[bearjaws]

The economy is going to go into a deep recession for years with the current economic environment.

There will be nobody left to spend money, just increasing corporate and ultra high wealth spend. The rest will be left with food and water.

We are destroying currently valuable jobs to allocate resources to electricity and silicon, concentrating wealth into 10 companies pockets.

I don't know what comes after, but when you combine this with the Iran war it's going to be closer to economic depression.

[darth_avocado]

> I don't know what comes after

You start looking like South Africa, Brazil, India or other large economies with high concentration of wealth at the top.

[dmix]

All of them famous for top heavy bureaucracies meddling in industry and highly political byzantine rules for business, which is the current drumbeat the west is following.

[piva00]

Lumping "the West" as one thing in this argument is just wrong. The West is composed of so many different countries with their own legal systems, cultural baggage, bureaucratic and political processes which evolved differently over time that it makes your sentence meaningless.

From my own experience moving from Brazil, having ran businesses there, and later in life moving to "the West" (Sweden) there's simply no comparison between the hurdles you have in Brazil vs Sweden. No, not even the drumbeat is pointing in that direction, it's almost a literal different world.

You need to be more specific to make this kind of criticism, it is absurdly vague, and by that also quite unhelpful to any discussion.

[dmix]

That are exceptions but there is a noticeable trendline. The freedom of business index ranks Scandinavian countries pretty high. Norway, Sweden, and Finland tend to rank highest among Singapore and South Korea. Ireland tops it because it's a giant tax shelter but there's not much notable innovation there. Meanwhile UK, France, Italy, Spain are ranking poorly. The US has been declining there slowly, which is much more obvious when you factor in local/state/housing etc, federally it's long been more permissive but fiscally irresponsible.

My personal indicator is how many young (<50) entrepreneurs are building real stuff vs announcements of ex-bigco executives partnering with the government to jump on a new bandwagon.

[intrasight]

Start?

[dragon-hn]

It can get so much worse than what we have in the West.

[kjkjadksj]

Lack of density in the US means we at least get the mexican version of this not the indian/bladerunner flavor.

[darth_avocado]

Neither South Africa nor Brazil are that dense, which is why I included them as examples.

[carefree-bob]

heh, I guess "bearjaws" is a good name.

I don't see any doom or gloom, but what I do see is that tech companies massively ballooned headcount, and are now scrambling to return to sustainable levels, using anything as an excuse in order to avoid saying "we exercised poor judgment in 2020-2023". It must be AI! It's blockchain! It's tariffs! It's global warming! The list of excuses goes on and on, but just look at what the headcount was for these companies in 2020, and think about whether it makes sense for them to add that many new people.

Management screwed up.

I guess you can take this as a harbinger of Total Collapse, but I don't think that's warranted. Oracle added 30,000 people since 2020 and they are now realizing that this was foolish, given that Oracle's primary source of revenue growth is hiking license fees for legacy products. They don't need 30,000 new people. They don't even need the 130,000 people they had in 2020.

[palmotea]

> The rest will be left with food and water.

Why? That's wasteful. The money for that should go to the shareholders, and the moocher problem will solve itself in a couple of weeks.

[matty22]

Read the history of just about any political revolution in history. Eventually, those oligarchs at the top find their heads in the guillotine.

[monero-xmr]

I heard this canard my entire life. It’s been said for centuries. If you want maximum employment pass a law that says all grass must be cut with scissors. Otherwise let productivity gains diffuse out - that’s the only way to increase true wealth

[haxiomic]

You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest. We have analogs we can compare to: massive wealth injections through a natural resource such as oil. Now what happens to that wealth is not obvious; for some countries it's a curse with radical inequality and pernicious and robust power structures, in fewer it has been bestowed to the heritage of the people (think Norway)

Now, the nature of AI is to change the balance of the labour trade. We have a notion of the “economic value of the average person” which is presently very high in the western world.

What happens when the median figure drops through 0 thanks to AI?

Do the remaining wealth owners share their wealth? How often does this occur in existing systems we can compare against?

The cost of primary resources to products also goes toward 0, perhaps this offsets the decreasing economic power of the average person. But what forces protect them if their bargaining power is lost?

[Terr_]

> _why_ the gains must diffuse out

Especially because there's no a priori reason to expect it to occur "naturally". Strong inequality arises automatically in mathematical models.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inev...

[fragmede]

> You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest.

Late 18th century France has a historical point of view as to why the gains will diffuse out if the median person has no food.

[ajross]

> You need to explain, from a systems point of view _why_ the gains must diffuse out as you suggest.

Do we? I mean, isn't "because they always have" enough of an argument on its own?

