So the AI boom is resulting in a) fewer jobs, b) massive increases in hardware, and c) exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?).
With some work on crypto many people could be a trillionaire on paper. Whether it translate to actual wealth and liquidity is another matter. We are talking about P/E of 300 / P/S of close to 100 for Tesla and SpaceX.
>When exactly are the upsides going to hit?
A lot of people take Moore's law, or technology improvement as granted. It will always come. It will always become cheaper. But none of that is true. Massive R&D is required along with ROI.
The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle. What normally would have taken 10 years to happen is now getting close to 5 years. We were suppose to stagnate or slow down with 3nm and 2nm, we are now rushing to push through everything from interconnect, smaller transistor and massive increase in Foundry capacity. PCI-Express 8.0, Nvidia Photonics, DRAM Improvement, HBM, HBF, even capacitor, immersive cooling. I don't even record the last time we had such a massive shift and changes in hardware technology. Even the start of smartphone era wasn't like this as majority of its start was picking on lower end PC components. Instead the AI is pushing the frontier hardware technology. With multiple trillion companies, insane appetite from market. We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
Sure would be nice if we got to see any of that, instead of it all going solely to resource guzzling data centres selling opaque models whilst simultaneously destroying the pricing for local hardware!
We are only 1 to 2 year into a cycle and we expect a lot of things to happen. Even the business decisions of things were decided before the cycle happened, as if they are fortune teller or God, the hardware lead time would meant it will be next year at best before we see results. And Nvidia has already moved at a faster pace than most imagined. Latest GPU R&D are now fully amortised on the AI server front. GPU now move to leading edge node faster than before and iterate on a shorter cycle. I have yet to read a single comments on either HN, Reddit or wider internet that appreciate this.
And as to NAND and DRAM, which most people are concern. We only need a few companies to commit to long term ( 3 - 5 years ) agreement on pricing and quantity, DRAM and NAND will increase supply or new fabs accordingly. This isn't new and is exactly what Apple did with iPod. But no companies wants to do that, as they all want lowest price and little commitment, while foundry don't want to bare the risk of new fab and over supply in the long term. This is just classic commodity supply and demand scenario.
On a simpler terms, no one asked why Toilet paper companies aren't putting up more factory just to output more paper rolls during COVID. And If you need 5 to 10 years just to earn back the cost of additional supply line, why risk that?
Please show sources. Maybe no one appreciates it because it's only rumors spread by enterprises massively profiting from such rumors?
And about your toilet paper analogy: Every producer tried everything to improve output. You cannot just let your machines run faster. You also need input materials, workers and logistics to scale accordingly, which is often not possible.
>You cannot just let your machines run faster. You also need input materials, workers and logistics to scale accordingly, which is often not possible.
It is not about getting machines to run faster, it is about buying new machines setting up a whole new line. And the ROI will never make sense until the scale and price reach certain point.
>Please show sources.
You can literally apply the same theory across all commodity industry. The problem is supply Chain was never understood by wider audience.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years. Give me everything you have got.
We are saying AI companies have trillions to spend over the next 5 years on infrastructure, based on servicing a hypothetical TAM that includes large amounts of workers who it also expects to displace.
> The AI Boom pushed a lot of technology forward by at least 2 - 3 years or 1 cycle.
Untrue. Technology has been evolving perfectly fine for the last 50 years. If anything it has slowed down lately due to getting close to the physical limits - which were reached without any AI whatsoever. We were getting insane gains in clock speed and memory capacity some 20 odd years ago, it's not the case any more.
> We are basically saying we have Trillions to spend over the next 5 years.
No we don't, inflation tells you that loud and clear. If the Fed wanted to really take care of the raging (but under-reported) inflation, they'd have to raise interest rates a lot more but that would kill the pump-up operation of the AI market bubble. So the Fed is sitting on their hands.
> Give me everything you have got.
That figures. I'm pretty sure you're never going to say "We're giving you everything we've got". The asset pump works only one way - up, trickle down is for losers. You see, the trillionares aren't waiting for the bright future, they're grabbing all they can right now, only the peons are forced to "give everything they've got" while on a steady diet of hallucinations which can never materialize.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.
