[HN Gopher] Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will g...
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Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic'
benefits
Author : belter
Score : 276 points
Date : 2025-10-03 16:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| mattnewton wrote:
| Seems like a measured approach- my read is him saying it's
| probably a bubble in that bad ideas are being funded too, but
| there are a lot of really good ideas doing well.
|
| Also nit: Typo right in the digest I assume, assuming "suring" is
| "during", does cnbc proofread their content?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| irony level IV
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| Apparently not. An LLM proofread would've definitely caught
| that
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Typos are proof something wasn't Ai written. Everyone should
| make at least one tyop in their writing.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Only worms until the typos get into the training data. You
| need to say at least one thing no one has ever said before in
| every post.
| square_usual wrote:
| R9k wins again
| danielbln wrote:
| "Claude, make sure to sprinkle at least one typo in here. And
| no em dashes you hear?"
| Loughla wrote:
| Faculty at the college I work for are kicking and screaming
| about AI and students using AI. They don't want to use new
| tools so they're just trying to outright ban students from
| using them.
|
| One smug English faculty said, "well it's not that hard.
| You just look for dashes in their writing."
|
| I responded with, "you know you can just tell it not to use
| those, right?"
|
| Blank stares.
|
| I hate it.
| baobun wrote:
| The writing is a mandatory part of the learning process.
| Outsourcing it to tools is skipping and cheating. Nothing
| new here. It was the same when the tool was your buddy or
| upwork before LLMs.
|
| Banning advanced graph calculators on undergrad math
| exams is not because "they don't want to use new tools",
| either.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| The sad difference that makes a difference is that
| banning graphing calculators from proctored exams is
| enforceable in practice.
|
| Appealing to honor is a partial solution at best.
| Cheating is a problem at West Point, let alone the
| majority of places with a less disciplined culture. It's
| sad, but true. The fact that you and I would never cheat
| on exams simply does not generalize.
|
| https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-
| army/2021/04/18/51-west-...
|
| edit: good on West Point for actually following up on the
| cheating. I've witnessed another institution sweeping it
| under the rug even when properly documented and passed up
| two or three levels of reporting. As an academic director
| and thus manager of professors this was infuriating and
| demoralizing for all concerned.
| smj-edison wrote:
| Time to crack out the faraday cage!
| watwut wrote:
| I dont see anything reason at all to expect West Point to
| have less cheating then anywhere else. Army people dont
| commit crimes less then civilians either.
| Loughla wrote:
| Sure but there's also a continuum of practice between
| banning outright and letting the students use llm's to
| just write for them.
|
| Use it as a peer review. Use it during brainstorming. Use
| it to clarify ambiguous thoughts. Use it to challenge
| your arguments and poke holes in your assumptions.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| It's sad. I use dashes in my writing all the time. I've
| had to consciously pause and make an effort not to use
| them in my emails now.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Indeed, the very dashes the English teacher taught me to
| use.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| If you didn't write it, you don't deserve credit for it.
| You don't learn by outsourcing your work to a piece of
| software.
| threecheese wrote:
| I see what ya did tbere :)
| janalsncm wrote:
| Then it's a market for lemons. Buyers can't (or choose not to)
| tell a good AI idea from a bad one.
| hyghjiyhu wrote:
| A market for lemons means there is an information asymmetry.
| Sellers know what they have and try to offload their lemons
| on clueless buyers. I don't think that's the case here.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| It is indeed hard to tell how many of the people selling
| this stuff are True Believers. It's also a bit scary, given
| how incredibly implausible some of these stuff they're
| saying is.
| Insanity wrote:
| I think most level-headed people can see this is a giant bubble
| which will eventually burst like the dot-com crash. And AI is
| technology that's hard to understand to non-technical (and even
| some technical) investors.
|
| But of course, every company needs to slap AI on their product
| now just to be seen as a viable product.
|
| Personally, I look forward to seeing the bubble burst and being
| left with a more rational view of AI and what it can (and can
| not) do.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| How is AI hard to understand when you enter a cafe and everyone
| is chatting with their LLM?
| redwood wrote:
| Where do you see that?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| In some Hollywood reality, probably.
|
| (Like those people that casually assume that everyone has a
| therapist or a lawyer.)
| bombcar wrote:
| dotcom bubble had tons of activity, too.
|
| it was making _money_ off those idea _at the valuations
| expected_ that was problem.
|
| the Internet really _did_ revolutionize things, in
| substantial ways, but not to the tune of millions of dollars
| for pets.com
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >dotcom bubble had tons of activity, too.
|
| The difference now is that this is all (or mostly) idle
| cash being invested. The massive warchests built up by
| FAANG over the last decade are finally being deployed
| meaningfully rather than sitting in bonds or buying back
| stock. Much different scenario than companies with non-
| viable business models going IPO on a wish and a dream.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's a question of how far the contagion goes - the
| Dotcom bubble trashed the NASDAQ and rumbled the world a
| bit, but the "big stocks" weren't directly involved or
| affected much; the subprime mortgage bubble shook the
| very foundations of the banking world.
|
| Will the contagion be limited to a few companies, or will
| the S&P crumble under the bubble's collapse?
| arisAlexis wrote:
| in the meantime USA and all the world is going actually
| all-in AI..
| Insanity wrote:
| Not hard to use. I meant hard to understand what the
| limitations are for non tech users. E.g people who think AGI
| is just around the corner because we now have stochastic
| parrots.
| gizajob wrote:
| The part that's hard to understand is how the sunk costs of
| hundreds of billions in capex gets repaid by all those people
| in cafes paying hundreds of dollars per month to use those
| LLMs.
| yeasku wrote:
| Chat rooms webs were sold by millions in the dotcom era.
|
| And everybody used them.
|
| Nowdays everybody see them as useless.
| fzzzy wrote:
| Pretty sure discord and slack are not useless...
| yeasku wrote:
| Discord and slack are evolutions of msn messenger and
| icq.
|
| Not web chat rooms.
| fzzzy wrote:
| that makes absolutely no sense
| yeasku wrote:
| msn messenger became Skype wich then became ms teams.
| blackoil wrote:
| They evolved into Instagram(8 billion), WhatsApp(20
| billion) and FB(trillion)
| yeasku wrote:
| No.
|
| Chats did not evolve to social media.
|
| Facebook is a descendant of hotornot not icq or chats.
|
| Ws was seen as free sms.
| ivape wrote:
| People have no idea how much concern there was around whether
| FB would ever be able to monetize social media. That company
| went public at $15, and nearly closed below that on IPO day.
|
| AI is more useful than social media. This is not financial
| advice, but I lean more toward _not a bubble_.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > AI is more useful than social media.
|
| Communication is a fundamental human need.
|
| Generating slop isn't.
| lumost wrote:
| OpenAI has a reasonable path to reduce their costs by 10-100x
| over the next 5 years if they stop improving the models. That
| would make them an extremely profitable company with their only
| real risk being "local ai". However customers have wanted their
| data in the cloud for years, local inference would likely just
| mean 0 cost tokens for OpenAI.
|
| The challenge is the rest of the industry funding dead
| companies with billions of dollars on the off chance they
| replicate OpenAI's success.
| ten_hands wrote:
| I don't see how this works though. OpenAI doesn't exist in a
| vacuum, it has competitors, and the first company to stop
| improving their model will get obliterated by the others. It
| seems like they are doomed to keep retraining right up until
| the VC funding runs out, at which point they go bankrupt.
|
| Some other company, that doesn't have a giant pile of debt
| will then pick up the pieces and make some money though. Once
| we dig out of the resulting market crash.
| lumost wrote:
| The winner takes all thesis would be that like TSMC, the
| capex of competing in this field keeps growing until only
| one vendor can both raise sufficient capital to compete and
| effectively execute with that capital. OpenAI doesn't need
| to be the first to stop raising money and go profitable,
| they need to be the last vendor to go profits first.
| wmf wrote:
| It's not impossible that the crash will hit all companies
| at the same time and they might all stop training.
| rchaud wrote:
| OpenAI is trying to launch a hardware product with Jony Ive,
| an ads company, a AI slop-native version of TikTok and
| several other "businesses". They look well on their way to
| turning into a Yahoo! than a Cisco or VMWare.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Yeah they are all over the place and this should be a huge
| red flag.
|
| Some marginal investors know this but they are okay because
| the music is still playing - but when they think its time
| to leave the bubble will pop.
|
| People seem to forget that its not about whether or not its
| actually a bubble, its really about when will certain
| people who set these stock prices for valuations, decide
| its time to exit and take their profit.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| The problem is OAI has very firece competition - folks who
| are willing to absorb losses to put them out of business.
|
| Uber and Amazon are really bad examples. Who was Amazons
| competition? Nobody. By the time anyone woke up and took them
| seriously it was too late.
|
| Uber only had to contend with Lyft and a few other less
| funded firms. Less funded being a really important thing to
| consider. Not to mention the easy access to immense amounts
| of funding Uber had.
| outside1234 wrote:
| The problem is that their competitor is Google and they are
| much better at most of the things that OpenAI needs to be
| good at.
| gtowey wrote:
| I too am waiting for the bubble to burst. Particularly because
| I think it's doing real harm to the industry.
|
| Every company seems to be putting all their eggs in the AI
| basket. And that is causing basic usability and feature work to
| be neglected. Nobody cares because they are betting that AI
| agents will replace all that. But it won't and meanwhile
| everything else about these products will stagnate.
|
| It's a disasterous strategy and when it comes crashing down and
| the layoffs start, every CEO will get a pass on leading this
| failure because they were just doing what everyone else is
| doing.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| What is going on with AI right now could be a bubble just like
| there was the dotcom bubble. But it isn't like the internet went
| away after the dotcom burst. The largest companies in existence
| today are internet companies or have products that wouldn't make
| sense without the internet.
|
| Sure, many of these "thin prompt wrapper around the OpenAI API"
| product "businesses" will all be gone within a few years. But AI?
| That is going to be here indefinitely.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Things like recommendations, ads, and search will always be
| around because they were money printers before VCs found out
| about AI and they will continue to be long after.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| This is always a bad take.
|
| The dotcom bubble was not about "the internet" itself. The
| Internet was fine and pretty much already proven as a very
| useful communication tool. It was about business that made
| absolutely no sense getting extremely high valuations just
| because they operated - however vaguely - over the internet.
|
| Generative AI have never reached the level of usability of the
| Internet itself, and likely never will.
| gizajob wrote:
| The bubble is in the valuations on the stock market, not in the
| technology.
| hvb2 wrote:
| And their promises.
|
| The "it'll make all your devs 6x as productive by the end of
| the year" types of promises. But those probably explain the
| valuations
| gizajob wrote:
| Yeah, Sam Altman's recent one saying that his LLMs would
| "cure cancer" if they built enough data centres was also a
| winner.
| yeasku wrote:
| And create a theory of quantum gravity.
| mxschumacher wrote:
| i have to say I'm a little disgusted by these statements.
| LLMs are useful for many problems, but is there really a
| conceivable path of them making progress into fighting
| the countless cancers tormenting humanity?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| My framing device: if you had LLMs in the 1500s, how
| would that help Copernicus determine the orbits of the
| planets? Maybe through dumb chance, but creating a well
| reasoned model of the universe required new observations
| and the ability to interpret the data from a different
| point of view.
| padjo wrote:
| More likely the LLM would condescendingly tell him that
| he was wrong and that the earth was clearly at the centre
| of the universe.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Depending on the time of creation, it might be impossible
| for the LLM NOT to tell him he's wrong and the earth is
| the center of the universe.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Interesting framing. Although I assume all the
| observations had been done already. It was more about
| being bold enough to investigate a line of thought that
| wasn't obvious or popular at the time and proving it
| convincingly.
|
| They already had many "explanations" and models for why
| the planets were seemingly moving back and forth in the
| sky during the year. Their models were more complicated
| than necessary simply because they didn't want to
| consider the different premise.
| gizajob wrote:
| All the 1500s and earlier data that such an LLM would
| have to have been trained on would lead to an LLM that
| wouldn't ever suggest a heliocentric solar system. That
| LLM might even say he was heretical or refuse to give an
| answer to anything that led to it saying that the earth
| wasn't the centre of the universe. So no help at all.
| Tcepsa wrote:
| Without those sorts of revolutionary claims, would they
| still be receiving enough funding to keep the lights on?
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Thats not true actually.
|
| The technology - for what it is being used vs what is
| invested - does not match up at all. This is what happened to
| the dot-com bubble. Theres was a whole bunch of innovation
| that was needed to come to bring a delightful UX to bring
| swathes of people onto the internet.
|
| So far this is true about LLMs. Could this change? Sure. Will
| it change meaningful? Personally I dont believe so.
|
| The internet at its core was all about hooking up computers
| so they they could transform from just computational beasts
| to communication. There was a tremendous amount of
| potentitial that was very very real. It just so happens if
| computers can communicate we can do a whole bunch of stuff -
| as is going on today.
|
| What are LLMS? Can someone please explain in a succint
| way...? Im yet to see something super crystal clear.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| AI has been here well before transformers. Please, let's not
| pretend that AI started with LLM chatbots.
| coffeecoders wrote:
| Every bubble looks obvious in hindsight. The dot-com crash left
| behind Amazon and Google. The crypto crash left behind Coinbase
| and a few real revenue generating companies. If this is the AI
| bubble, then the survivors are going to look very obvious in a
| decade, we just don't know which ones yet.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| But google and amazon were obvious to those in the know, in
| terms of what they delivered.
|
| S Jobs called it back in 1995-97 - he referred to it as
| shopping for information and shopping for good and services.
|
| Nobody has this crystal clear, tangible vision re. LLMs. Nobody
| at all. That is a big problem.
|
| I found the interview:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSfFcaluHc&t=1700s
| yeasku wrote:
| Personally I never tougth of Google as a dotcom era company.
| Most of those were landing pages with news and chat rooms.
|
| It was more of web 2.0 company.
| mkl wrote:
| It was founded 1998, very much dotcom era, and had no
| significant web 2.0 products for years after that.
| yeasku wrote:
| And the term 2.0 was coined in 1999.
| mkl wrote:
| Right, but the term and the concept didn't really take
| off until years later. From
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0:
|
| > The term "Web 2.0" was coined by Darcy DiNucci, an
| information architecture consultant, in her January 1999
| article "Fragmented Future" [...] her "2.0" designation
| refers to the next version of the Web that does not
| directly relate to the term's current use.
|
| > The term Web 2.0 did not resurface until 2002.
|
| Google's first big Web 2.0 products were GMail (beta
| launched in 2004, just before Google's IPO) and Google
| Maps (2005).
| fzzzy wrote:
| Gmail and Google Maps were prototypical 2.0.
| mkl wrote:
| Gmail's beta started in 2004, and Google Maps launched in
| 2005. Google's IPO was in 2004, so Web 2.0 products
| played no part in its enormous early growth.
| yeasku wrote:
| Gmail had a fundamental part in Googles IPO.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Because LLMs are a technology, not a business.
|
| Ultimately it doesn't matter who survives the AI bubble,
| because they are all more or less equivalent, proposing the
| same technical solution.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| > The crypto crash left behind Coinbase and a few real revenue
| generating companies.
|
| A lot of us clocked the crypto bullshit waaaay before the
| crash.
| afroboy wrote:
| Crypto isn't bullshit well most of it is but the utility is
| still used by millions of people around the world,
| specifically USDT and USDC which they proven a good way to
| move your assets without too much regulations.
| tobias3 wrote:
| So it is regulatory arbitrage. I think many of the critics
| never contested that crypto is good for doing crime. The
| critics just also think that either those crimes should
| continue to be prevented via the financial system or the
| financial system should be deregulated for all without a
| crypto backdoor.
|
| A Money Market Fund gives you interest if you are able to
| access it.
|
| This is kind of a pattern:
|
| 1. There is some regulation that is inefficient ( e.g. taxi
| medallions, KYC, copyright protection ...)
|
| 2. New technology comes about which allows startups to
| claim that they have invented a new area that should be
| regulated differently
|
| 3. Turns out (2) is not true and new technology can easily
| be mapped to existing regulation but it would look bad for
| the regulator to take away the punchbowl
|
| 4. There is some down-turn (bubble pops) and the regulator
| takes away the punchbowl OR investors have accumulated so
| much money/power that they corrupt the government to have
| new rules for their businesses
| jobigoud wrote:
| > A lot of us clocked the crypto bullshit waaaay before the
| crash.
|
| I'm sorry what crash are you talking about?
| csours wrote:
| "Commodity Tokens"
| righthand wrote:
| > "That is what is going to happen here too. This is real, the
| benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic."
|
| As an owner of a web host that probably sees advantage to
| increased bot traffic, this statement is just more "just wait AI
| will be gigantic any minute now, keep investing in it for me so
| my investments stay valuable".
| dang wrote:
| [stub for offtopicness]
|
| (title fixed now)
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Totally wrong title
| coffeecoders wrote:
| @dang
|
| Title needs to be changed to something like
|
| "Bezos says AI is in industrial bubble yet promises huge
| benefits"
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Tagging doesn't work on HN.
