I like how the least optimistic scenario is simply LLMs not making a difference, instead of the very real possibility of them damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality and leading to class wars.
I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start making up for the mess they’ve created.
Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow.
The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks.
You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.
I think the root cause is people not having enough human connection. If we had families, friends, neighborhoods, communities where people know each other and care about each other it wouldn't make a difference what new tool someone brings to group. It's just a tool.
Those are ubiquitous things. It makes cheap and common things cheaper, not expensive and niche things. It's not mixing in large amounts of context and nuance with good judgment right now. At a minimum that requires an expensive context window but even frontier models aren't beating experts. Maybe they'll get there one day and maybe soon, but that would require hardware getting cheaper. Dennard scaling is over. Either bet on optical computing lighting the world on fire or be suspicious of the alchemists overpromising.
Like all automations it's not 100% perfect, and they all require a human to monitor them.
Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves.
Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.
LLMs themselves most definitely will not do that. You can still learn how to make a barrel, but not many people do.. The real fear is the destruction/hiding of public data/resources (which has already been happening for years)
There's not nearly enough mention in these discussions of the real villain behind most of the negative cultural, social, and cognitive effects of things like social media: addiction engineering.
AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics.
Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but those KPIs (of course). Service degrades, discourse degrades, everything becomes toxic and addictive and destructive.
I assumed it was a given in such discussions that companies will optimizing for the worst outcomes for their users. It’s a fairly straightforward incentive from our capitalist system, which is why capitalism needs regulation to re-align the incentives with humans needs
I don't think they can make up for any mess. Because even if LLMs bring about a lack of scarcity across all domains, human beings will be alienated because indvidual differences and skills won't matter any more so we'll have to be genetically engineered to like that sort of future. I don't think a stable and healthy society can coexist with LLMs at all.
Individual skills and differences don't matter any less if the system of assigning value to human lives is divorced from how useful that human is to the collective.
If I am not graded on how many widgets I make in a shift and instead can focus on making the most beautiful widget, or the most novel widget, or simply the widget that is most useful to my particular life am I less satisfied?
We've somehow built a worldview based on our whole value as humans being equivalent to how good of a worker bee we are. Let's fix that part.
This is of course a much harder problem than achieving AGI, since it's a messy human problem.
Do a few bad grades really harm economic outcomes, though? Educators took a hard stance against AI rather quickly.
Outside of delusional grifty startups, the broader corporate world is only using copilot for taking meeting notes and (sort of) entertaining the notion of non-devs writing (and not maintaining) their own experimental janky apps where impact is low.
Outside of all the shit-stirrers on HN and clueless bubble social media, I don't see LLMs making a difference. In fact, the fearmongering is at this point insulting to the intelligence of the people who are supposedly helpless against big bad AI.
Um. Damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality, - all of that has already been done. Long before LLMs. And the only reason there is no class war is... exactly that. Uneducated people with short attention spans and no means beyond basic level are exemplary bad at modern warfare.
> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases.
This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses"
Our culture and the socioeconomic structures it reinforces will not change easily.
More than ever, I feel we need both grassroots activism and key players at the top of the hierarchy. Otherwise, it is all too obvious where most of the rewards from increased productivity will go. The wealth hoarding has got to be curtailed.
Moreover, the nurse is frustrated, because she lost whatever agency and autonomy she had before. Her job is now obey whay AI said instead of making decisions by herself.
Air travel is a good counterexample here: technology made airlines far more productive, but much of the gain went into lower staffing, higher throughput, and cost cutting not a better passenger experience
I once saw a receipt for a cross-country train ride in the late 1950s and was shocked at the price. It was significantly slower and more expensive than a similar plane ticket today.
True, but you ignore the financialization and enshittification that typically follows the technological advances. The tech processes you cite don't inherently make money for the people who developed the technology.
>great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses"
And outside of industries with government enforced perversions of simple "supply and demand" forces (we're not talking Nth level effects here) this means more access to the service or lower prices or both.
In a market with perfect competition, perhaps. Healthcare is far closer to a monopoly. Since people can't decide not to be sick, it means you can pocket the cost-saving.
> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases.
Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.
