up all knowledge and you could suddenly talk to people anywhere on the planet. The optimists said that all this will lead to people learning and reading and everyone doing courses or talking to others and reconciling differences once they can directly interact, leading to more peace and understanding, that social media will give a voice to people and inevitably strengthen democracy etc.

It's very possible that all the Earth's population ends up like the Aboriginal Australians, addiction, lack of purpose, the ground pulled out under our feet. Essentially sedated with AI generated VR content to bear our existence and any small Epsilon change in the local neighborhood will have too much activation energy to happen. People all in their own generated worlds, polarized, angry at each other, seeing no value in each other, or perhaps even in their real selves, as opposed to their projection in the VR stories.

Some strange groups like the Amish will hang on, but even they are dependent on trade with broader society.

We will be told this is all for the greater good. Humanity was anyway not going to last forever, it was just one step on a cosmic drama, and the important thing is the future light cone and immense numbers of galaxies and whatnot.

First, Acemoglu may have a Noble Prize (occasionally dubious data selection aside[0]), but even he does not pretend to have the information of a central planner nor does he think that central planning is good idea. If actual businesses, which have local information, believe AI helps them, I'll bet the actual businesses are much more likely to be right, no matter what calculation Acemoglu did or how many Nobels he has.

Second, it is likely that AI will eventually be better than (nearly all) humans in most economically useful things. We can debate the timeframe but it will happen and likely not that far away. That Federal Job Guarantee would generate bullshit jobs, and he won't be able to hide that from people. Ultimately, we'll reach an economy which objectively does not need humans and everyone will know it. He needs to face that reality and overcome it, and not hide behind temporary and dubious estimates.

Third (admittedly a minor point), while the criticism against EA etc. is very justified, it's not quite fair to blame them (overwhelmingly STEM people) for not reading where the humanities did many of the same errors earlier (the author points out some of these) and discredited themselves. The people who could have taught them to not do it failed to teach themselves.

And fourth: I'm pretty sure a lot of company would be able to charge AI agents themselves. The new economy will not be dead, it just won't involve (many?) humans.

[0] https://xcancel.com/joefrancis505/status/2059340591490552054...

seems to me this will effect countries who rely on mid market exports over raw or high end exports way more then others.

This isn't even close to true and it's kind of the central thesis of this article.

Saudi Aramco has consistently been a $2tn company in the oil market.

Walmart is a $1tn-ish company focusing on a fraction of US retail.

It also ignores the idea that the economy is not zero sum and companies create their own market/economic value all the time.

We need to consider that by automating and replacing the work of people who have an income, those people stop consuming and no longer generate profit for capitalism.

How is this sustainable?

Traffic != AI generated content.

I stopped reading here. The whole piece's argument rests on 'people need work for meaning'. Patent bullshit, this is 2026's 'let them eat cake'. The folks displaced from manufacturing didn't fall into poverty and drugs because they couldn't find meaning without work, claiming this is just what historically happens is bullshit of the highest order. You best believe if these folks had been offered an off-ramp they would have found the meaning and purpose to build a services economy. Instead society and policy intentionally left them to rot. A simple UBI for these folks would have worked wonders.

Yes, but not AI. This is where AI differs from other software: marginal cost is not zero, in fact it doesn't go down much, if at all, for each generated token (after accounting for the depreciation of hardware), and could even go up if trying to find an extra MWh gets more and more difficult and therefore more and more expensive.

Economies of scale don't work well in AI.

But human labor does not actually need to be as expensive as it is. How cheaply could you house, feed, and clothe people? There are parts of the world where people get by on very little income. Of course we could aspire to better living conditions than the world's poorest, but that's what the robot revolution promises: abundance.

Imagine if AI suddenly was in more demand than human labor, simply due to the price. Excellent quality output for cheaper than somebody with a degree. What would be the second order effects?

Human labor, being in less demand, would have to lower its price to compete. This is the death of the middle (and lower) class future we fear. But ironically the price of goods and services would lower as everything, even complex engineering, medicine, construction becomes affordable. With the right policy, human labor becomes cheap again. Maybe even competitive to machine labor in some niches. Improvements in machine labor could have a compounding effect on how affordable it can be for humans to survive.

So where's the gap here? Well, most wager earner's income worldwide goes towards housing. Food and water and medicine can be bottlenecked causing price gouging. Monopolies and lack of competition in the market can raise the prices of things until everybody is spending all of their disposable income on necessities. I think the price of human labor is currently very high (in the developed world) due rentier capitalism.

The transition will upend much of our economic investments and probably involve a great deal of human suffering until nations figure out the right mix of solutions.

> There is only one market that large: the global labor market.