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Very misleading clipping of the headline imo
| blast wrote:
| He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble,
| which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable
| companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did
| eventually change everything.
| zerosizedweasle wrote:
| The biggest problem is the infrastructure left behind from the
| Dotcom boom that laid the path for the current world (the high
| speed fiber) doesn't translate to computer chips. Are you still
| using intel chips from 1998? And the chips are such a huge
| cost, and being backed by debt but they depreciate in value
| exponentially. It's not the same because so much of the current
| debt fueled spending is on an asset that has very short shelf
| life. I think AI will be huge, I don't doubt the endgame once
| it matures. But the bubble now, spending huge amounts on these
| data centers using debt without a path to profitability (and
| inordinate spending on these chips) is dangerous. You can think
| AI will be huge and see how dangerous the current manifestation
| of the bubble is. A lot of people will get hurt very very
| badly. This is going to maim the economy in a generational way.
| hibikir wrote:
| If you look at year over year chip improvements in 2025 vs
| 1998, it's clear that modern hardware just has a longer shelf
| life than it used to. The difficulties in getting more
| performance for the same power expenditure are just very
| different than back in the day.
|
| There's still depreciation, but it's not the same. Also look
| at other forms of hardware, like RAM, and the bonus
| electrical capacity being built.
| lomase wrote:
| In 1998 to transfer a megabyte over telephone lines was
| expensive and 5 years later is was almost free.
|
| I have not seen the prices of GPUs, CPU or RAM going down,
| on the contrary, each day it gets more expensive.
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| But why not measure $ per intelligence. In 2020 you'd
| need a billion dollars to get your computer to write good
| code, now it is practically free.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Personally I think people should stop trying to reason from
| the past.
|
| As tempting as it is, it leads to false outcomes because you
| are not thinking about how this particular situation is going
| to impact society and the economy.
|
| Its much harder to reason this way, but isnt that the point?
| personally I dont want to hear or read analogies based on the
| past - I want to see and read stuff that comes from original
| thinking.
| munk-a wrote:
| Doesn't that line of reasoning leave you in danger of being
| largely ignorant? There's a wonderful quote from Twain
| "History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes" there
| are two critical things I'd highlight in that quote - first
| off the contrast between repetition and rhyming is drawing
| attention to the fact that things are never exactly the
| same - there's just a gist of similarities - the second is
| that it often but doesn't always rhyme - this sure looks
| like a bubble but it might not be and it might be something
| entirely new. _That all said_ it's important to learn from
| history because there are clear echoes of history in events
| because we, people in general, don't change that
| fundamentally.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| IME the number of times where people have said "this time
| it's different" and been wrong is a lot higher than the
| number of times they've said "this time is the same as the
| last" and been wrong. In fact, it is the increasing
| prevalence of the idea that "this time it's different" that
| makes me batten down the hatches and invest somewhere with
| more stability.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| With all due respect, Im not here to teach people how to
| think.
|
| This guy gets it -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxLCTA5wQow
|
| Instead of plainly jumping on the bubble bandwagon he
| actually goes through a thorough analysis.
| hx8 wrote:
| A lot of the infrastructure made during the Dotcom boom was
| shortly discarded. How many dial-up modems were sold in the
| 90s?
|
| The current AI bubble is leading to trained models that won't
| be feasible to retrain for a decade or longer after the
| bubble bursts.
| zerosizedweasle wrote:
| The wealth the Dotcom boom left behind wasn't in dial up
| modems or internet over the telephone, it was in the huge
| amounts of high speed fiber optic networks that were laid
| down. I think a lot of that infrastructure is still in use
| today, fiber optic cables can last 30 years or more.
| triceratops wrote:
| > fiber optic cables can last 30 years or more
|
| The trenches for the cables even longer than that.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| How much of it is still dark?
| yeasku wrote:
| Honestly, not that many people had modems.
| jorts wrote:
| In the late 90s to 2001? Many people were still using
| modems at that time. Cable or DSL wasn't even an option
| for a considerable percentage of the population.
| yeasku wrote:
| In 2000 6% of the population had access to internet.
|
| In 2002 I was woking making webs and setting up linux
| servers and I did not have internet at home.
| macNchz wrote:
| This is pretty location specific--in the US 42% of
| households had home internet in 2000.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/189349/us-households-
| hom...
| yeasku wrote:
| That web is not a good source.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Yes it is.
|
| Low Global Penetration: Only 361 million people had
| internet access worldwide in 2000, a small fraction of
| the global population. Specific Country Examples United
| States: The US had a significant portion of the world's
| internet users, making up 31.1% of all global users in
| 2000. Its penetration rate was 43.1%.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Not _still_ using, flat out modemless. Lots of guys got
| their hand on a mouse for the first time only after
| Windows XP launched. Which was after the collapse.
| yeasku wrote:
| Windows 95 didnt even have Internet by default.
|
| It had the Microsoft network or whatever it was called.
| simonw wrote:
| That's true for the GPUs themselves, but the data centers
| with their electricity infrastructure and cooling and
| suchlike won't become obsolete nearly as quickly.
| davnicwil wrote:
| this is a good point, and it would be interesting to see
| the relative value of this building and housing 'plumbing'
| overhead Vs the chips themselves.
|
| I guess another example of the same thing is power
| generation capacity, although this comes online _so_ much
| more slowly I 'm not sure the dynamics would work in the
| same way.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The data centers built in 1998 don't have nearly enough
| power or cooling capacity to run today's infrastructure.
| I'd be surprised if very many of them are even still in
| use. Cheaper to build new than upgrade.
| bialpio wrote:
| How come? I'd expect that efficiency gains would lower
| power and thus cooling demands - are we packing more
| servers into the same space now or losing those gains
| elsewhere?
| alchemism wrote:
| Yes - blades-of-servers replacing what was 2 or 3 rack
| mount servers. Both air exchange and power requirements
| are radically different in order to fill that rack as it
| was before.
| master_crab wrote:
| This is true. It's probably 2-3 times as long as a GPU
| chip. But it's still probably half or a quarter of the
| depreciation timeline of a carrier fiber line.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Even if the building itself is condemnable, what it took
| to build it out is still valuable.
|
| To give a different example, right now, some of the most
| prized sites for renewable energy are former coal plant
| sites, because they already have big fat transmission
| lines ready to go. Yesterday's industrial parks are now
| today's gentrifying urban districts, and so on.
| master_crab wrote:
| That's true. The permitting is already dealt with, and
| that's substantial lead time on any data center build.
|
| Evnn moreso for carrier lines of course. Nimbyism is a
| strong block on right-of-way needs (except the undersea
| ones obviously).
| Ekaros wrote:
| How much more of centralized data center capacity we
| actually need outside AI? And how much more we would need
| if we used slightly more time on doing things more
| efficiently?
| wmf wrote:
| They're only replacing GPUs because investors will give
| "free" money to do so. Once the bubble pops people will
| realize that GPUs actually last a while.
| bilsbie wrote:
| We don't have moores law anymore. Why are the chips
| obseleting so quickly?
| myhf wrote:
| FLOP/s/$ is still increasing exponentially, even if the
| specific components don't match Moore's original phrasing.
|
| Markets for electronics have momentum, and estimating that
| momentum is how chip producers plan for investment in
| manufacturing capacity, and how chip consumers plan for
| deprecation.
| o11c wrote:
| They kind of aren't. If you actually look at "how many
| dollars am I spending per month on electricity", there's a
| good chance it's not worth upgrading even if your computer
| is 10 years old.
|
| Of course this does make some moderate assumptions that it
| was a solid build in the first place, not a flimsy laptop,
| not artificially made obsolete/slow, etc. Even then,
| "install an SSD" and "install more RAM" is most of
| everything.
|
| Of course, if you are a _developer_ you should avoid doing
| these things so you won 't get encouraged to write crappy
| programs.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| There are probably a lot of cool and useful things you could
| do with a bunch of data centers full of GPUs.
|
| - better weather forecasts
|
| - modeling intermittent generation on the grid to get more
| solar online
|
| - drug discovery
|
| - economic modeling
|
| - low cost streaming games
|
| - simulation of all types
| amatecha wrote:
| - cloud gaming service? :D
| mort96 wrote:
| Eh not really. Maybe retro cloud gaming services. But
| games haven't stopped getting more demanding every year.
| Not only are the AI GPUs focused on achieving clusters
| with great compute performance per watt and dollar rather
| than making singular GPUs with great raster performance;
| even the GPUs which are powerful enough for current games
| won't be powerful enough for games in 5 years.
|
| Not to mean that we're still nowhere near close to
| solving the broadband coverage problem, especially in
| less developed countries like the US and most of the
| third world. If anything, it seems like we're moving
| towards satellite internet and cellular for areas outside
| of the urban centers, and those are _terrible_ for
| latency-sensitive applications like game streaming.
| fooker wrote:
| > But games haven't stopped getting more demanding every
| year.
|
| This is not particularly true.
|
| Even top of the line AAA games make sure they can be
| played on the current generation consoles which have been
| around for the last N years. Right now N=5.
|
| Sure you'll get much better graphics with a high end PC,
| but those looking for cloud gaming would likely be
| satisfied with PS5 level graphics which can be pretty
| good.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Intel chips from 2008, as there is no real improvements.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > This is going to maim the economy in a generational way.
|
| Just as I'm getting to the point where I can see retirement
| coming from off in the distance. Ugh.
| donmcronald wrote:
| And a lot of the gains from the Dotcom boom are being paid
| back in negative value for the average person at this point.
| We have automated systems that waste our time when we need
| support, product features that should have a one-time-cost
| being turned into subscriptions, a complete usurping of the
| ability to distribute software or build compatible
| replacements, etc..
|
| The Dotcom boom was probably good for everyone in some way,
| but it was much, much better for the extremely wealthy people
| that have gained control of everything.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Don't say that, you'll hasten the Antichrist!
| Terr_ wrote:
| (For those who missed it: https://www.theverge.com/ai-
| artificial-intelligence/785407/p... )
| hattmall wrote:
| AI itself is a manifestation of that too, a huge time
| waster for a lot of people. Getting randomly generated
| wrong but sounding right information is very frustrating.
| Start asking AI questions you already know the answer too
| and the issues can become very obvious.
| xmprt wrote:
| If you're ever been to a third world country then you'd see
| how this is completely untrue. The dotcom boom has
| revolutionized the way of life for people in countries like
| India.
|
| Even for the average person in America, the ability to do
| so many activities online that would have taken hours
| otherwise (eg. shopping, research, DMV/government
| activities, etc). The fact that we see negative
| consequences of this like social network polarization or
| brainrot doesn't negate the positives that have been
| brought about.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| With telecom, we benefited from skipping generations. I
| got into a telecom management program because in
| 2001-ish, I was passed by on a village street by a farmer
| bicycling while talking on his cellphone. Mind you _my
| family_ could not afford cellphone call rates at the
| time.
|
| In fact, the technology was introduced out here
| _assuming_ corporate / elite users. The market reality
| became such that telcos were forced kicking and screaming
| to open up networks to everybody. The Telecom Regulatory
| Authority of India (back then) mandated rural <> urban
| parity of sorts. This eventually forced telcos to share
| infrastructure costs (share towers etc.) The total call
| and data volumes are eye-watering, but low-yield (low
| ARPU). I could go on and on but it's just batshit crazy.
|
| Now UPI has layered on top of that---once again,
| benefiting from Reserve Bank of India's mandate for zero-
| fee transactions, and participating via a formal data
| interchange protocol and format.
|
| Speaking from India, having lived here all my life, and
| occasionally travelled abroad (USAmerica, S.E. Asia).
|
| We, as a society and democracy, are also feeling the
| harsh, harsh hand of "Code is Law", and increasingly
| centralised control of communication utilities (which the
| telecoms are). The left hand of darkness comes with a
| _lot_ of darkness, sadly.
|
| Which brings me to the moniker of "third world".
|
| This place is _insane_ , my friend --- first, second,
| third, and fourth worlds all smashing into each others'
| faces all the time. In so many ways, we are more first
| world here than many western countries. I first visited
| USAmerica in 2015, and I could almost smell an empire in
| decline. Walking across twitter headquarters in downtown
| SF of all the places, avoiding needles and syringes
| _strewn_ on the sidewalk, and avoiding the _completely_
| smashed guy just barely standing there, right there in
| the middle of it all.
|
| That was insane.
| yugioh3 wrote:
| That kind of extreme poverty juxtaposed to extreme
| wealth, and all of the social ills that come along with
| it, have always been a fixture of the American
| experience. I don't think it's a good barometer or
| whether the USA is in decline when there has long been
| pockets of urban decay, massive inequality, drug use etc.
| Jump back to any point in American history and you'll
| find something similar if not much, much worse. Even in
| SF of all places, back in the wild west era gold rush or
| in the 1970s... America has always held that
| contradiction.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Yeah, I sort of recounted a stark memory. That
| juxtaposition was a bit too much.
|
| However, it wasn't just that, and the feeling has only
| solidified in three further visits. It isn't rational,
| very much a _nose_ thing, coming from an ordinary
| software programmer (definitely not an economist,
| sociologist, think tank).
| intended wrote:
| It seems the crux is that we needed X people to produce
| goods, and we had Y demand.
|
| Now we need X*0.75 people to do meet Y demand.
|
| However, those savings are partially piped to consumers,
| and partially piped to owners.
|
| There is only so much marginal propensity to spend that
| rich people have, so that additional wealth is not
| resulting in an increase in demand, at least commensurate
| enough to absorb the 25% who are unemployed or
| underemployed.
|
| Ideally that money would be getting ploughed back into
| making new firms, or creating new work, but the work
| being created requires people with PHDs, and a few
| specific skills, which means that entire fields of people
| are not in the work force.
|
| However all that money has to go somewhere, and so asset
| classes are rising in value, because there is no where
| else for it to go.
| jaggederest wrote:
| > partially piped to consumers, and partially piped to
| owners.
|
| Or, the returns on capital exceed the rate of economic
| growth (r > g), if you like Piketty's _Capital in the
| Twenty First Century_.
|
| One of the central points is about how productivity and
| growth gains increasingly accrue to capital rather than
| labor, leading to capital accumulation and asset
| inflation.
| intended wrote:
| Yep, that's the source of the point. The effort is in
| finding a way to make it easy to convey. Communication of
| an idea is almost as critical as its verification now.
| jaggederest wrote:
| I just need to read it one of these days. I keep reading
| parts of it but never sitting down with it.
| intended wrote:
| Oh hell, don't make me feel bad. I've got a meager
| capacity to trudge through major papers. I cheer you on.
| andrepd wrote:
| You're in luck! A couple years ago he released an
| "abridged version" of sorts. A Brief History of
| Inequality is the name. Much more accessible than the 700
| pages of Capital in the 21st Century.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/97806
| 742...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _Now we need X_ 0.75 people to do meet Y demand.*
|
| This is how GDP/person has increased 30x the last 250
| years.
|
| What always happens is that the no longer needed X*0.25
| people find new useful things to do and we end up 33%
| richer.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| "we end up."
|
| It's actually, "they end up" and the 33% gains you're
| talking about aren't realized en masse until all the coal
| miners have black lung. It's really quite the, "dealy" as
| Homer Simpson would say. See, "Charles Dickens" or,
| "William Blake" for more. #grease
| the_other wrote:
| I think you're putting too much weight on cost (time,
| money), and not enough weight on "quality of life", in
| your analysis.
|
| For sure, we can shop faster, and (attempt) research and
| admin faster. But...
|
| Shopping: used to be fun. You'd go with friends or
| family, discuss the goods together, gossip, bump into
| people you knew, stop for a sandwich, maybe mix shopping
| and a cinema or dinner trip. All the while, you'd be
| aware of other peoples' personal space, see their family
| dynamics. Queuing for event tickets brought you shoulder
| to shoulder with the crowd before the event began...
| Today, we do all this at home; strangers (and
| communities) are separated from us by glass, cables and
| satalites, rather than by air and shouting distance. I
| argue that this time saving is reducing our ability to
| socialise.
|
| Research: this is definitely accelerated, and probably
| mostly for the better. But... some kinds of research were
| mingled with the "shopping" socialisation described
| above.
|
| Admin: the happy path is now faster and _functioning_
| bureaucracy is smoother in the digital realm. But, it's
| the edge cases which are now more painful. Elderly people
| struggle with digital tech and prefer face to face.
| Everyone is more open to more subtle and challenging
| threats (identity theft, fraud); we all have to learn
| complex and layered mitigation strategies. Also: digital
| systems are very fragile: they leak private data, they're
| open to wider attack surfaces, they need more training
| and are harder to intuit without that training; they're
| ripe for capture by monopolists (Google, Palantir).
|
| The time and cost savings of all these are not felt by
| the users, or even the admins of these systems. The
| savings are felt only by the owners of the systems.
|
| Technologgy has saved billions of person-hours individual
| costs, in travel, in physical work. Yet, wemre working
| longer, using fewer ranges of motions, are less fit, less
| able to tolerste others' differences and the wealth gap
| is widening.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Yes, this is true. There used to be a lot of local book
| stores, for example. Amazon optimized that away, while
| ruining social fabric.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| RIP literacy in America. We hardly knew ye.