Every new generation changing technology is followed by a frenzy of infrastructure build out.
Running up to the dotcom bubble lot of money was spent on building undersea cables and Internet infra because the assumption was that the demand for websites was going to be a straight line if it not exponential. There was an over capacity of expensive infra. Then the market crashed and the same infra went for cheap and laid foundation for Internet as we know today.
Same thing happened during the railroad frenzy in the 1800s.
And same thing is happening today. There is assumption that the pace of AI improvement and demand is going to be straight line if not exponential. So lot of money is being spent on data centres looking at “future”. There is going to be an oversupply of expensive hardware and models because who doesn’t want that sweet AI money.
Sooner or later the market is going to reset because nothing can keep going up forever. It’s only after the reset we are going to see the upsides of AI.
The railroad bubble and the dotcom bubble feature prominently as disastrous misallocations of capital in one of my favorite books: "Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation."
Pitching AI as in the same vein is a very dark prognostication. As in, probably going to cause a wreck so bad we won't see breakeven in our lifetimes. The railroad bubble and the dotcom bust were generational economic calamities. For Gen X and Millenials, combine that with the 2008 GFC and it's been nonstop waves of speculation-driven disaster drowning us our whole lives.
The comparison with the internet is not valid, and I can immediately give you one reason. I was there (3000 years ago) when the internet was in its infancy. When the dot com bubble was going on, the internet was a fringe thing for most people. People didn't really use it, didn't know how to use it, didn't trust it (for purchases, for information). The investors were still right, but they were too ahead of their time, by almost a decade.
AI is not like that today already, both by common people or by companies. They're using AI at capacity. Demand is higher than supply. Not the other way around, like it was for the internet.
If the research about it making people reliant and dumber is true, then they can probably do some serious price increases before people actually consider stopping to use them, but of course that would be in the future when the entire market in general stops subsidizing the cost.
Upsides will be seen into societies that are not capital-above-govt, but govt-above-capital. China for instance: they will show advantages of AI (amongst other technologies). Sure they've got surveillance there, but there's also surveillance in the west. In China you have clean streets and low crime, while in the west it's surveillance without tangible benefit for the common people.
I could barely exist in Shanghai when I visited it for a week earlier this year. The surveillance is suffocating. With all my disdain towards the way the West is going, the level of control and freedom can't be compared. Especially if you've ever experienced freedom taken from you (unfortunately, I have).
Here is my experience in the center of Shanghai, very subjective of course:
- I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.
- We stayed in a short rent apartment, so we had to temporarily register with government. Of course that requires uploading photos of me, my kids, and all our IDs
- with a lot of apps banned there, you are essentially told which one you have to use
- you need VPN
- you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
- fences everywhere - don't walk on the nice lawn there, don't sit here, don't stand there. And the moment your kids do - the security / police will come
- lack of public spaces (we couldn't find a playground, the one we eventually found was behind the fence) make the environment hostile and it almost feels like they don't want you outside
US is out of control on KYC as well. If you're a nomad, as in you don't have a permanent physical address, you cannot have a bank account. You cannot have credit cards. And now you cannot even have a mail handling service, because the new USPS requirements include ID showing a permanent residential address.
Sure this doesn't affect most people, but it affects at least two groups: the very poor, and the perpetual travelers (which includes retired folks who bought RVs and live/drive around the country full time).
Before anyone comments with, "I'm a nomad and I have X bank/credit card", I'll just say that within one year you won't. Every one of those services is legally required to collect your permanent address info. They haven't all done it yet, but they are increasingly becoming compliant. The various services which previously enabled nomad life are becoming blocked by the financial verification services.
The usual (bad) suggestion is, "just use a family member's address". This is a bad idea for many reasons, not the least of which is how the sloppy credit and data aggregation agencies will comingle yours and your family's data, resulting in all kinds of problems later.
Re: Apartment
You can't rent an apartment in Texas without proving your ID, passing a credit check, and potentially overcoming other obstacles. And you can't stay in a hotel for more then 30 days at a time (without separate bookings). You can't check into a hotel without proving your ID and the IDs of everyone staying with you.