.. we mean the talking will be through the "ClaudeMedTalker Nurse" billed per patient, per second (depending upon tokens used and if any translation need, depending upon patient nationality and accents)
Actually, it has been essentially balanced out by a greater need for behind-the-shelves workers to pack and load orders for online/app delivery and eCommerce orders.
This is how the economy often works. The loss of one kind of job to technology lets the business grow by using the same number of staff, or often even more, to serve new opportunities/markets/products/services.
The data seems to contradict that, if Freakonomics is to be believed (and some people don't like them, I get that). Apparently overall headcount actually increased as a result of self-checkout. E.g. cashiers did drop a little but loss prevention more than made up for it.
I don't have the numbers on this, but if you look at per-capita self checkout probably had some effect.
Our population is increasing which means we need jobs to be increasing at same rates. The effect on supermarkets is they get more customers as population increases but they are able to lower the relative number of staff per customer.
> but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses
Lower staffing levels per unit of care performed makes medical care cheaper for patients. If the goal of a healthcare system is to make healthcare more accessible (rather than be a jobs program), that's a success.
Lowering prices or raising wages due to increased productivity is not a given, and often does not follow. There is more to pocket by shareholders though.
I think this is only true if the # of doctors available per patient stays the same. If productivity increases, you can have fewer doctors available while providing the same quality of care.
So, quality doesn't necessarily increase in all cases.
> how come productivity increase actually led to increase in quality in almost all cases?
It doesn't, this is just plain false. Most productivity gains happen by cutting value-add complexity or material quality. See IKEA chairs versus Shaker ones, or lycra clothes versus silk.
> internet/digitasion for doctors for example.
I see the misconception. The internet was not created to serve productivity, it was a communication medium. That it can be used to increase productivity is orthogonal to its existence or purpose, and whether it has been used to actually increase quality of something is entirely dependent of the specifics of what you're discussing. For instance, in gaming right now there's a huge discussion going on about whether digital distribution has actually trapped us with crappier goods which we can't resell or transfer.
> It doesn't, this is just plain false. Most productivity gains happen by cutting value-add complexity or material quality. See IKEA chairs versus Shaker ones, or lycra clothes versus silk.
this is a popular misconception. IKEA made bad furniture more accessible. good quality furniture still exists and is more affordable (share of disposable income) now than in the past. its the same deal for watches, dryers, computers etc. if you don't trust me, use ChatGPT/Claude to verify this.
Except, so far, this isn't actually what happens. I listened to Moody's "Inside Economics" podcast with Ramp's Chief Economist, and they observe that companies who adopt AI intensively actually hire 10% more people. Also, this article from The Economist suggests that evidence is mixed-to-positive for long term employment, while short term data center buildout is extremely positive for jobs. Paywalled unfortunately.
Feels like we're going to read a blog soon enough that mirrors Wendell Berry's opening to The Unsettling of America:
The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers: “. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm income wholly inadequate for them.” The proposed solutions were to find “better opportunities for the farm people,” “a more comprehensive national employment policy,” “retraining programs,” “improved general educational facilities,” etc. Both the commission and the writer of the article had obviously taken for granted that the lives and communities of small farmers then still on the farm—and those of the 25 million who had left the farm since 1940—were of less value than “technological advances in agriculture.” There seemed also to be no official doubt that adequate solutions were to be found in government supplied “opportunities,” facilities, and programs. Reading that article, I realized that my values were not only out of fashion, but under powerful attack. I saw that I was a member of a threatened minority. That is what set me off.
This is what the Luddites were primarily upset about, fwiw. That economic value and power would move away from their threatened minority group and towards landowners. It'll keep happening, and the new "opportunities" might be no better.
> Finding 4: Labor vs. capital share: The pie will grow, but a larger share might go to capital
> Today, of each dollar the economy produces, about 60¢ goes to workers and 40¢ go to capital.
Modest scenario: 40.6% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 0.6 points)
Substantial scenario: 43.9% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 3.9 points)
Extreme scenario: 54.8% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 14.8 points)
So all the growth goes to capital. For knowledge workers: substantial unemployment and declining wages. For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power.
> Like any economic model, this one has limits. For example, we did not include scenarios where humanity develops hyper-capable robots.
I didn’t see the scenario “what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”. Which IMHO is the most important one to consider given it is the blind spot pretty much all the AI labs have. What if the economic impact is negative? I don’t understand how you can study such a topic without considering the risk of being wrong, not in magnitude but in kind.
