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Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

But AI is touted as the replacement for the working class? It’s TAM is “the combined wages and salaries of everyone below the C-suite” and it gets trillions of investment dollars, and letters of marque for copyright infringement and hacking, to pursue this market.

I mean, just look at the sequence of events you’re expecting here:

1. Ai companies achieve their stated goals

2. ???

3. Housing, infrastructure, medical care, etc get better for the working class

Are you the king of the underpants gnomes or something? How could it ever turn out this way? Why does anyone think it would? Am I taking crazy pills?

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> AI companies achieve their stated goals

If those goals are fully eliminating need for human labor, then I agree it probably won't be good for most people. But that will probably take at least decades.

Anything short of that, and I think economy will be pretty similar to what it is now. You still need working class and need it to be productive, so you do need them to be reasonably happy, housed, healthy, and you need good infrastructure. With lower cost for all this, why wouldn't things improve, like all times throughout history?

Not parent but I could image an (utopian?) society in which AI/LLM helps us develop software and hardware that can help generating better and cheaper outputs in those fields. Not saying it's going to happen but it could be a possible outcome.

“Are you the king of the underpants gnomes or something?”

No I’m just at the frontlines of this so called “replacement” and all I’m seeing is people doing more with less with no possibility of replacement. I have no idea what all this marketing pablum about TAM replacement is. All I’m seeing is growing businesses serving more people with less resources.

Could it be that CEO’s of struggling businesses are lying about why they’re doing the layoffs? Why are we suddenly believing them on this one issue?

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