Re: Public Spaces
Few and far between in many US cities.
Re: Police, security, fences
I'm not sure where in the US you are, but lots of developed areas of Texas are like what you describe. Worse, you've got the occasional Proud American property owner who is just itching to be a manly man and brandish his gun.
I'm an Australian who was born in Eastern Europe. I've travelled around the world, lived in the US for 4 years and done a few cross country trips in the US including visiting Texas. With all its pros/cons, my experience there can't be compared to what I had in China
It's surprising to me to learn that a place like Texas is like that. I live in California and have access to lots of public spaces, and rarely see police or fences. Private security is pretty common, but that don't bother me much; most of them don't carry firearms, and there's very little they're legally allowed to do. (And they don't make enough to risk life and limb, so they're not going to get into any but the lightest of confrontations.)
I haven't had to rent an apartment since 2014, but my experience then was similar to yours. I don't think any of that is required by law, but if I were going to rent my house out to someone I'd absolutely want to do all that stuff too.
I've definitely checked into hotels in California only providing my own ID, not the IDs of anyone staying with me. And I believe the ID check wasn't a legal requirement; the hotel was using it to verify that I was actually the person I was claiming to be for the purposes of matching me to my reservation. I don't know if there are legal limits on how long you can stay in a hotel here without re-booking.
It sounds like "know-your-customer" is not the problem, but rather the quaint assumption of a permanent mailing address is the problem. Isn't some manner of KYC an essential part of a society with laws?
Roaming works to bypass GFW. Apparently many local employees of international businesses have a Hong Kong SIM card with generous data allowances, just so they can communicate with the outside world.
> you go outside, there is always a police or some security in booth watching you. Of course cameras are also everywhere.
My take on this is that because of high youth unemployment in China, there's a nationwide drive to hire young people as security. When I was there, I noticed how young many of the security people are.
But yeah, a lot of this security theatre probably has to do with having to manage their large population and keeping them gainfully employed.
>Roaming works to bypass GFW. Apparently many local employees of international businesses have a Hong Kong SIM card with generous data allowances, just so they can communicate with the outside world.
I… don't know. If anyone knew exactly how GFW worked (and it adapts over time), and made something that would bypass whatever blocking or throttling happens when it does, they'd make a lot of money selling their solution.
I had difficulty using non-XRay VPNs even back to my home network, so for the most part I just used data roaming even with my laptop.
Usually, yes, but it's an IPsec VPN that the great firewall will explicitly not mess with in any way, because they don't want to inconvenience foreigners who are there on business.
> - I can't pay with my credit/debit cards there so I need to get their alipay pay app. There is KYC required to upload my government ID.
It's not so odd that the Chinese choose to use their domestic payment system over a US one. You probably needed a government ID to get your credit/debit card too (at least when you opened your bank account).
I'm not saying the Chinese surveillance system isn't horrible, but the western ones are catching up quickly with the adoption of Flock cameras everywhere and Palantir analyzing every bit of digital footprint you leave. Is there anyone who think there isn't a non-negliable risk that people will walk around with a "jew star" marking in the US in the coming 5-10 years?
Interesting...although most of these are present in any country, at least the ones I have been to. You can use Google in India but not Tiktok (to give one example). Earlier Singapore used to have proxy server for websites but for a long time, that is gone but I guess that's cos they have found other ways to check if they need to. Crackdowns on private condos becoming hotels with guests dragging their luggage and strangers in lift 24x7 have created a lot of trouble in many cities.
Credit card seems too much...have not seen that anywhere.
As for playgrounds etc, I guess this is to do with China being still lower income + much more densely populated.
> Earlier Singapore used to have proxy server for websites but for a long time, that is gone but I guess that's cos they have found other ways to check if they need to.
They probably had to do away with it, with HTTPS becoming more and more mainstream.
Singapore still blocks numerous sites at ISP DNS level:
Wouldn't they have most of that just from customs/your passport? Not saying it isn't all rather dystopian, but, like, they have your ID as soon as you hit an airport.
