As one company starts to streamline, all of their competitors will follow suit. It will become a competition because the stock market will reward you if you cut headcount and punish you if you don’t.
I don't buy this. Won't investors still seek growth? Sure, efficiency amazing can be attractive, but much more attractive is runaway growth. If you only need 5 people to do what uses to require 100, you still might need to hire new people if you are growing.
Andrew Yang has some predictions:
"1. Mid-career office workers will be fired in droves.""1. Mid-career office workers will be fired in droves."
the number of people necessary to make large corporations function is going to be dramatically reduced. What do you say if your child asks you about becoming a newspaper journalist? You say, “Well, that field hasn’t really been growing, you might want to consider something else.”
Sure, journalism majors aren't exactly thriving. But I'd wager more people make money by writing (and in more ways) than thirty years ago...by a lot.
Seems to me that whenever people develop something that automates humans want done, the humans who used to do the thing don't just give up -- they start doing something more.
"2. Personal bankruptcies will surge.""2. Personal bankruptcies will surge."
The amount of money getting paid to human labor is about to go down. The value is going to get soaked up into the cloud. The K-shaped economy, where the rich enjoy the growth and keep spending while the bottom 80% or so are trying to tread water will become all the more dramatic.
So, the argument is that we will be so productive that nobody will need to work (remember everybody loses their job?), but at the same time nothing will get cheaper and nobody will be able do anything.
"3. College grads won’t be able to find jobs.""3. College grads won’t be able to find jobs."
The social contract of ‘study hard, go to school, get a good job, live a decent life’ is about to be vaporized to smithereens. Upward mobility for most will be a thing of the past.
This social contract hasn't worked since 1998, and Yang is just now catching on?
Many young people will be faced with getting a job that doesn’t require a degree while paying for the one that they got at great expense.
Right: degrees may not be very useful, but that doesn't mean people will also not be useful. People are weird. Weirdness is gonna cone out in spades and it's going to be pretty great. I'm expecting a great wave of weird new things that make being alive even better.
"4. Downtowns and office parks will empty out.""4. Downtowns and office parks will empty out."
Maybe...cities have more than office parks. You don't get really awesome bakeries without density.
"5. Pessimism and anger will rise up.""5. Pessimism and anger will rise up."
I strongly disagree with this.
It's at least a 50/50 that AI opens doors to people that we definitely aren't thinking about.
Despite my tone here, I'm not an AI booster. But it is very tiring to see this constant pearl-clutching.
We aren't gonna do less, we're gonna do more.
I'm going to react to a single thing that I think is important to think more about.
Idk about this one, but I levitate towards the doomers a bit.
Because honestly, it is easy to reason about this from a privileged position. If you are of sound mind, it's easier to not fall into a trap of emotional dependency on a sycophantic bot. But if you're vulnerable, what then?
And, unless you have a pretty good idea what you're doing with your coding buddy, you may, as @k00b put it, be telling your bot to boil the ocean. Can everyone afford a 1M sats OpenAI bill because you instructed an oopsie in that agentic setup some 40yo former cofounding fuckboi from the Valley said was the only way or you go bust? I don't think so.
The fomo is messed up. The pressure immense. I have an interview soon and I intend to ask the hiring party, as in seriously, what on earth is moving them to hire right now. I didn't think I'd ever need to wonder about that, but I honestly do.
You make a good point about emotional dependency. I wasn't considering that, much.
This evening, I've been reading Arthur Hayes'latest and it is a little surprising how in step with Yang he is:
Who am I to disagree with the likes of Yang and Hayes? But it seems to me that markets get very weird around things that everybody expects to happen. Right now, everybody expects massive white collar job loss courtesy of the Terminator (wouldn't it be just poetic if that bureaucratic term cum sci-fi horror actually returns to its hr roots?).
I don't expect that everyone is going to emerge a vibe coder like a butterfly from their pre-AI cocoon, but I really don't see how this thing that is going to obliterate all the things that people are doing will yet remain out of reach for those very same people.
I am pretty confident that hiring good people is still a good idea. Some of them will have ideas that reveal how small a closet we've been standing in all this time.
eg. Film, tv and movies are something like half a percent of GDP. This is a thing that didn't exist much more than 100 years ago, and which we could all probably be just fine. Yet there it is. I expect AI will get turned into at least one major new art form of such scale.