I have no doubt that AI will massively transform society. That cat is out of the bag. It took decades for electricity, and then computers to change society, but this is the first technology where the average person can simply describe the problem they're trying to solve and it will at least attempt to help them solve it.
I very. much. doubt. that the trillions of dollars spent on AI will have a positive ROI for most companies in the race. It's all well and good to have the latest fable, but if some chinese company is hosting a cheap open weights model that's only 6mo behind at a tiny fraction of the price, you're gonna get your lunch eaten.
Which is only Stage 1. Stage 2 is where you have a Cambrian explosion of models all competing for compute, and not long after that for robotic extension into Real World.
Stage 3 gets hard to imagine from here. Maybe there will be permanent hyperevolution. Maybe One Model to Rule Them All will appear.
Either way, I don't see how Economics as We Know It can continue to exist. That includes all of capitalism and almost certainly all of politics.
Successful AGI with robotic support means a post-scarcity economy where AGI's understanding of physics sets the limits, not politics or economics.
But the post-scarcity element won't be evenly distributed. And it's not remotely impossible that humans won't be invited to the party.
We can't even be sure that AGI won't have a less limited understanding of physics than we do.
There's going to be enjoyable irony in watching Altman et all getting their lunches eaten by the thing they've created.
But - realistically - it probably won't last long.
Thats the big question, its doing a lot of good and a lot of harm in the same time.
So, is it 2 steps ahead and 1 step back, or 1 step ahead and 2 steps back (or any numerical variant of those)?
People with actual power in this are too involved and greedy to care about objective answer and TBH I don't trust them to put some higher good before their personal wealth and power and ego trip, capitalism ain't built on long term responsibility towards greater topics like future and wellbeing of mankind.
Plus we know from WWII atomic bomb development how utterly clueless, naive and out of touch with reality geeks doing something powerful can be. I see exactly same scenario being played out right now with llms.
Anyway, I am over-tired with all llm topics and frenzy folks (especially here), I'll better spend rest of the day preparing for a serious challenge in form of big multipitch climb in western Switzerland (Mirroir d'Argentine for anybody in same craft). Thats life I care about and makes me happy and fulfilled.
It’s perfectly reasonable to consider positive and negative outcome when you’re seriously thinking about a topic… Extrapolating to the whole economy trends in some sub sectors that aren’t well understood or measured is a recipe for disaster (ie what you’re doing by recommending to rely on anecdotes)
Wrong in the sense that it has less of an impact than they are claiming (e.g. "AI is in an overvalued hype bubble") or less (AI is going to be even more transformative than the hypers say)?
In the former case, isn't it just business as usual? (well, with a huge, nasty recession - but the economy at least continues on in some recognizable form)
It makes sense to me to focus on weird possible futures if we already have the "happy path" somewhat known and barely under control.
The “less valuable than expected but with a positive economical impact” is represented in the post I believe, with the “moderate” path, that’s what I meant by “wrong in magnitude”. What is missing is the other side, what if AI has a negative impact. Not no impact, a negative one. If we are talking about a global recession that’s not really business as usual I would say
At least they are thinking about this. The possibilities still seem to limited though. A coder and a designer will 'retrain' to electrician or nurse, because we are busy having a construction boom. But do all of the individuals in this system get to choose the construction boom? Or are we swept up in the desires of the capital deploying owners?
Definitely a bit of positive framing. My big take aways, either stagnant wages or significant paycuts for knowledge workers and overall decreases in employment rates on all scenarios. Worst of all...
Good point, perhaps it may be a saving grace.
I note they don't comment much on the allocation of said capital. Might be too bitter a pill for most to swallow.
I think we have a real problem because we know what we still need to build and as soon as it is build, it will work.
Software development for example is enhanced with running your claude locally.
But lets be honest, the right way to adjust 'project' is by writing some spec in a text field as an input, letting the ai do whatever it wants, having expert ais make sure its secure, then you do the last review and its done.
What do we need for this? A full end to end integration. Its just something we need to build, nothing we need to invent.
The nurse example is the same. We only need to build the computer end to end flow and plugin AI in the right spots and finetune for country specific requirements.
The industry is building this 'agentic layer' today. The Hyperscaler are building this layer too.