| dangus wrote:
| Independent book stores are booming in quantity since the
| initial Internet crash.
|
| Be careful about making narratives that don't line up
| with industry data.
|
| There's a lot of brick and mortar retail going on. It
| just doesn't look like the overbuilt mall infrastructure
| of the 1970s-1980s.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Recall that the arXiv was established in 1991, many years
| before the dotcom bubble. Many scientists still use arXiv
| prominently for research.
| personjerry wrote:
| > I think you're putting too much weight on cost (time,
| money), and not enough weight on "quality of life", in
| your analysis.
|
| "Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be
| zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both
| inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the
| most important factors in their lives.
| anon7725 wrote:
| Setting aside time, is money not downstream from quality
| of life? Meaning, in a better world one might not need to
| care as much about money? I believe that time and quality
| of life are congruent - good quality of life means
| control over one's own time.
| visarga wrote:
| > The Dotcom boom was probably good for everyone in some
| way, but it was much, much better for the extremely wealthy
| people that have gained control of everything.
|
| You are describing platform capture. Be it Google Search,
| YouTube, TikTok, Meta, X, App Store, Play Store, Amazon,
| Uber - they have all made themselves intermediaries between
| public and services, extracting a huge fee. I see it like
| rent going up in a region until it reaches maximum bearable
| level, making it almost not worth it to live and work
| there. They extract value both directions, up and down,
| like ISPs without net-neutrality.
|
| But AI has a different dynamic, it is not easy to centrally
| control ranking, filtering and UI with AI agents. You can
| download a LLM, can't download a Google or Meta. Now it is
| AI agents that got the "ear" of the user base.
|
| It's not like before it was good - we had a generation of
| people writing slop to grab attention on web and social
| networks, from the lowest porn site to CNN. We all got
| prompted by the Algorithm. Now that Algorithms is replaced
| by many AI agents that serve users more directly than
| before.
| thfuran wrote:
| >You can download a LLM, can't download a Google or Meta.
|
| You can download _a_ model. That doesn 't necessarily
| mean you can download the best model and all the
| ancillary systems attached to it by whatever service.
| Just like you can download a web index but you probably
| cannot download google's index and certainly can't
| download their system of crawlers for keeping it up to
| date.
| throwzasdf wrote:
| I know HN and most younger people or people with otherwise
| political leanings always push narratives pointing at rich
| people bad but I feel a lot of tech has made our lives
| easier and better. It's also made it more complicated and
| worse in some ways. That effect has applied to everyone.
|
| In poor countries, they may not have access to clean
| running water but it's almost guaranteed they have cell
| phones. We saw that in a documentary recently. What's good
| about that? They use cell phones not only to stay in touch
| but to carry out small business and personal sales.
| Something that wouldn't have been possible before the
| Internet age.
| elbasti wrote:
| About 40% of AI infrastructure spending is the physical
| datacenter itself and the associated energy production. 60%
| is the chips.
|
| That 40% has a very long shelf life.
|
| Unfortunately, the energy component is almost entirely fossil
| fuels, so the global warming impact is pretty significant.
|
| At this point, geoengineering is the only thing that can earn
| us a bit of time to figure...idk, _something_ out, and we can
| only hope the oceans don 't acidify too much in the meantime.
| Naklin wrote:
| Interesting. Do you have any sources for this 60/40 split?
| And while I agree that the infrastructure has a long shelf
| life, it seems to me like an AI bubble burst would greatly
| depreciate the value of this infrastructure as the demand
| for it plummets, no?
| smj-edison wrote:
| > the current debt fueled spending
|
| Honestly I think the most surprising thing about this latest
| investment boom has been how little debt there is. VC
| spending and big tech's deep pockets keep banks from being
| too tangled in all of this, so the fallout will be much more
| gentle imo.
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| I am not still using the same 1Mbps token ring from 1998 or
| the same dial up connecting to some 10Mbps backbone.
|
| I am using x86 chips though.
| mountainriver wrote:
| This won't even come close to maiming the economy, that's one
| of the more extreme takes I've heard.
|
| AI is already making us wildly more productive. I vibe coded
| 5 deep ML libraries over the last month or so. This would
| have taken me maybe years before when I was manually coding
| as an MLE.
|
| We have clearly hit the stage of exponential improvement, and
| to not invest basically everything we have in it would be
| crazy. Anyone who doesn't see that is missing the bigger
| picture.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Go ahead and post what youve done fella so we can critique.
|
| Why is it all these kinds of posts never come with any
| attachments? We are all interested to see it m8.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| One thing to note about modern social media is that the most
| negative comment tends to become the most upvoted.
|
| You can see that all across this discussion.
| tmaly wrote:
| my 486sx with math co-processor is long gone.
| NathanaelRea wrote:
| Companies want GW data centers, which are a new thing that
| will last decades, even if GPUs are consumable and have high
| failure rates. Also, depending on how far it takes us, it
| could upgrade the electric grid, make electricity cheaper.
|
| And there will also be software infrastructure which could be
| durable. There will be improvements to software tooling and
| the ecosystem. We will have enormous pre-trained foundation
| models. These model weight artifacts could be copied for
| free, distilled, or fine tuned for a fraction of the cost.
| rchaud wrote:
| Dotcom mania companies were not Internet providers. They tried
| making money _on_ the internet, something people already saw as
| worth paying for.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| This is not really true, e.g. Cogent was basically created by
| buying bankrupt dotcum-bubble network providers for cents on
| the dollar.
| hx8 wrote:
| Also AOL was a mix of dialup provider and Dotcom service.
| There were many other popular examples of such.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| I don't think it is fair to characterize AOL as a bubble
| baby- they were a thing before that
| yeasku wrote:
| Nor I dont think Coget, GX or Level-3 were dotcom
| companies.
| munk-a wrote:
| Cisco, Level3 and WorldCom all saw astronomical valuation
| spikes during the dotcom bubble and all three saw their stock
| prices and actual business prospects collapse in the
| aftermath of it.
|
| Perhaps the most famous implosion of all was AOL who merged
| (sort of) with TimeWarner gaining the lion's share of control
| through market cap balancing. AOL fell so destructively that
| it nearly wiped out all the value of the actual hard assets
| that TW controlled pre-merger.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Video game crash followed by video games taking off and
| eclipsing most other forms of digital entertainment.
|
| Dot com crash followed by the web getting pretty popular and a
| bit central to business.
|
| To all those betting big on AI before the crash:
|
| _Careful, Icarus._
| NedF wrote:
| > Careful, Icarus.
|
| What does that even mean?
|
| pets.com was a fat loser only telling telling people that
| were going to fly.
|
| Amazon was Icarus, they did something.
|
| Vs weak commentators going on about the wax melting from
| their parents root cellar while Icarus was soaring.
|
| Most of Y Combinator are not using AI they just say that and
| you're worried about the people who do things?
| jrflowers wrote:
| > commentators going on about the wax melting from their
| parents root cellar while Icarus was soaring.
|
| Icarus drowned in the sea.
|
| Even if you want to put the world into only two lumps of
| cellar dwellers and Icaruses it is still a group of living
| people on one side and a floating/semi-submerged pile of
| dead bodies that are literally only remembered for how
| stupid their deaths were on the other.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Bad comparison.
|
| The leap of faith necessary in LLMs to achieve the same feat
| is so large its very difficult to imagine it happening.
| Particularly due to the well known constraints on what the
| technology is capable of.
|
| The whole investment thesis of LLMs is that it will be able
| to a) be intelligent b) produce new knowledge. If those two
| things that dont happen, what has been delivered is not
| commensurate to the risk in regards to the money invested.
| N70Phone wrote:
| Given they're referencing Icarus, they seem to agree with
| you.
|
| Past bubbles leaving behind something of value is indeed no
| guarantee the current bubble will do so. For as many times
| as people post "but dotcom produced Amazon" to HN, people
| had posted that exact argument about the Blockchain, the
| NFT, or the "Metaverse" bubbles.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Many AI startups around LLMs are going to crash and burn.
|
| This is because many people have mistaken LLMs for AI, when
| they're just a small subset of the technology - and this has
| driven myopic focus in a lot of development, and has lead to
| naive investors placing bets on golden dog turds.
|
| I disagree on AI as a whole, however - as unlike previous
| technologies this one can self-ratchet and bootstrap. ML
| designed chips, ML designed models, and around you go until
| god pops out the exit chute.
| wslh wrote:
| I would add more metrics to think about. For example, very few
| people used Internet in the dotcom era while now the AI use is
| distributed into all the population using the Internet that
| will probably not growth too much. In this case, if Internet
| population is the driver, and it will not growth significantly
| we are redistributing the attention. Assuming "all" society
| will be more productive we will all be in the same train at the
| relatively same speed.
| padjo wrote:
| And what were the societal benefits of the internet?
| gitaarik wrote:
| That everybody all over the world can instantly connect with
| each other?
| mountainriver wrote:
| The analogy to the dot com bubble is leaky at best. AI will hit
| a point of exponential improvement, we are already in the outer
| parts of this loop.
|
| It will become so valuable so fast we struggle to comprehend
| it.
| shiandow wrote:
| While this remains possible my main impression now is that
| progress seems to be slowing down rather than accelerating.
| dsamarin wrote:
| Maybe once we get another architecture breakthrough, it
| won't feel so slow.
| nucleative wrote:
| I'm not so sure about this.
|
| First were the models. Then the APIs. Then the cost
| efficiencies. Right now the tooling and automated
| workflows. Next will be a frantic effort to "AI-
| Everything". A lot of things won't make the cut, but
| absolutely many tasks, whole jobs, and perhaps entire
| subsets of industries will flip over.
|
| For example you might say no AI can write a completely
| tested, secure, fully functional mobile app with one prompt
| (yet). But look at the advancements in Cline, Claude code,
| MCPs, code execution environments, and other tooling in
| just the last 6 months.
|
| The whole monkeys typewriters shakespeare thing starts to
| become viable.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Not even remotely. In LLM land, the progress _seems_ slow
| the past few years, but a lot has happened under the hood.
|
| Elsewhere in AI however progress has been enormous, and
| many projects are only now reaching the point where they
| are starting to have valuable outputs. Take video gen for
| instance - it simply did not exist outside of research labs
| a few years ago, and now it's getting to the point where
| it's actually useful - and that's just a very visible
| example, never mind the models being applied to everything
| from plasma physics to kidney disease.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > the progress seems slow the past few years, but a lot
| has happened under the hood.
|
| The claim is "exponential" progress, exponential progress
| never seems "slow" after it has started to become
| visible.
|
| I've worked in the research part of this space, there's
| neat stuff happening, but we are very clearly in the
| diminishing returns phase of development.
| mountainriver wrote:
| If you keep up with the research this isn't the case, ML
| timelines have always been slower than anyone likes
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| Then why has my experience with AI started to see such
| dramatically diminishing returns?
|
| 2022-2023 AI changed enough to be me to convert from skeptic,
| to a believer. I started working as an AI Engineer and wanted
| to be on the front lines.
|
| 2023-2024 Again, major changes, especially as far as coding
| goes. I started building very promising prototypes for
| companies, was able to build a laundry list of projects that
| were just boring to write.
|
| 2024-2025 My day to day usage has _decreased_. The models
| seem better at fact finding but _worse_ for code. None of
| those "cool" prototypes from myself or anyone else I knew
| seemed to be able to become more than just that. Many of the
| cool companies I started learning about in 2022 started to
| reduce staff and are running into financial troubles.
|
| The only area where I've been impressed is the relatively
| niche improvements in open source text/image to video models.
| It's wild that you can make sure animated films on a home
| computer now.
|
| But even there I'm seeing no signs of "exponential
| improvement".
| mountainriver wrote:
| I vibe coded 5 deep ML libraries this month. I'm an MLE by
| trade and it would have taken me ages without AI. This
| wasn't possible even a year ago. I have no idea how anyone
| thinks the models haven't improved
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > This wasn't possible even a year ago.
|
| My experience has been that it _was_. I was using AI last
| year to build ML models about as well as I have been this
| year.
|
| I'm not saying AI isn't useful, just that the progress
| certainly looks to be _sigmoid_ not _exponential_ in
| growth. By far the biggest year for improvement was
| 2022-2023. Early 2022 I didn 't think any of the code
| assistants were useful, by 2023 I was able to use them
| more reliably. 2024 was another big improvement, but I
| honestly haven't felt the change (at least not for the
| better).
|
| Some of the _tooling_ may be better, but that has little
| do to with exponential progress in AI itself.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > [At dotcom time] There was a bubble, many non-viable
| companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet
| did eventually change everything.
|
| It did, but not for the better. Quality of life and standard of
| living both declined while income inequality skyrocketed and
| that period of time is now known as The Great Divergence.
|
| > He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble,
| which seems to me correct.
|
| He's got no downside if he's wrong or doesn't deliver, he's
| promising an analogy to selling you a brand new bridge in
| exchange for taking half of your money... and you're ecstatic
| about it.
| AfterHIA wrote:
| Thank you for acknowledging this. The internet was created
| around a lot of lofty idealism and none of that has been
| realized other than opening up the world's information to a
| great many. It made society and the global economy worse
| (occidental west; Chinese middle class might disagree) and
| has paralleled the destabilization of geopolitics. I am not
| luddite but until we can, "get our moral shit together" new
| technologies aren't but fuel on the proverbial fire.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| Glad to be in agreement. The higher message here is that
| technology is no substitute for politics, cue crypto-hype
| which produced little more than crime and money-laundering.
| Without proper policies, corruption invades every strata of
| society.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Here's a link to the full interview Bezos had yesterday
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0x3UZDKSNo
| jmclnx wrote:
| My translation of what Jeff says:
|
| "AI is in a bubble but billionaires will get 'gigantic' benefits"
|
| I see no benefit to anyone unless you can live off your stock
| portfolio and can easily ride through periods where your
| portfolio can suffer a 50% loss.
| ozmodiar wrote:
| Honestly, during the dotcom bubble at least workers were
| getting paid and jobs were abundant. Things didn't start
| getting bad for workers until it popped. We're supposed to be
| in the 'positive' part of the AI bubble and people already seem
| desperate and out of hope.
|
| Everyone not directly involved seems to want AI to pop. I'm not
| sure if that says anything about its longevity. Not very fun to
| have a bubble that feels bad on both sides.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| My understanding is that the cost of training each next model is
| very very large, and a half trained model is worthless.
|
| Thus when it is realised that this investment cannot produce the
| necessary returns, there will simply be no next model. People
| will continue using the old models, but they will become more and
| more out of date, and less and less useful, until they are not
| much more than historical artifacts.
|
| My point is that the threshold for continuing this process (new
| models) is very big (getting bigger each time?), so the 'pop'
| will be a step function to zero.
| wmf wrote:
| Models don't become out of date now that deep research exists.
| Duralias wrote:
| So with every prompt you are expected to wait that long? I
| highly doubt general people will be willing to wait, it also
| doesn't seem entirely viable if you want to do it locally,
| less bandwidth and no caching akin to what a literal search
| engine of data can do.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| If they stop getting returns in intelligence, they will switch
| to returns in efficiency and focus on integration, with new
| models being trained for new data cutoffs if nothing else. Even
| today there is at least a 5-10 year integration/adoption period
| if everything halts tomorrow.
|
| There is no reality in which LLMs go away (shy of being
| replaced).
| ares623 wrote:
| Is adding new data to a model a full retraining from scratch?
| Or can it be added on top of an existing model?
|
| If it costs $10B to add 1 year of data to an existing model,
| every year, that doesn't sound too good.
| SrslyJosh wrote:
| > If they stop getting returns in intelligence, they will
| switch to returns in efficiency
|
| I don't think we can assume that people producing what appear
| to be addictive services are going to do that, especially
| when they seem to be addicted themselves.
| mythrwy wrote:
| They probably are getting a bonanza of intelligence from
| people using them.
| renjimen wrote:
| Many argument the current batch of models provide a large
| capability overhang. That is, we are still learning how to get
| the most out of these models in various applications
| jobigoud wrote:
| Why do you think the models will become out of date and less
| useful? Like, compared to what? What external factor makes the
| models less useful?
|
| If it's just to catch up with newly discovered knowledge or
| information then that's not the model, they can just train
| again with an updated dataset and probably not need to train
| from scratch.
| lazystar wrote:
| > What external factor makes the models less useful?
|
| Life. A great example can be seen in the AI-generated
| baseball-related news articles that involve the Athletics
| organization. AI articles this year have been generating
| articles that incorrectly state that the Atlanta Braves
| played in games that were actually played by the Athletics,
| and the reason is due to the outdated training model. For the
| last 60 years before 2025, the Athletics played in Oakland,
| and during that time their acronym was OAK. In 2025, they
| left Oakland for Sacramento, and changed their acronym to
| ATH. The problem is that AI models are trained on 60 years of
| data where 1. team acronyms are always based on the city,
| rather than the mascot of the team, and 2. acronyms OAK =
| Athletics, ATL = Atlanta Braves, and ATH = nothing. As a
| result, an AI model that doesnt have context "OAK == ATH in
| the 2025 season" will see ATH in the input data, associates
| ATH with nothing in it's model, and will then erroneously
| assume ATH is a typo for ATL.