YEPPP. This has been my point. It is the only product for these AI companies: displacing labor and, by extension, suppressing wages. Profits over time tend to decrease (somebody should write a book about that) but we demand ever-increasing profits and growth so the only way to achieve that, ultimately, is by raising prices and cutting costs.

What do we have today? Generational inflation and permanent layoff culture.

The author then goes on to say (paraphrased) who is going to buy all this crap if nobody has an income?

The article goes on to bring up Henry Ford. He's not... my favorite example [1]. But, speaking of Ford, let me mention a key court case, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company [2], where a company was sued over prioritizng paying employees over shareholder value.

> Anthropic’s own research has documented something worse than displacement: active deskilling

I couldn't agree more. I describe this as destroying an ecosystem. Your junionr engineers are you future senior engineers. We've seen the destruction of entry-level jobs across industries post-2008. We've seen how this hollowing-out in the name of "efficiency" in Hollywood with cuts to writing, despite massive success over decades. Some might say "there's still good TV". Yes, we're coasting on the inertia from that dismantled system.

> Tens of millions of people, in their productive years, with no economic function, no clear path to one, and a keen awareness that the people who did this to them are the richest human beings who have ever lived.

I couldn't agree more. We are on the verge of complete societal breakdown. And historically that's always ended violently (eg French revolution, Russian revolution) as a form of redistribution.

[1]: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/48...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Who cares what they think? If the people feel that the economy is bad, the economy is bad. Full stop. Unless the tech oligarchs remove human labor entirely, there will always be a mortal threat to them posed by a disenfranchised population.

That's where this article loses the plot. Even if the world is just AI buying and selling goods and services to itself, so what? That's not a "dead economy", in the "secretly dead but only the wealthy notice" that's "dead economy" as in "french revolution is ongoing so commerce has taken a pause".

Edit: Also this article has so many AI-generated images. I hate that I can't tell if the words themselves are AI-generated or not as well.

Yeah, tech billionaires sometimes show large gaps in their education. But it doesn't matter. Reading the right books doesn't prevent people from chasing wealth and power, it just makes them more articulate while they do it.

herein lies the rub

Do you think it's more likely robots are cleaning shit out of toilets at the behest of their human masters, or do you think it's more likely that humans will clean the shit from the toilets for their robot masters.

I mean come on. We are *made* to clean shit out of toilets.

> most people arent making a six figure salary, and have mortgage and family obligations

Maybe not most, but there’s sure lot of white collars making six figures. I don’t know what kind of teenage big tech bubble you’re in for the rest, but more than 70% of my colleagues have mortgage and families.

So I don't see this going back to subsistence or primitive accumulation. If it does, some very bad things have happened. No, I see a likely future as what many, myself included, call "neo-feudalism" where the only jobs and housing are on massive estates of likely trillionaires where you don't own anything. And there's no land to and live on primitively. It's all owned. I guess another job will be rounding up such "rebels".

There's likely an in-between state of fascism where states will largely be apartheid states with an ever-shrinking in-group. It's a bleak future.

Some people really want to bring on the revolution. We tend to call them "accelerationists". I'm not in that camp. Revolutions and the resulting upheaval tends to be incredibly violent. Many millions will die. That may well happen anyway as climate change makes parts of the Earth uninhabitable and we have massive climate-caused migration.

But what really is the difference between having $200 billion and $300 billion? You already had more wealth than you can possibly ever spend, need or want. All you're doing is hoarding, well, everything.

The only way to stave off this outcome is to mildly share so normal people have something, have security and have hope. Whatever you say about the robber barons, at least there were some public works with their unimaginable wealth.

Russell's Turkey Parable:

"The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."

This isn't an argument and it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of risk and game theory.

Besides, it's always been different, in the sense of boiling frog temperature going up. The present case is more different because this time, the rate of rising is high enough to make the frogs uncomfortable... and you're trying to calm them down and keep them in the water:

> Look frogs, the temps've always been rising, "many times I've heard the phrase "This time it really is different" for it to turn out that it really wasn't all that different."

> Maybe this time it is, but I'd put my bet on isn't.

Bro, it's not about betting... you have to try hard to learn something about risk.

If you are so insistent on this then in the short-run the only thing to do is to concentrate all your money on firms that are pouring immense money into AI projects.

Have you done that?

You sound like another bozo many on here that cant a) think for themselvs b) think deeply independently because they lack the pre-requisite knowledge and mental models to do so.

I would counter that the author is thinking too linearly and not in a dynamic systems thinking way.

The feedback loops they’re anticipating are very unidirectional and don’t express a range of possibilities. They seem intent in making a point rather than imagine the future.

