[frognumber]

It's very unclear to me.

The key question is on direction of LLMs. Right now, LLMs are taking over human jobs. If the cost of silicon+power < cost of human being doing the same work, what rational reason is there to employ a human being?

If this applies to SWEs, lawyers, business analysts, many research scientists, .... this situation could persist for a long, long time. While capital costs less than the inputs of labor (nominal food, housing, etc.), there is no need for labor.

The key question is about continued progress in models, and of the tooling around them:

- Plateau: Old silicon obsoletes in due course

- Rise quickly: Old silicon maintains value for a long time

[fluidcruft]

What I don't understand is if nobody has jobs, who's paying the machines to do anything?

So okay cool you don't need people to design and build cars. Who's going to buy the cars and where exactly are they finding money?

But see also the "radiologists driving to work" meme for why I think tech in general is currently getting high off their own farts.

[saulpw]

Rich people become the only consumers.

[andy_ppp]

Yes, the plan seems to be anti human in the extreme. Why do you need the plebs if they can be entirely replaced by AI? But the question then becomes why does the AI (and before that their security detail in a post money world) need billionaires?

[iugtmkbdfil834]

This likely is the tertiary reason as to why llms are so heavily kneecapped. Granted, at this point, projects do exist to remove those arbitrary restrictions, but the effort that goes into it suggests it is a real concern.

[laichzeit0]

I think the Amish will mostly be fine. Maybe that's how the future looks like.

[ben_w]

Long term, or short term?

Short term, money physically exists and gets spent, so if you wave a magic want of oversimplification and transition all labour to AI instantly, all the money currently in bank accounts and wallets gets spend on the same businesses it was already getting spent on, a lot of which gets spent on stuff from other businesses who have in this scenario also replaced all their labour with AI.

Eventually, perhaps quickly, all this money ends up in the hands of shareholders and landlords. There's a lot of both in the economy; famously retirement funds, but smaller-scale shareholders and landlords also exist. I wouldn't want to guess what the distribution looks like, probably highly variable between countries not just social classes (the definitions of which themselves can vary between countries).

Long term, money exists as a convenient fiction to help us organise transactions of goods and services: while it may be physically possible to eat gold and banknotes, you're not getting any real nutrients out of it when you do. So in a world where goods and services come from machines, the options are too broad to forecast: humanity could be relegated to the same role and economic stature as other primates (both in and out of zoos), or we could get universal UBI denominated in machine labour credits which lets each of us live better lives than the most extravagant billionaires live today.

[fluidcruft]

I don't know. It just seems odd because money was used as an abstraction of labor and if labor disappears it seems like money has no fundamental value. If you can't pay people to do something (because machines are doing all the labor). Then people have no money and money has no value to people. Industrialization resulted in transition to service-based economy but this new wave of machines are being said to replace service work.

I'm just trying to understand if suppose you have fully robotic farms and fully automated slaughterhouses and fully automated McDonald's, who is McDonald's selling anything to and how do these people supposedly buying fully-mechanized burgers have jobs? Something just doesn't add up about this in my head about how this equation balances.

UBI ultimately seems like socialism with extra steps. Mostly is comes across as billionaires desperately begging for an alternative to being nationalized.

[BobbyTables2]

I’ve also wondered about this.

Industrialization allowed people to shift human labor from agriculture to factories and such.

Seems like intellectual labor became more possible as people looked beyond subsistence but also more valuable since a greater population could drive demand for more than just subsistence related activities.

If both aren’t done by many humans, what’s left? Sports training and massage therapy? Sports training might not even be safe…

OTOH, my current lifestyle is already weird if I think about it. Developing software for a machine that I cannot make myself, whose raw materials I cannot obtain, using energy I cannot produce on my own — somehow entitles me to get a particular amount of goods and services from others including food, healthcare, entertainment, landscaping, and manufactured goods.

We live in interesting times…

[ben_w]

> If both aren’t done by many humans, what’s left? Sports training and massage therapy? Sports training might not even be safe…

Peacock tails.

As in, things where the effort itself is the point, to show off that you are capable of surviving when you consume resources so extravagantly on something other than (or even detrimental to) mere survival.

This includes stuff like hand-made art, being in a literal cult, extreme sports, and also refusing modern medical interventions/seeking out infections.

You may ask how someone can get paid for those things; I don't know, but we did manage to monetise talking to each other (ads on Facebook) and being locked in a house with some strangers while everyone's under surveillance cameras for a few weeks (TV show Big Brother).

[andrekandre]

  > how do these people supposedly buying fully-mechanized burgers

stand in line and watch some ads; the more you watch, the more you can order!