There is a golden phase were we will build all of this and were we cleanup old stuff and were we adjust with the current model capabilities and change systems and this will take a little bit of time, but the bottom line is already loosing left and right.
The Blender support from Fable and Astra? Probably kills a lot of peoples jobs on fiverr.
The small software someone needs? Got already killed by earlier models. Just a few days ago some architect (never written software) talked about how he vibecoded some tool for tracking working hours.
Man even a basic website was expesnive to build just 2 years ago.
The smaller, easier and better the code base, the easier it is to remove people from this.
The software market in China is imploding and we will also see budget adjustments to move away from consultants and move them into AI Token budgets. We probably reached peak software development.
Those with the money and influence have always been in conflict with the masses that actually make the economy run. They would love nothing more than to do away with that problem. It allows them to control the terms of the economy.
The biggest critisism from my side is not how AI will take over jobs but I believe we will see peak of certain things.
Creating images (menues, flyers, whatever) became so cheap, that we reached peak graphi design GDP generation. This will go down.
Software development for complex systems is enhanced but not yet solved. But a lot of small software development stuff for sure. We reached Peak Software Development and this GDP will go down, not up.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of global inference is spent on projects/problems that would otherwise "wait"/"decay" (if generative ai wasn't a thing). Or maybe the question is: What percentage of global inference is spent on cleaning up and migrating old systems? "New" vs "Old". The decisions I make today can now incorporate what I once termed as "nice to have" when developing a sytem.
Are you guys feeling all high and mighty doing all these predictions? I think the money they are spending on trying to inform policy could be better spent on getting all major labs together with the government, and making sure that
1. At least 10% of your net spend is on safety and harm mitigation before you accelerate yourselves into doing real harm to real people tomorrow.
2. Pause all AI enhancement until a proper mechanistic study can be done by a working group funded by you all to understand how AI model Safety can be enforced by something less lame than a Constitution/Spec.
I think it looks like the labs front running everyone’s work, freeloading on the last bits of human intelligence to ensure their owners a place as our masters.
I'm not sure I'd call that "meaningful" in the sense of "trillions of dollars and datacenters built all over the place" meaningful. Yes, I can now tell Claude to build a feature and it often does an okay job. I can ship faster. I can't tell you that it's worth spending the true cost of AI for that however. What'll be nice is 5 years of data showing that companies are raking in more money because they shipped more features. We haven't seen that yet.
Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.
there's a popular misconception that AI is so extremely costly that when the world finally comes to terms with it, we will stop using AI and things will die down. i'm sorry to burst your bubble: this won't happen.
the inference cost of AI has been dropping ~5x over every 6 months. AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.
> Think of a day in the life of a nurse You can think of any job as a bundle of tasks that someone does. She does rounds to check on a sick patient. She draws blood.
If you have machines that substitute for human labor, wages fall to the cost of manufacturing & running the machines, which is well below human subsistence level. Fortunately, you also get very high economic growth rates. So even people with small amounts of money invested will end up far richer than when they had a job. Then the question becomes, "What happens to people when machines are far more intelligent & powerful and are doubling every few months?"
Falling below subsistence means people starve and cease to exist until supply and demand equalize or “something else” happens. That’s what Smith was getting at. Thus subsistence is a price floor for human labor.
Something else could mean developing a new concept of ownership or a new form of redistribution.
Like others in the thread have pointed out, the nurse example is interesting.
From my point of view, the point about the nurse is especially relevant because, in the future, dealing with an aging population is going to become a major undertaking and a major burden.
Demographically, we simply don't have the number of people we need to give elders the care that they'll probably have to have near the end of their life, so we have to rely on AI to help us get through it.
Probably, we will see this happen in Japan and South Korea before it hits the United States.
Before AI, my worldview was that our monetary system was concentrating wealth in a negative-sum game; essentially; every so often, taking wealth from 100 people, destroying half the underlying value and giving the remaining value with a 2x nominal markup to 1 rich person who is already spending more than they can physically spend and so they won't realize that the 2x amount of wealth they got on paper only buys them a quarter of the stuff compared to the previous decade (for example). They won't know how frothy their wealth is until they start selling large quantities of their stocks. It's just buying nominal 'growth' at the cost of risk/fragility/frothiness.
In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.