| dmix wrote:
| I'm paying for 3 different AI services and our company and most
| of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. Sounds like
| a real industry to me. There's just going to be VC losers as
| always, where usually "losing" is getting bought by a bigger
| company or aquihires instead of 100xing or going public.
| RoyTyrell wrote:
| Those companies are also likely still in the red. They're
| banking on the hope that one day they will be profitable. I'm
| sure one of them will be.
| dmix wrote:
| HN said the same thing about Uber forever.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Uber didn't invent anything, they drove taxis out of
| business then jacked up the prices, squeezed the workers,
| and now everybody is riding around in regular people's
| crappy cars for more than a cab cost. And now I need a
| phone and to maintain my relationship with these two crappy
| companies rather than to wave at the street (which is what
| I used to do to get a ride.)
|
| That was literally what everybody said would happen.
| jfengel wrote:
| I think Uber invented (or at least made widely available)
| taxi-by-app. Having scores of cab companies, accessed by
| telephone call, was supremely user-hostile.
|
| If the cab companies had gotten together on an app, they
| might have shortcut Uber and all of its many dubious
| practices. They finally are starting to but it's much too
| late.
| taormina wrote:
| Taxi-by-app existed pre-Uber, the innovation was making
| the taxi actual show up. Austin had the apps, and I would
| order one, and the taxis would get distracted on the way
| to my house and pick up other fares, so I couldn't go
| where I wanted. They had every chance to not be
| outcompeted by Uber, but they couldn't stop being taxis.
| And, here we are.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Not only did taxi by app exist way earlier, it was also
| wide spread ... in some big countries.
| eastbound wrote:
| > the innovation was making the taxi actual show up
|
| Uber regularly doesn't show up, just playing with "4...
| 3... 6... minutes left". I always have to wait half an
| hour at a certain location, with a message "Just book a
| few minutes before your trip."
|
| I've had a friend miss his flight because of Uber not
| showing up!
| dmix wrote:
| It completely changed an industry. Just because you don't
| like the current version doesn't mean it wasn't a major
| innovation. Uber was just the main player in scaling and
| marketing a new model across the entire globe, which was
| a huge and costly endeavor.
|
| LLMs have already changed how software can be written and
| a thousands of other business/consumer usecases, these
| companies are just battling it out and finding the most
| profitable niches. It will be a major business for a long
| time and the technology will mature and plateau pretty
| quickly. If R&D doesn't scale economically, it will just
| slow down and existing models will be heavily optimized
| to be cheaper to run.
|
| The dot com boom resulted in very few real industries and
| comparing the two is not very useful.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Uber is way cheaper and better than any cab ever was.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| From my experience, this is not the case in many european
| cities. In those places the main benefit seems to be not
| having to interact with the cab driver.
| culi wrote:
| You don't talk to your drivers? I've had a lot of
| genuinely good conversations in my rides. I always at
| least feel it out and see how much the driver _wants_ to
| talk but it feels wrong to not say anything
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Is that still true?
| rjdj377dhabsn wrote:
| I think you're definitely in the minority. For most of
| the world, Uber/Grab/Bolt have made transportation
| cheaper, safer, more convenient, and more comfortable.
| bloomca wrote:
| Uber definitely screwed the workers and probably existing
| taxi companies, but for the users it was a huge W, at
| least in many parts of the world. Taxi companies are
| notoriously scammy and it seems to be a very universal
| experience.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Uber didn 't invent anything_
|
| They didn't. They innovated, practically implemented
| ideas that resulted in the introduction of new goods and
| services [1]. This is a meaningful difference.
|
| Uber didn't invent anything. But they did pull
| ridesharing out of a hat.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation
| j4hdufd8 wrote:
| > rather than to wave at the street (which is what I used
| to do to get a ride.)
|
| Ummm taxis aren't everywhere like NYC or something.
| Broadly speaking Uber will pick you up in an arbitrary
| place and take you anywhere.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Uber sold something like $50 billion in equity and debt
| before it went public, and although they're profitable now,
| to me it doesn't seem like they have answer to Waymo coming
| up fast in the rear-view mirror. I think Uber is still a
| scam, just one where the earlier investors fleeced the
| later ones who are never going to see the returns they paid
| for.
| tyre wrote:
| Uber is still >$10bn net negative over its lifetime.
| Claude estimates about -$19bn.
|
| It's still quite possible that Uber doesn't make that up
| in the near future.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| For almost 20 year, Amazon has been the poster child of "A
| company can be unprofitable for years and still turn out a
| winner", but of course - not all companies can pivot from
| being a regular e-commerce company to cloud
| infrastructure/hosting, and become a money machine.
|
| So the question, at least to me, is how these AI companies
| will find a product or service that makes them profitable.
| Other than becoming actual monopolies in their current
| domains.
| mxschumacher wrote:
| are you paying them enough to have profitable unit economics?
| How hard would it be for you to switch from one provider to
| another?
| themafia wrote:
| > 3 different AI services
|
| Why three? Will you ever be in a position where one will do it
| for you?
|
| > and most of my team is also paying money for various AI
| stuff.
|
| And what are they using it for?
|
| > Sounds like a real industry to me.
|
| Sounds like early adopter syndrome to me. We'd have to know
| more about your business to take this out of the realm of hazy
| anecdotes.
| someuser54541 wrote:
| My team is doing the same, and yet all of us still aren't sure
| that we're actually more productive overall.
|
| If anything it seems to me like we've just swapped coding with
| what is effectively a lot more _code review_ (of whatever the
| LLM spits out), at the cost of also losing that long term
| understanding of a block of code that actually comes from
| writing it yourself (let 's not pretend that a reviewer has the
| same depth of understanding of a piece of code as an author).
| mirekrusin wrote:
| If you work in a team then you are likely already not writing
| most of the code yourself.
|
| There will be point where ai will consistently write better
| prs - you can already start to see it here and there -
| finding and fixing bugs in existing code, refactoring,
| writing tests, writing and updating documentation and
| prototyping are some examples of areas where it often
| surpasses human contribution.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| Yes there is a very real trade off between labour and
| capital.
|
| In the past the tradeoff has been very straight forward. But
| this is a unique situation because it involves knowledge and
| not just the physicality of the human in regards to
| productivity.
| qudat wrote:
| The problem is the hype machine that is claiming it will
| replace human labor which justifies the insane losses.
|
| These companies are burning cash to support the current
| formulation of AI services.
|
| These services will survive because they are useful but
| probably not at its current cost
| raincole wrote:
| A real industry can be a bubble too. Not every bubble looks
| like tulips.
|
| For example:
|
| - Dotcom bubble. Of course making website was and is a real
| industry.
|
| - Japanese real estate bubble. Of course building houses was
| and still is a real industry. It's so real people call it real
| estate, right.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| He may be right, everything points to that conclusion. My main
| issue is - why the fuck do we care what Bezos thinks on this
| matter? His ML efforts all lag behind the competition and he's
| certainly not an expert in the field of deep learning. Why?
| sudohalt wrote:
| If you're asking yourself why hasn't the bubble burst when
| everyone is calling it a bubble it's because no one wants to stop
| dancing until the music stops. If you told an investor the market
| will collapse tomorrow with 100% certainty they will invest today
| like there is 0% certainty of it happening tomorrow.
| harmmonica wrote:
| Do I have this right that there have been no or at least very few
| pure AI IPO's during this cycle (I can't actually think of a
| single one)? So it's dissimilar to dotcom in that regard because
| during that time countless dotcoms went public with sky-high
| valuations and then failed. A bunch of reputable companies also
| went or were already public during that time and those saw huge
| valuation drops so that's more analogous to what could happen in
| the _public_ market (NVDA, for instance, could pull a Cisco and
| drop "catastrophically," but survive just fine).
|
| That would cause a lot of pain for those shareholders, but would
| that be somewhat contained given the public "AI" companies for
| the most part have strong businesses outside of AI? Or are these
| market caps at this point so large for some of these AI public
| companies that anything that happens to them will cause some kind
| of contagion? And then the follow up is if the private AI
| companies collapse en masse is that market now also so big that
| it would cause contagion beyond venture capital and their
| investors (fully aware that pensions and the such are material
| investors in VC funds, but they're diversified so even though
| they'd see those losses maybe the broader market would keep them
| from taking major hits).
|
| Not giving an opinion here, though my knee jerk is to think we're
| due for a massive drop, but I've literally been saying that for
| so long that I'm starting to (stupidly) think this time is
| different (which typically is when all hell breaks loose of
| course).
| missedthecue wrote:
| There aren't very many IPOs in general. There were about 8000
| publicly traded companies in the US in Jan 2000. Today there
| are about 3950. A lot of the AI related IPOs have been the
| infra like CoreWeave and Nebius.
| mrosett wrote:
| IPOs aren't what they once were. The burden of being a public
| company has increased (SOX and related public company costs are
| $5-10M/year), so companies are far more likely to stay private.
| That has created a positive feedback cycle as the private
| funding ecosystem has become increasingly robust, which is why
| you see so many $100B+ private companies.
|
| Also keep in mind that the biggest companies during that bubble
| had peak market caps of ~500B and then lost ~90%, so 400-500B
| in losses each and total internet related losses of a couple
| trillion. If NVDA lost 90%, it would be down 4 trillion
| dollars, or twice that total just by itself.
|
| AI company valuations collapsing would have meaningful impacts
| on the broader market. Big pension/mutual funds are important
| sources of capital across every sector, and if they're taking
| big losses on NVDA, GOOG, and a portfolio of privates, it will
| have a chilling effect on their other activity.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| The costs are a weak argument. The more stronger argument for
| why they arent going public any time soon is that OAI in
| particular is a corporate governance nightmare, in which the
| way they transmit information about their firm and financials
| will have to completely change.
|
| Theres also plenty of money washing around in private markets
| so no need to go public. Staying private is an advantage.
| pedalpete wrote:
| This time is always different, until it isn't.
|
| However, it is different from the internet bubble partially for
| the reason you describe.
|
| There have been a few IPOs, but they perhaps happened earlier
| in the cycle, or companies are pivoting into AI. I'm thinking
| companies like Palantir, which was always AI, or Salesforce
| which is making a big AI pivot.
|
| Most of the funding is not coming from public sectors. There is
| so much private capital available that it isn't necessary. I
| believe the bubble is in VC, which some would think is find
| because it protects public markets from the crash, but I'm not
| sure that is correct.
|
| When the VC money stops flowing into AI, I think it will send a
| shockwave through the public markets. The huge valuations of
| companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc will be repriced, which
| will probably force a re-pricing of public darlings like
| Palantir, Microsoft, NVIDIA.
|
| If VC funds aren't buying NVIDIA chips and building data
| centers, everyone will feel the need to re-price.
|
| It's emotional, not logical.
| rhetocj23 wrote:
| It may be true that OAI et al are raising money in private
| markets, but does that matter? Ultimately they are still just
| raising money. Ultimately returns need to show up. You cannot
| escape that. If you cannot do that nobody will eventually
| supply the funds to keep operating.
|
| The big advantage of staying private is controlling the
| narrative.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Because the comment was specifically pointing out that this
| doesn't seem like a bubble because there aren't many IPOs
| or public pure play AI companies.
| Archonical wrote:
| How was Palantir always AI?
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Historically, the worst busts following the bursting of an
| asset price bubble, in terms of real economic impact, have
| been from debt fueled bubbles (Great Depression, Global
| Financial Crisis). You can read Hyman Minsky and Irving
| Fisher for a detailed analysis of why, but it mainly comes
| down to the fact that the financial obligations remain once
| prices and expectations have reset.
|
| Then you have the busts that follow public equity fueled
| bubbles (Dotcom crash). Nowhere near as bad as the former,
| but still a moderate impact on the economy due to the widely
| dispersed nature of the equity holdings and the resulting
| wealth effect.
|
| What we have now is more of a narrowly held private equity
| bubble (acknowledging that there's still an impact through
| the SP500 given widespread index investing). If OpenAI,
| Anthropic, Perplexity, and a bunch of AI startups go bust,
| who loses money and what impact does it have on the rest of
| the economy?
| seydor wrote:
| there is no way they could raise that much money from public
| markets.
|
| Also, there s no need to invent new tech names anymore.
| Marketing can add "AI" to the company name, or (as they say),
| change the wording from "Loading..." to "Thinking.."
| akagusu wrote:
| The big question is what "society" he is talking about? Is it the
| "society" that includes all people, or the "society" that
| includes only rich people?
| brookst wrote:
| Which of those did the Internet benefit?
| lomase wrote:
| Is AI at the same level of global instant comunication and
| gigabites of bandwidth?
| strombofulous wrote:
| Does it have to be for the analogy to work?
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| Probably. The the internet was more clear cut. Moores law
| all the things. Governments investing in pipe etc.
|
| AI harder to tell. Will 2026 models kick 2025 ass or just
| be slightly better. Who knows.
| Retric wrote:
| Is the average person actually better off after the late 90's
| internet is probably a harder question than it might seem.
|
| The long tail may be closer to what I want, but the quality
| is also generally lower. YouTube just doesn't support a team
| of talented writers, Amazon is mostly filled with junk, etc.
|
| Social media and gig work is a mixed bag. Junk e-mail etc may
| not be a big deal, but those kinds of downsides do erode the
| net benefit.
| amscanne wrote:
| Are you being objective or just romanticizing the past?
|
| Just to use your example: YouTube is _filled_ with talented
| writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to
| share their content in the past. *And* the traditional
| media complex is richer than ever.
|
| I don't think average quality matters. Just what you want
| to consume.
|
| If anything, I'd be more open to the opposite argument.
| Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually
| makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too
| high!
| glohbalrob wrote:
| Media is rich but not in proportion of the thousands of
| new creators doing very well. An extreme example is
| playboy vs only fans creators
| bobthepanda wrote:
| show business and things like it are famously pyramidal
| in shape. there are decades' worth of people who couldn't
| make it in previous generations in Los Angeles and New
| York.
|
| i think what is relatively new is the unaffordability
| crisis making it so doing such pursuits and not being
| that successful is no longer a way to make a living on
| its own.
| Retric wrote:
| I was trying to be objective which is why I didn't try to
| compare individual shows.
|
| Thus average production quality seems like a useful
| metric. There's currently a handful of "traditional
| media/streaming" shows with absolutely crazy budgets
| today and if you happen to like them then that's great.
| However, if you don't things quickly fall off a cliff in
| terms of production quality.
|
| The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one
| man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like
| MrBeast, but if you don't like MrBeast budgets drop off
| fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may
| prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with
| Julia or other 90's show with a much her budget, but
| there where several options to chose from.
|
| Thus purely objectively even if 90's TV had lower maximum
| budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking
| into consideration.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| It's worth noting that due to advances in technology, it
| is possible to deliver the same show for less money and
| time.
|
| The average "how to cook on a food network" show was,
| ultimately, one person in the kitchen of a large home
| cooking for the camera, produced once a week. There are
| plenty of people delivering that style of cooking show
| with high production quality today. Obviously it's not
| the same because some things are less deliverable with
| smaller or one-person teams (Miss Piggy is not going to
| visit some Youtube show the way she visited Martha
| Stewart) but there are people making this content ranging
| from big shops like NYT Cooking to smaller outfits like
| Binging with Babish, Glen and Friends Cooking, etc. and
| there are even outfits like this dedicated to more niche
| topics like Tasting History or Emmymade.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I'm also a fan of Tasting History. Highly recommended.
| Retric wrote:
| A wide range of things have gotten dramatically cheaper,
| but that only goes so far.
|
| Many YouTube channels make great use of Zoom calls for
| example. It's still generally a compromise vs an actual
| face to face conversation.
|
| Safety is another real concern. People have died doing
| stuff solo that wouldn't have been particularly dangerous
| with minimal supervision.
| immibis wrote:
| > it is possible to deliver the same show for less money
| and time
|
| Do we, though?
|
| I recently learned about the controversial scene "Baby,
| It's Cold Outside".
|
| Ignoring the content of the scene for a moment, the
| quality of the choreography stood out to me as something
| you would _never_ see in a movie today. Certainly not in
| one take.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I would say that has more to do with the decline in
| musicals involving _small_ numbers of people doing
| choreography, and the current movie system de-
| prioritizing dance as an important skill. The highest
| grossing musical movie happened in 2024 with Wicked, and
| the second half of that movie is probably going to do the
| same thing next year.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I wish this argument would die. We're asking for a better
| future among futures, not a better future compared to the
| past.
|
| It's like buying a car, receiving a bike, and then being
| told, "A bike is great because you don't have to walk
| anymore." If you feel like that's unfair and the response
| misses the point, that's how that lands. I don't know
| who, when hearing that, feels better. It feels out of
| touch and dismissive.
| majormajor wrote:
| Does the answer to "is the average person better off"
| have a lot to do with "how many TV shows are out
| there"...
|
| or does it have to do with:
|
| - how often their boss bugs them after hours
|
| - how much their boss uses technology to keep an eye on
| them, their friends, their political views
|
| - how often random strangers might get mad at them and
| SWAT them, make false claims to their employers, etc
|
| - how often their neighbors are radicalized into shooting
| up a school
|
| - how hard they find it to talk to a real person to
| resolve an issue with a company or government service vs
| being stuck on hold because of downsizing real support
| staff relative to population size, or with an ai chatbot?