I am hardly a libertarian ideologue nor AI-first LLM jockey. But I do think people tend to catastrophize too much. Blacksmiths were killed dead by the industrial revolution. "Secretary" is a forgotten art. It's been decades since an actuary actually calculated a sum on an actual table. And the apocalypse didn't arrive. All those jobs, and more, were backfilled by new stuff that was previously too expensive to contemplate. We're eating at more restaurants. We can find jobs as content creators and twitch streamers.

Life not only goes on after rapid technological change, it improves. That's not to say that every individual is going to appreciate it in the moment or that regulation and safety net work needs to happen at the margins. But, we'll all be fine.

AGImageddon is, at its core, just another economic phenomenon driven by technology. And that's basically always worked to society's benefit over the long term.

[_DeadFred_]

The 1880s blacksmith didn't become a 1950s American suburbanite. They moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row, the section of town for failures who couldn't 'adapt' to the new modern world. Their children died in WW1 in a trench to industrial produced gas. Their children's children were transported around the world to die storming a beach in WW2. And their children's children's children lived on meager 1940-60 diets as the world rebuilt it's food stocks destroyed by industrialized war, eating new industrial food replacements like margarine and SPAM. There were hundreds of millions of industrial enabled deaths. There was industrial enabled famine and near famine.

That all gets waived away with 'always worked to society's benefit'. It took almost 70 years and the post WW2 destruction of the rest of the worlds economies/infrastructure to create that 1950s American suburbanite world. 'always worked to society's benefit over the long term' is just handwaving not based on the reality of adapting, or if those societies even wanted to join in.

Because not all peoples/nations even had a choice. Japan among many originally opted out. But they were forced to 'modernize'. Peoples around the world were forced into the industrial world by railroads and machine guns and the industrial need for rubber/banana whatever plantations or lumber or strip mines. Once one nation passed through the door, every nation had to follow or be subjugated.

[Terr_]

To highlight one of your points: Adaptation is very different than dying and being replaced with a new cohort.

We have to be very careful about fallacies of division.

[ajross]

> The 1880s blacksmith [...] moved to shared housing in Manchester and a shorter lifespan working for poverty wages, lost fingers/arms in machines, maybe ended up on skid row

That's... just not remotely true, unless you're talking about it as a maybe-it-happened-to-someone story. In fact it's basically a lie.

Every income group in the US (and recognize that "blacksmiths" represent skilled trades workers who earned well above median and had for thousands of years!) saw huge, huge, HUGE increases between 1880 and 1950. I mean... are you high?

> It took almost 70 years and the post WW2 destruction of the rest of the worlds economies/infrastructure to create that 1950s American suburbanite world.

Again, big citation needed on this one. Western Europe was very close to US quality-of-life numbers by the 60's, and the more successful nations started to pass it in the 90's. (Also recognize that the US had already pulled ahead in the 30's, Germany and France were lagging even before the war). You're looking at something along the lines of a decade to rebuild, tops.

[_DeadFred_]

You need to tighten up before you call someone a liar. Manchester is the poster child city for the industrial revolution. The blacksmith moving to Manchester had a lower lifespan/quality of life, it's not in question or up for debate. He is who we will be in the AI disruption, not the person in 1950.

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...

https://healthinnovationmanchester.com/cottonopolis-to-metro...

You don't think there are 70 years between 1880 and the end of WW2 and the real start of suburban American prosperity we think of when we think of the end results today? And I need a citation? Or are you saying I should use 1960 not 1950s as the point, since it took a decade to rebuild in much of the world?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb#Postwar_suburban_expans...

Or are you arguing that butter use recovered over margarine before the 1970s? https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016/july/butter-and-ma...

[haxiomic]

This pattern continuing indefinitely without the need for analysis would be certainly nice but we do need to confront recent data. In the US, multiple metrics of quality-of-life peaked around 2015 and have declined since then, with some showing 11% decline while US total wealth has doubled! (with the majority of that decline pre-covid and pre-AI) [0][1][2].

What forces act on this trend? How can we make predictions? An interesting metric, which tracks the aggregate of many complex factors is the distribution of wealth, which could be seen as proxy for the distribution of power or agency of a person in their society. Median income as a fraction of total wealth decreased nearly 50% in real terms over this same period. [3]

Now inversely, during the period where life quality increased most the last century (1920 - 1980) inequality was _falling_.

How is super-human AI advanced through 2030, 2040, 2050 likely to affect things? Will it sharpen the inequality or relax it?

With AI the cost of raw resources to products goes down, but it's likely inequality increases. It's not obvious which force has a bigger impact on human quality of life as things shake out. However, I think the strongest argument – which also explains the steady improvements in QoL through previous changes you mentioned – has been to follow inequality, or median share of power in society.

- [0] https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp

- [1] https://www.socialprogress.org/social-progress-index

- [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGZ1FL192090005Q

- [3] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58533

[gruez]

>This pattern continuing indefinitely without the need for analysis would be certainly nice but we do need to confront recent data. In the US, multiple metrics of quality-of-life peaked around 2015 and have declined since then, with some showing 11% decline while US total wealth has doubled! (with the majority of that decline pre-covid and pre-AI) [0][1][2].