Added surveillance bonus(!) at Mainland Chinese airports: When doing international to international transfers, you are required to have your passport scanned. I have never seen this in free countries. You just wait in an international terminal (no customs, etc) and take the next flight. I am curious if CCP will require HK Airport to change their rules/procedures in the future.
In Singapore Changi, the arrival and departure are at same gate so you can just sit and wait for next flight. Passport is checked before you get into next flight at the gate where they check your boarding pass as well..right there your bags are also scanned (at each gate or group of few gates)
Just transited in HKG, the gates are same but boarding at different levels. So you clear the security at a common area, get same PP checks done then go to departure gate which is one level above. IIRC Qatar etc are the same.
Big difference between airline employee checking whether or not you're the ticket holder and the government checking every passenger for warrants.
The false positive rate when doing this via passenger records alone is so high that airport law enforcement will generally only go out of their way to actively look for particularly interesting people.
Germans: ~1,786 per 100k (baseline)
All Non-Germans: ~7,365 per 100k (~4.1× German rate)
Syria: ~12,900 per 100k (~7.2×)
Afghanistan: ~12,300 per 100k (~6.9×)
Romania: ~8,450 per 100k (~4.7×)
Turkey: ~6,660 per 100k (~3.7×)
Poland: ~6,640 per 100k (~3.7×)
Ukraine: ~5,130 per 100k (~2.9×)
---
Some other countries (Switzerland, Denmark) also publish per-nationality data and it doesn't look any better. The other comment shows data from Norway/Finland/Sweden which is more of the same.
The US is a different topic (but strong arguments with clear data can be made as well), so I'll refrain from engaging it here to avoid further derailing the thread.
how does claiming that the US has strong arguments to support your point, but discussing them would derail the thread, when the person you were replying to was showing data from Texas, a US state?
This is ignoring a lot of variables, the most obvious of which is that crime rates for people in economically disadvantaged positions are unsurprisingly higher.
I was going to explain some of the others when I realized that in the context of this thread — namely comparing Europe to China in terms of ethnic diversity — these misleading statistics smell like a call to return to a ‘monocultural’ Europe. My grandparents have had pretty bad experiences with Germany’s last attempt at that; I therefore want to stress how dangerous it can be to present statistics like these as ‘neutral’.
> exponential acceleration in wealth inequality (world's first trillionaire anyone?)
How much did Musk becoming a trillionaire move the US national (or global) Gini coefficient of wealth?
If wealth inequality is significantly worsening due to AI, the wealth Gini will noticeably go up. I don’t know whether that’s happening; what I do know is individual extremes are very noticeable, but have limited impact on the big picture.
The upside will mostly be the schadenfreude we'll get when, coming in Q4 of this year, the managerial class is finally called on to show ROI for the $100,000+ (depending on company size) per employee they shunted to anthropic and openai.
Sure, the world will still burn, and the economy will collapse, and the managers will still blame the doers. But it's something.
Personally, I can do more than I could before as the result of AI.
Honestly I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
The benefits COULD hit by employers reducing everybody's hours.
The blocker to this is the middle management disease where there's a class of people who spend 40+ hours a week in some kind of update meeting or another and that much talking can't be replaced by AI. (much of it could be replaced by just not doing it any more but that's a different story)
You can't shift productivity by 10X and expect the rest of the supply/demand equilibrium to stay the same, with you working 10% of the time and sipping drinks on the beach while retaining the same job opportunities and expected salaries.
There will be increased competition for job openings, reductions in real wages, or increased expectations of productivity. Probably some combination of all three.
No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people.
Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.
People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.
It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.
It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.
Strongly agree. Reduce the work week today to 4 days 32 hours, the US already generates $5T in profits per year. That is time taken from workers from the one life they get. If corporations want to be more productive, take your best shot with LLMs. If it works, great, we keep reducing the work week. If it doesn't work, well, take it up with who sold you the magic beans.
We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).
Yes, in theory but if working more confers an advantage then work expectations will stay the same and will show up as higher productivity. So the real question is how will that productivity be distributed. Right now it's being concentrated into shareholders value rather than wages.