|
| etc?
| brookst wrote:
| How about "how often a sibling dies because the local
| medical people don't have access to all of the world's
| medical information instantly".
|
| Most of the world is not rich people getting swatted by
| teenagers they're playing call of duty with.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Youtube has some marginal value, but I'm not sure
| "storytellers" bring a materially positive impact (and I
| reject the "richer" aspect outright). We had libraries in
| the 90s and they didn't force you to watch ads.
| aborsy wrote:
| You could afford a house in 90s, with a 9-5 job. Today,
| you would see housing crisis in major metros.
| microtonal wrote:
| _Media is so much richer and more engaging that it
| actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs
| is too high!_
|
| I am not sure it's the quality, it's more that it's
| optimized for dopamine shots. Heroine is highly
| addictive, but I think that few people would argue it's a
| quality drug.
|
| Recently there was a TV item that was filmed (in NL) just
| before the broad adoption of mobile phones (not
| smartphones). People looked so much more relaxed and more
| oriented towards others. I am happy that until my 18th or
| so mobile phones were not really a thing and that
| smartphones were not a really a thing until I was 25-27.
| I was an early adopter of smartphones, but I don't think
| we realized how addictive and destructive social media +
| smartphones would become.
|
| The early internet was very cool though. Lots of info to
| be found. A high percentage of users had their own web
| page. A lot of it was pretty whacky/playful. Addictive
| timelines etc. had not been invented yet.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| It's really not though. There are a few high quality
| individual creators, but not many.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Undeniably better off in every single way. Minimum is that
| the price of long distance phone calls is now zero, let
| alone video calls. Being able to speak to family and see
| them nonstop is incredible.
| goalieca wrote:
| And yet, when we are with family and friends, we're on
| the damn phone!
| ghaff wrote:
| Do people actually visit family in-person at least less
| often? And to the degree they augment rare family in-
| person visits with a lot of phone calls and/or video
| calls.
|
| I can believe a lot of friend get togethers IRL have been
| replaced with video calls. There's a tradeoff. I have a
| group of older friends and we still get together in-
| person but Zoom calls are a nice adder.
|
| I'm in a few organizations where we also find Zoom a nice
| alternative to people schlepping somewhere for an hour
| meeting that mostly works as well online--and we still
| have a few physical get-togethers over the course of the
| year.
| amrocha wrote:
| Young people are forced to move to wherever job
| opportunities are due to how hyper optimized the economy
| has become, so I would say most people spend way less
| time with family than 30 years ago
| ghaff wrote:
| It's complicated and you can look at a lot of studies.
| People have always moved where opportunities existed--
| including across oceans pre-aircraft. Yes, when there
| were company towns, people moved less.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Why are people much less happy then?
|
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-
| reach-n...
| simonh wrote:
| I wonder what event started in 2020 that might have
| caused major social and economic disruption, and could
| have had that effect. Maybe something that drastically
| limited peoples social mobility and lead to mass
| isolation.
| amrocha wrote:
| The trend goes back way further than 2020
| card_zero wrote:
| More precisely, Americans are more diagnosed with
| depression. In the five years prior to COVID it's shown
| as rising by 3.3 percentage points. Is that surprising?
| The trend isn't likely to be flat. Also, is this
| happiness? Also, does a graph starting in 2015 relate to
| the question about the 90s? Also, do you expect happiness
| to be driven by having new things, or for people to
| adjust their expectations and remain constantly unhappy?
| Isn't _disruption_ the main cause of unhappiness?
| brookst wrote:
| Because they have lost the ability to distinguish
| correlation from causation?
| amrocha wrote:
| I'm glad I can call my parents to ask them for money for
| groceries after I was laid off
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| The political instability that came with social media isn't
| great, either.
| 7952 wrote:
| I think in the near term social media can actually have a
| stabilising effect just because of how much it paralyzes
| people. It takes emotion and redirects it into something
| with little real world effect. Whilst most actual power
| is exercised offline. This sometimes breaks down and the
| crazy escapes from the internet and reeks havoc. But
| mostly the geriatrics are left alone to pull the levers
| of power in relative peace.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Ah yes. The popular ~14000 year stable period disrupted
| by social media.
| BirAdam wrote:
| I question this narrative. While social media is
| certainly having a negative impact, most democratic
| societies have relatively short life spans historically
| speaking. There's also a tendency for economies to
| falter, for irrationality to increase, for birth rates to
| drop, and so on. It would seem that the same trends
| (roughly) occur in every democracy as it starts to fail.
| brookst wrote:
| Yes. The meta problem is the trend toward "I dont't like
| X, and I don't like Y, therefore X is causing Y"
| thinking.
|
| It's always been the reactionary's argument: immigrants
| cause crime, inter-racial marriage causes poverty, etc,
| etc.
|
| The real collapse we're seeing is the liberal /
| progressive adoption of these fallacies. Social media
| causes fascism (nevermind the absence of social media in
| previous collapses into fascism), etc.
|
| Many of the people rightfully dismayed by trends are
| unwittingly contributing to the changes they dislike.
|
| The correct answer to "I think social media leads to
| fascism" is not "let's ban social media". The correct
| answer is "let's study the problem and see what science
| says". Abandoning that is giving up.
| brookst wrote:
| Expand the thinking to include impact on developing
| countries, the poor, minority groups who have few people
| like themselves in their local area, etc.
|
| I'll grant that for comparatively wealthy, privileged
| people who were always going to have an easy time (which
| frankly include me), the internet has been a mixed bag.
|
| But for the kids growing up in comparatively poor
| countries, who can now access all of the world's
| information, entertainment, and economy.. I think it's a
| pretty clear win.
|
| I expect AI will be similar: perhaps not a huge boon to the
| best off, but a substantial improvement for most people in
| the world. Even if we can sit back and say "oh, but they
| also get misinformation and lower quality YouTube content"
| gyomu wrote:
| Would you rather be a 22 year old starting in life in 2025 or
| 1995? Unless you pick one of the few countries that underwent
| a drastic change of regime in that time, the answer's pretty
| clear to me.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| 1995 (and I was 22 in 1995)
| naijaboiler wrote:
| Ib the US, 1995 by far!!!
| jfyi wrote:
| Given my skillset at age 22? Yeah, I'll take 1995. I was
| old enough to grow up hearing how great the world was going
| to be if I learned computer programming just to enter the
| job force at the start of the dotcom bubble burst. 1995
| would have been a major upgrade.
|
| Also, knocking that almost decade off my birthday would
| assure that I spent most of my adult life with the luxury
| of thinking that energy didn't have negative externalities
| that were being forced on later generations.
|
| We had Chomsky-esq "any major world power is kind of
| fascist if you think about it" instead of literal talk by
| politicians about putting people in camps if they don't
| like your diet or country of origin.
|
| TV was pretty bad I guess but music was great and I read
| more back then.
|
| There was a lot of huffing and puffing about gang violence.
| I grew up on the street the local gang named themselves
| after and it only marginally touched my life at all.
|
| Housing was dirt cheap, food was dirt cheap, gas was dirt
| cheap. There was undeveloped land everywhere around the
| city I live in and it gave a general sense of potential.
|
| What exactly was so bad about the 90's?
| StackRanker3000 wrote:
| Yes, the US was in a particularly prosperous and exciting
| period compared to much of the rest of the world in 1995.
| If you're, say, Chinese, chances are you find life in
| 2025 much more appealing
|
| Overall, life is better in 2025 for the vast majority of
| humans. Life expectancy, child mortality, health (despite
| the obesity epidemic, which is a result of an abundance
| that has eliminated hunger and food insecurity from large
| swathes of the globe), purchasing power, access to
| technology and entertainment, etc, etc...
|
| That some people in the US are feeling disillusioned
| because housing has become more unaffordable (partly
| because of regulations and technological advancements
| that have improved their quality and safety) and that
| they don't have the same incredible economic trajectory
| as the preceding generations, especially since WWII,
| doesn't negate that. A run like that can't last forever,
| especially since it to a large extent depends on having a
| relative advantage over the rest of the world - at some
| point, they'll start to catch up
|
| Much of the same dynamics apply to Europe, too
| bko wrote:
| ChatGPT currently has
|
| ~ 120 to 190 million daily active users
|
| ~ 800 million weekly active users
|
| ~ 450 million to over 800 million depending on the data source
| and methodology.
|
| Get a grip. Hundreds of millions of people are using it, most
| of them for free. I would say "society" has benefited.
|
| This has to be peak HN.
|
| Create the fastest growing consumer product in history.
|
| HN anon: yes, but who will benefit?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Facebook has more. Was it a benefit? Does the benefit
| outweigh the harms?
| bko wrote:
| Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me
| React which much of the modern web is built on, and React
| Native, PyTorch, GraphQL, Cassandra, Presto, and RocksDB
| just to name a few.
|
| The question is, what are billions of people doing on
| Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. My daycare sends me
| updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I
| used it to sell my fridge.
|
| This hole Facebook irrational hate is ridiculously
| overblown. It's an app, and compared to things like TikTok
| that is essentially a Chinese psy-op, it's really a great
| product.
| danielheath wrote:
| > The question is, what are billions of people doing on
| Facebook if it's harmful?
|
| Perhaps _you_ don't know.
|
| It's quite notorious for being the place to organise the
| genocide over in Myanmar.
|
| IMO, that should disqualify every executive or engineer
| who knew (and did nothing) from ever again being involved
| with widely-used infrastructure.
| uncomputation wrote:
| > what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's
| harmful? I don't know.
|
| This is extremely naive and akin to asking "why do people
| drink if it's bad for you then??" Popular != healthy
| rafaelero wrote:
| Tbh, it's not clear that if we all stopped drinking the
| world would be better.
| gtowey wrote:
| Yeah, and maybe it would be better still if we all tried
| heroin!
| Foxhuls wrote:
| Are you legitimately trying to compare alcohol to heroin?
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I think they are legitimately mocking the notion that we
| wouldn't all be better off without alcohol.
| gloosx wrote:
| I don't want to spoil anything for you, but ethanol is
| actually a very reactive molecule -- and in some ways, it
| acts similarly to opioids like heroin. It, among other
| things, stimulates endogenous opioid pathways, leading to
| the release of b-endorphins and activation of mu-opioid
| receptors. So, alcohol works indirectly, heroin directly
| - but both enhance opioid signalling. If you're curious,
| this study explains it really well:
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3728478/
| rafaelero wrote:
| Food can also indirectly enhance opioid signaling. What's
| your point?
| gloosx wrote:
| Food activates it within normal biological limits,
| alcohol and heroin artificially push the same system far
| beyond normal range, forcing the brain to compensate by
| downregulating receptors or reducing endogenous opioid
| production, so it's totally legit to compare alcohol to
| heroin
| tbossanova wrote:
| Oh it definitely would
| keanb wrote:
| Hard disagree.
| bko wrote:
| I think it's incredibly naive and arrogant to tell
| billions of people who use a product through their own
| free will "ackchyually its really bad and you should
| stop".
|
| Almost everyone would give you a response similar to
| mine. They use it because its easy way to plan events
| since so many people are on it, or a small business can
| easily create a website, sell something or just kill some
| time on the can.
|
| Give it a rest.
| kovac wrote:
| > My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me
| when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.
|
| To consider the other side of this, read "The age of
| surveillance capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff (really read
| it though, not chatgpt the summary :).
|
| All the benefits you mentioned are real. But, at what
| cost and could we have reaped the same benefits without
| surrendering all agency to those who can't be held
| accountable?
| bko wrote:
| What are the costs? Seems like a huge benefit to me
| considering the alternative would be... I don't know. No
| updates? Maybe some shitty custom app that would 100% for
| sure have worse data security and privacy rights than
| something like Facebook?
|
| Everyone's talking vaguely about the costs but no one
| actually makes a concrete case, where I made a concrete
| case of the benefits.
| an0malous wrote:
| > Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave
| me React
|
| No, _this_ is peak HN
| amrocha wrote:
| It's hard to believe this is not a rage bait AI comment
| given the last paragraph.
|
| Both are terrible for society but I use facebook tools so
| Chinese app bad, USA app good i guess? Is that what
| you're trying to say?
| weregiraffe wrote:
| >much of the modern web is built on,
|
| Was modern web a benefit?
| weregiraffe wrote:
| >The question is, what are billions of people doing on
| Facebook if it's harmful?
|
| Why do everyone get sick and eventually die if it's
| harmful?
| bko wrote:
| It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them
| pretending not to understand things, thus making
| discourse impossible.
| grafmax wrote:
| Facebook and many of these other VC companies have worked
| by building a moat through network effects by burning money
| to build something free and awesome. Then once you HAVE the
| network effect then it becomes hard to leave. Your history
| is on there, people know you through it, your friends and
| family are there; are you really going to leave? That's
| when Facebook starts turning the screws. Ads. Manipulative
| algorithms. Polarizating recommendation algorithms. Social
| isolation. Making deals with dictatorships. Censorship of
| the worst crimes humanity can commit against itself
| (genocide).
|
| Why? They are making money through all of it. It's called
| rent extraction. You OWN something valuable. You no longer
| have to produce something of value. You can just charge
| people money for what you own. Rent. It's various forms of
| rent. Sucking out money and souls into it. One of countless
| ways we're leeched on by these companies and their
| billionaire owners.
|
| Do the benefits outweigh the harms? Facebook and the VC
| playbook is boiling a frog and we are the frog.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| It's fast because there already gobs of people on the
| internet because of all the other products that came before.
| Facebook didn't grow as fast because there weren't as many
| people on line then. Gmail didn't grow as fast because there
| weren't as many people online then.
| platevoltage wrote:
| I use it for free, and when it stops being free, I will stop
| using it.
| javierluraschi wrote:
| It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally
| benefit more rich people.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| And we're not talking a 51-49 disproportion, we're talking
| about a 99.9999 percent of the benefit will go to the richest
| people
| twoodfin wrote:
| How so?
| irjustin wrote:
| Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real.
|
| This basically means almost everything can be built
| without human involvement. The guy who owns the
| replicators is the richest.
|
| The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because
| we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government
| needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make
| it a state asset?
|
| Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.
| twoodfin wrote:
| But these aren't replicators owned by a monopolist. There
| are a number of highly funded, highly competitive vendors
| at every level of the stack.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Sure, but you're not one of them.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Sure, but who do they sell stuff to if no one has a job?
| We're on the brink of some _very_ unexplored branches of
| human behavior.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Imagine a few billionaires pay big bucks to keep AGI to
| themselves and let the rest of us die on the vine.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn't we
| just... make a parallel economy without the AGI? The
| world works today without AGI.
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| Parallel economies are banned. Try making a new currency
| in the US.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Economies can work without currencies. It's a little
| inconvenient, but bartering/trading goods for services
| was common in the depression when nobody had any cash.
| amatecha wrote:
| Interestingly, new ad-hoc currencies pop up all over in
| times like that:
|
| https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/history/europes-
| economic-...
|
| https://collectingpapermoney.spmc.org/wiki/Scrip_Issued_d
| uri...
| scotty79 wrote:
| Printing money is lucrative for the printer so any time
| it might get even a little bit useful and feasible for
| other parties somebody will start printing.
| majormajor wrote:
| Did we just ignore the last fifteen years of crypto?
