[Retric]

> one virtual mega company

Free market efficiency is inherently tied to having multiple companies. Treating the entire economy as a single company gives nonsensical results because it fundamentally differs from what actually occurs. You might as well compare the economy to a game of tick tack toe, inherent complexity isn’t something you can simplify it has meaningful consequences.

Your ideas like many other ideas are simply wrong.

> could somehow know the future

Perfect accuracy isn’t the only possibility here, there’s levels of error.

Our system involves intermediaries between the actual owners of capital and the allocation of that capital who have very different incentives. When the worst possibility is missing a bonus there’s little difference between losing 10% of an investors money and 100%. That results in inefficiency through the misalignment of incentives.

That is actually true, and thus there’s no way to gloss over that truth without simply being wrong.

[fsckboy]

>Treating the entire economy as a single company gives nonsensical results

trust me bub, I've studied much more econ than you. If a competitive market sets the prices (check, that's what is happening), and you want to analyze statistics of a sector (check, that's what we are doing), you can take those competitive prices as "given" and hold them constant, and consolidate the assets of in industry into one virtual entity. No claims were being made about competition, the claim is that "it is validate to consolidate statistic of what you are trying to study.

"how much did the AI sector make last year? how much will it make next year?" is not answered by running a simulation of competitive marketplace with production functions.

>>could somehow know the future

>Perfect accuracy isn’t the only possibility here, there’s levels of error.

if you deviate from the market's prediction of the future, you are increasing your levels of error; why do that?

[Retric]

> I've studied much more econ than you.

Then try and justify why you say shit this clueless:

> how much will it make next year?" is not answered by running a simulation of competitive marketplace with production functions.

Profits next year very much depend on the number of companies involved 1 vs 100 is not going to give the same results. Like I hope you realize how false what you just said was. Because if you actually believe this there’s literally no point in talking with you.

[fsckboy]

>That’s an overly simplified model. AI companies spending results in infrastructure beyond the company such as manufacturing capacity, power lines, software systems, and even individual expertise.

in a competitive marketplace, economic profit will go to zero. so whether an AI company buy or rents outside infrastructure, or builds it itself doesn't matter, it makes no difference. Therefore, if your argument is "outside infrastructure X", you can see the meaning of that by looking at "assume the company bought up the whole industry including outside infrastructure, then go back and look what I said and it still applies" A company monopolizing outside infrastructure for its own use would not abuse its monopoly against itself, but even if it did, makes no difference the extra profit and extra loss would balance out. Would it abuse its monopoly against downstream customers? if we use the existing market prices unchanged in our example, that is analyzing the case where it does not, which is the case that is comparable to the current situation.

or to put it another way, let's say these are all publicly traded companies competing. What if I told you "hey, i've investigated the ownership of all these public shares, guess what, Elon Musk owns them all, he owns every share of every company in AI, and all the infrastructure suppliers. Does that change the analysis from what we see in the marketplace? no, it doesn't. You want to draw a bigger circle around more affected parties, the suppliers to the infrastructure suppliers: OK, Elon owns those too it turns out.

nobody is analyzing the future here, we're talking about the case of AI going bust, not trying to predict AI going bust.

if were were going to project the future, we still would not do it with a simulation using functions to model companies to try to come up with meaningful profit numbers, we would project profits (and costs and revenues) based on margins of similar industries

[Retric]

> in a competitive marketplace … current situation.

Lots of words to say you don’t understand what you’re talking about.

At the most simple level monopolies extract profits through raising prices above that of a competitive market. This price increase reduces total sales even as it drives up profits.

As such the existence or non existence of a monopoly would change how much energy/etc AI was consuming among a host of other effects completely independent of how much utility it provided.

> nobody is analyzing the future here

That’s genuinely funny.

[fsckboy]

again, nothing that you are talking about has anything to do with the conversation I initiated. (IBM used to be a monopoly, now they're not. How much power did they do they use? we don't need economics, we just look at their power bill, it's that much, that's the impact they have on the power grid.)

if you want to sound like you know what you are talking about, don't talk about "total sales", you want to talk about quantity demanded at the market clearing price vs the monopoly price, and the effect that has on producer surplus.

and what is bad about a monopoly in economic terms is not that they extract a higher price and profit from their smaller number of customers (those customer choose to purchase the product because it's worth it to them), it's the dead weight loss which represents unmet demand which slows the economy overall

[Retric]

> we just look at their power bill

We can’t look at next year’s power bill today. Hell finding their power bills from 1930 isn’t trivial either, thus we model the universe and test those models rather than just making up nonsense models that look pretty.

> that's the impact they have on the power grid.

That’s only the direct effect, the indirect effects get way more complicated.

The fact you’re constantly demonstrating profound ignorance is why I am treating you like a 5 year old. You understood what I said and had no defense, thus my use of simple terms was entirely justified. Using more words to say exactly what I just said doesn’t change my opinion. Instead try and apply that line of reasoning to your earlier statements and find the issue, that would demonstrate some actual understanding.

PS: The economic harm from monopolies extends to R&D etc but …