The invisible Hand may be monetary policy. The median household may simply no longer be able to afford the median home due to the continued wealth distribution shift brought on by interest rate targeting.
It also forces you to focus on some extremely narrow problem definition. Often, these narrow problem definitions turn out to be features of existing platforms or in the ai age - artifacts of the current model generation.
Anecdotally, the concern I hear from many is that the current positioning of AI as labor replacement doesn't benefit them at all. An expensive AI which simply takes your job or forces you to work harder is categorically worse for people's quality of life.
What consumer benefits is ai driving? at least with industrial automation consumers benefited from new technologies, cheaper goods, and new job categories.
In case someone at Anthropic reads this.. if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up as a result of using your tools, or find some way to fast forward society to that stage of the effect of AI, you’ll have a lot of fans, and even faster adoption.
It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.
> It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.
If they wanted to do this, they could put their models in a public trust for the public's access and benefit in research, education, etc. Then it could be licensed, pay a dividend like a sovereign wealth fund, etc.
Considering that they copy and train on the sum total of all human creativity, a public trust is something that would be in line with both the spirit, and first and fourth considerations, of fair use doctrine:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
That way everyone is rewarded with the benefits of running a model that was trained on everyone's creations.
I don't need software developer salaries to go up. That would be kind of selfish and narrow minded.
What I need instead is something that takes the burden off my entire society and gives them a breather. Universal health care to start. They could also use a higher minimum wage, and lower housing costs.
Is it more selfish and narrow minded to wish for a "utopia" that is economically unsound and happens to be your personal preference, or to wish for productive workers' salaries to increase - something with an actual track record of improving any society it occurs in?
All perl programmers should be wishing for ponies, that's definitely less narrow minded.
It doesn't sound like utopia to me, hence the quotation marks. Eminently achievable, but not actually good. Only those engaged in utopian thinking - with a heavy slice of ignorance of basic economics and history - would think it is utopia or leads to it.
Universal healthcare is very sound economically. Costs are lower and outcomes better than under private insurance, and overhead is dramatically reduced.
This is not true, the Kings Fund publishes a report that the Guardian fauns over whenever it comes out because it shows how "cost effective" the NHS is, yet if you read it you find that actual health outcomes are generally worse than other, insurance based systems. Give me wealth and health over a postcode lottery produced by utopianists.
The economically sound thing is to accrue more power to those with wealth. The owners will have access to a machine that turns money into money without a cent flowing outside of the owner class. That'll improve society /s.
>if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up
This is quite easy. Just optimize the models to do reviews and bug finding. This would make developers (who normally hate reviews) quite happy and let them do more coding, thus delivering more value and possibly earning more...
It’s often lamented that some employees have a difficult case to argue for their impact on the bottom line, and as a result probably get paid a lower fraction of their value to the business than other roles where the link is easy to measure.
I can at least “imagine” a model that tries to crack this nut.
But your value to a company doesn’t just come from your impact, but how tough you are to replace, how much others value your skills, etc.
Nike’s logo designer was paid $35. One model says she should’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars, because of what her work product went on to become. Another model of the value says it was worth $35 because that’s what she agreed to.
If, as an employee, you think you’re massively undervalued for the impact you generate, go out to the market and either get another job or start your own business making widgets - either you’ll get that pay bump you expect, or you’ll see you actually were relying on a lot of other supporting mechanisms to generate that value.
The intrinsic satisfaction of increasing the wealth of shareholders. We should all be happy to devote ourselves to getting them more, nothing is more important than that.
Of all the possible criticisms that's the one you chose? If that's the worst of the problems you can see, why don't you buy some stock and became the shareholder. Per your own words, you will get more.
> Of all the possible criticisms that's the one you chose? If that's the worst of the problems you can see
The point is there is little benefit to these technologies to the consumer, especially in relation to likely harm in other areas (you lost your customer service job, but AI overview will answer your trivia question with slightly less effort). Note: little does not mean none.
So the farce is they benefit by religiously worshiping capitalist shareholders.
> why don't you buy some stock and became the shareholder. Per your own words, you will get more.
LOL. Don't you get it? The kind of smallholdings of shares available to regular people won't provide the kind of returns to mitigate any of these harms. They work as a ploy to trick dumb-ass workers into identifying with capitalist tycoons (e.g. opposing pro-worker things that'd get you a dollar more an hour in wages to get a penny more a quarter in dividends, it works because most don't do the math).
> Yes, yes, workers of the world unite. It worked so great the last few times it was tried. You are very smart.
No, I guess I wasn't smart enough to realize there are only two options: the present day status quo or Soviet central planning. Nothing else is possible.
My kids like to use AI to discuss things they learned in school in greater depth, and from different angles than they learned in the textbook. They can also ask "What if" and "Why not" questions from this infinitely patient teacher.