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| No I had the speculative ponzi front of mind when making
| that comment.
|
| Governments love crypto because it lets you seize lots of
| money from criminals across borders. And it is legal
| gambling where you can tax the winnings without
| reimbursing the losers (unless they can offset it but
| most probably can not)
| AngryData wrote:
| Or use any of the wonders of military technology invented
| in the last 200 years to take back society. These fuckers
| have lived in prosperity for so long that they don't even
| think it is possible. But so many people throughout
| history thought they were untouchable until the masses
| decided they had enough of their shit. Kings with
| professional armies, full plate knights, men with
| cannons, mens with guns, machine guns, bombs, planes,
| tanks, helicopters, and yet at the end of the day when
| enough random people are pissed off enough the mass of
| people with nothing to lose are the ones who "win" in the
| end with the powerful dead or hiding.
| scotty79 wrote:
| When unrest happens the military sides with the ones that
| give better hopes of keeping the stream of money that
| funds the army flowing.
|
| It sides with the poor only if the powerful (gov) are
| hopelessly inept at gathering money. If there's a chance
| that current civilian power can reform and keep
| collecting the money from the people and funding the army
| then the army sides with them and help quell the
| rebellion.
|
| Those who hold kinetic power will never side with poor
| against the rich.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Not always .. see the peasants revolt of 1381, French
| Revolution in 1789-1793, Bolshevik Revolution in 1917,
| etc.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Okay, but why would we die on the vine? Wouldn't we
| just... make a parallel economy without the AGI? The
| world works today without AGI.
|
| Because you need things they want. Like why would they
| spare the electricity to heat your home, when it could go
| to "better" use powering a few dozen GPUs serving a
| billionaire? Why would they spare the land for you to
| grow food, when they could use it to build ziggurats
| dedicated to their power (or whatever else is their
| whim)?
|
| The market sends the scarce resources to those with the
| most money.
| card_zero wrote:
| What is the fantasy AGI supposed to be that's so great
| for billionaires to have? A human baby is an <s>A</s>GI,
| it won't tell you the Ultimate Answer, or even a
| penultimate one, because it has no way to know.
|
| No, seriously, what? You think an AGI is going to be a
| willing slave and endowed with special knowledge? Where
| does either part of that come from?
| irjustin wrote:
| This is why revolts happen.
|
| If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism to
| keep revolutions at bay. The balance of tax the ultra
| wealthy vs giving people enough to "live comfortably" is
| always the job of governance.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > If you scratch under the hood of UBI, it's a mechanism
| to keep revolutions at bay.
|
| It's also putting money in the hands of the consumers so
| the rich can compete between themselves at how much each
| can scoop back up.
|
| Something like feeding animals in the forest to compete
| with your friends at who can hunt better.
|
| When poor have nothing then you have to shift to taking
| money of the other rich, but they are clever, so it's
| easier to take a little bit from the hands of all rich
| equally, give that money to the poor and reduce the new
| problem to the old one, how to extract as much as you can
| from the poor.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| The first sentence is definitely. But, UBI is a
| nerd/socialist fantasy. It would nevet work and will
| never happen. Everyone with these sci-fi fever dreams of
| what will happen if AI collapses white collar jobs are
| coming from people that don't know how the world or
| people actually work outside of their daydreams. People
| aren't going to just be like "ok, well I guess it's time
| for bread and water and Soviet style tenement housing,
| all this progress in livings was great while it lasted."
| And other people are talking about using batteries for
| money or something. People need to touch grass.
| lemonlearnings wrote:
| Bots. Agentic consumers.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| That's the key. The poor are useful to business so long
| as they are a source of money and power. What happens if
| the time comes that the poor have nothing the rich want?
| tbossanova wrote:
| Oh, the rich will be very happy wielding sadistic power
| over the poor
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Historically in this case eventually the poor kill the
| rich
|
| Probably not this time though
| 64718283661 wrote:
| If they killed the poor, then how can they enjoy their
| power over people?
| balamatom wrote:
| They'll just make some more poor to kill.
| noduerme wrote:
| It's strange that socialists seem more concerned with
| their material possessions than anyone else.
| Lio wrote:
| I guess that's why Larry, Zuck and Thiel, et al want
| constant recording of the plebs, so that 'citizens will
| be on their best behaviour'.
|
| This time there will be no revolution but it will be
| televised. :P
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I mean, eventually like 1 person is going to have more
| wealth than 60% of the nation combined. At that point,
| why even bother trying to earn customers or appeal to the
| lower half when you can instead curry favor with that 1
| person.
| delusional wrote:
| The poor will always have the only thing the rich want.
| Labor. Without labor Trump cannot slather the white house
| in gold. Without labor Zuck cannot smoke meats. Without
| labor Musk cannot troll people on X.
|
| The rich do not want anything you have, they want you.
| Body and soul.
| lukan wrote:
| Robots can take most of the jobs, but the feeling of
| power over other humans they likely cannot replace.
| delusional wrote:
| > Robots can take most of the jobs
|
| Not in our lifetimes and certainly not in our form of
| society. Robots will only drive down the price of labor.
| People will always be able to supply labor at costs below
| the price of materials for robots.
| lukan wrote:
| " People will always be able to supply labor at costs
| below the price of materials for robots."
|
| Why? What critical materials do robots need that will
| always be more expansive than raising a human?
|
| Also, from the point of "the rich" - the benefit of a
| robot is, that it will (stupidly) do as command, unlike a
| human. They don't have a family they want to take care
| first.
| happymellon wrote:
| They will always want entertainment.
|
| Whether it's gladiators or bum fights, the poor will
| ultimately be given a job. Robot wars was fun, but UFC
| has stayed.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The rich will need play things. Think Westworld, but with
| real people.
| intended wrote:
| This is very explored - it was the state of humanity for
| most of its existence. The few had resources, the many
| were poor.
| Fricken wrote:
| For most of humanity's existence nobody was poor because
| there was no such thing as money.
| zo1 wrote:
| We're nearly-there. The _humans_ then become the capital
| /resource to be acquired, not money.
|
| That's why every country is somehow chasing that elusive
| "population growth". It creates more "things" to own,
| whether that be money by virtue of more people creating
| more money through economic activity or simply more
| people to claim as "yours" (for the elites/leaders).
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| If you can make many replicators, money stops making much
| sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices
| take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
|
| My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get
| screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way
| that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.
|
| Maybe because the very few that control the replicators
| will be able to cut people they don't like out of
| partaking from them? That'd make some sense.
|
| If replicators were replicatable, that control evaporates
| quickly. Remember how nervous we all were about LLM
| censorship, then suddenly a $2000 MacBook Pro could run
| pretty great open source models that seem a few months
| behind SOTA?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| But energy is essentially free also, at least on the
| margin, and if we're talking about sunlight.
| petre wrote:
| Sure. And AI will only run at peak solar times.
| lukan wrote:
| Did you know, that there is always a place on earth
| enjoying peak solar time right now?
| majormajor wrote:
| What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of
| money as currency?
|
| People would still want to be able to trade with lower
| friction than lugging batteries around, so don't you just
| re-invent money on top of it? orrrrrr just keep having
| the current money around the whole time?
|
| --
|
| The general limiting factor with the "one person controls
| the replicators, only they have income" idea is that they
| would rapidly lose that income because nobody else would
| have anything to trade them anymore. (If you toss in the
| AI/robotic dream scenario, they don't even need humans to
| manage the raw material.) But then does that turn into
| famine and mass-die-off, or Star Trek utopia?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > But then does that turn into famine and mass-die-off
|
| Probably extremely bloody revolt and collapse
| noduerme wrote:
| Only if you assume people's major motivation is wanting
| what they don't have, as opposed to wanting a little more
| to survive. History shows the opposite.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > History shows the opposite.
|
| I strongly disagree, everything I know about history
| points the other way
|
| Human history is littered with "people's major motivation
| is wanting what they don't have"
|
| Look at the conflicts happening right now in Ukraine, or
| Israel
|
| Come on, be serious
| scotty79 wrote:
| > What does it mean in practice to have energy instead of
| money as currency?
|
| Something like Bitcoin. When the progress in miners
| efficiency stalls any kWh of energy not used for
| something else will be used to make some amount of
| bitcoins. If you have energy you can make btc. If you
| have btc you can give your btc to someone in exchange for
| their energy so that they give you their energy, instead
| of using it to mine bitcoins themselves.
| UltraSane wrote:
| That just seems very wasteful when proof-of-stake works.
| FabHK wrote:
| Or even good old centralised distributed systems that do
| it another 4 to 6 orders of magnitude more efficiently
| than PoS.
| motorest wrote:
| > If you can make many replicators, money stops making
| much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these
| devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new
| currency.
|
| If you can make many replicators, you certainly won't be
| providing them to anyone else. You'd be using them to
| ensure that money starts funneling into your revenue
| stream, and use that as a cash cow to pursue other
| projects.
| simonh wrote:
| That's only a temporary possibility, once the tech gets
| out everyone will have replicators.
| card_zero wrote:
| What are they replicating? Patented things, copyrighted
| things? Or groceries? Do they _want_ to replicate things?
| In Star Trek, they travel light, wear uniforms, and have
| few personal possessions, because they 're _on a ship, in
| the navy._ That 's why everything has to be digital and
| everybody stuffs their life inside a phonecorder and
| drinks synthale. When he's back on earth, Picard has a
| horse. I could be wrong but I don't think he replicated
| it.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Just like everyone owns factories today
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap
| goods lead to that outcome.
|
| It has nothing to do with how cheap the goods are
|
| The problem is that at some point people won't be able to
| afford literally anything because all, and I mean
| literally all, of the wealth will be hyper concentrated
| in a super small percentage of the population
| squigz wrote:
| Do you have anything to support this hypothesis?
| neel8986 wrote:
| Simple hypothesis. Top 5percent of US wealth now belongs
| to top 50 richest American. Even if you ignore
| corruption, lobbying and any ill intent you can
| definitely conclude that this top 50 individuals have
| better way of getting return from money than rest of the
| population. Even if if their delta of return is 5% we can
| assume that withing next 50 years there is a high
| probability that these guys will own 30-50% of wealth. I
| have a strong belive AI will acclerate that further.
| prewett wrote:
| But all your numbers (except maybe top 5% one) are
| completely made up. Strong beliefs don't prevent one from
| being completely wrong. Neville Chamberlain has a strong
| belief that he had ensured peace; Einstein had a strong
| belief that quantum theory's "spooky action at a
| distance" was incorrect. Both were wrong. Fifty years is
| a long time, and anything could happen. The last fifty
| years had the fall of Communism, the EU, China going from
| an impoverished countryside to a superpower, video phones
| in our pocket, social media upending communication and
| mental health, renewable energy displacing coal, Trump,
| etc.
| squigz wrote:
| Not to mention that 50% of US wealth is only 15% of the
| world's total wealth - a far cry from "literally all
| wealth"
| heavyset_go wrote:
| https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf
| squigz wrote:
| Link's broken.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250126183923/https://delong
| .ty...
|
| This should work
| intended wrote:
| IMO - Money will NEVER stops making sense.
|
| Money is a cheap way to translate unlike objects. Cows to
| art, labor to goods. Green to triangle.
|
| Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a
| needed lubricant for transactions.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| In a word: it's fungible[0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Money (or something) will always exist, because it is a
| needed lubricant for transactions.
|
| So it's only useful for as long as you have the need for
| transactions.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > So it's only useful for as long as you have the need
| for transactions
|
| Which you will always have some need for, because
| resources aren't infinite, real estate isn't infinite,
| services aren't infinite, etc
| delusional wrote:
| > Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship
|
| You're taking the wrong lesson from that observation.
| Models that people actually use are just as censored now
| as they ever were. What changed was the the hysterical
| anti-censorship babies realized that it's not that big of
| a problem, at least acutely.
| x______________ wrote:
| You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a
| lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
|
| So what's stopping you from replicating a power source
| and battery?
|
| Seems analogous to LLM's: replicators replicate but do
| not create. Information would then seem to the proper
| choice for a new currency..
| FabHK wrote:
| > If you can make many replicators, money stops making
| much sense.
|
| There are many, many, many, many positional goods.
| Beachfront properties, original art, historical
| artifacts, elite clubs, limited edition luxury goods, top
| restaurants, etc.
|
| The notion that we'd all live happily and contentedly
| without money if only we had some more iPhones and other
| goods produced by replicators strikes me as false.
|
| Remember that Keynes predicted about a century ago that
| 100 years thence (in other words, now) everyone would
| just work 10 hours a week at most, and the biggest
| challenge would be to avoid boredom? He predicted
| productivity growth accurate enough, but assumed that
| people would have enough with 4x, 5x as much as they had
| back then while simultaneously working 4x, 5x less.
| Instead, people opted to work just as much and consume
| 16x as much.
| noduerme wrote:
| Yeah, but which tech has not had a homegrown variant that
| ultimately democratized it? Makes me think of the "feed"
| vs the "seed" in "The Diamond Age".
| 7952 wrote:
| Ultimately labour goes and works on something else
| instead. And the availability of free labour makes that
| possible. New industries and markets develop as a result.
| But a huge number of people will be left behind. But
| people will focus on things that were a lower priority
| before.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| I have bad news for you, we've run out of sectors to
| pretend labor could be funneled towards. Manufacturing
| and agriculture are highly automated, service industry is
| full tf up, and nobody can afford more construction.
| 7952 wrote:
| What about medical, elder care, fitness, leisure. Even
| service industries that focus on a more human connection.
| Or jobs focused on nature, the environment etc.
|
| And i don't think this would nbe an easy process or
| something that could or would be managed. But it is
| probably already happening.
| jfyi wrote:
| The world of Star Trek was fully post scarcity. Rich/poor
| were not things that existed.
|
| They had to get through this before things got better:
| https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
| jobigoud wrote:
| > The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts
|
| This never happens. It's not the relative wealth gap that
| creates revolts it's the poverty/bad conditions in
| absolute terms.
|
| If the lower class conditions improve, even just a little
| bit, there is no revolt.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Continuing current trends presumably.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Cite?
| lightedman wrote:
| The entirety of human history.
| palmotea wrote:
| > It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally
| benefit more rich people.
|
| Yes: you'll be homeless and living under a bridge, but you'll
| have an LLM therapist on your phone to console you. That's a
| benefit!
| Gud wrote:
| Doubtful. More likely that there will be robocops to stop
| you from loitering in the scenic places.
| lukan wrote:
| For sure, but most bridges aren't in scenic places and
| robocops will still be limited in numbers, so no worries,
| just ask your LLM assistance in case of doubt under which
| bridge you won't get evicted from. Altough, that would
| probably be illegal advice, but they can try to help you
| with therapy should you end up in such a situation. Not
| the top model of course, but hey, it is a benefit.
| balamatom wrote:
| >robocops will still be limited in numbers
|
| The population of developed countries is _already_ at
| least 75% robocops
| lukan wrote:
| Erm, what qualifies as a robocop to you?
| stinkbeetle wrote:
| No they don't want that, because it could lead to an
| uprising against them. They want us provided with the
| essentials in exchange for being dutiful workers, so we
| have something to lose.
|
| Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects,
| not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we
| should be able to get our entertainment and everything to
| keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment
| services. Basically we are to consume as little as possible
| to barely keep ourselves alive and sane while they sail
| themselves around to pat one another on the backs at their
| climate and economic conferences on their billion dollar
| luxury yachts.
|
| Actually no that would be stupid they don't have the time
| or patience to sail their yachts around. They have crew for
| that. They will fly in one of their handful of private jets
| and have the yacht meet them there.
| ta1243 wrote:
| That would be https://marshallbrain.com/manna
| akk0 wrote:
| I'd actually love to eat insects but to my dismay I found
| out they're actually really expensive...
| pokstad wrote:
| Soylent green will be affordable when the baby boomers
| start passing.
| lukan wrote:
| Just go outside for a while with a survival book if you
| are into it.
| akimbostrawman wrote:
| don't forget the dismantling of the local community and
| family identity to make people reliant on the government
| preventing resistance by division.
| kakacik wrote:
| People do this to themselves and willingly, no spooky
| evil capitalists behind the curtains are necessary.
|
| People love money and what they can bring on the table,
| people often hate each other ie within families stiffed
| by peer pressure and expectations of mentalities formed
| in another very different era, people love discovering
| new countries and cultures. And so on and on.
|
| Ie me - I love my parents, my childhood was normal, only
| later to find and compare with others to see how such
| childhood was... abnormally uncommon. But I very much
| prefer seeing them few times a year only, even though we
| love when they help with kids. Some of their opinions are
| very outdated, their ramblings are often out of touch
| with reality, they tend sometimes to spoil kids (even
| after setting boundaries), and overall generational gap
| is absolutely massive. It is a form of freedom. Make that
| 10x more in much more strict societies where pressure and
| expectations from parents on kids are massive and then
| they wonder why kids stay the heck away from them once
| adults.
|
| And fuck local communities, for every good-hearted
| neighbor who just wants to socialize and help out and
| otherwise stays away from one's life, there is easily 5
| or 10 who are the epitome of nimbyism, voyeurism or
| similar hobbies of people with empty lives, clueless on
| how world and people actually work but always with very
| strong opinions on everything and will to push those on
| everybody else.
| garte wrote:
| the last bit is only true under individualised
| consumerism. its when everybody is like a spoiled child
| is where solidarity goes to die.
| watwut wrote:
| But kids in those strict societies stay with parents
| more, help them and treat them better.
|
| Meanwhile, you dont care about them except for them being
| potential resource of free work.
|
| And I mean, you idea of local comunity is all about other
| people doing free work for you and then tolerating your
| peculiarities with no reciprocation.
|
| So, I dont think that is much of an argument here.
| palmotea wrote:
| > And I mean, you idea of local comunity is all about
| other people doing free work for you and then tolerating
| your peculiarities with no reciprocation.
|
| When it seems to you like everyone around you is the
| problem, you may actually be the problem.
| kakacik wrote:
| Maybe I phrased wrongly (not a native speaker) but what
| you say is incorrect. I am not free coasting on parents,
| in contrary my first years all my earning went into
| providing them a good home for rest of their lives, while
| living in tiny rental rooms. You have no idea from sort
| of poor background I come from, most western kids have no
| clue. It was a massive improvement of QoL for them that
| they would never be able to afford themselves and they
| still appreciate it massively. Since we live 1500km from
| them they help with kids literally few hours per year,
| not a burden for anybody involved.
|
| But freedom to chose with whom we spend our time is a
| thing, no matter how much people like you try to force
| their righteous values that are the only proper true way
| (TM) on everybody else. I am old enough and over time met
| plenty of folks like that, be it religious or other
| forms, they are at the end the same as your comment.
| azan_ wrote:
| > Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat
| insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly
| places, we should be able to get our entertainment and
| everything to keep ourselves happy from their
| subscription entertainment services.