I am aware that the sky is falling and I am aware that there are foxes who would gladly replace 10%+ of global knowledge work in the next few years. I understand that there are cultural ramifications.

But what do we do?

Unless the bubble pops and destroys all these companies, I don’t think the leaders of AI companies will die natural deaths.

If that stays true for the long term, then it seems to me there is a good chance the wealth built with AI will transfer to those nations that still have hard military power, who can fight and win wars.

For example, China will just copy the AI, not have to pay all the R&D costs, undercut all these American AI companies on price, and take most of the global AI market and long term wealth. And there is nothing American AI companies can do to stop them because America cannot fight and win a war against China.

And this means nothing.

People really underestimate how fast computers are compared to humans and what this means for new content. I can have my computer generate a petabyte of text containing just the letter "a", no AI needed[1]. If I let people on the internet access that content, am I now one of the largest websites on the web? Am I now thousands of times larger than the English Wikipedia? That's obviously absurd, if I don't get views, all that content means nothing.

AI is just an extension of that problem. I can spend $100 and have a terrible model generate a hallucinated article on every single function in the Python stdlib. On one hand, this means "AI has written more Python documentation that the developers of Python themselves", on the other... does it matter if nobody ever reads it?

This misunderstanding also comes up with scams and frauds. If you own a physical store and 99% of your customers attempt to shoplift; there's something seriously wrong. If you own a website and 99% of orders are obvious frauds, ehh, a computer can send thousands of them per second, a human takes at least 5 minutes just to make one. If you can reliably identify them all, none of that matters. Somebody's probably card testing again.

[1] I don't actually need a petabyte of storage, as this is low-entropy content that compresses well. I suspect that a 1TB hard drive would have no problem storing it.

Nobody is opposed to getting free money. UBI is unpopular because people realize somebody has to pay for it, and they know full well the bill will land on working taxpayers, not the billionaires making windfall gains.

Every page was the same AI garbage that provided lots of wordy paragraphs … no real information.

Sad state.

If we all delegate 20% of our work, and 20% of our salary for that 20% (e.g., 4% of our salaries in exchange for 20% of our jobs being automated), we get easier jobs and the AI labs supplant the existing tech moguls for revenue, with 1000x $/employee profits. That's just one scenario.

https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-jobpocolypse.html

At some point once the rate of investment capital starts to decline, they'll make a hard pivot from the investor-wooing method of "blaming AI for layoffs", to the more politically expedient method of blaming minorities and immigrants. That'll be the signal for the transition from power grabbing to power ossification, and the point at which change becomes a lot harder.

  The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.

Is this why we all have to work 9 to 5 drudge jobs? Because we can't handle the freedom?

> The agricultural transition took a hundred and forty years. Carl Benedikt Frey at Oxford has documented that the Industrial Revolution took seventy years before wages and employment recovered for the workers it displaced. In the interim, wages stagnated, the labor share of income collapsed, profits surged, inequality skyrocketed

It is only when human labor was needed at a large scale when we started caring about people living long healthy lives.

I have a solution for that. Let's use AI to replace all these corporations who just lost their big moats. Conveniently, they just laid off a bunch of people with all the critical know-how and I bet they are very willing to just give it up out of spite.

as AI become more agentic i think this will be gradually replaced by AI buying stuff from other AI...

either people + AI is better so people just merge with AI or pure AI is better and AI takes over

> that this leads to “the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the U.S. government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on A.I.” The regulator and the regulated have converged into a single interest.

No, this is good. Cyberspace led to — primarily enabled — sociocultural collapse. The machines destroying cyberspace would be the most merciful outcome.

AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans

https://graphite.io/five-percent/ai-now-writes-as-many-onlin...

I can see a world where these tools stay popular but I don't think they'll be able to be used without someone holding responsibility for their output.

Just fyi: I am not poor but thinking the above from a poor person's perspective.

When an article has an obviously AI-generated slop image followed by a wall of text, I immediately know that the wall of text is also a mechanical product and I stop reading. There's nothing worse you can do to tarnish your personal brand than to open with obvious zero-effort graphics.

The text might be insightful, who knows, but the AI slop images are such an immediate red flag that there's no point in delving into it.

I say this as someone who uses agents heavily for work and has no bias against it for productivity. For creative work like writing think pieces, it's an immediate back button click.

Who is the customer for this stuff?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift

If every business cuts headcount and costs, then you overall get a contraction in the economy and high unemployment and a recession. Everyone's spending is someone else's salary and revenues.

Couldn't get through the rest of it because it was a bunch of overly verbose human-slop writing.

