As one company starts to streamline, all of their competitors will follow suit. It will become a competition because the stock market will reward you if you cut headcount and punish you if you don’t.
I don't buy this. Won't investors still seek growth? Sure, efficiency amazing can be attractive, but much more attractive is runaway growth. If you only need 5 people to do what uses to require 100, you still might need to hire new people if you are growing.
Andrew Yang has some predictions:
"1. Mid-career office workers will be fired in droves.""1. Mid-career office workers will be fired in droves."
the number of people necessary to make large corporations function is going to be dramatically reduced. What do you say if your child asks you about becoming a newspaper journalist? You say, “Well, that field hasn’t really been growing, you might want to consider something else.”
Sure, journalism majors aren't exactly thriving. But I'd wager more people make money by writing (and in more ways) than thirty years ago...by a lot.
Seems to me that whenever people develop something that automates humans want done, the humans who used to do the thing don't just give up -- they start doing something more.
"2. Personal bankruptcies will surge.""2. Personal bankruptcies will surge."
The amount of money getting paid to human labor is about to go down. The value is going to get soaked up into the cloud. The K-shaped economy, where the rich enjoy the growth and keep spending while the bottom 80% or so are trying to tread water will become all the more dramatic.
So, the argument is that we will be so productive that nobody will need to work (remember everybody loses their job?), but at the same time nothing will get cheaper and nobody will be able do anything.
"3. College grads won’t be able to find jobs.""3. College grads won’t be able to find jobs."
The social contract of ‘study hard, go to school, get a good job, live a decent life’ is about to be vaporized to smithereens. Upward mobility for most will be a thing of the past.
This social contract hasn't worked since 1998, and Yang is just now catching on?
Many young people will be faced with getting a job that doesn’t require a degree while paying for the one that they got at great expense.
Right: degrees may not be very useful, but that doesn't mean people will also not be useful. People are weird. Weirdness is gonna cone out in spades and it's going to be pretty great. I'm expecting a great wave of weird new things that make being alive even better.
"4. Downtowns and office parks will empty out.""4. Downtowns and office parks will empty out."
Maybe...cities have more than office parks. You don't get really awesome bakeries without density.
"5. Pessimism and anger will rise up.""5. Pessimism and anger will rise up."
I strongly disagree with this.
It's at least a 50/50 that AI opens doors to people that we definitely aren't thinking about.
Despite my tone here, I'm not an AI booster. But it is very tiring to see this constant pearl-clutching.
We aren't gonna do less, we're gonna do more.
I think this is a great prediction. By it's nature, AI will replace the known and the routine, so we will find our comparative advantages in the unusual.
there's def something to this... It's in the nature of innovation and making new workable shit that we couldn't see the new things it made possible.
Every major general-purpose tech has destroyed something obvious and well-trodden, on which plenty of people relied. In (long) hindsight we can see that it turned out OK and the society-wide gains outweigh the short-term pain/losses.
But looking forward, and always wondering if this tech time is different, it feels scarier
This makes me wonder if optimism / pessimism is one of the dividing lines between libertarians and socialists. I view pessimism as fundamental to anyone seeking government solutions, because it's a view that says most problems cannot be solved by the individual, but only by collectivism
if there were only, like, a book about that?
I've heard such great things about that book.
Reminds me of when my best friend realized that my worldview is radically optimistic rather than cynical.
Both extremes are wrong.
The most powerful economic model is a combination of collective organisation and strategic development and free enterprise.
There are sectors and areas of development that private enterprise will not develop but which can and do benefit the overall economic strength and power projection of a nation.
Rare earths is just one example.
Chinas mixed model with the CCP directing capital into infrastructure education and strategic priorities while leaving free market competition to operate underneath that umbrella of infrastructure provision has proven its ability to outcompete the wests industrialised economies.
With AI and the post industrial economy emerging such combined use of free market and strategic planning and capital direction is even more important- the size and scale of the structures required are even larger and more complex than ever before and neither an entirely free market or a fully command economy model will not provide a full systemic complexity required.
This is why Trump is oncreasingly adopting State Capitalism...but it may be too little too late.
USA does not have the electricity power generation capacity to power the AI power consumption that is projected.
China builds nuclear power generation at 1/6th yes 1/6th the cost it takes USA to.
Chinese consumers and businesses pay less than half what US consumers and businesses pay because China has prioritised both building power generation capacity and building energy efficiency..and has been focused on this strategy for the last 20 years.
USA has focused its AI reaserch on achieving AGI- while China has focused upon more pragmatic and immediate research and development priorities that deliver productivity gains sooner.
