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0 pointstwoodfin29d ago0 comments

We were talking about infrastructure costs under increasing labor productivity. Now what are we talking about?

If the premise is that AI won’t improve productivity in industries like healthcare, education, and housing construction, then why are we worried about “the dead economy”?

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rglullis29d ago· 2 in thread

No. You are getting it backwards. The premise is: even if AI improves productivity, we the people are not going to benefit from it.

The mistake you are making is that you are assuming that a system where productivity per unit of labor is higher automatically translates into increased global output. It does not. This idea of a dead economy theory is precisely the concern we are heading to a world where machines can make practically everything on the cheap, but it won't matter because the moneyed class won't need to satisfy the demands of the general populace.

twoodfinOP28d ago

So we have a bunch of billionaires sitting around, surveying a world where a much smaller amount of labor will produce a much larger amount of output, and they collectively decide not to hire that labor or spend capital on the technology that generates that output in combination with that labor because… they have enough money already?

rglullis28d ago

No, ffs. You are missing that if they can do whatever they want with just "a small amount of labor", then the whole system gets to a point where Capital becomes the bottleneck for global productivity. People can not be trained faster than the machines can be created, so all that capital will go to an increasingly smaller number of workers.

To illustrate the point: Facebook laid off thousands of developers at the same time that it was hiring AI researchers, paying them tens of millions of dollars as a signing bonus.

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