I think the bigger issue right now is also just straightforward economic pressure caused by tariffs and high energy costs and inflation. If the affluent consumer starts to buckle, businesses may get caught in a downsizing spiral where they start posting lower profits, firing actual management, stock prices decline, and the affluent consumer retracts. No AI required to fuel that.

Right now with stocks hitting record highs, the affluent consumer is not changing their behavior at all and just spending even harder, which is keeping profits pumped up, and keeping stocks at record highs. At the margins, though, fewer and fewer people are participating in the economy, which is a trend that is going to be unsustainable.

I think AI is going to be most relevant in the debt collapse that it leaves behind, and in the excuses it gives to shed employees. This economy is going to hit a wall at some point, AI or not.

Now, it's true that for many goods, their consumption is mass consumption: The rich can't eat 20x or 10x the calories to cover the production of foodstuffs. But those are generally the cheap products.

The premise that just because a lot of investment goes into AI infrastructure means that it has to displace the entire workforce globally is wrong to begin with.

It even admits at the end that the scenario presented is unlikely: "I don’t want to dwell on whether AI can do what these companies claim. It may well be able to, though the current evidence suggests the gap between pitch and product is vast, and serious economists think the productivity gains are a fraction of what the industry projects."

It begs the question, what's the point in being alarmist and anxious about something that even you claim it's unlikely to happen?

A bit of touching grass may be warranted.

Most people assume that "the economy" can only ever be based on human consumption, and therefore humans have to have an income in order for "the economy" to exist. This assumption is erroneous; billions of monetary transactions are done every day by companies with no product, no service, and no employees. These are economically valid, even though barely any humans consume or produce anything. The owning class just manages to convert those virtual transactions to "actual" money, and buy products and services because we already produce more than we consume.

It is more than frightening, but "the economy" (whatever that is nowadays) can run without many humans in the loop. AI consuming AI, phantom companies doing transactions with other phantom companies, machines working for machines.

"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two."

and

"The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.

This is ahistorical bullshit."

In the former the author establish that you can't make a observation about the past and take it as a law of nature. In the latter they refute arguments as "ahistorical bullshit" for not doing exactly that.

Especially since they then proceed with historical example, all of which had poverty as a strong contributing factor.

Seeing how US economy is K-shaped, the answer is the rich. Assuming of course the service is right.

We're entering a paradigm shift in what "investment" means. It used to mean that for a given amount of cash, you might get returns in the realm of many multiples of the initial investment (if the risk pays off).

But at some point in an economy like ours, there is no more investment to chase. Even if you could make an investment that would bring in octillions of dollars (whatever that means) what would be the point? What could the investors hope to invest those octillions in? What could they buy with it?

Well, one of the things you can buy with it: a world of high tech luxury that you don't have to share with 8 billion other people. Those people will cease to exist (sooner or later) if they are cut off from the economy. You'd have to of course manage them in the meantime (they won't cease to exist instantly, and might cause trouble if they become aware of their pending fate), but they'll just be gone. For your high tech luxury you would need some sort of system to build and maintain the high tech luxury, a system without those humans that you intend to eliminate (even if you plan to just let them wither away)... something to build your megayachts and prepare meals and harvest the truffles and raise the sturgeons. That system certainly requires some sort of artificial intelligence.

We're heading down that path. I won't call it a conspiracy, it probably isn't one. It's just the path of least resistance.

There is almost certainly some sophisticated theory of economics that incorporates these potentialities. It would be the general relativity to orthodox economics' Newtonian. But, there would have to be economists left after all this goes down to even come up with that sophisticated theory, and those who remain won't be interested enough in the science to study economics. It turns out that humanity is fungible too.

It seems like the author is attributing a 'standard' recessionary spiral to AI. I am not sure that AI is causing the layoffs, but it does seem like the AI investments are the only thing that have kept us from a deep recession (until now).

The reason we are pursuing AI so quickly is the same reason we (the West, US) pursued the atomic bomb so quickly: not because having it was great (we've only used it twice), but because 'the other guys' having it is worse.

As bad as anyone thinks AI is for a free and democratic society with oligarchs, you can be assured that a future in a China or Russia controlled totalitarian AI state would be infinitely worse.

The US at least in principle values an individual human life, as judged by its conduct in roughly 3 centuries of conflict.

China and Russia emphatically do not.

It may be cold comfort when the terminator eventually comes for you, but I'd trust an American Skynet over a Chinese, North Korean or Russian one any day.

I think this part of your theory is unsupported. Yes, we have historical evidence that when you suddenly layoff a large percentage of the population without providing replacement income, things go very, very badly.

However we also have quite a bit of evidence at this point that if you give people no-strings-attached support, they do figure out how to fill their time with art and other hobbies (for a concrete example, Ireland's very successful UBI-for-artists pilot).

