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by FuckButtons 30 days ago
You assume that the people who are at the top of the organizations generating said wealth will have any incentive to do that. Look around the world at the petro states for examples of a highly capital intensive industry generating money that subsidizes the rest of the economy.
2 comments
throw310822 30 days ago
If you think that people won't have work and therefore no money to buy anything, there will be no wealth- not for the people and not for the riches. The value of Google or Tesla go to zero without masses of people paying for their products.
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vanuatu 30 days ago
1. AI seems different here, American AI companies doing better seems to result in the rest of the American economy doing better as intelligence is generally productivity increasing. Plus it's not bound by physical scarcity as oil. It feels more like cloud computing or electricity

2. Even if we were to assume an analogy to a petro state, it seems like we as a society can decide if we go the route of Norway or Venezuela

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claytongulick 30 days ago
> generally productivity increasing

Are you aware of any reputable study that supports this? Everything I've seen, coding included, has productivity at a net neutral at best, with large cost increases due to LLMs.

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vanuatu 30 days ago
https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/

This is probably the best one for coding? The two main findings are that developers didn't want to do tasks without AI (implication being that they would find it too tedious) and for the tasks that were measured, there was a speedup (and more of a speedup if you had more experience with AI tools)

Unfortunately "productivity" is very hard to measure directly. I prefer looking at how much money companies are paying Applied AI companies (a lot) because in aggregate, that meant these companies justified ROI vs. OpenAI/Anthropic directly, and sufficiently enough that large enterprises are willing to go through the time and money to spend on a vendor. It's not foolproof but it dampens the effect of companies tokenmaxxing their Codex/Claude Code to look productive.

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