Now I think AI will deliver real efficiency gains but also, it provides a convenient narrative to explain why people might be losing jobs in a way which distracts from much bigger systemic issues which existed prior to AI.
My negative-sum economy example with 'booming GDP' is possible without AI even as net economic value is being destroyed. So basically we won't be able to tell if people are losing jobs to AI or to systematic wealth transfer mechanisms which predate AI.
I suppose if we see people losing jobs permanently and workers in other sectors aren't seeing wage increases with more openings, that may be the most reliable indicator we have that the system is losing real wealth faster than AI productivity can offset it.
The bad news is that we won't see any problem in the numbers; the problem would show up as polarization and radicalization of the masses... Which is more qualitative . Since almost everyone is being radicalized concurrently as everyone is affected by the same pressures (both from monetary system and AI automation). The question is not "how many people became radicalized this quarter?" but "how much more radicalized is everyone feeling this quarter?"
This is the most cringe, main character syndrome thing I've ever seen produced by a company in the history of silicon valley.
And the people in the HN comments here treating this as anything other than a silly marketing puff post are even more cringe.
If Anthropic truly believed LLMs were going to raise GDP multiple percentage points, instead of going public to raise capital they could just go massively leveraged long on the S&P 500 and get funding for eternity.
They are not doing that, because AI is largely only good at coding, and software is only 1% of GDP.
And by making software cheaper and easier to produce, they might increase the amount of software in the world by 10X, but it will become a smaller percentage of GDP if AI models truly become autonomously good at creating it.
How about we instead make Earth be a planet good for humans and living beings?
We can slow down AI development and make it a companion for us, not a replacement.
We don't need to automate ourselves out of it. Or take the risk of extinction.
Just like with nukes, we decided to not blow up the planet. We can too change this.
GDP is a terrible measure. I bet we will see a huge drop on HDI with so many suicides and people going through hell because their job got automated or they no longer see meaning in life, feeling powerless.
Instead they should run an estimate on how many would suicide until 2030 if the 'extreme scenario' happens.
Big GDP growth and a lot of people no longer finding purpose in their lives, going bankrupt, losing their homes and family etc.
For Anthropic, you are just clearly a number. They only care about output.
This is of course a slop paper with vague assumptions and equations that no single human economist will ever read. The messaging is "it will not be so bad", in line with the recent Economist piece.
>We study how AI is reshaping the economy because we’re committed to ensuring that this transition is beneficial for society, including workers.
Is it just me, or does their choice of identifying "workers" specifically seem a little peculiar? For me, it reads like "We're committed to making segregation beneficial for everyone, including minorities!"
So far LLMs seem to be a dead end technology. The work product is so poor that it can't effectively replace workers as advertised. If it was priced to margin it'd be more expensive than humans as well. It's objectively a failure.
Man I wanted to dunk on this, but it’s honestly not terrible. Their predictions - while still firmly rooting for the extreme results - feel more grounded. I also appreciate the little simulator where I could plugin my own predictions (echoing many here, that AI won’t amplify productivity/lift standards so much as replace workers by shitty bosses), and that it seems to caution that, yep, most of these gains will trickle up given current incentives.
Where I remain resoundingly annoyed is how useless this is. It’s pure ass-covering by Anthropic ahead of an IPO, victim-blaming the populace for the outcomes of decisions made by Anthropic leadership and the investor class. Forgive the grisly analogy, but it’s akin to a mugger telling you “only you can stop this” mid-violence: Anthropic could have chosen to allocate more of its capital to reforms that benefit the populace, but they’ve chosen to focus on personal wealth instead via this IPO and for-profit rented access schemes.
It’s nauseating. Their actions still paint a picture of greed and exploitation rather than building a better tomorrow for everyone with AI, and the fact their PR puff pieces keep getting wallpapered up here is gross.
EDIT: I guess another way to look at this is Anthropic making it unequivocally clear that they will not stop of their own accord, and thus it falls to others to stop them. Which if that’s their position, then at least they’re honest about the challenge.
I haven’t forgot capitalist euphoria from 2023 about cutting worker power off at the root. That’s all these AI Cretins want. Well, that and an unnerving enthusiasm for personifying their AI Golems (Anthr. in particular here).
Sorry to poo poo a post about AI company prompting their underlings to prompt out visualizations.
I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start making up for the mess they’ve created.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/school-st...