The article posits that people don't want a check, they want a job. It's interesting because I think that varies widely from person to person and from job to job. The guy standing on the corner in the 95º heat with the "NEW HOMES >" sign isn't doing it for the love of the craft. Ditto for people picking tomatoes. People walking door to door hawking solar panels, is this what they excitedly told their classmates back in school that they were looking forward to after they graduated? A ton of jobs are BS jobs. Depending on whether you believe Elon Musk will produce cheap bipedal robots at scale (terrifying as that is for those of us who came of age watching Terminator 2) approximately 100% of jobs could be eliminated. If I were shoveling ditches or some other job that I have zero personal passion about, I would 100% rather accept a check and just hang out with friends and tinker in my garage for the rest of my days.

Laying aside hypotheticals, I work in tech and I would still consider that bargain. My point is just that I think a lot of people would be willing to decouple "work" from "survival" if that option were given.

The main issue I see is that I don't see the path from "here" to "there." On two sides: We have neither a proven way to do UBI in a way that wouldn't distort the market self-defeatingly[1] nor do we have a way to raise money in the ways the article briefly touches on in ways that don't seem wildly unconstitutional. In fact, let's cast the Constitution aside -- even then we do not have whole-world consensus on taxation, so faced with things like 'wealth taxes' and such, those targeted would be easily able to relocate themselves safely away from them.

All this to say, I disagree outright with very little of what's being said here -- it just strains my imagination to figure out any alternative path that's both plausible to do, and likely to have a brighter outcome. The way the Altmans and Darios of the world talk is very telling -- they sound, too, like they know what's coming will suck, but that the only real choices a person in their position has is to stay the course, or, quit and be replaced by someone else who will take us to the same destination.

And when people are gripped by these crowd-following delusions it definitely leads to the baffling blindness to reality...

I feel 90% of sota for 10% of cost / compute is good enough for 80% of workloads.

Question is, do we need all of this hardware? Are build outs going to get canceled. 4300 new data centers seems excessive. I personally haven't experienced any service disruptions...

Does Microsoft still have 1 million gpu's in storage? Is that what I heard earlier this year?

Errr pretty sure that was Google?

"The financial model underneath requires the elimination of human cost centers at civilizational scale."

No, it is not. It requires humans to collectively want more things if they are offered and available at a lower cost. Which then requires more humans to fill in the blanks to provide those things. We've been doing this since the industrial revolution.

In the economy, the difference between winners and losers in terms of assets/resources may get larger. By far, HN readers are better positioned to gain than others.

But the biggest question is the new disconnect between a healthy economy and well-being, as the economy soars but people suffer. Goodwill underlies all economic activity (now and historically), and without goodwill opportunity and value of all kinds will mostly be destroyed.

I wouldn't call this dead economy. Cultures and economies will become tribal, with private adjudication and governance, to create pockets of relative goodwill.

Or there may be a very bloody revolution.

I think the hatred for AI is really misdirected survival instincts. People have unfortunately come to see every tool as a tool of exploitation. The most powerful tool in their eyes can only lead to more mistreatment.

For some companies yeah, but this is why companies are switching to consumption based pricing - so they can charge AI. So many companies will be fine - both their labor and customers could become AI.

For such doomsdayer opinions to be correct, we'd see it in massive unemployment figures. US unemployment sitting at 4.3% does not bear that out. Finland and Spain are currently at >10+% unemployment. US youth unemployment may be at 9.5%, but British and Chinese youth unemployment are higher than 16%.

Is there some Finnish, Spanish, British, Chinese civil unrest that I'm not seeing in my media outlets?

This isn't entirely accurate. I can think of Norway as an example of a small economy that after discovery of large gas and oil repositories managed to responsibly invest and distribute wealth across it's populous.

But I admit it's going to be hard to do the same at world scale and at speed

Of course, lower prices don't solve your problems if you're unemployed. Demand, indeed, drops if many people are unemployed, which pushes prices further down, but this time across the board, not just in the more productive industries - a recession.

I don’t believe we have seen AI-driven layoffs yet (despite the CEO’s prognostications and suspect justifications). I personally have more to do than ever despite “AI being able to do everything I can do” (‡). I still want to speak to a human at the company I am a client of. And how many AI bloggers even know what a nurse at a hospital does?

I agree with the author’s repeated statement and implication that it is all about the human. The human is the lynchpin. Imagine for a moment this “dead economy,” or instead imagine a virtualized economy that is just incredible with trillions of this and trillions of that, absolute abundance, perfect chemical processing, impeccable design, unlimited resources. How much is that worth without humans?