>- [0] https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/indices_explained.jsp

It's hard to take that metric seriously when the top city is Raleigh, NC. If that were the best city you'd expect people to vote with their feet and move their in droves.

[piva00]

There's an argument about the speed of change though, a society going through the technological evolution from blacksmithing to industrial metallurgy didn't experience it happening in the short-medium term (1-10 years), it had a gradient of change.

Over time with the speed of technological development compounding on itself, the rate of change becoming much more acute, there's a debate to happen on the "what if this change happens over 5-10 years"? Can you imagine a world where in 10 years most well-paid office jobs are automated away, there's no generational change to re-educate and employ people, there would be loads of unemployable people who were highly-specialised to a world that ceased to exist, metaphorically overnight in the span of a human life.

Pushing this concern away with "it happened in history and we're fine" leaves a lot of room for catastrophising, at least a measured discussion about this scenario needs to be had, just in case it happens in a way that our historical past couldn't account for. No need to be a doomer, nor a luddite, to have the discussion: can we be in any way prepared for this case?

[ajross]

I mean, arguably AI is faster (but it's equally arguably oversold, certainly we aren't seeing that kind of change yet). But the stuff I cited was faster than you think. In the rural US, in 1900, most routine transport was still done with horses. By the 20's it was basically all in trucks, and trucks don't need hand-forged shoes that the blacksmiths were making[1]. Likewise professional typists were still clacking away in 1982 but by the mid 90's their jobs[2] had been 100% automated.

[1] "Blacksmithing" didn't disappear, obviously, but it survives as an expert craft for luxury goods. That's sort of what's going to happen to "hacking" in the future, I suspect.

[2] Likewise, some of the best positions survived as "personal assistants" for executive staff too lazy to learn to type. Interestingly these positions are some of the first being destroyed by the OpenClaw nonsense.

[k32k]

Your example is flawed.

The professional typist' role evolved - to serving through other ways, as you say - by become executive assistants. Much like a Bank Tellers' role also evolved.

And its not because they (executives) are too lazy to type. They actually need people to manage their calendar, monitor emails etc. Moreover, the personal computing revolution led to an expansion of firms that needed more of said people.

Could this be disrupted by things like OpenClaw? Maybe. Personally I doubt it. Trust is a huge element that LLMs have yet to overcome and may never over come. Its the same reason Apple pulled "Apple Intelligence". I know this place is full of doom and gloom, but I am not a SWE by trade so I can see the bigger picture and not get bogged down by the fact it might affect my income.

Moreover, work is more 'fun' with people around. So to you it may seem irrational to keep employed for that basis (call it Culture) but to others, and in particular the executive class - nope. People will start realising things like this once the hysteria dies down.

[jayd16]

We can use technology to increase production and have a progressive tax. There is absolutely no reason we need to endure the extreme wealth divide.

[monero-xmr]

If there is a need that people pay for, and it took 10 people, and technology comes and it can now be done by 1 person, that is a great thing. That’s not a bad thing at all. That’s exactly how the world progresses forwards. Everyone can get the need met, and at a cheaper cost, while freeing the other 9 people to do something else useful.

That is why we have the standard of living we have today

[zahlman]

I genuinely cannot understand why this comment was killed. Even if you disagree with the position, there's nothing at all objectionable about how it's being presented.

[acdha]

I think it’s because it’s ignoring the impact of concentration and the range of affected jobs. When, say, people switched from animals as the primary source of motive power for shipping, relatively few people immediately lost their livelihood because the things now using engines still employed tons of people (a delivery guy had to learn to drive but the rest of the job was similar) and a bunch of new jobs were created.

Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.

[monero-xmr]

Perhaps white collar employees have felt jobs not conducted in an office are beneath them. Because a wide range of physical jobs pay a lot more than office work already

[johndhi]

The govt can't spend money well

[skeeter2020]

and (likely) your entire life we've seen concentration of wealth and resources in the west. It's not about maximum employment but about much more basic things like utilization and purpose. There has been no general productivity diffusion on a national basis. Gains have come from outsourcing the lower productivity jobs without acknowledging the cost: the destination subsidizes by not investing growth in their own people but by maintaining an artificially lower-cost region, and the outsourcer (i.e. the US) finances with their currency.

[AdamN]

Who are you responding to? OP made a moral argument for sure but he wasn't pushing for maximum employment.

[bequanna]

> I don't know what comes after, but when you combine this with the Iran war it's going to be closer to economic depression.

I follow your extrapolation in the first part, but this is where you lost me.

Why is the Iran war guaranteed to have long-term net negative consequences? It seems far too early to predict the outcome with any kind of certainty.

