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Comment by raz32dust | Hacker News Reader

This view is too cynical. The frontier advancements are certainly going to trickle down. Take cars for example. AI driven cars are already here. AI-designed battery systems, fuel systems, materials and 3d printing capabilities will come to cars. It will likely lead to cheaper, more efficient and more effective vehicles. If will just take time for the impact to percolate.

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My prediction is that while those “advancements” may come to cars, the only practical differences will be lower quality products, cost savings for the car companies, probably more expensive for consumers, and somehow it will also be collecting more data to sell to advertisers.

If you look at the average price of a new car, adjusted for inflation, it has pretty much always gone up aside from recessions. There have been plenty of advancements in car technology, they do not make them cheaper. It actually gives reason to charge more for them due to perceived increase in value.

Yes but you're getting a lot more for the same price. It's a lot more powerful, comfortable, safe and efficient while the effective cost has remained the same.

Again, the effective cost has not stayed the same, cars are getting more expensive. I am all for increased safety, I just wanted to throw a little water on the idea that cars(or really anything) is getting cheaper. You may be getting more performance or safety per dollar, but thats a value proposition that keeps people paying more. All the convenience and "power" features I can leave, I don't need a car that goes 0-60 in 2.8 seconds because why would anyone need that on public roads.

I drive a 1993 land cruiser, fwiw I would not put my kids in it for long drives because I don't think it even has air bags.

I would argue that cars are sufficiently advanced now and there are more important things to focus on. I don't care if AI moderately improves the comfort or efficiency of a new car while it took my job.

Obviously we get things in return for the social and economic fallout, carbon emissions, pollution, destruction of education, etc. that AI has provided us. I just haven't heard a compelling argument for why that is nearly enough to warrant this.

What percentage of that price is cost of good sold vs. a bunch of regulatory bs like dealers and taxes?

No idea, and it doesn't really matter because the customer ends up paying all of it.

Just a few more weeks, a few more hundreds of billions, it's right around the corner....

AI car navigation is here, but driving is a social act. Have you ever tried to keep an automated taxi out of a private driveway or the scene of an emergency? There is a lot of work to do and limited evidence of LLMs raising the bar.

This only works if there remains a viable and attractive consumer market for these advanced goods. AI is both an imminent wealth shock and perhaps the largest structural change to the economy in history as it threatens to drive the value of human labor to zero over the next decades.

In American history, when previous shocks like this occurred (e.g. with the Great Depression), we needed massive economic programs like the New Deal to restore consumer demand. When such programs are not forthcoming while wealth inequalities keep increasing, one can look to other countries for what ends up happening; either the disenfranchisement of ordinary people over time or unrest and redistribution by force.

I think he means LLMs, we knew about RL already.

Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" theory, which you may know from its smash hit "trickle down economics"! Surely this time it'll be different, right?

> Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" theory

While trickle down theory is dubious when it comes to economics, it's clear that it is valid when it comes to technology. Tech trickles down.

Ah yes, like my RAM, SSDs, and GPUs are trickling down right now? You're absolutely right! I love a trickle of PC parts!

This is a temporary anomaly due to the datacenter buildout, which will not last forever. Historically, tech has always trickled down. Sooner or later, hardware will again become cheap.

"Temporary" is a few months. We're looking at many multiple years before parts even _begin_ to decline in price, if even. How much will we as consumers lose in the time it takes for this to correct? This is not "temporary", this is a decimation of an entire product sector for the foreseeable future. There is no historical precedent for this. Companies are not and will not slow down gobbling up literally every tech part they can. Every year, training and running AI will demand more resources over and over and we will continue to be charged increasing amounts for everything because everything costs more either directly or upstream of us. It is a literal cancer.

> Every year, training and running AI will demand more resources over and over and we will continue to be charged increasing amounts for everything because everything costs more either directly or upstream of us.

Unless we are really going to hit the Singularity and create Godlike superintelligence that improves beyond all limits, sooner or later the models will stop improving, no matter how much compute we throw at them. After that happens, the best models will be etched into model-specific ASICs with weights fixed in mask ROM (like Taalas is already doing), which will result in massive, order of magnitude inference efficiency increase. Couple this with the training datacenters suddenly becoming available for inference, and the cost of compute will plummet.

Yes, it might take a few years, but the hardware will be cheap again. And if the result of the whole process is human-level AI, then it will be worth it in the end.

I don't think you understand the current state of capitalism very well. Absolutely nothing goes down in price once companies know people will still buy an item at a higher price. We will never see hardware at the previous affordable prices again. Sure it might go down somewhat, but going down from 500% of previous prices to 400% of previous prices is not suddenly "affordable". And that is exactly what will happen. Models will not suddenly stop improving and their consumption of hardware will not stop. The corporations won't allow it. We have too many companies in an arms race against each other. They literally cannot stop or they die.

> Absolutely nothing goes down in price once companies know people will still buy an item at a higher price.

This is empirically false when it comes to technology.

A few years of technological inflation (with a very specific cause) do not invalidate a hundred years of technological deflation.

How can you say tickle down economics doesn't work? The US has made it easier for businesses to grow and the result is the highest standard of living ib tje world.

I think it's hard to quantify "highest standard of living", but for the attempts at it (e.g. HDI, etc), the US is not number one.

Trickle-down economics specifically refers to economic policy that favors the wealthy and corporations with the argument that this will lead to wealth trickling down to the economically less fortunate. Examples include the Reagan and Trump tax cuts.

This has been studied somewhat extensively (https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/20/2/539/6500315?login=... is one example), and it’s been shown over and over that this does in fact not work and leads to larger wealth disparity, across many countries where it has been attempted.

It’s possible you’re working off some other definition of the term based on your comment but that’s the generally accepted usage.

The person you replied to was the second person I've seen on HN this week try and defend trickle-down economics explicitly in more or less the exact same terms and justifications. What is going on with that? Did Peter Thiel tweet some pro trickle down dreck recently that these people latched on to?

You should see the comments sections on NYT articles, lately. It was like someone flipped a switch about two weeks ago.

It would be neat if someone did sweeping sentiment analysis on them, just to see it graphed, but I’m sure gathering the data would be prohibited.

It’s all bots anyway at this point.

Hate to break it to you, but the US doesn’t even break the top 10 in a lot of reports.

The US alone!

Worse, the view is largely phrased as gaslighting AI. Blaming the cause of particular grievances that coincidentally have been sourced at the same time as the rise of AI, is purposeful.

> [Your train] never comes on time. Fuel is more expensive. The roads are still congested with traffic. Your kids are (probably) doing worse at school. Food costs more. Houses cost more. Rent is higher. Buying a computer or a PS5 is more expensive. Politics is still full of mentally unstable people. The environment is getting worse. You will still die of heart disease or cancer. Food quality is worse. Your kids can't find work. Wealth inequality is accelerating.

None of this has to do with AI.

> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using), and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)

Plain wrong on both counts.

> Imagine what a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" will be able to do Apparently...nothing.

Nonsequitor, probably based on a personal beef. Datacenters, at best, are understood to be for hosting more AI - not for people to somehow live in as an arcology of discovery.

I think only because these are all things that AI companies are saying will be helped by AI so give us more money. Nobody advertises their product publicly as "you will be able to buy other product to do the same things you do now but pay people less and make more profits" even though that is where the value is for them.

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