Agree on the knock-on effects. My prediction is deflation. Money will be worth more and more. As a consequence governments will have to step in to ensure inflation(with e.g. universal income), otherwise the economy stops.
But honestly I'm not sure this will be enough for people to spend on e.g. restaurants or activities or oh I don't know, children. I think this will imply a freezing or even stepping back on the Maslow pyramid, the majority of people consolidating in the middle.
What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
> What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
I'm not so sure about this one. The powerful in a society like the one you describe would surely know about that potential powderkeg and supply ample cheap entertainment to dull the edge. Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.
That's even more dystopian than your scenario, if you ask me.
Yeah that also sounds realistic, and actually there's evidence of this dulling effect from even before llms. The attention economy has been literally streamlining.. well, the road to death. And nobody is angry.
I can spin this in a weirdly positive light though. With fertility rates going down, life becoming less and less meaningful and simultaneously a small and decreasing group of people becoming extremely productive.. maybe humanity will finally stop exploiting the planet and start a sort of transition.
AI enhanced increased lifespan forest elves watching over nature. Mm I'd prefer that over soma. We are the heralds of The Great Ones
Nonsense. What the hell would you do with 1B? Give it to charities maybe. Maybe set up an investment where dividends are paid to charity. Running out of ideas
Set up a nice investment vehicle with maybe 400m so I can get 1.6m in dividends a year which would be better enough to comfortably travel the world, have a private chef, someone who organized travel so I don't have to..
A nice 12 person yacht on the Mediterranean is 400k eur for 2 weeks (with staff) so I'd realize it's not enough and invest the rest so I could get comfy.
Along the way help friends and family, pay off mortgages, usually good stuff.
What's the point of that? That sounds like the most boring life. You want to rot away on a yacht? Private chef? Are you kidding?
Help family? Sure, although you don't need that much money for that. Friends? Ehh not very smart, just think about the changes in the friendships' authenticity.
Private chef, absolutely. Like some people rot away managing Linux as a desktop or putting together 3D printers instead of buying one that works and using a Mac, I enjoy food.
You've run out of ideas already? Try harder!
What charities? Why? How much, to which ones? How involved with those charities are you going to be? What dent in history are you going to make with that billion? With or without your name attached. Build housing, cure cancer, feed the hungry, buy this simulator https://www.1940airterminal.org/news/liquidation-of-simulato...
I could be wrong but I think you could get started with all of that with a fraction of $1B.
Sure there is leisure and entertainment but if you want to use it to do something meaningful, with only 24 hours in a day you'll probably have much more money than time to use it well.
On the other hand 1B is really an arbitrary choice of number, so I think the reason he would choose this specific number definitely has more to do with arbitrary reasons (class, status), perhaps subconciously.
Personally I don't agree with the parent that everyone wants that much money. I think I can safely say not only am I content with much less but I also don't ever want to have the responsibility of having to manage that. Though I'm already saying that from a place of privilege where I don't need to worry about survival.
Furthermore, a lot of money almost certainly places you in an outlier group where normal laws and rights as formulated by humans don't apply the same. Assuming everyone has some empathy and sense of justice/righteousness, that should make them intrinsically not want to be in that group.
Completely missing the other costs associated with any of these things. If money was enough to “feed the hungry” Musk or Gates would have already done it. The real problem is systemic injustice, like governments stealing foreign aid that’s meant to go to the poor. Money can’t always solve these.
Time is more valuable than money and unless you have tons of time and space that simulator is just an expensive paperweight.
My point was that there isn't anything I could do with that money, and neither can the vast majority of people in the world. So I would immediately try to pass it on to people who have better use for it
Wishing for 1B is completely nonsensical if you understand what kind of money that is.
If anything less than $1B isn't enough then it is never enough. $1B is the new $100M thanks to ongoing currency debasement.
Also, there is something called "taxes" which is what makes anyone who has millions or billions to want even more money and the IRS will still come after you anywhere in the world.
Otherwise they have to renounce their citizenship and move to a tax haven.
There seems to be a category of "coder" which fits the other commenter's description, where someone else makes all the significant decisions and they just write the code. Not coincidentally, that category seems most at risk from AI, because they're basically like a human version of a coding agent.
They don’t want to officially disclose the reality because while some users will understand the realities of protecting a product while innovating, many will just realize it means one can go looking for claude 4.5 performance elsewhere.
Regret? Of what? The tech is here. You won't slow it down by not using it. People need to either adapt by moving to more and more niche areas, or become the person to be retained when the efficiency gains materialize. We still don't have the proper methodology figured out, but people are working on it.
That said, I'd agree that people who currently claim 20x speedups will indeed be replaced.
It's because of simple FOMO of companies. If they don't "invest" in it they will be left behind. Which is true. However, the way they invest is equally (if not more) important. E.g. MS is a good example of how not to do it.
It's failing when there is no data in the training set, and there are no patterns to replicate in the existing code base.
I can give you many, many examples of where it failed for me:
1. Efficient implementation of Union-Find: complete garbage result
2. Spark pipelines: mostly garbage
3. Fuzzer for testing something: half success, non-replicateable ("creative") part was garbage.
4. Confidential Computing (niche): complete garbage if starting from scratch, good at extracting existing abstractions and replicating existing code.
Where it succeeds:
1. SQL queries
2. Following more precise descriptions of what to do
3. Replicating existing code patterns
The pattern is very clear. Novel things, things that require deeper domain knowledge, coming up with the to-be-replicated patterns themselves, problems with little data don't work. Everything else works.
I believe the reason why there is a big split in the reception is because senior engineers work on problems that don't have existing solutions - LLMs are terrible at those. What they are missing is that the software and the methodology must be modified in order to make the LLM work. There are methodical ways to do this, but this shift in the industry is still in baby shoes, and we don't yet have a shared understanding of what this methodology is.
Personally I have very strong opinions on how this should be done. But I'm urging everyone to start thinking about it, perhaps even going as far as quitting if this isn't something people can pursue at their current job. The carnage is coming:/
Nope. Especially with these agents the thinking trace can get very large. No human will ever read it, and the agent will fill up their context with garbage trying to look for information.
I understand the drive for stabilizing control and consistency, but this ain't the way.
But honestly I'm not sure this will be enough for people to spend on e.g. restaurants or activities or oh I don't know, children. I think this will imply a freezing or even stepping back on the Maslow pyramid, the majority of people consolidating in the middle.
What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
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