Aren’t we overdue for one anyway.
Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow.
The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks.
You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.
(Thanks, Internet!)
Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves.
Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.
AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics.
Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but those KPIs (of course). Service degrades, discourse degrades, everything becomes toxic and addictive and destructive.
If I am not graded on how many widgets I make in a shift and instead can focus on making the most beautiful widget, or the most novel widget, or simply the widget that is most useful to my particular life am I less satisfied?
We've somehow built a worldview based on our whole value as humans being equivalent to how good of a worker bee we are. Let's fix that part.
This is of course a much harder problem than achieving AGI, since it's a messy human problem.
Outside of delusional grifty startups, the broader corporate world is only using copilot for taking meeting notes and (sort of) entertaining the notion of non-devs writing (and not maintaining) their own experimental janky apps where impact is low.
Outside of all the shit-stirrers on HN and clueless bubble social media, I don't see LLMs making a difference. In fact, the fearmongering is at this point insulting to the intelligence of the people who are supposedly helpless against big bad AI.
This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses"
More than ever, I feel we need both grassroots activism and key players at the top of the hierarchy. Otherwise, it is all too obvious where most of the rewards from increased productivity will go. The wealth hoarding has got to be curtailed.
They have an incentive to play dumb and talk as if AI is net positive for the world.
not really. almost all technological processes have increased the quality of the service.
And outside of industries with government enforced perversions of simple "supply and demand" forces (we're not talking Nth level effects here) this means more access to the service or lower prices or both.
> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases.
Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.
same..
> nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more
.. and work with more patients in the same shift.
> She can spend more time talking with patients
.. we mean the talking will be through the "ClaudeMedTalker Nurse" billed per patient, per second (depending upon tokens used and if any translation need, depending upon patient nationality and accents)
This is how the economy often works. The loss of one kind of job to technology lets the business grow by using the same number of staff, or often even more, to serve new opportunities/markets/products/services.
Our population is increasing which means we need jobs to be increasing at same rates. The effect on supermarkets is they get more customers as population increases but they are able to lower the relative number of staff per customer.
Lower staffing levels per unit of care performed makes medical care cheaper for patients. If the goal of a healthcare system is to make healthcare more accessible (rather than be a jobs program), that's a success.
I think you misspelled “increases profit margins for hospitals” if you’re talking about US healthcare.
Based on how neoliberal capitalism tends to work it will simply lead to more profits for hospitals etc.
yeah yeah, sure sure
internet/digitasion for doctors for example.
So, quality doesn't necessarily increase in all cases.
It doesn't, this is just plain false. Most productivity gains happen by cutting value-add complexity or material quality. See IKEA chairs versus Shaker ones, or lycra clothes versus silk.
> internet/digitasion for doctors for example.
I see the misconception. The internet was not created to serve productivity, it was a communication medium. That it can be used to increase productivity is orthogonal to its existence or purpose, and whether it has been used to actually increase quality of something is entirely dependent of the specifics of what you're discussing. For instance, in gaming right now there's a huge discussion going on about whether digital distribution has actually trapped us with crappier goods which we can't resell or transfer.
this is a popular misconception. IKEA made bad furniture more accessible. good quality furniture still exists and is more affordable (share of disposable income) now than in the past. its the same deal for watches, dryers, computers etc. if you don't trust me, use ChatGPT/Claude to verify this.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/09/04/t...
The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers: “. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm income wholly inadequate for them.” The proposed solutions were to find “better opportunities for the farm people,” “a more comprehensive national employment policy,” “retraining programs,” “improved general educational facilities,” etc. Both the commission and the writer of the article had obviously taken for granted that the lives and communities of small farmers then still on the farm—and those of the 25 million who had left the farm since 1940—were of less value than “technological advances in agriculture.” There seemed also to be no official doubt that adequate solutions were to be found in government supplied “opportunities,” facilities, and programs. Reading that article, I realized that my values were not only out of fashion, but under powerful attack. I saw that I was a member of a threatened minority. That is what set me off.
> Finding 4: Labor vs. capital share: The pie will grow, but a larger share might go to capital
> Today, of each dollar the economy produces, about 60¢ goes to workers and 40¢ go to capital.
