[mrsilencedogood]

Software will ALWAYS be an attractive VC target. The economics are just too good. The profit margins are just inherently fat as fuck compared to literally anything else. Your main expense is headcount and the incremental cost of your widget is ~$0? It's literally a dream.

It's also why so much of AI is targeting software, specifically SAAS. A SaaS company with ~0 headcount driven by AI is basically 100% profit margin. A truly perfect conception of capitalism.

Meanwhile I think AI actually has a decent shot at "curing" cancer. AI-assisted radiology means screening could be come significantly cheaper, happen a lot more often, and catch cancers very early, which is extremely important as everyone knows to surviving it. The cure for cancer might actually just involve much earlier detection. But pfft what are the profit margins on _that_?

[daxfohl]

Yeah for the better part of a generation, our best and brightest minds have been wasted on "increasing click count". If that can all be AI from here on out, then maybe we can get actual humans working on the real problems again.

[drivebyhooting]

The problem was always funding. All those bright minds went into ads because it paid well. Cancer research, space, propulsion, clean, energy, etc.. none of those paid particularly well. Nor would they have afforded a comfortable life with a house and family. The evisceration of SWE does not guarantee a flourishing in other fields. On the contrary, increased labor supply with further pressure, wages, downwards.

[daxfohl]

Agreed, though I think we all knew that the software industry payscales were out of whack to begin with. Fresh college grads that can barely do a fizzbuzz making twice as much as experienced doctors.

What I don't know is, say the industry normalizes to roughly what people make in other engineering fields. Then does everything else normalize around that? i.e. does cost of living go down proportionally in SF and Seattle? Or does all the tech money get further sucked up and consolidated into VC pockets and parked in vacant houses, while we and our trite "cancer research" and such get shepherded off to Doobersville?

[drivebyhooting]

Expensive private schools, luxurious ski vacations, and exclusive neighborhoods existed long before the ascendance of software engineers. These had been the purview of investment bankers, high-powered, lawyers, realtors, etc..

For a brief time with big tech, it seemed like intellectual prowess could allow you to jump the social strata. But that arrangement need not exist. It’s perfectly possible, indeed likely that we will revert to the old aristocratic ways. The old boys’s network ways.

[b3kart]

It’s funny that perfect capitalism (no payroll expenses) means nobody has money to actually buy any of the goods produced by AI.

Re cancer: I wonder how significant is the cost of reading the results vs. the logistics of actually running the test

[daxfohl]

Bots using bots to write software for bots. And it only cost 5 trillion dollars!

The best part? Bots don't get cancer, so that problem is solved too!

[9rx]

> It’s funny that perfect capitalism (no payroll expenses) means nobody has money to actually buy any of the goods produced by AI.

When you remember that profit is the measure of unrealized benefit, and look at how profitable capitalists have become, its not clear if, approximately speaking, anyone actually has the "money" to buy any goods now.

In other words, I am not sure this matters. Big business is already effectively working for free, with no realistic way to ever actually derive the benefit that has been promised to it. In theory those promises could be called, but what are the people going to give back in return?

[acuozzo]

Can you please dig into this more deeply or suggest somewhere in which I can read more?

[fatherwavelet]

The economy in the 21st century developed world is mostly about acquiring positional goods. Positional goods as "products and services valued primarily for their ability to convey status, prestige, or relative social standing rather than their absolute utility".

We have so much wealth that wealth accumulation itself has become a type of positional good as opposed to the utility of the wealth.

When people in the developed world talk about the economy they are largely talking about their prestige and social standing as opposed to their level of warmth and hunger. Unfortunately, we haven't separated these ideas philosophically so it leads to all kinds of nonsense thinking when it comes to "the economy".

[9rx]

Money is an IOU; debt. People trade things of value for money because you can, later, call the debt and get the exchanged value that was promised in return (food, shelter, yacht, whatever) I'm sure this is obvious.

I am sure it is equally obvious that if I take your promise to give back in kind later when I give you my sandwich, but never collect on it, that I ultimately gave you my sandwich for free.

If you keep collecting more and more IOUs from the people you trade your goods with, realistically you are never going to be able to convert those IOUs into something real. Which is something that the capitalists already contend with. Apple, for example, has umpteen billions of dollars worth of promises that they have no idea how to collect on. In theory they can, but in practice it is never going to happen. What don't they already have? Like when I offered you my sandwich, that is many billions of dollars worth of value that they have given away for free.

Given that Apple, to continue to use it as an example, have been quite happy effectively giving away many billions of dollars worth of value, why not trillions? Is it really going to matter? Money seems like something that matters to peons like us because we need to clear the debt to make sure we are well fed and kept warm, but for capitalists operating at scales that are hard for us to fathom, they are already giving stuff away for free. If they no longer have the cost of labor, they can give even more stuff away for free. Who — from their perspective — cares?

[czl]

Money is less about personal consumption and more about a voting system for physical reality. When a company holds billions in IOUs, they are holding the power to decide what happens next. That capital allows them to command where the next million tons of aluminum go, which problems engineers solve, and where new infrastructure is built.

Even if they never spend that wealth on luxury, they use it to direct the flow of human effort and raw materials. Giving it away for free would mean surrendering their remote control over global resources. At this scale, it is not about wanting more stuff. It is about the ability to organize the world. Whether those most efficient at accumulating capital should hold such concentrated power remains the central tension between growth and equality.

[acuozzo]

The gap for me was mapping [continuing to hoard dollars] to [giving away free goods/services], but it makes sense now. I haven't given economics thought at this level. Thank you!

[jacquesm]

It's really simple: if you crash the market and you are liquid you can buy up all of the assets for pennies. That's pretty much the playbook right now in one part of the world, just the same happened in the former Soviet Union in the 90's.

[acuozzo]

I get (and got) that. My focus was specifically on: "its not clear if, approximately speaking, anyone actually has the 'money' to buy any goods now."

[AndrewKemendo]

Cause it’s mostly bought on credit now, not with cash

[llmslave]

when software gets cheap to build the economics will change