Then again if it's all kyc'd and they can choose who to lock out...
#1436017
Yes. There are days that I wonder: why do they let me do this? lol
do report back.
Me too. I'm not an AI maxi or doomer. Yang is someone I can't take seriously and your comments on his writing illustrate this beautifully.
What impact did the computer, the internet and the software revolution have on the economy? As software becomes exponentially cheaper and faster to build and deploy and on-demand intelligence scales order after order of magnitude, what impact will this have on the economy? Likely it will scale up just as it has before with every other technology revolution.
Yes, there will be social displacement, as this is the very nature of revolutions. There will be turmoil and politicians like Yang will try to convince you into WWIII. Do not be psyop'd by the evil politician.
I think this is a great prediction. By it's nature, AI will replace the known and the routine, so we will find our comparative advantages in the unusual.
Amazing
What is Stacker News?
It is a social media platform intentionally created to enable a P2P V4V BTC denominated community.
Originally Stacker News (SN) custodyed sats on behalf of participants but the threat of government regulatory prosecution on the pretext of money transmitter forced a move away from the custody of sats by the platform to the platform enabling participants to send sats via their wallets.
To achieve this participants need to attach wallets to both send and receive sats.
Where participants do not or cannot attach LN wallets transactions will often default to Cowboy Credits.
This change was a compromise forced by the threat of government prosecution.
The difficulty of attaching both sending and receiving wallets is moderate- it takes some effort and newbie or non tech people may struggle with it, but most competent Bitcoiners can succeed in attaching wallets and thus enabling sats denominated P2P transactions.
But a number of Stackers have chosen not to attach wallets- in particular sending wallets which enable you to send sats into the SN community.
Very few have attached just a sending wallet- many have attach just a receiving wallet.
Those who only attach a receiving wallet can receive sats from others but cannot send sats into the community. They may feel that as content providers they have no need or obligation to send sats into and within the SN community. I disagree.
Where these receive but not send (horse but no gun) Stackers proclaim to be Bitcoiners but refuse to enable a sending wallet they are demonstrably hypocrits. They claim they want to build and grow the BTC LN MoE network but they cannot be bothered contributing toward that growth by attaching a sending wallet and demonstrating they are not just talking, but are also walking and supporting a sats denominated platform.
If we do not use the LN wherever and whenever we can it will not grow and develop.
Some claim it is too hard to attach wallets- its too hard on their self custody nodes or wallets- this just highlights how much work the LN still needs before it is capable of anything approaching 100% reliable MoE capability.
But the best way to grow and strengthen the LN is it use it – despite its remaining flaws and glitches.
When wallets are supported by people using them they receives transaction fees and can develop liquidity and systems further.
When LN wallets are not used the LN decays- it does not have the usage and fees income to grow.
So when self proclaimed advocates for BTC and LN refuse to attach wallets (especially sending wallets) I see hypocrit.
I will continue to see hypocrit until and unless someone can explain why I should not.
Calling me a Nazi, trolling and making fun of me crudely seeking to avoid the issues I raise will not stop me from asking why are you claiming to be a Bitcoiner but refusing to attach wallets and use the LN here where we can help it grow.
Now some are deliberately concealing their wallet status, as if this is about a right to privacy.
Concealing your wallet status means nobody else can verify whether or not you are serious about using BTC LN, or whether you are just an all talk no walk hypocrit.
Do not trust- verify.
What about this fundamental principle do they not understand?
And then they talk about 'content' being more important than whether or not you have attached wallets - in this context the intentional lack of attached wallets undermines your credibility as your actions do not match your words.
Your submitted content may be great, but you as someone claiming to be a serious Bitcoiner are undermining your credibility and the credibility of your content by being a hypocrit.
Your content, is tainted by your verifiable hypocrisy.
SNs needs both good content providers and those who pay for that content if it is succeed.
I am more in the latter group than the former but both are required overall or the model does not work.
So as a net contributor of sats and thus a net consumer of content I object where content providers refuse to engage in the P2P V4V ethos by refusing to attach both sending and receiving wallets and I will both withhold my contribution of sats and sometimes downvote in response.
V4V needs to work reciprocally or it will not work at all.
The content providers need net sats contributors/content consumers who send sats into the platform, or the entire platform fails.