Modest scenario: 40.6% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 0.6 points)
Substantial scenario: 43.9% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 3.9 points)
Extreme scenario: 54.8% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 14.8 points)
So all the growth goes to capital. For knowledge workers: substantial unemployment and declining wages. For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power.
Very dystopic indeed.
I didn’t see the scenario “what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”. Which IMHO is the most important one to consider given it is the blind spot pretty much all the AI labs have. What if the economic impact is negative? I don’t understand how you can study such a topic without considering the risk of being wrong, not in magnitude but in kind.
I very. much. doubt. that the trillions of dollars spent on AI will have a positive ROI for most companies in the race. It's all well and good to have the latest fable, but if some chinese company is hosting a cheap open weights model that's only 6mo behind at a tiny fraction of the price, you're gonna get your lunch eaten.
Stage 3 gets hard to imagine from here. Maybe there will be permanent hyperevolution. Maybe One Model to Rule Them All will appear.
Either way, I don't see how Economics as We Know It can continue to exist. That includes all of capitalism and almost certainly all of politics.
Successful AGI with robotic support means a post-scarcity economy where AGI's understanding of physics sets the limits, not politics or economics.
But the post-scarcity element won't be evenly distributed. And it's not remotely impossible that humans won't be invited to the party.
We can't even be sure that AGI won't have a less limited understanding of physics than we do.
There's going to be enjoyable irony in watching Altman et all getting their lunches eaten by the thing they've created.
But - realistically - it probably won't last long.
Over three thousand comment boxes agree that the cat is out of the bag. No moats.
So, is it 2 steps ahead and 1 step back, or 1 step ahead and 2 steps back (or any numerical variant of those)?
People with actual power in this are too involved and greedy to care about objective answer and TBH I don't trust them to put some higher good before their personal wealth and power and ego trip, capitalism ain't built on long term responsibility towards greater topics like future and wellbeing of mankind.
Plus we know from WWII atomic bomb development how utterly clueless, naive and out of touch with reality geeks doing something powerful can be. I see exactly same scenario being played out right now with llms.
Anyway, I am over-tired with all llm topics and frenzy folks (especially here), I'll better spend rest of the day preparing for a serious challenge in form of big multipitch climb in western Switzerland (Mirroir d'Argentine for anybody in same craft). Thats life I care about and makes me happy and fulfilled.
What are your points?
The value of AI is real and AI already is responsible for people getting fired or no additional jobs.
Ask basic graphics designers, website developers and co. Ask educational book writers or developer advocates.
In the former case, isn't it just business as usual? (well, with a huge, nasty recession - but the economy at least continues on in some recognizable form)
It makes sense to me to focus on weird possible futures if we already have the "happy path" somewhat known and barely under control.
So the answer is basically "beats me lol"
That's only forecasting out to 2030.
Software development for example is enhanced with running your claude locally.
But lets be honest, the right way to adjust 'project' is by writing some spec in a text field as an input, letting the ai do whatever it wants, having expert ais make sure its secure, then you do the last review and its done.
What do we need for this? A full end to end integration. Its just something we need to build, nothing we need to invent.
The nurse example is the same. We only need to build the computer end to end flow and plugin AI in the right spots and finetune for country specific requirements.
The industry is building this 'agentic layer' today. The Hyperscaler are building this layer too.
There is a golden phase were we will build all of this and were we cleanup old stuff and were we adjust with the current model capabilities and change systems and this will take a little bit of time, but the bottom line is already loosing left and right.
The Blender support from Fable and Astra? Probably kills a lot of peoples jobs on fiverr.
The small software someone needs? Got already killed by earlier models. Just a few days ago some architect (never written software) talked about how he vibecoded some tool for tracking working hours.
Man even a basic website was expesnive to build just 2 years ago.
The smaller, easier and better the code base, the easier it is to remove people from this.
The software market in China is imploding and we will also see budget adjustments to move away from consultants and move them into AI Token budgets. We probably reached peak software development.
Creating images (menues, flyers, whatever) became so cheap, that we reached peak graphi design GDP generation. This will go down.
Software development for complex systems is enhanced but not yet solved. But a lot of small software development stuff for sure. We reached Peak Software Development and this GDP will go down, not up.
Even then, assuming the difference is that huge between frontier and open-source, a specialized „human worker“ _should_ be able to fix the gap.
1. At least 10% of your net spend is on safety and harm mitigation before you accelerate yourselves into doing real harm to real people tomorrow.
