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by somenameforme 9 days ago
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.
1 comments
hdgvhicv 9 days ago
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.

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solumunus 8 days ago
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.
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somenameforme 8 days ago
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

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