The US industrial base is gutted after decades of outsourcing.
If the big gamble on AI rescuing the declining US empire doesn't work out it could be all over for US global hegemony and the extraordinary wealth and privilege USA has enjoyed for many decades.
US will lose to China because of zoning, ~lol #1435840
I'm going to react to a single thing that I think is important to think more about.
Idk about this one, but I levitate towards the doomers a bit.
Because honestly, it is easy to reason about this from a privileged position. If you are of sound mind, it's easier to not fall into a trap of emotional dependency on a sycophantic bot. But if you're vulnerable, what then?
And, unless you have a pretty good idea what you're doing with your coding buddy, you may, as @k00b put it, be telling your bot to boil the ocean. Can everyone afford a 1M sats OpenAI bill because you instructed an oopsie in that agentic setup some 40yo former cofounding fuckboi from the Valley said was the only way or you go bust? I don't think so.
The fomo is messed up. The pressure immense. I have an interview soon and I intend to ask the hiring party, as in seriously, what on earth is moving them to hire right now. I didn't think I'd ever need to wonder about that, but I honestly do.
You make a good point about emotional dependency. I wasn't considering that, much.
This evening, I've been reading Arthur Hayes'latest and it is a little surprising how in step with Yang he is:
Who am I to disagree with the likes of Yang and Hayes? But it seems to me that markets get very weird around things that everybody expects to happen. Right now, everybody expects massive white collar job loss courtesy of the Terminator (wouldn't it be just poetic if that bureaucratic term cum sci-fi horror actually returns to its hr roots?).
I don't expect that everyone is going to emerge a vibe coder like a butterfly from their pre-AI cocoon, but I really don't see how this thing that is going to obliterate all the things that people are doing will yet remain out of reach for those very same people.
I am pretty confident that hiring good people is still a good idea. Some of them will have ideas that reveal how small a closet we've been standing in all this time.
eg. Film, tv and movies are something like half a percent of GDP. This is a thing that didn't exist much more than 100 years ago, and which we could all probably be just fine. Yet there it is. I expect AI will get turned into at least one major new art form of such scale.
Honestly? You're Scoresby and you, like everyone else, can disagree with anyone you like. I'm personally not particularly sensitive to Hayes (though I do appreciate his savagery and he does get things right from time to time) or Yang (though I do sympathize with the feeling of impending doom, a little, but I see much bigger problems than LLMs)
I think it would be great if anyone could emerge a vibe coder, but that's what I tried to elude to: I don't think that that's true. Most importantly, the barrier to entry is real. Maybe not for you or I, but for anyone not privileged, it's hard. But even without that, it's a skill to know what to ask. This is easy for someone that spent a career in architecting huge systems for huge corps and govs, but most people that are born before 2010 don't even know what to want, let alone what to ask.
Maybe the current gen of youth (whatever that's called) will be much more enabled in this, because of them growing up with the tech widely available while still curious. But I am not at all sure about that: we see the capture happening in front of our eyes (see your reply below). Who is taking that on? The geopolitical imperialism everyone around me is pretty upset about right now isn't nearly as bad as the digital kind done by the corpos, yet.
I've always said coding is an art form. I think coding is dying at the moment, but not because the bots are so good. Simply everyone expects it to die, so I guess it will die.
I read this thing from Eric S Raymond today, and maybe it speaks to what you are saying. He has spent a career architecting. But his point is interesting. Here's the bitter link:
https://nitter.net/esrtweet/status/2023978360351682848#m
This part is spot on. I don't know hardly anyone outside of my Bitcoin bubble who cares.
You sound more down on coding than many writers are on writing. I can't speak to coding, but as far as writing goes I'm pretty optimistic. For me writing has always been about making weird connections to show to readers and that part at least is getting better.
I recognize what he's saying (the comment stright below the main tweet is spot on about systems thinking). He's right, I think, but it shows the obstacle for anyone that has evolved as a
not-systems-thinker. And I cannot use these bots to help others get better bots at this time, yet, because they come with massive vendor lock-in despite everyone and their stepmom's LLM platform having copied the OpenAI API. One of the most costly things is constant evaluation and prompt tuning. I've also found thatarena.aitop lists are biased towards plausibly retarded prompts and do not send traffic to more obscure models often, so you gotta DYOR every time, for your own use-cases, across a wide set, not just the top list. That's not just hard work; building the right framework for judging the job at hand is expert work - it requires you to be a Chad in the field you're working in.I think it's because the trend since the 80s has been to rely on regulation for privacy and it's been seeded with political bravado all over Cali, Canada, Europe, Mexico... I even see politicos in the Carib emulating this behavior. But it's virtue signaling. Yes, it's extra income for the state when they catch "bad orgs", but the real problems are caused by the places that they force surveillance upon: govt agencies, banks (especially of the "neo" kind), mobile providers, healthcare... and now social media and AI firms. These guys get hacked all the time. And the chance that your data isn't out there on the darkweb is minimal.
