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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

I have a very different position on this. I think we will see the most growth we’ve ever seen in the next decade and it will be powered by AI.

I think most of these investors don’t really understand how close we are to have very useful AI and what it’s impact will be. We are roughly on the verge of another industrial revolution

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None of the AI stuff really solves things like affordable housing or keeping wages up with inflation (or addressing inflation). It's not going to magically give us more energy without environmental impacts, or settle conflicts between countries.

Building another AI-marketed SaaS only benefits people who don't need those benefits. In all likelihood, it'll just give us more bullshit jobs.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...

I just heard of this the other day and it is in my queue.

It might, you can't possibly know that. If the coming AIs make humans twice as productive, then we've boosted our output tremendously.

One way that we become twice as productive is to use half the labor. This is my fear that AI brings about—not huge gains for society, but huge gains for a small minority.

Again, unknown. If we look at history, technology that increases productivity is initially disruptive, then just frees up people to tackle bigger problems.

If you look at worker productivity vs income, they have diverged sharply over the past 50 year. I have zero optimism that AI-driven productivity would improve the financial footing of the average citizen. It will likely just exacerbate existing social unrest as more jobs are automated.

The percentage of people working in US society has increased steadily since the 50's, and the income of individuals has also increased steadily over the same time frame.

It may not exactly match productivity, but more people are working and people are earning substantially more than ever before.

AI may be different, but its entirely likely that it will just continue this trend

> I think most of these investors don’t really understand how close we are to have very useful AI and what it’s impact will be. We are roughly on the verge of another industrial revolution

Tell me more. I'm willing to be persuaded by this position but I'm skeptical.

What specific AI breakthroughs do you think will happen on what timelines?

Just take AI assisted programming, if it makes devs twice as effective at their jobs then its massively increased the output of our most profitable industry.

This is just one field, AI will impact the output of most fields

I'm a dev. It won't make us more productive. Our limitations are not how much code can we write, it's how many requirements can we gather.

Eh, code also takes a whole lot of time to get right, and AI will reduce that significantly.

AI will only be a positive revolution if it's not putting a large number of people out of jobs, but merely increasing their productivity.

Or, if it DOES put a lot of people out of jobs, it would be good for them to have some ownership over the AI, so that it's the labor force who reaps the benefits, not just the corporations. The bad scenario is mega-corps replace lots of humans with a fleet of machines owned by the mega-corp. The better scenario is we see widespread ownership of AI-powered productive property (that is, distributism), such that mega-corps contract out jobs to humans who own that property, and the property allows those humans to provide better service than before.

Yeah its a concern there may be a transition period. I have the take that it will just make everyone way more capable and we can up our dreams

I think the economy is hitting real, hard barriers in resource extraction, energy usage, and number of people that buy and sell. That’s where stagnation comes from.

The real economy will stagnate. AI can automate some work and intensify future technological discoveries, but that won’t make energy any cheaper, clean our environment, create more humans, or make resources as easily extractable as they were 100 years ago.

The real economy can’t grow too much more than it’s current size, at least in the physical world.

Yeah there are hard limits but I think AI will help us be way more efficient and probably optimize reusability.

>We are roughly on the verge of another industrial revolution

I was told that the "internet of things" would bring about unparalleled gains in manufacturing, and then that very quietly went away. I'm not holding my breath for AI to deliver on what IoT was supposed to do.

AI isn't IOT, its the greatest invention we will have ever created

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