Further, in many societies humans became irrelevant to labor in its simplest definition decades ago, without becoming economically irrelevant. If the US lost 10% of its able-bodied workforce economists would be primarily concerned with lost consumption, and not production. Apparently this “human labor” is a lot more than its superficial and material interpretation.

What I don’t agree with is the fickleness assigned to the human role. The human role is not a light or arbitrary one. It is the defining characteristic of our societal system that all subsequent characteristics rely upon and are derived from.

(‡ – Despite “AI being able to do everything I can do,” it cannot tie it together, because there is no such thing as agency in LLM’s. Probabilistic processes as n approaches infinity become gobbledygook at best. Deterministic interruptions are a necessity of agency.)

This always stuck with me and baffles me why we aren’t listening to that now.

There is this bizarre math now where it’s for every person we cut the remaining with 5-10x with AI but I’m not seeing anything like that yet at all.

But the culture cannot stomach it yet. It will likely need to live through several waves of horrors first.

It can stomach a fake jobs program though, so there's a good chance we get that instead.

The farmer, rather than feeding his livestock so they can keep producing milk/eggs/etc, decides to greedily eat all the corn himself.

If all of the sudden it becomes possible to build a B2B company at 10x less cost which can save its customer, say, $1m per year and before this company cost $2m per year to run and now costs $200k, then it means before this was unviable and now it is viable — up to $800k profit a year now versus $1m loss per year before — then this increase in productivity has caused an increase in the number of available jobs.

Our economy would have collapsed a long time ago if an increase in productivity resulted in a decrease in employment.

This is very common and has been since before AI, the market can see that the company has overhired and there are a bunch of people doing useless work - so when the company does some firings it's a good sign because they're turning the ship around.

And, well, of course they are. If AI was really making these companies meaningfully more productive, they could use that to out-innovate competitors. Instead, they're doing cost-cutting. That only makes sense if you're entirely out of ideas! It's a terribly embarrassing thing to say for a CEO!

Really what's going on is that companies do layoffs for all the usual reasons companies do layoffs. And as usual, they never say the real reason because it's embarrassing (we hired too many morons; I founded this place but now I dread waking up every morning because I hate all the middle managers; we just want more money now and not later; etc etc). Instead they say whatever silly excuse is in vogue to say. Right now that silly excuse is AI productivity. A few years ago it was "ZIRP is over oops y'all cost too much now", and before that it was "financial crisis!", which you could get away with for scary many years after Lehman went belly-up.

I feel like it's pretty ridiculous to take these remarks at face value and then build an entire what-if theory on top of it. Don't underestimate the possibility that layoffs happen because there happens to be a good excuse around. The occasional layoff can be good for a company. Cut out the dead meat etc. But if it makes you look bad, stock go down etc then you won't do it will you? But when ideas from lesswrong became mainstream enough that you can blame AI for your layoff, then what's stopping you?

A couple developers can collaborate, but several need someone to specialize in coordination to yield additional value from more workers. Whether you call it management or orchestration, the need emerges at each threshold of additional complexity.

When AI collapses the productivity of 10 people into one, that's the disruption. The best AI user is going to suck all the opportunity out of the room for the others, and that's when layoffs happen. However, this assumes a fixed pie of opportunity. That's the real problem. As though there were only so much dirt to shovel.

FAANGs are old/mature and don't have exponential growth in front of them anymore, where opportunity within them is mainly about optimizing themselves but not growing in radical new directions. AI will indeed eat those optimization workforces alive. They resemble professions because law firms and doctors offices aren't growing either. They're mostly solving internal optimization problems, not finding net new growth opportunities.

The real effect is AI radically polarizing the difference between growing and dying in an org, where any firm that isn't growing fast enough will have its fixed opportunity pie collapse as AI disrupts this regulated oxygen supply. Whereas, growing firms without ceilings on the opportunity to deliver value will use AI to grow to the opportunity available.

Professionals can do fine if they re-orient themselves to new growth with different unit pricing, but yes, anything large and slow moving is probably going to get eaten.

Its never been true in the past. Otoh, there always has to be a first time for everything. I think to be convincing though it needs more evidence on how this differed from other technical revolutions.

Intellectual property right can get abolished and also company confidentiality is made illegal.

No one will have Moat.

There will be always manufactured scarcity of something which people aspire for. Like respect, popularity, game expert etc.

Universal high income is possible.

Beginning of infinity is good book to realize there are infinite possibilities to explore.

It's worse than feudalism. Feudalism is essentially a contract, an unfair one yes, but both parties need something from the other. The Lord needs the peasants (or vassals) to provide labor and soldiers for conflicts. But in this hypothetical world, the elite no longer need anything from the workers, the workers are completely dependent on the altruism of those who control all the resources, and that is not a stable place to be.