At least with search engines, or even libraries, you're aware that there are many authors of varying reliability and the publications/sites might not be reputable.
AI chat bots will summarize the top N web search results as if they're fact, weaving them into seemingly coherent narratives, all while reassuring the user that their questions are really good and they're learning a lot.
Also it's better not to answer, but flip the question back and let your kid think through it, offer hypothesis, and so on, helping him problem solve, recall, and all that.
I guess you could argue that there should be cheaper software, but most software people interact with is free/ad supported. Where it is paid, it's already a race to to the bottom.
Basically consumers don't really pay for software in the first place, and the leverage from labour companies get through software is already through the roof even before AI. Will much change for consumers of software?
> An expensive AI which simply takes your job or forces you to work harder
But this implies higher productivity, no? This must mean more outputs that should benefit someone, unless the jobs that are being automated had little value to begin with. Seems paradoxical.
There is a practical upper bound on how much labor can be replaced before deflation becomes a problem. AI firms risk spoiling the pot if no other business model is discovered.
Smart employees understand this dynamic. When leadership hides information - it always means its bad. The first thing I noticed when I had a bout of bad employers was that they claimed "we can't share financial information because of XYZ investor/legal reason."
Those startups all had major financial problems within 6 months to 2 years. Management has strong incentives to hide bad information from employees.
ehh there is a common thread that when management becomes convinced either of falsehoods or that lying to employees is the best strategy, the business outcomes won't be the best either.
Part of this depends on if you care that the AI wrote the code "your way." I've been in shops with rather exotic and specific style guides and standards which the AI would not or will not conform to.
Yeah, I also highly value consistency in my projects, which forces me to keep an eye on the LLM and steer it often. This limits my overall velocity especially on larger features. But I'm still much faster with the agent. Recent example, https://github.com/igor47/csheet/pull/68 -- this took me a couple of hours pairing with Claude code, which is insane give the size of the work here. Though this PR creates a bunch of tables, routes, services -- it's not just greenfield CRUD work. We're figuring out how to model a complicated domain, integrating with existing code, thinking through complex integrations including with LLMs at run time. Claude is writing almost all the code, I'm just steering
With the current concentration of wealth and banking, it almost seems like there is an incentive for banks to ruin themselves when they end up in a little trouble.
If the bank has trouble, shareholders/executives lose - if the banking system has trouble... then QE will solve the bank trouble.
IMHO, if QE solves the trouble, the Fed or treasury should be taking a bigger bite of ownership from the bailed out companies in exchange specifically to disincentivize taking risks with a bailout backstop.
That all relies on the assumption of petro-dollar, something that could have been taken for granted during the last 50 years but could easily change within weeks now.
No it doesn’t, the petro-dollar isn’t a real thing. Forcing USD denomination for a transaction doesn’t help USD because there is a buyer of USD and an equally sized seller of USD.
However, there does seem to be an outsized effort applied to defending this not-real thing. A leader who defies the petrodollar has a good chance of getting killed or kidnapped. In a way, the same principle makes any god real: he doesn't have to exist, as long as people who will beat up non-believers do.
Total USD reserve involved in that transaction is not zero. They have to already hold dollars to do the transaction at all, which means a benefit has already been provided to the US. The transaction doesn't change the US's position, but enabling the transaction to occur does.
Petrodollar hypothesis is debunked. The total volume of petrodollar trade approximates minutes in stock markets. This simply isn’t a real factor anymore; a lot of people think it is because there are writings from the 70s that are compelling.
As you said, trade volume doesn't drive valuation, it's reserve size.
Which goes up with inflation btw, so you can export inflation. Actors who maintain reserves of your currency will have to keep buying more from you, providing you with benefits.
I suspect the issue is the SDLC methodology of existing mature products. The "I can build it in a weekend" use case has gotten a massive boost as you can build something which "looks" real faster then ever. Mature teams need to deal with backwards compatibility and real development risk.
Or its a simple signifier that the author was human, and that a real person is trying to convince you of something. I've experimented with putting minor grammar mistakes into my work of the sort that would be frowned upon, but are not strictly invalid. The existence of any kind of mistake makes the work sound "human".
Don't know about that as a general rule, since spam messages have had typos and mistakes in them since forever, and its precisely what marks them as not trustworthy.
More like signaling that a specific human wrote it themselves instead of one of their human assistants. The article is mostly about emails from the Epstein files so non-human authorship wasn't really a possibility at the time they were written.
Hedging against currency collapse is notoriously difficult. But a reasonable set of hedges are assets that will have value regardless of currency changeovers. Eg housing, land, gold etc.
I just assume the USA will be the place where violent "repurposing" of land will happen because of all the guns here. Housing seems risky for that reason.
reply