|
| Yes of course capitalists love when economy is bad.
| Sorry, these dystopic visions do not pass even simplest
| smell test.
| grafmax wrote:
| It's less complicated than that. Externalities are when
| an individual profits but others pay the price. Think of
| climate change. And when a small number are so rich they
| control the government, so there's nothing to stop them.
| It's narrow incentives driving the whole thing.
| watwut wrote:
| They love it when the richest people do well. They dont
| care about how anyone else lives. The poorer other people
| are better they feel about winning.
|
| Those you call "capitalists" love monopolies as long as
| they are theirs. They love captured market. They dont
| care about competition unless it is someone not them
| competing to provide for them on lower price.
|
| As of now, billionaires dont want or need strong economy
| as a "middle class and lower class doing good". They want
| the "our wealth goes up, we are getting tax breaks, if
| lower class pays for it cool" kind of economy.
| gaindustries wrote:
| The poorer people are that are still able to work, the
| cheaper labor is. It's really that simple.
| squidbeak wrote:
| At that stage, owners will very likely have enough drones
| and robots at their command to not need to worry about
| petty things like flesh and blood uprisings.
| blks wrote:
| How will they steal added value and get richer if masses
| consume as little as possible?
| csomar wrote:
| All the value will be diverted. I don't know if you
| noticed, but in the last few years, you'd have come ahead
| if you gambled on the stock, crypto or commodities market
| than if you busted your ass.
| fhdkweig wrote:
| It can even help you learn to tie a noose.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chatbot+suicide
|
| 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III
| https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-
| teen-a...
|
| 16-year-old Adam Raine https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-
| health-news/2025/09/19/nx...
| designerarvid wrote:
| Every strata of society has been getting richer and richer
| along with technological progress. What makes you think
| that would change now?
| sspiff wrote:
| For just $19.99/mo no doubt.
| pRusya wrote:
| And covered by universal basic income.
| aborsy wrote:
| Not necessarily. The benefits may barely trickle down, and
| the conditions for the majority could degrade overall.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| Yeah it's a complicated picture and of course nobody knows,
| but it would be helpful to split "benefits" into things
| like;
|
| - net benefits to the average person (considering
| drawbacks)
|
| - overall relative benefits compared to income groups
|
| - benefits in certain areas of society and topics
|
| I think there'll be some "benefits for all" in terms of
| things like medical advances and health technology. There
| will also be broader benefits to all in general areas but
| as a parent poster said it'll benefit equity holders most
| and there might be some bad tradeoffs (like we'll have
| access to much better information and entertainment but it
| may also affect the overall employment rate). It's a very
| nuanced picture and it's probably disingenuous of some tech
| leaders to say "we'll all benefit) but some do believe that
| will be the future.
| simianwords wrote:
| Based on what evidence? The last few times this happened
| the whole world benefitted.
| aborsy wrote:
| Based on extensive academic research on trickle-down
| economics, in particular looking into the evolution of
| real wages of different sectors of population, since
| 1980s.
|
| See the work of recent Nobel prize laureates in
| economics. Many argue for redistribution and investment
| back to the society.
| simianwords wrote:
| But the past few revolutions benefitted everyone and we
| are better off. Look at industrial revolution, digital
| revolution. Why do you think it is different this time?
| If trickle down economics don't work, why is world
| poverty at all time low and consumption at all time high?
| aborsy wrote:
| As noted, this refers to Reagan policies and onward.
| simianwords wrote:
| Even after Reagan's policies how do your points hold?
| abenga wrote:
| Because we are counting people's wealth in significant
| fractions of a trillion dollars and young people around
| the world cannot afford homes no more?
| simianwords wrote:
| Prices of houses increased but others decreased. Life
| expectancy increased, consumption increased.
| grafmax wrote:
| "Phones not homes."
| pyrale wrote:
| > Look at industrial revolution
|
| I really don't see how one can separate the industrial
| revolution from colonialism, considering we have chiefs
| of government in colonial countries on the record saying
| that colonies are a necessary outlet for industrial goods
| [1].
|
| Once you've established that link, it's hard to explain
| that "everyone" benefitted from the industrial
| revolution.
|
| Even disregarding that, the working conditions created by
| industrialization allowed for situations that can hardly
| be described as "beneficial" [2][3][4].
|
| > digital revolution.
|
| [5] provided without comment.
|
| ---
|
| [1]: for instance, Jules Ferry: https://www2.assemblee-
| nationale.fr/decouvrir-l-assemblee/hi...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisbee_Deportation
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
|
| [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars
|
| [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Places that luckily avoided colonialism haven't improved
| a zilch.
| danans wrote:
| > Places that luckily avoided colonialism haven't
| improved a zilch
|
| Thailand and China would like a word.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| So would Liberia and Ethiopia.
| sokoloff wrote:
| What percent of the population in places which
| experienced the industrial revolution would be better off
| if they time-travelled back 200 years? 1%? 0.2%?
| pyrale wrote:
| > in places which experienced the industrial revolution
|
| People experienced the industrial revolution everywhere.
|
| I suspect, when you think "places which experienced the
| industrial revolution", you think about a small subset of
| areas where some development happened as a result of
| that, likely the areas where industrialists lived.
|
| But you would also have to consider other places'
| experience of industrialization. For instance, Congo
| under EIC colonial rule did experience industrialization
| - it was the place where industrial amounts of rubber
| were harvested to allow for plants elsewhere to produce
| joints, pipes, motor belts, etc. It's not really hard to
| believe that, had Congo not experienced that, its citizen
| would almost certainly have been better off now.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Does Congo lack electricity, modern medicine, and air
| conditioning?
|
| If the industrial revolution has made their lives worse,
| it's a double-whammy because they are forced to suffer
| almost twice as long, as their life expectancy at birth
| has approximately doubled since 1870.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071021/life-
| expectancy-...
| squidbeak wrote:
| When have we ever had a push to full automation?
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| It will not benefit the rich as disproportionately as the
| covid pandemic did.
| Lio wrote:
| I can't speak for others countries but here in the UK
| special "VIP lanes" were used to steal billions using
| fraudulent PPE contracts.
|
| I'm not just talking about Baroness Mone either. PPE Medpro
| was the tip of the iceberg.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Rich people will enjoy additional monetary benefits, but
| everyone will still enjoy the same standard benefits.
| squidbeak wrote:
| What you mean is those with some form of ownership of the
| technology. If development eventually results in full
| automation, with the expense of production reduced to zero,
| money will be irrelevant.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Energy, raw materials, and logistics still remain. I don't
| think we'll ever get to a place where there isn't some
| input to a production process that is not infinite and
| free.
| squidbeak wrote:
| You don't see full automation with robotics as a possible
| outcome?
| sokoloff wrote:
| Theoretically possible? Maybe (but still an extremely
| slim chance).
|
| Practically possible? No. People (and countries) own
| land. Raw materials for robots comes from land. Energy
| for robots consumes land. Farming food requires massive
| inputs beyond just the land and energy (but also needs
| those).
|
| I don't imagine we'll get to a world where my great-
| great-great^20-grandkids can hold out their hand and have
| a plate of steak and potatoes (or the then-equivalent)
| placed into it for free, anytime they want.
|
| The expense of production and on-demand delivery of just
| a simple plate of steak and baked potato will not ever
| get to zero. If we can't even get that simple of thing
| for free, I don't believe in a world without the notion
| of money.
|
| Expand that to even better dining, vacation, and
| leisure/recreational activities and I think the argument
| becomes even more solid that some form of
| rationing/limiting will be in effect and there will be a
| unit/notation of ration and trade that will be
| indistinguishable from money.
| squidbeak wrote:
| 'Not ever' is a broad statement. Would you rule out off-
| planet mining and manufacturing? Or the scaling of
| artificial meat production?
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't. If you do, maybe you could hypothesize a
| practically possible path from now to then and enlighten
| us Luddites?
|
| The overwhelmingly most likely "end of money for humans"
| comes from the extinction of humans.
| squidbeak wrote:
| Believe me, ruling them out is the last thing I'd do. I
| fully expect them in the next decade or two.
|
| A practically possible path to both: Starship is
| perfected and mining companies begin operations in space.
| Vast data centers training spatial ai using virtual
| simulations perfect it well enough for general robotics
| to become practicable. Automation is then as follows:
| robotics manufacturing and maintenance is handled by
| robots. Mining is performed by robots. General
| manufacturing performed by robots. Potential
| manufacturing scales increase by orders of magnitudes.
| Where are the costs in this scenario that would prevent
| prices falling to zero? And if prices for all goods and
| virtually all services* fall to zero, what possible role
| can money have at that point, other than sitting on a
| shelf as a memento of a vanished system?
|
| *excluding sex workers.
| thfuran wrote:
| The cost is in transportation (aside from the cost of
| developing and producing all those automated systems).
| Where do you expect extra-terrestrial mining to occur and
| why do you think what's mined there would be used on
| Earth? The nearest place to mine would be the moon, and
| it's on the order of 1 million dollars per kg to bring
| things back. We could potentially drop that, but that's a
| hell of a base cost just for material transport. What
| makes you think that's going to be happening soon?
| squidbeak wrote:
| In the next couple of decades? Starship is real, space
| mining companies are real, NVIDIA Cosmos is real,
| robotics development is nascent, but real and thrilling.
| Ordinary market forces will ensure the uptake of
| robotics.
|
| You're calculating the expense of returning mined
| resources using past metrics that are superseded
| altogether in this scenario. For instance miniaturization
| suddenly won't be necessary for mining companies wishing
| to send gear to asteroids.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Why would off-planet mining and manufacturing make things
| easier?
| illuminator83 wrote:
| The wealth gap widening is quite independent from AI being
| involved. A natural progression which was always happening
| and continues to be happening. Entil some sort of catastrophe
| reshuffles the cards. Usually a war or revolution. The poor
| simply rising up or a lazy and corrupt ruling class depriving
| their country of enough resources and will to defend itself
| that some outside power can take it.
| visarga wrote:
| > It will benefit all people but it will disproportionally
| benefit more rich people
|
| The rich already have a diminishing returns situation with
| money. Everyone else has much more upswing.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| If be benefitting you mean displacing all reason to live,
| then yes, it will solve that problem I face. Now I will be
| certain.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I don't understand this argument. Speaking as a kid who grew up
| middle-class as an 80's teen obsessed with (the then still new)
| computers, a non-rich person has access to more salient power
| today than ever in history, and largely for no or low cost.
| There are free AI's available that can diagnose illnesses for
| people in remote areas, non-Western nations, etc. and which can
| translate (and/or summarize) anything to anything with high
| quality. Etc. etc. AI will help anyone with an idea execute on
| it.
|
| The only thing you have to worry about are not non-rich people,
| but people without any motivation. The difference of course is
| that the framing you're using makes it easy to blame "The
| System", while a motivation-based framing at least leaves
| people somewhat responsible.
|
| Wealth may get you a seat closer to the table, but everyone is
| already invited into the room.
| tbossanova wrote:
| The problem is if the system leads to demotivating people
| more than motivating them on average, which risks a negative
| feedback loop where people demotivate each other further and
| so on
| mlrtime wrote:
| Yes, just read reddit or this thread.
|
| I'd love to see the people's lives saying how bad it is
| now. My guess is they have every luxury afforded to them.
| There is strong negativity bias.
| amrocha wrote:
| This is a simplistic, individualistic view of the impact of
| AI.
|
| You're imagining the world we have today, but with AI.
|
| In reality it'll be a world that's completely different, and
| most likely in a worse way, and AI is the tool used to make
| it worse.
| zekrioca wrote:
| "Free ai" lol
| thrance wrote:
| You have an incorrect reading of history and economy.
| Basically none of the wealth and comfort we (regular people)
| enjoy were "gifted" or "left over" willingly by the owner
| class. Everything had to be fought for: minimum wage,
| reasonable weekly hours, safe workplaces, child labor,
| retirement, healthcare...
|
| Now, ask yourself, what happens when workers lose the only
| leverage they have against the owner class: their labor? A
| capitalist economy can only function if workers are able to
| sell their labor for wages to the owner class, creating a
| sort of equilibrium between capital and work.
|
| Once AI is able to replace a significant part of workers, 99%
| of humans on Earth become redundant in the eyes of the owner
| class, and even a threat to their future prosperity. And they
| own everything, the police and army included.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Cheaper cloud costs
| tempodox wrote:
| When billionaires talk about "benefits", I'm getting _very_
| suspicious.
| goku12 wrote:
| That's a very relevant question. And as your question implies,
| we all know which society the billionaires talk about. But AI
| is just a technology like any other. It does have the potential
| to bring great benefits to humanity if developed with that
| intent. It's the corruptive influence of the billionaire and
| autocrat greed that turns all technologies against us.
|
| When I say benefits to humanity, I don't mean the AI slop,
| deepfakes and laziness enabler that we have today. There are
| niche applications of AI that already show great potential.
| Like developing new medicines to devising new treatments for
| dangerous diseases, solving long standing mathematical
| problems, creating new physics theories. And who knows? Perhaps
| even create viable solutions for the climate crisis that we are
| in. They don't receive as much attention as they deserve,
| because that's not where the profit lies in AI. Solving real
| problems require us to forgo profits in the short term. That's
| why we can't leave this completely up to the billionaires. They
| will just use it to transfer even more wealth from the poor and
| middle classes to themselves.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| What are the actual benefits? Where are all these medicines
| that humans couldn't develop on their own? Have we not been
| able to develop medicine? What theorems are meaningful and
| impactful that humans can't prove without AI? I don't know
| what a solution to the climate crisis is but what would it
| even say that humans wouldn't have realistically thought of?
| yard2010 wrote:
| It's a matter of prompt engineering, you have to be a
| really good engineer to pick the correct words in order to
| get the cure for cancer from ChatGPT, or the actual crabby
| patty recipe
|
| ;)
| squidbeak wrote:
| You're most likely correct in thinking 'we would get there
| eventually'. But in the case of medicine, would you like to
| make that case to those who don't have the time to wait for
| 'eventually' - or who'll spend their lives in misery?
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| I have a phd in mathematics and I assure you I am not happy
| that AI is going to make doing mathematics a waste of time.
| Go read Gower's essay on it from the 90s. He is spot on.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| Counter prediction. AI is going to reduce the (relative) wealth
| of the tech companies.
|
| AWS and Facebook have extremely low running costs per VPS or Ad
| sold. That IMO is one of the major reasons tech has received
| its enormously high valuation.
|
| There is nuance to that, but average investors are dumb and
| don't care.
|
| Add in a relatively high fixed-cost commodity into the
| accounting, and intuitively the pitch of "global market
| domination at ever lower costs" will be a much harder sell.
| Especially if there is a bubble pop that hurts them.
| infinitezest wrote:
| History would indicate that if the you make a bubble big
| enough and then it pops, you don't have to clean up the mess.
| 2008 wasn't that long ago.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Manna ponders the same question. I don't think we're headed
| towards the "good" ending.