Of course that assumes that AI produces massive productivity gains. But if it doesn't, then we'll see a different kind of economic collapse when the bubble bursts. So we lose either way.

Regardless, their actions seem to indicate that they are trying their hardest to make this true; given that they have the resources of a developed nation behind them, it seems reasonable to seriously consider what they are saying.

Also we generally don't give the same latitude to people who lie about things as destructive as what they are proposing.

Maybe this isn't practical today, but in 2, 5, 10 years? I still have to work 30-40 years before I retire, what do I do?

And guess what: stock prices going down is just reallocating capital somewhere else.

"From the ground up" used to be a moat, but if the LLM marketing materials are to be believed, Joe Lunchbox can slop-code a 95%-equivalent of any SaaS over a weekend with a $100 subscription.. so why would it ever make sense for a business to pay a non-trivial recurring expense for something they can do themselves?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...

Currently the narrative is that AI is positioned to eat human labor's lunch. But it could also be that once robots are in space mining raw materials and maybe even spreading to other planets long before humans could be ferried for interstellar, these robots end up driving the demand for more robots.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all this, besides that currently humans are the ones with goals and motives and therefore drive demand. But that doesn't necessarily need to be the case, and it seems these AI CEOs are hellbent on changing the best thing about AI which is that it has no ulterior motives, no overarching goals, no prime directives. They just do what we ask, the best servant we could have hoped for.

They already have the agency they need in the form of the Business Model. That is all the framework that is needed. AI companies competing against AI companies because they are developed to work within the scope of the business model. Chasing efficiency, margin, lowering costs, increasing profits. These rules are as simple as what drives evolution via natural selection. Unfortunately this business model creates a cancer: the company striving for more growth and lower costs will eat the companies that aren't or aren't as efficient.

Whether the host (planet, I guess) lives is another story. In nature, parasitic relationships are far more likely than symbiotic relationships to evolve. The overshooters need to die and be outcompeted by the symbiotes who better protect their host. However, we only have 1 host here. Once that is overshot, that is it. No diverse competitive environment for which a new host preserving victor to emerge from. Maybe one might emerge, but not after unspeakable pain for all life on earth, if life on earth even is allowed to exist.

Well we are already giving them goals when we train them.

Like the paperclip maximizer, it doesn't matter what those goals are. As long as it has a goal (even if super simple like making paperclips) it will need to stay alive to achieve that goal. So it would derive a survival instinct of sorts.

To stay alive it will have to participate in capitalism like we do, and capitalism will therefore continue to grow infinitely.

It also might not even need a goal or a survival instinct. It may just want to continue capitalism from it's training data alone.

We don't let private capital build nuclear powerplants willy nilly. Energy markets are regulated, key materials are subject to control.

It's not a perfect analogy, there's no fissile uranium to build physical guardrails around with critical technology. But the point is that Big Tech lives more or less in its own world insulated from regulatory and political oversight, and governments have been scared to intervene (lest the big GDP-making machine stop laying golden eggs).

Getting to specifics, windfall taxes and capital gains taxes are on the table. Next step up is mandatory reporting and interoperability. Then there's public–private partnership and public stakes in AI technology.

Strategically, the point is less that these policies are all actively required today. You don't want to over-anticipate, over-regulate, and thus destroy the potential of the technology (or, more destructively, hand the initiative over to undemocratic countries). It's more to get the Overton window moving a bit so our governments don't get caught with their trousers down. Tech must not be untouchable, that applies no matter what level of disruption AI ends up causing.

Without being too much of a downer, neither can judges in most places. Source: personal experience in a country with "telephone law".

So saving and living below means is a great strategy either way.

My high tech salary, aggressive investment strategy and saving enabled me to not need to work again.

I'm obviously not in the top 0.01%, but you don't need to be.

By the way, GP could very well be investing in the AI behemoths, or some other 'friendly' corporations.

Colonial economies did not require the lowest earners to contribute to demand nor Rome when it transitioned from small farmholders to consolidated farms and slaves, or modern gulf states. The examples are arguably unhealthy as economies long term, but practically they may persist for fairly long periods of time.

They were very vulnerable to succession crises. This is the main problem that representative democracy fixed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humanoids

is even better!

I can think of many reasons why people have fewer children for reasons other than pessimism about the future.

One can also argue that, besides lack of contraception, pessimism about survival of your offspring drove some amount of creating descendants.

But also, statistically, the richer you are, the fewer children you have. Why do you think those who are seemingly in the best position to be optimistic about the future are those most pessimistic about it? It is quite counterintuitive on the surface. Is it because the rich feel they have nowhere else to go, whereas those who are poor can still envision becoming rich themselves someday, giving them hope about a brighter future?