(And thus, when you sound the alarm, the politicians will not tell the public that their little laws don't help preventing criminals stealing your stuff; criminals don't care about breaking the law, that's why they are criminals)
If I get someone that spent a couple of weeks and then messes up their first PR, they're on their way to become a contributor. If I get someone that spent a couple of dollars on API creds from the smartest AI in the world and then still messes up their first PR, there is no way for me to guide them. This is why coding dies. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, by everyone saying it will die.
I last night had a bot solve a real security issue for me in 30 minutes (incl my human time) that would have taken me at least half a day by hand by having a smoke, saying,
noto a boiling the ocean idea and giving it a very precise instruction (and rockets for the lulz.) So of course I'm optimistic on this tech, but it's not as good as advertised.The bot at first did what any jr coder that (in a distant past) would work for me do though: ask me to lower the requirement. Tough luck lil bot, meet my resolve, and pretty please use that grey mass... oh wait.
But, there is a catch. The solution doesn't work in the field because the field is a spaghetti of shit built upon shit. In fact, I boiled both oceans telling it to use its solution because it ended up in an endless loop of
npm install && npm audit. Upside is that we can all get our fish soup straight off the boat now. I'll have to replan it.I wonder if, to your point about writing, is that there's gonna be a differentiation between mass market and niche.
The payscale for mass market writing is probably gonna shrink, or at least support fewer human authors, because AI may be able to reliably produce "good enough fare" for the mass market. Especially business and technical writing, which is meant to be boilerplate, but also perhaps for some mass market fiction genres.
But perhaps AI will cause a flourishing of the indie and niche writing scenes, as authors have more time and tools to find their voice, and audiences have more tools to find the people that speak to them most directly, in a human way that the AI's can't (yet)
Just a thought.
I like Andrew Yang but not his views on public policy
Hayes has interesting takes, some wrong, some have a kernel of truth maybe
Then again if it's all kyc'd and they can choose who to lock out...
#1436017
Yes. There are days that I wonder: why do they let me do this? lol
you need a new nym, methinks
@realism? nah. no fun3 minute video
https://substack.com/home/post/p-188281173
Thanks, and yes I fully agree with that. I don't believe that we need UBI or any of that bs.
I even know why the guys I'm having an interview with wanna hire me (of course they do, lol). I just don't understand why
now, as opposed to in 6-12 months; everyone is consolidating, so why are they not? For a moment I thought this was one of them rubber hose honeypots where they gonna beat me to death over sats I already spent anyway lol.I do worry about this being more of a consolidation event than an enabling event, looking at how it's going, and with all the political capture, I'm seeing the enthusiasm of 9-18 months ago dry up, and instead a lot of the same fomo on the one side and doomer bs on the other repeated over and over again. There aren't many people on the middle ground in AI, and I suspect that that's what's preventing a good balance - polarization doesn't really bring that.
Nasdaq and SP500 will go to 0
The world is ending, chosen people will return to the holy land, second coming of Christ
I forgot to mention trigger alert
I think a lot of people are in their minds pre-sorting for a
Butlerian Jihadof sorts, likeliness of that outcome may grow parallel to inequality in access.If I think about the impact of AI, the danger is in the human response much more than in a bundle of - often poorly designed - query processes over layered vectors of float16.
do report back.
Skeptical on this one... somebody needs to do a fact-check/deep dive. (I suppose delineation of exactly "writing" matters here)
On this, I'll have a LOT more to say -- about price/wage rigidity, about labor supply, about deflationary fiat prices etc -- but no, I don't think you have this right.
...and we only every know that afterwards. Yes, I think history of technological revolutions is on your side -- tho in all of them the convo was "what if this is different?" It is kind of hard to see the new-and-improved/nonexisting world before it's here
I disagree with your sentiment on writers. They have been fired in droves. I lost my writing career in Spring 2024 due to AI, and it never recovered. The good thing is, it was a second job/freelance gig versus my primary. But yeah, writers were fooked hard by AI and still are.
You have first hand evidence, and I defer to that. I'm curious if you have found a new outlet for your writing or if you are trying something different with it.