[jcranmer]

About 20% of the world's oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which is effectively closed right now. So far, the economy is coping by drawing down inventories elsewhere and praying that the strait reopens soon, but even then, crude oil futures are skyrocketing (up 50% in a week). If this lasts for a few months--and if a few oil tankers get blown up in the crossfire--this is going to be a repeat of the 1970's oil embargo. There is also the worry that the war is going to end up targeting and destroying a significant chunk of oil production facilities in the region, which will persist the energy crisis well beyond the end of active hostilities.

Combine that with the fact that the war is being led by a senile idiot who is unable to articulate a strategic purpose for the war in the first place and being prosecuted by someone who thinks that war crimes are aspirational, and you begin to understand that there is actually little prospect of this being resolved anytime soon.

[Ostrogoth]

One potential knock-on impact of the strait being effectively closed, is that at some point the gulf states will be forced to shut-in production as local storage fills up and production can’t be exported. That combined with war damage to critical transport/export infrastructure will cause a lag where production can’t meet global demand even when the strait re-opens. Turning oil wells back on is not like flipping on a light switch.

[velik_m]

It's already happening: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kuwait-cuts-oil-refining-outp...

[toast0]

Ignoring concerns about the wisdom of the war; there's about three directions this can go:

Fizzle out: Strait reopens cause Iran needs ocean shipping.

Continue as now: oil trade disrupted, but using lots of missiles and drones and things; increased munitions demand leads to increased manufacturing jobs.

Boots on the ground: oil trade reopened, long term quagmire, probably more munitions production.

[nradov]

The other Gulf States will now have to greatly increase military spending in order to protect their sea lines of communication against Iranian aggression. A lot of that spending will flow to US defense contractors. (I'm not claiming this is a good thing, just that it's inevitable.)

[shimman]

Not just oil but a lot of fertilizers goes through the strait as well, fertilizers that have to be applied at certain moments of the year. Missing a shipment by a few months will decimate crop yields across the world.

If you think food is expensive now, wait until fall!

Unrelated, Grapes of Wraith is a good read if you're looking for something to distract yourself with.

[mjburgess]

Iran's principle strategy is to impose severe economic consequences on the US and its allies, to tip the balance of resolve in their favour. This is easy for them to do, because closing vital shipping lanes and attacking energy infrastructure in the region is done at only the cost of a few drones -- whilst defending this is incredibly expensive. This asymmetry is the only one which is profoundly in Iran's favour, and their best strategy for forcing a diplomatic resolution. This is why they are attacking multiple US allies in the region.

[lumost]

The Iran war is symptomatic of what's to come. If the US/other major powers feel unconstrained to wage semi-limited disruptive conflicts at will - then the world will be much less stable.

Iran can close the straight of hormuz as retaliation, and there really isn't anything that can be done about it except for invasion. Other countries have similar capabilities or can acquire them readily. If Cuba wanted to close the gulf in retaliation for a US attack - they could, Denmark could lock the north sea to US shipping and naval traffic etc. etc.

[nradov]

Cuba has effectively zero capability to project military power beyond their territorial waters. They can't close the Gulf of Mexico or even credibly threaten to do so. They are in no way comparable to Iran. As an island nation with limited natural mineral resources they're also very vulnerable to blockade.

[lumost]

Shahed style drones are quite inexpensive, the straight between key west and cuba is only 90 miles. To my knowledge, it is practically impossible to destroy distributed shahed launchers from an air campaign alone.

[nradov]

To my knowledge it is practically possible to carpet bomb Cuba and just kill everyone on the island. And they have almost zero domestic manufacturing capacity to build long-range drones (or anything else).

[convolvatron]

turn it around. how is it possible that we interfere with a population, already inflamed with hatred because of past interference, and expect them to become moderate apolitical consumers. we kill more fathers, there will be more angry sons. that's been going on for more than 50 years. so no, it doesn't seem like there is any good outcome to be had by invading yet another country in the area and setting up another weak puppet government. what is the end game supposed to be here?

[nradov]

There's no end game. In foreign policy circles they refer to this as "mowing the grass". Whenever an adversary starts to become a credible threat then bomb them enough to knock them down a few notches and delay the problem. From a purely amoral geopolitical perspective this can be effective, although at tremendous human cost.

[convolvatron]

personally I think this is 'fair'. wave your stick around and threaten people and the community takes away your stick. But I don't really trust this administration to follow the wisdom of the elder Bush. it seems a situation primed to follow the course of the mideast wars of the last couple decades, where the US stayed purely for the reason of not wanting to own up to the obvious and attempt to force some kind of submission. I guess we can check in a couple weeks to see which way the wind the blowing.

[ericfr11]

When a country leader says "another country leader won't last without my approval", he becomes an imperialist driven by power and money