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| __oh_es wrote:
| What an incredible read - thanks for the share
| mlrtime wrote:
| What value does your question add, if it wasn't Bezos saying
| this would you have the same question?
|
| How are you defining rich, Billionaires? It's sad that your
| comment is the top post.
| infinitezest wrote:
| The fact that Bezos is saying this is precisely why the
| commenter is asking this. He clearly stands to benefit
| massively from the bubble. Statements like this are meant to
| encourage buy-in from others to maximize his exit. Presumably
| "rich" refers to those, like Bezos, who already have
| incredibly disproportionate wealth and power compared to the
| majority of people in the US. I'm honestly not sure what the
| thrust of your comment even is.
| a4isms wrote:
| Once upon a time, society was all of us, but Society were the
| filks that held coming out parties and gossiped about whose
| J-class yacht was likely to defend the America's cup.
|
| Society with a capital S are the beneficiaries of the bubble.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Business. People in the human centipede who wont fight fascism
| FilosofumRex wrote:
| Bezos didn't define "society", but knowing Devil is what Devil
| does, we can infer:
|
| 1. Amazon files the most petitions for H1-B work visas after
| Indian IT shops. 2. Amazon opposed minimum wage increase to
| $15/hr until 2018! 3. Amazon not only fires union organizers,
| it's claiming National Labor Relations Board is
| unconstitutional!
| mountainriver wrote:
| It is all society as long as they have access, and they do.
| Even if the big labs get more closed off, open source is right
| there and won't die.
|
| AI increases everyone's knowledge and ultimately productivity.
| It's on every person the learn to leverage it. The dynamics
| don't need to change, we just move faster and smarter
| acdha wrote:
| > AI increases everyone's knowledge and ultimately
| productivity. It's on every person the learn to leverage it.
| The dynamics don't need to change, we just move faster and
| smarter
|
| This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge
| if people practice information literacy and validate AI
| claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill.
| Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and
| pollute public sources of information, it can make people
| less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are
| more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course,
| but they're moving from artisanal to industrial scale.
|
| Another area where this is begging questions is around
| resource allocation. The best AI models and integrations cost
| money and the ability to leverage them requires you to have
| an opportunity to acquire skills and use them to make a
| living. The more successfully businesses are able to remove
| or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of
| people who can afford to build skills, compete with those
| businesses, or contribute to open source software. Twenty
| years ago, professional translators made a modest white
| collar income; when AI ate those jobs, the workers didn't
| "learn to leverage" AI, they had to find new jobs in
| different fields and anyone who didn't have the financial
| reserves to do that might've ended up in a retail job
| questioning whether it's even possible to re-enter the
| professional class. That's great for people like Bezos until
| nobody can afford to buy things, but it's worse for society
| since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and
| power.
|
| Open source in particular seems likely to struggle here: with
| programmers facing financial downturns, fewer people have
| time to contribute and if AI is being trained on your code,
| you're increasingly going to ask whether it's in your best
| interests to literally train your replacement.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| https://www.billjaneway.com/productive-bubbles this is a good
| essay on this topic
| chris_wot wrote:
| Just like how sending Katy Perry to space hugely benefitted
| society.
|
| Could some let Bezos know that he doesn't truly represent society
| in any way?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Society as a whole, or one percenters like him?
| MountDoom wrote:
| Bezos is a 0.0001-percenter. Most of people on HN are probably
| in the top 1% to 5%.
|
| You're in the top 10% in the US if you make $170k/yr.
| nemomarx wrote:
| are most people on HN making 170? I feel a bit less
| privileged now.
| MountDoom wrote:
| Entry-level total comp for SWEs in the SF Bay Area is
| probably $250k. A senior dev at a public tech company can
| easily clear $400k. Really senior engineers at FAANG
| routinely clear $1M.
| eBombzor wrote:
| I need to move back to the Bay
| NaomiLehman wrote:
| it's possible to work remotely, albeit harder to land a
| job. Still if you makea bit less and live in a LCoL area
| that's a great deal.
| MountDoom wrote:
| For senior engineers with some fiscal discipline, it's
| great, although it's more great to work remotely.
|
| On the more junior end, that $250k goes about as far as
| $100k in a less expensive region. Keep in mind that the
| average 1-bedroom rent is $3k+/mo, the average home for a
| family with kids is $2M, the average PG&E bill for a
| house is probably $400+, any repairs or remodels will
| cost you 2x as much as in most other places... and state
| income taxes are 10% on top of federal.
|
| Most CoL estimates put the cost of living in San Jose at
| 2x the national average. And that's San Jose.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And we aren't also in some other bubble. From rest of the
| world those compensation levels sound insane.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Midway through my career, these days I feel fortunate to be
| making 60k. But I'm in Canada.
| culi wrote:
| It's extremely regional. I was at 160 after less than 5
| years in the industry. In the Bay Area, that still put me
| in the bottom 10% for tech workers
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/heatmap/
| martinohansen wrote:
| True. But that's income, to be top 10% in your net worth you
| need 1.5m USD and 12m USD for top 1%
| MountDoom wrote:
| Yeah, but net worth is weird because for most people, it
| just measures age. When you're young, you have nothing in
| your 401k and you have a brand new mortgage, so you're
| worth around $0. Negative if you have any student loans.
|
| When you're in your 50s or 60s, the mortgage is repaid, and
| if nothing blew up, you probably also have a million or two
| in your 401k, so at that point, it's actually not that hard
| for a person who had a decent career in the SF Bay Area to
| be worth $4M+. And many FAANG retirees will probably flirt
| with $10M+ if they don't spend too much.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Is that in the world? Or in the USA. Idk I thought there
| would be more millionaires.
| Fricken wrote:
| Earning $60k/yr would put you in the global 1%.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| The massive economic productivity gains from AI will improve
| the lives of very few if some form of fair fiscal
| redistribution is not be put in place.
| ripvanwinkle wrote:
| This shouldn't be a surprise - capitalism always overshoots.
| Anything worth investing in will generally receive too much
| investment in because very few people can tell where the line is.
|
| And that's what causes bubbles but at this point it should be
| clear that AI will make a substantial impact - at least as great
| as the internet, likely larger
| ivape wrote:
| As FB IPO'd at 100bn, and marched to over 1T, when would you
| have considered it a bubble? You can ask the LLM if you need to
| ... catch my drift?
| Archonical wrote:
| I'm not sure I see the point. The march to $1T took 10 years
| with available financial statements.
| ivape wrote:
| You made the point for me. That 100bn doubled every 2-3
| years. It wasn't a bubble, but it absolutely looked like
| one. This will be a bitter lesson too.
| more_corn wrote:
| There's a typo. "Society" should be written as "five
| billionaires"
| taeric wrote:
| I see that my Echos want me to enable the new Alexa. I confess a
| great deal of trepidation on these. Fairly confident that this is
| not going to go smoothly.
|
| And again I'm baffled on how they would light such good will and
| functionality on fire.
| theartfuldodger wrote:
| Until costs of utilities, food, medical, insurance are dropped by
| technology, there are no societal gains, just loss of human jobs.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| AI is in a bubble like we don't need more than 16kb.
| yeyeyeyeyeyeyee wrote:
| People in the comments seem to have forgotten about, or never
| lived through, the dot com bubble. Amazon's shares fell from $113
| to $6 in 2000. So yes, the internet survived and some companies
| did well after, but a lot of people were hurt badly.
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| This seems obviously and trivially correct to me...
| ulfw wrote:
| Oh if Jeff Bezos says it then it must be true
| platevoltage wrote:
| I feel better knowing that someone that is as in touch with
| society as he is, is saying this.
| muldvarp wrote:
| I'd love to see those "gigantic benefits". Currently, the only
| positive thing about LLMs I hear regularly is that it made people
| more productive. They don't get paid more (of course), they're
| just more productive.
| james_oofou wrote:
| more productivity at same cost = more stuff, cheaper
| mgol94 wrote:
| Soo where is that deflation? Bc from what I see all of that
| extra productivity is landing in the pockets of shareholders
| james_oofou wrote:
| Right, so not a bubble then
| neuronic wrote:
| This lie is still being spread in economics classes?
| james_oofou wrote:
| No clue
| muldvarp wrote:
| More productivity at same cost = More profit for companies.
|
| Also, the cost of most of the stuff I (have to) buy (i.e.
| rent, groceries, ...) is not dominated by the wage of
| knowledge workers.
|
| Or to put it differently: If AI makes me lose my job but
| doesn't decrease my rent, I'm in a really bad position.
| james_oofou wrote:
| > More profit for companies
|
| Agreed. So I don't think it's a bubble.
|
| Will also be good for consumers in the long-term: much
| faster pace of drug discovery and new tech generally.
| muldvarp wrote:
| > Agreed. So I don't think it's a bubble.
|
| I'm not arguing it's a bubble. I'm arguing it's not going
| to be a "gigantic benefit" for society.
|
| > Will also be good for consumers in the long-term: much
| faster pace of drug discovery and new tech generally.
|
| Medicine and tech that knowledge workers won't be able to
| pay for without a job. I also don't think "new tech" is
| necessarily a good thing societally.
|
| The calculus is easy, really: AI makes 100% of my income
| worth less but only decreases the cost of a fraction of
| my expenditures. AI is bad for anyone that works for a
| living. That's pretty much all of society except for the
| top x%.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| *To sell, not to buy.
| delfinom wrote:
| I don't think I need email marketing spam or useless apps to
| be cheaper.
|
| The hard trades and manual labor services we consume for
| everything that matters daily? That's not going to be made
| cheaper by AI.
| gsky wrote:
| Yesterday, I asked an LLM to create a browser plugin and it got
| 98% correct in its first try.
| sema4hacker wrote:
| How many people can recognize that 2% is wrong? Of those, how
| many can fix the 2% without introducing more errors?
| asadotzler wrote:
| Yesterday someone's uncle tried the same thing and now his bank
| account's drained because the 2% that wasn't working was the 2%
| that prevented his password store from being posted online.
|
| See how that works? A few nerds think it's great while everyone
| else gets screwed by it.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get
| 'gigantic' benefits
|
| Yes. Cheap, second hand, datacenters.
| sylware wrote:
| Please, Mister Bezos: fix amazon shop to work again with
| noscript/basic (x)html browsers (like lynx).
|
| (oh, and keep on eye on all those 'internet scanners', 'script
| kiddies' using AWS for scans/attacks, honey pot time?).
| crnkofe wrote:
| Gotta say I'm pessimistic about the future of AI. At least until
| its adopted by public sector, schools and societies. Right now
| its just enhancing what we already have. More "efficient"
| meetings with auto-note-taking so we can have more meetings. More
| productivity so we can make less people do more, increase the
| workload and make them burn out faster. Better and more
| sophisticated scammers. More sophisticated propaganda by various
| legal and illegal actors. Cheaper and more grotesque looking vidz
| and music. More software slop. Not to mention all the "cool"
| improvements coming our way in the form of smart rockets, bombs
| and drones and of course I drool for all the smart improvements
| in surveillance capitalism 2.0. They call it a revolution but for
| now its just a catalyst for more of all the things we "love".
| m000 wrote:
| "During bubbles, every experiment or idea gets funded, the good
| ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the
| middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas
| and the bad ideas. ... But that doesn't mean anything that is
| happening isn't real."
|
| Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas? The
| whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can better
| align with the needs of the society and the current technological
| reality.
|
| If the investors aren't the gurus we make them to be, we might as
| well do with a planning committee. We could actually end up with
| more diversified research.
|
| "Under socialism, a lot of experimental ideas get funded, the
| good ideas and the bad ideas. And the planning committee have a
| hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing
| between the good ideas and the bad ideas. ... But that doesn't
| mean anything that is happening isn't real."
| cladopa wrote:
| There is a very important difference: real investors risk their
| own money, the money they saved over their entire life making
| decisions.
|
| Under socialism bureaucrats risk someone else's money.
|
| We are not in a pure capitalistic society, we also have States,
| central Banks with central planning expending over half the
| money in Europe and USA and more than half in Asia.
|
| As a European myself that see the public money being wasted by
| incompetent people and filling the pockets of politicians,
| specially marxist ones. For example, the money Spain received
| after COVID filled so many socialist pockets and has not given
| information back to Europe as of how it was spent(it was spent
| on their own companies of friend and family).
| tliltocatl wrote:
| >> There is a very important difference: real investors risk
| their own money, the money they saved over their entire life
| making decisions.
|
| Except for the "institutional investors".
| foxglacier wrote:
| Even then, the people the money came from voluntarily chose
| those institutions. If you don't like risky investments,
| there are lower risk institutions or products you can put
| your money in. It's still ultimately the will of the
| individual what they do with their money, and the
| consequences of bad choices are still mostly contained to
| the individuals who make them. But when it's done with tax
| money, everyone's dragged into it and has no personal
| choice in the matter. Even worse, when it's tax money
| without democracy, even if the majority of people don't
| like how it's used, they even collectively have no choice
| in the matter.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| Committees' investment tends to be not very diversified and
| often too risk-averse because of how blame placing works. E. g.
| most of soviet's cloning of chip (and many other products)
| wasn't due to lack of engineering skill - it's just less risk
| for the bureaucrats running the show. R&D for an original chip
| is risky and timing it to the next November the seventh is
| likely to not work. Cloning is a guaranteed success.
|
| The whole point of capitalism is that one is entitled to the
| consequences of their own stupidity or the lack thereof. The
| investors are more willing to take the risks because their
| losses are bounded - they are risking only as much as they are
| willing, rather than their status in an organization. Of course
| once all investors ends up investing into the same bubble there
| is no real advantage over a committee.
| probablypower wrote:
| > Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas?
|
| A lot of good ideas only look bad in hindsight. It costs time
| and money to determine goodness, and that deserves funding.
| danans wrote:
| > A lot of good ideas only look bad in hindsight. It costs
| time and money to determine goodness, and that deserves
| funding.
|
| Governments can also do that funding. The most pivotal
| technologies in recent history have been a result of
| government investment.
|
| Private capital has a role, but it's mostly at the
| productization phase, not fundamental research.
| nr378 wrote:
| > Remind me again why we need investors to fund bad ideas?
|
| Early stage investors generally fund a portfolio of multiple
| ideas, where each idea faces great uncertainty - some
| investments will do tremendously well, some won't. Invstors
| don't need every investment to do well due to the assymmetry of
| outcomes (a bad investment can at worst go down 100%, a good
| investment can go up 10,000%, paying off many bad investments).
|
| > The whole premise of western capitalism is that investors can
| better align with the needs of the society and the current
| technological reality.
|
| This is not the premise of capitalism, it's the justification
| for it - it's generally believed that capitalism leads to
| better outcomes over time than communism, but that doesn't mean
| capitalism has 0 wasteage or results in 0 bad decisions.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| We need investors to fund ideas to find out if they are good or
| bad. It is called testing.
| JCM9 wrote:
| All the smartest people I know in finance are preparing for AI to
| be a huge bust that wipes out startups. To them, everyone in tech
| is just a pawn in their money moving finance games. They view
| Silicon Valley at the moment salivating on what there plays are
| to make money off the coming hype cycle implosion. The best
| finance folks make the most money when the tide goes out... and
| they're making moves now to be ready.
|
| Take that for what it is.
| amelius wrote:
| Especially startups in AI are at risk, because their specific
| niche projects can easily be outcompeted when BigTech comes
| with more generalized AI models.
| james_oofou wrote:
| I'll take it for finance people being totally clueless, right?
| Have you talked to these people about AI?
| Archonical wrote:
| My experience has gone the other way than OOP: Anecdotally, I
| have had VCs ask me to review AI companies to tell them what
| they do so they can invest. The VC said VCs don't really
| understand what they're investing in and just want to get in
| on anything AI due to FOMO.
|
| The company I reviewed didn't seem like a great investment,
| but I don't even think that matters right now.
| JCM9 wrote:
| To be clear when I said "finance folks" I wasn't really
| referring to VCs. I'm talking more family office types that
| manage big pools of money that you don't know about. The
| super wealthy class that has literally has more money than
| the King but would be horrified if you knew their name. Old
| money types. They're well aware of the "dumb VC" vibe that
| just throws money after hype. The finance folks I'm talking
| about are the type that eat failed VCs for lunch.
| james_oofou wrote:
| And what is it that you believe about these old money
| types' knowledge of AI and why is it that you believe it?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| In my experience they invariably conflate LLMs with AI and
| can't/won't have the difference explained.
|
| This is _the_ blind spot that will cause many to lose their
| shirts, and is also why people are wrong about AI being a
| bubble. LLMs are a bubble within an overall healthy growth
| market.
| walleeee wrote:
| LLMs are a bubble on the back of an AI bubble in a market
| finally surmounting an enormous single-shot energy
| surfeit
| justin66 wrote:
| Just startups? Really?
| JCM9 wrote:
| Broader impact, but while the big players will take a hit the
| new wave of startups stands to take the brunt of the impact.
| VCs and startups will suffer the most.
|
| At the end of the day though it's how the system is designed.
| It's the needed forrest fire that wipes out overgrowth and
| destroys all but the strongest trees.
| ripped_britches wrote:
| Poor Jeff gonna miss that sweet AGI gravy
| Flatcircle wrote:
| If you listen to the speech it's a bit more nuanced than that
| headline.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It's very hard to find anything other than half saying AI is in a
| bubble, and we will pop any day now, and the other half declaring
| AGI by 2029, when a new revolution will begin. If you follow the
| hard science and not the money, you can see we're somewhere in-
| between these two takes. AI datacenters requiring new power
| plants is unsustainable for long-term growth. Meanwhile, we have
| LLMs accepting bullshit tasks and completing them. This is very
| hard to ignore.
| slaterbug wrote:
| > Meanwhile, we have LLMs accepting bullshit tasks and
| completing them.
|
| Would you mind elaborating on that? I'm not quite sure what you
| mean.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| By society, he means the oligarchy will get more power and
| control.
|
| Yeah, sure some side benefits to people. AI is still a nuclear
| weapon against labor in the capital - labor (haves - haves not),
| and will start pushing wealth inequality to the Egyptian pharoah.
|
| The only good news for plebians is that virtual reality
| entertainment means you just need a little closet to live in.
|
| Overall, this just leads up to further demographic decline, which
| as an environmental malthusian I would welcome in the initial
| stages to get us down from our current level, but I also suspect
| it would turn into an economic downward spiral, especially with
| AI, where the oligarchs have such total authoritarian control and
| monopoly on resources that humanity basically stops having kids
| at all.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| Seems like society isn't going to benefit much, but the
| ultrawealthy will benefit enormously.
| taberiand wrote:
| Of course they will, the ultra wealthy are too big to fail. In
| a bubble like this, they just invest in pretty much everything
| and take the losses on the 99% of failures to get the x1000
| multiples on the 1% of successes. While the rest of us take the
| hit.
| christiangenco wrote:
| To those who have everything more will be given; from those who
| have nothing everything will be taken.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| "Billionaire known for exploiting workers says 'trust me, you all
| will benefit from this'"
| fithisux wrote:
| AI is a solution searching for a problem.
|
| This is what he acknowledges.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Onion Headline 2026: "Unemployed data scientist glad society is
| benefiting from AI without him after layoffs."
| Jgoauh wrote:
| Well I say nuh-huh
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