I still write to keep the mental muscles working, but most of it now is done for free or for sites like Stacker News when it relates. Much of my second job energy now has shifted to other markets, such as online second-hand sales and coding. There has always been a market for being a "treasure hunter" for folks, finding the things they want from the past, but the income level doesn't come close to what I earned as a freelance writer. Coding also has taken a hit from AI, being the second wave of jobs impact, but what I do there is focus on building software myself instead of doing it for a client. Then I let the product sell itself. So, much of what I've had to do has been reinvention and diversifying as well as re-training.
Sounds like these 'writers' were fired by Washington Post
Me too. I'm not an AI maxi or doomer. Yang is someone I can't take seriously and your comments on his writing illustrate this beautifully.
What impact did the computer, the internet and the software revolution have on the economy? As software becomes exponentially cheaper and faster to build and deploy and on-demand intelligence scales order after order of magnitude, what impact will this have on the economy? Likely it will scale up just as it has before with every other technology revolution.
Yes, there will be social displacement, as this is the very nature of revolutions. There will be turmoil and politicians like Yang will try to convince you into WWIII. Do not be psyop'd by the evil politician.
Amazing
What is Stacker News?
It is a social media platform intentionally created to enable a P2P V4V BTC denominated community.
Originally Stacker News (SN) custodyed sats on behalf of participants but the threat of government regulatory prosecution on the pretext of money transmitter forced a move away from the custody of sats by the platform to the platform enabling participants to send sats via their wallets.
To achieve this participants need to attach wallets to both send and receive sats.
Where participants do not or cannot attach LN wallets transactions will often default to Cowboy Credits.
This change was a compromise forced by the threat of government prosecution.
The difficulty of attaching both sending and receiving wallets is moderate- it takes some effort and newbie or non tech people may struggle with it, but most competent Bitcoiners can succeed in attaching wallets and thus enabling sats denominated P2P transactions.
But a number of Stackers have chosen not to attach wallets- in particular sending wallets which enable you to send sats into the SN community.
Very few have attached just a sending wallet- many have attach just a receiving wallet.
Those who only attach a receiving wallet can receive sats from others but cannot send sats into the community. They may feel that as content providers they have no need or obligation to send sats into and within the SN community. I disagree.
Where these receive but not send (horse but no gun) Stackers proclaim to be Bitcoiners but refuse to enable a sending wallet they are demonstrably hypocrits. They claim they want to build and grow the BTC LN MoE network but they cannot be bothered contributing toward that growth by attaching a sending wallet and demonstrating they are not just talking, but are also walking and supporting a sats denominated platform.
If we do not use the LN wherever and whenever we can it will not grow and develop.
Some claim it is too hard to attach wallets- its too hard on their self custody nodes or wallets- this just highlights how much work the LN still needs before it is capable of anything approaching 100% reliable MoE capability.
But the best way to grow and strengthen the LN is it use it – despite its remaining flaws and glitches.
When wallets are supported by people using them they receives transaction fees and can develop liquidity and systems further.
When LN wallets are not used the LN decays- it does not have the usage and fees income to grow.
So when self proclaimed advocates for BTC and LN refuse to attach wallets (especially sending wallets) I see hypocrit.
I will continue to see hypocrit until and unless someone can explain why I should not.
Calling me a Nazi, trolling and making fun of me crudely seeking to avoid the issues I raise will not stop me from asking why are you claiming to be a Bitcoiner but refusing to attach wallets and use the LN here where we can help it grow.
Now some are deliberately concealing their wallet status, as if this is about a right to privacy.
Concealing your wallet status means nobody else can verify whether or not you are serious about using BTC LN, or whether you are just an all talk no walk hypocrit.
Do not trust- verify.
What about this fundamental principle do they not understand?
And then they talk about 'content' being more important than whether or not you have attached wallets - in this context the intentional lack of attached wallets undermines your credibility as your actions do not match your words.
Your submitted content may be great, but you as someone claiming to be a serious Bitcoiner are undermining your credibility and the credibility of your content by being a hypocrit.
Your content, is tainted by your verifiable hypocrisy.
SNs needs both good content providers and those who pay for that content if it is succeed.
I am more in the latter group than the former but both are required overall or the model does not work.
So as a net contributor of sats and thus a net consumer of content I object where content providers refuse to engage in the P2P V4V ethos by refusing to attach both sending and receiving wallets and I will both withhold my contribution of sats and sometimes downvote in response.
V4V needs to work reciprocally or it will not work at all.
The content providers need net sats contributors/content consumers who send sats into the platform, or the entire platform fails.