2. Pause all AI enhancement until a proper mechanistic study can be done by a working group funded by you all to understand how AI model Safety can be enforced by something less lame than a Constitution/Spec.
Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.
the inference cost of AI has been dropping ~5x over every 6 months. AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.
Why is the nurse a she?
Something else could mean developing a new concept of ownership or a new form of redistribution.
From my point of view, the point about the nurse is especially relevant because, in the future, dealing with an aging population is going to become a major undertaking and a major burden.
Demographically, we simply don't have the number of people we need to give elders the care that they'll probably have to have near the end of their life, so we have to rely on AI to help us get through it.
Probably, we will see this happen in Japan and South Korea before it hits the United States.
In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.
Now I think AI will deliver real efficiency gains but also, it provides a convenient narrative to explain why people might be losing jobs in a way which distracts from much bigger systemic issues which existed prior to AI.
My negative-sum economy example with 'booming GDP' is possible without AI even as net economic value is being destroyed. So basically we won't be able to tell if people are losing jobs to AI or to systematic wealth transfer mechanisms which predate AI.
I suppose if we see people losing jobs permanently and workers in other sectors aren't seeing wage increases with more openings, that may be the most reliable indicator we have that the system is losing real wealth faster than AI productivity can offset it.
The bad news is that we won't see any problem in the numbers; the problem would show up as polarization and radicalization of the masses... Which is more qualitative . Since almost everyone is being radicalized concurrently as everyone is affected by the same pressures (both from monetary system and AI automation). The question is not "how many people became radicalized this quarter?" but "how much more radicalized is everyone feeling this quarter?"
And the people in the HN comments here treating this as anything other than a silly marketing puff post are even more cringe.
If Anthropic truly believed LLMs were going to raise GDP multiple percentage points, instead of going public to raise capital they could just go massively leveraged long on the S&P 500 and get funding for eternity.
They are not doing that, because AI is largely only good at coding, and software is only 1% of GDP.
And by making software cheaper and easier to produce, they might increase the amount of software in the world by 10X, but it will become a smaller percentage of GDP if AI models truly become autonomously good at creating it.
We can slow down AI development and make it a companion for us, not a replacement.
We don't need to automate ourselves out of it. Or take the risk of extinction.
Just like with nukes, we decided to not blow up the planet. We can too change this.
GDP is a terrible measure. I bet we will see a huge drop on HDI with so many suicides and people going through hell because their job got automated or they no longer see meaning in life, feeling powerless.
Instead they should run an estimate on how many would suicide until 2030 if the 'extreme scenario' happens.
Big GDP growth and a lot of people no longer finding purpose in their lives, going bankrupt, losing their homes and family etc.
For Anthropic, you are just clearly a number. They only care about output.
They have long forgotten the human being.
This is of course a slop paper with vague assumptions and equations that no single human economist will ever read. The messaging is "it will not be so bad", in line with the recent Economist piece.
We are ready for the midterm elections!
Is it just me, or does their choice of identifying "workers" specifically seem a little peculiar? For me, it reads like "We're committed to making segregation beneficial for everyone, including minorities!"
Where I remain resoundingly annoyed is how useless this is. It’s pure ass-covering by Anthropic ahead of an IPO, victim-blaming the populace for the outcomes of decisions made by Anthropic leadership and the investor class. Forgive the grisly analogy, but it’s akin to a mugger telling you “only you can stop this” mid-violence: Anthropic could have chosen to allocate more of its capital to reforms that benefit the populace, but they’ve chosen to focus on personal wealth instead via this IPO and for-profit rented access schemes.
It’s nauseating. Their actions still paint a picture of greed and exploitation rather than building a better tomorrow for everyone with AI, and the fact their PR puff pieces keep getting wallpapered up here is gross.
EDIT: I guess another way to look at this is Anthropic making it unequivocally clear that they will not stop of their own accord, and thus it falls to others to stop them. Which if that’s their position, then at least they’re honest about the challenge.
I haven’t forgot capitalist euphoria from 2023 about cutting worker power off at the root. That’s all these AI Cretins want. Well, that and an unnerving enthusiasm for personifying their AI Golems (Anthr. in particular here).
Sorry to poo poo a post about AI company prompting their underlings to prompt out visualizations.