[HN Gopher] Do Markets Believe in Transformative AI?
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Do Markets Believe in Transformative AI?
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 21 points
Date : 2026-02-08 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marginalrevolution.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (marginalrevolution.com)
| akomtu wrote:
| It tells a lot about our society that the only way to apply
| capital is to build a slop machine that will make us redundant.
| thrance wrote:
| Nothing new here, that's basically what the luddites complained
| about: the machines that replaced them output worse quality
| garments and sent them all to the streets. It only benefitted
| the owners. Capital will always seek to rid itself of its
| dependence on labor, until it eventually succeeds...
| delichon wrote:
| > It only benefitted the owners.
|
| And the buyers. As a ballpark estimate, it would take around
| 50 hours of human labor to produce a shirt by hand, fabric
| plus sewing, versus about an hour of human labor by
| industrial machines. That lowers the cost greatly, which most
| consumers demonstrably value over custom tailoring.
| thrance wrote:
| At the time, the quality of machine-made clothes was
| noticeably worse than human-made. It's debatable wether the
| "consumers" (the term certainly wasn't used at the time)
| won in the end. Terry Pratchett's "Boots theory" feels
| relevant here:
|
| > Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a
| month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots
| cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which
| were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like
| hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.
| Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore
| until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he
| was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the
| cobbles.
|
| > But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and
| years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of
| boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years'
| time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots
| would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same
| time and would still have wet feet.
| delichon wrote:
| > It's debatable whether the "consumers" won in the end.
|
| If "in the end" is now, it's pretty clear that automation
| has made clothing both better and cheaper. And paying $10
| now for shoes of less than 1/5th value of $50 shoes much
| later, or not at all, can be entirely rational. Most of
| us make that kind of compromise frequently.
| stoneforger wrote:
| It's a cult, these people really just want to believe
| everything is better because of unhinged capitalism, not
| despite it.
| delichon wrote:
| I just bought a new shirt on eBay for $22, including
| shipping. If that shirt had taken 50x as much labor to
| produce, what would it have cost? Is it unhinged
| capitalism to prefer the cheap shirt?
| asdff wrote:
| The only reason why the shirt is cheap is because we
| value your labor in the dollars an hour and the shirt
| maker's labor in the pennies.
|
| Now what if you made that same $5 a week as the shirt
| maker. Is that $22 shirt still cheap? How many might you
| own? Now think of what shirt the $5 week shirt maker is
| wearing. It says Chicago Bulls on it and was given to
| them by a nonprofit. The nonprofit only had this shirt
| available because people like him make 1000 shirts a day
| to sell to westerners to wear for a few weeks
| collectively before they give it for free to goodwill.
|
| Does this seem like a sustainable, scalable system of
| resource and labor distribution to you? Or is it based
| entirely on the fact that there exist some orphan
| crushing machine still in some corner of the world to
| make it seem cheap and frictionless for those of us in
| the global 1%?
| mono442 wrote:
| I don't believe it'll work for anything that doesn't have a tight
| feedback loop. So while it can replace a lot of software
| engineers, it doesn't seem plausible to me that it would make a
| significant difference in other engineering industries.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| The markets and I agree then.
|
| I'm a firm believer in technological progress, but not so fond of
| group-think hype trains. The LLM/diffusion breakthrough(s) are
| huge, but they aren't what their rabid fans/neurotic critics are
| thinking.
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