[ben_w]

What good is showing ads to someone with no money?

(Only answer I can think of is political ads).

[ben_w]

> I'm just trying to understand if suppose you have fully robotic farms and fully automated slaughterhouses and fully automated McDonald's, who is McDonald's selling anything to and how do these people supposedly buying fully-mechanized burgers have jobs? Something just doesn't add up about this in my head about how this equation balances.

Well, people need to eat, so either the customers are on government support, or it comes from passive income, or from savings.

The people without those options, do it the old fashioned way: pick berries, throw rocks at animals, rub sticks for fire to cook them, or starve. Mostly starve, as the maximum number of humans who can survive as hunter-gatherers is 100-1000x smaller than the current global population.

> UBI ultimately seems like socialism with extra steps.

I agree. It's very much "from each according to their ability, oh wait we're all strictly worse than machines I guess that's from each nothing, to each according to their needs".

> Mostly is comes across as billionaires desperately begging for an alternative to being nationalized.

Perhaps, but that feels like claiming they're playing 5D chess, when Zuckerberg only plays Settlers of Catan with sycophants who let him win.

[somenameforme]

The overwhelming majority of the labor force remains service, manual labor, and other such stuff that LLMs will have no real effect on. So the economy will be fine, but I do agree with you from a different angle. The entire goal of LLMs seems self destructive. If they're successful then the endgame is completely removing the barriers to entry to producing software and other digital tech. But if we do reach that endgame then the value of tech is going to plummet because there will be absolutely no barriers to entry to compete, or even just individuals homebrewing up what they need on demand.

Like imagine there was something you could buy where you insert some lumber, give it some passable description of furniture, and it outputs it. And you paid $20/month for access to this. And this was all being bankrolled by the furniture industry? I mean, sure guys - it's much appreciated, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody so enthusiastic about digging their own grave. I think it's already obvious that the gazillion dollars of API calls isn't going to materialize - it seems the handful of companies that trialed that are already reversing course hard. And in the future where LLMs are successful, that'd be even more true.

[hdgvhicv]

Llms either reach the point where they can quickly design and build physical robots to take on that service industry or they stop exponential growth.

Both of those are devastating for their valuation. Stopping growth means open modes catch up in a year or so. Continuing means end of the current economy.

[solumunus]

There’s a good chance physical humanoid robots will always be more expensive than humans, especially in this new hypothesised reality where there’s an enormous labour surplus.

[somenameforme]

China is advancing robotics at a crazy pace, and hitting typical Chinese prices. This [1] robot is available starting at $6k. And of course what matters isn't the up-front cost, but the maintenance. If their maintenance costs are lower than human wages+taxes, then robots win.

The biggest practical issue will be that if these robots ever did start replacing people on a large enough scale, then you'd have a lot of angry, desperate people with a lot of time on their hands. So that alone will probably work as the primary mediating factor.

Quite an interesting time to be alive because the future is so completely impossible to predict. The world just a decade from now could look entirely different, or it could just be self driving cars all over again.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Q4Su54iho

[paulhebert]

> what rational reason is there to employ a human being?

To maintain a functioning society and social contract?

Is wanting low unemployment in our society not rational?

[Earw0rm]

It's ethnically rational, and morally right.

However.

It's not rational relative to the short-term incentives of a typical corporation or investment vehicle. PE, VC, fund managers aren't paid to give a fuck about the social contract. Literally not in their job description.

[ben_w]

> Is wanting low unemployment in our society not rational?

Only conditionally on there being bad consequences for high unemployment.

I don't particularly trust politicians, but there's a whole host of hypothetical scenarios about futures where work is essentially optional. Unfortunately, they're all either in the sci-fi or religion sections of the book store:

Despite people occasionally investigating UBI, the efforts to research UBI seriously have the same problems that Marx had with literal Communism, in that there's an obvious difference between any partial transition as compared to a global transition, and we don't have a completely disconnected parallel world to be a petri dish for us to test the economic outcomes on.

[hackyhacky]

Correct. Unfortunately, that's not how capitalism makes decisions.

[tirant]

Capitalism does not decide anything. Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market.

If you want to complain about selfishness then do it on selfish individuals, which by the way, are present in all types of economic systems.

[hackyhacky]

> Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market.

Capitalism provides a set of incentives that shape how people make decisions. Anyone can be selfish, but selfishness in capitalist society has a particular shape. To ignore the external incentives when looking at human behavior is horribly naive and shortsighted, but is frequently done by capitalism-apologists who seek to disregard any criticism of their favorite incentive system.

[goatlover]

Which includes SCOTUS recognizing corporations as persons.