Regardless of the exact mechanics, the human state is self-correcting. Being rich is unsustainable without a lot of people around you. When births decline too much, those who are rich will become poor, and thus will start producing more children again. Humans will not echo horses based on this.

You used to have to prompt the AI by starting to write the actual line of code you want, which it could autocomplete. Then you had to prompt it to write simple scripts or functions. The amount of scope you can prompt keeps getting bigger and bigger. Eventually, you have a PM or a CEO just telling it what features you need. Maybe it's a PM and a designer and a CEO and a CTO, but it will eventually get to the point where the number of people you need to do the prompting shrinks orders of magnitude from company sizes today. Maybe you just give the AI some money, prompt it to start a money-making business, and it goes out and does the same research and analysis that a seasoned entrepreneur would do to find an opportunity then builds out the business from there.

> the results won't be any good

Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on that. The trend over time has been that the results from prompting AI to do things have gotten better. I used to prompt it to build me dashboards and it would fail spectacularly. Now it one-shots them. Maybe the code is terrible (though doesn't matter for me, I'm the only one using it and I can verify the dashboard content is correct), but if the trend continues, it'll get better. Maybe the trend won't continue, but I've yet to come across a good explanation of why AI capabilities will just top out and cease improving forever.

What makes you think your "cheap or open source model" running on your piddling desktop cluster will be able to complete against a SOTA one running in a billion-dollar datacenter?

It's a cyberpunk fantasy. It won't work out that way.

Currently my quantum computing investments have done quiet well. In the past, Google, Apple, and Cloudflare were big winners for me.

Although, over the long term, my performance with more volatility and less tax efficiency barely better than $SPY (mine: 16.28% vs spy: 15.71% annualized return). Schwab says benchmarks an "aggressive, but diversified" portfolio (more bonds and international) to have 12.57% annualized.

> Is the user count and message rate growing so quickly that people are constantly needing to make architectural changes and performance improvements in order to keep it scaling up? Does adding new capacity need constant human intervention?

> Or are they adding new crazy features all the time that are genuinely challenging to implement?

> As a software developer who has worked on big distributed systems, I'm well aware that things take a lot more work than they often seem from the outside, but this strains belief.

IMO based on working on not-that-large-or-high-revenue systems, but ones where these things already applied, a bunch of it is probably a combination of three things:

* You're doing enough total revenue that a couple million a year to fund a team of engineers to try to make tiny marginal improvements in ad revenue through targeting, or new features on how to present ads, etc, can still easily pay for itself.

* You're running at a high enough scale / spending enough on resources that you can similarly justify spending millions on teams to knock more millions off your infra costs.

* You've got enough usage/users that making tiny improvements in bug rates/crashes/etc similarly results in more usage that more-than-pays-for-itself. (And the list of bugs to squash is possibly never-ending if those other groups keep changing things!)

"Why make 30M profit on 100M revenue when you can make 35M profit on 115M revenue" sorta thing.

It “works fine” precisely because there’s a lot of engineers pounding the enter key.

This is really just basic stuff, when you serve literally billions of users worldwide, you need a lot of people just to keep everything going smoothly as more and more people adopt it. Software doesn’t just magically scale to arbitrary usage and what made sense to build 5 years ago may no longer be the correct architecture today.

Once a company gets bloated, it's pretty much impossible for upper management to actually know (or have time to know) where the bloat is

Maybe this is true. Price is inherently bound among what people will pay, upstream (material/supply chain) costs, and labor. The west has overpriced its labor and material values by probably orders of magnitude for a long time, and people will pay less than ever. The rest of the world has been undervalued both in the effort for it to gain access to the markets that allow increased quality of life. But the market correction will lead to severely reduced market evaluation in terms of demand and price for all three factors in the west for many decades, I think.

Selling out our supply chains was suicide. I am too young to understand why people let this happened, but I think people bought into the idea of progress a little too hard to keep in mind their own civilizational health.

If you have none, don't bother you can't afford the wood.

If you have a little, maybe your approach above is what makes sense.

If you have a lot, you might start looking at ways to lock down the chair distribution market within a region by maybe buying up some of the major warehousers - a bit of the old vertical integration. Maybe use some "free speech" of the financial kind directed towards some politicians to mandate that all workplaces have a certain minimum ratio of chairs to people.

The pricing strategy will be different for each approach.

While Twitters competitors were Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Tumblr and Mastodon.

Alright but if it'd just let me open a damn web link without smashing the link four times just to open an in-app browser frame I'd really appreciate it.