[wnmurphy]

My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market.

Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

[victoro]

> Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

Well they are projected to spend $175 - $185B on capex in this year alone most of it for AI buildout. Lets say only 150B of that is for AI. If they can then somehow replace all their software engineers with AI that they then run for free and depreciate over 10 years then they just replaced 9B a year software expense with 15B a year depreciation expense for the next decade. Yes this is grossly oversimplified but it still illustrates how crazy high of a bet they're making on AI.

[nearbuy]

That's assuming they only use it to replace their software engineers and make no money selling AI usage or using it for anything else.

[ericbarrett]

> depreciate over 10 years

I believe the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allows full depreciation in the first year: https://www.bassets.net/blog/obbba-depreciation-2025-2026-gu...

[dahinds]

That's a bookkeeping issue, it doesn't affect the argument at all (which is that the capex has a finite useful life over which it would need to pay for itself).

[ericbarrett]

Yeah, just tangentially pointing out that asset depreciation rules in the U.S. changed recently. Could explain some of the crazy magnitude of this year's spending spree.

[majormajor]

> My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market.

That's not a new market, that's a new feature in an existing market. Lots going on in transportation and I'm not seeing any scenario where self-driving cars vastly increase total output vs just eat up other forms of transportation and change where people live/how long they commute.

> Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers. Google spends $9B a year on software engineers.

Similarly, many companies are trying to be more efficient - "do what we already do, but better". That's different than growth.

What could Google do with 9B on software agents? Let's say the future of them is amazing and this means they could write 100x more code than they can today.

Has Google recently showed much ability to turn "more/faster code" into "superbly profitable new market"?

Someone's gonna have to crack the demand side issue for anything transformative to happen.

[PieTime]

Market for who? Who is left working? If we can’t answer that question then we’re not prepared for what’s next.

[charlysl]

THIS is the question!

Henry Ford II: "Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?" Walter Reuther: "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?"

[irishcoffee]

Ah, the elephant in the room. Nobody seems able to answer this point, or even talk about it. Occam’s razor sure doesn’t imply a good outcome.

[jimkleiber]

For so long, people, especially politicians, have said that companies want to create jobs. But I think most companies want to create profit.

And for so long, I've had people tell me to just get a job. But I tell them that I don't want a job: I want money and I want something to do. Those two things don't have to be together.

I think this is the hard part: philosophically so many of us have learned we need jobs and don't realize a job can be decomposed into money and something to do.

So I think we need to start looking more creatively at 1) how people receive money from others and 2) how people give services to others.

[irishcoffee]

You’re trying to create nuance where there is none. Creating jobs exactly means “I want to pay someone less than the value they bring in to my company” and this has been true since forever.

Nobody cares that you want money and you want something to do that you enjoy. Nobody ever will.

If you actually dig into all the social programs that exist at least in the US, they’re just a massive payday for a small group of people under the guise of bettering humanity.

College/education is a fantastic example. Education as it has been established today is a joke. The humanities were originally established for rich bored wives to have something to do. They were never meant to create value. Colleges hang anvils around the necks of naive children via loans telling them “yes if you major in history you’ll have a job!” This is a joke, and a bad one.

Huxley was on to something. If everyone is educated, nobody collects trash, or chops lumber, mines minerals and metals, etc. it’s a big fucking not-talked-about open secret.

Nobody cares, either you bring something to the table someone else can exploit for money, or you lean into “I’m helpless and the government owes it to me to take care of me because I’ve been indoctrinated into learned helplessness.”

“AI” will at best lead to anarchy at this point, if all the grand visions of the billionaires comes to fruition. People have already tried to kill sama and burn his house down. Wait until armed humvees are driving around data centers. It’s coming.

[jimkleiber]

Well the essence of capitalism might be that people who own the capital receive money for owning it, not doing any labor on it necessarily.

So when we talk of people doing labor for money, we are assuming they can only own their body and receive money from that?

[captainbland]

Ah, well, nobody needs to buy them if the robots just provision everything for the people who would have otherwise had their businesses make cars.

[nine_k]

Driving a car is a chore, not a job (usually), much like washing dishes is. Dishwashers did not produce an economic collapse.

OTOH replacing people with AI would indeed bring about a huge economic downturn. What would be good is augmenting humans so that they can do 10x more. That would enable things that are hard to imagine exactly now, much like computers enabled interesting transformations in the society from 1980s to 2010s.

The current crop of AI is by construction unable to reach the human level of cognition, but it is quite good at doing some symbolic manipulation tasks. We will get used to that, and will integrate that in our workflows. Humans are still going to be needed.

[bobthepanda]

Tractor-trailer trucking alone is the 13th largest profession in the US. It’s not unusual for driving to be a whole profession in and of itself.

[nine_k]

Fair, but I spoke about cars, the commute / chore kind of work, not trucks, a commercial job.

[alluro2]

And do you feel that the industry in general, and individual companies are currently trying to augment / 10x their workers and have everyone share in the 10x profits that will bring? Or are they jumping on opportunity to try and cut costs by even single digits, by replacing those workers with AI and it's not their problem what those people do from there?

[nine_k]

If an employee brings in more profit than before, you want more such employees, not less.

You have to cut costs when the costs do not bring you enough profits.

[bobthepanda]

That assumes the market is infinitely expandable.

If in fact you can meet the same market demand with fewer workers and the market does not expand accordingly, you get deflation and job losses.

[MichaelZuo]

Huh?

Hundreds of billions are changing hands globally, every week, at the retail level alone.

And that happens literally every week, week after week.

That constitutes a massive market in any sense I can think of.

[tardedmeme]

That won't happen any more if nobody has jobs. It's also completely irrelevant because how did you just connect the self driving car market to the entirety of retail sales?

[MichaelZuo]

So you think a trend that is growing year after year, yes global retail sales grew from 2025 to 2026 week over week, indicates a future collapse?

That needs a way more complex explanation than simple gut feeling.

[sofixa]

> My car drives itself. That's a $18T global market

Which will take decades to become addressable. Self-driving cars work OK in a few cities in one country. Expanding that to be able to cover Mumbai and Omsk and Nairobi will require significantly more work.

> Also $1T in data center investment makes sense when you realize that companies are racing to create virtual white collar workers.

Does it make sense? How much would the resulting virtual white collar worker cost? Because datacenters have running operational costs, and so do the people operating them and working on the software that runs in them.

[lumost]

This probably ends in a deflationary spiral. The ai replaces the jobs, the lack of jobs chills demand, the ai becomes cheaper because it exists in a commodity market.

The money printer will be used, and maybe it all works out - or we see wealth hyperinflation and build out our own aristocracy.

[phs318u]

> My car drives itself.

No. It doesn’t. And if you’re defining “drives” as “it drives as well as I do” then you probably shouldn’t be on the road.

> makes sense

Nothing about any of this makes sense. Tell me, when all white collar jobs are replaced by AI, where will the customers come from? Who will have income to afford your products or services? The poor barista whose surveillance videos are training the robot that will soon replace them?

Leaving aside any consideration of human compassion or questioning of the purpose of an economic system (hint: it’s not just an abstract machine), shrinking the pool of potential customers by orders of magnitude has never been a recipe for sustainable success (let alone growth).