So tax them as much as needed, or require state ownership of some amount. Startups, and company entities in general, exist because a jurisdiction allows them to, or allows them to accept payments, control accounts with financial resources, pay vendors and workers, and operate within a commercial framework. That is a privilege, not a right. The rules are a shared agreement and delusion, the rules can change at any time.
It would be one thing if those increases in productivity were improving my QOL as a consumer of produced goods, through cost reductions or increases in quality, but I'm not seeing any of that.
All that seems to be happening is that these productivity gains roll up as profits for the owner class.
It's easier to enter the owner class. It's easier for you to do a startup where you're not the expert in everything. It's easier for you to rely less on buying things when you can make them yourself.
The moat of the owner class is lower because now information is everywhere and it's less possible to hide behind trade secrets and implementation effort.
Based on what? The macroeconomics don't work out that way. IF productivity goes up, but consumption does not, that means that it's harder to enter the owner class, because fewer productive enterprises (owned by non-working people) are supplying a larger share of customer demand.
This may make a difference on the margins for people in the software bubble. But for the other 8 billion people on the planet, they aren't all going to become owners in your brave new world, unless consumer demand goes to the moon to soak up all that productivity. It's not doing that. Prices aren't dropping. Quality isn't increasing.
If you think I'm wrong - is there a cross-economy explosion of small one-person businesses that I'm somehow not seeing? Are gigacorps across the board all losing market share? Because on the macro scale I see nothing but further consolidation.
Which is only relevant if one of the following two things happens:
1. Consumption goes up. (It's not going up. 40 hours at your job buys you less shit today than it did 3 years ago.)
2. Mega-corps start losing marketshare and revenue to this avalanche of new one-to-two-person businesses. (They aren't. Their revenues are climbing, which implies that consolidation is what's happening, not diversification.)
New markets are created all the time, as new products and services become viable. So one-to-two-person businesses don't necessarily compete with larger businesses for the same customers. And that's why both can have rising revenue.
None of that matters, if the populace lacks the purchasing power to sustain these “new markets”. It also assumes, that incumbents won’t enter the new markets, and acquire/squeeze/kill the new players.
A new market is made when a product or service which previously was too expensive becomes affordable to more people due to innovation. There's thousands of example, many of them in your own life.
But you are decided. Being negative is what you have chosen and there's plenty of people who will back you up because they are also afraid.
Could you give any examples of how these new markets have positively changed my life as a consumer? Did any of the stuff I buy become cheaper or better, or get replaced with something else entirely (that is cheaper or better)?
Where is the horse buggy -> automobile transition of this AI age? Where is the industrialization that made clothes 10x cheaper to make? Show me examples.
There's two many examples to mention, but you will shoot down any example I give. So what's the use? Also are you asking specifically for AI or for invention in general?
Where are these new markets, and how much of my spend as a consumer is going towards them?
This isn't the invention of the internal combustion engine, or the textile loom, or the internet. The way people are doing work has changed a bit, but from the consumer end, all I see is shit like 'your health insurance will be 30% more expensive next year' and $11 for a gallon of milk and another rent increase and when I ask Google a question the results are sometimes a bit better and sometimes a bit worse.
Yup. Everything after the first decade of a career is either jockeying for a promotion, jumping ship-to-ship as needed, or sitting around in meetings.
It's not that people get lazy or are underemployed, but that expertise is just that valuable. You'd think this would be proof enough to break the AI echo chamber already.
> I could "retire" to a senior level role and have AI do 90% of my work and nobody would know the difference.
They would notice, and then they would fire 9/10 of the people in your role. If you are unlucky, you get laid off. If you are lucky, you get to botsit full time for the workload of 10 engineers for less pay and no career advancement.
This would last until they figure out how to remove the human from the loop entirely.
Nobody has noticed where I work. I'm thinking of getting a second job, actually.
Key factors for me:
- Company is full of old school engineers who seem to hate AI and will scrutinize every command it runs. Means that even though we're both 'using' AI, I'm still way more productive.
- Said engineers have too much inside knowledge of the horrific system they made that management can't possibly get rid of them. Helps that they're workers-rights minded too.
- Company has enough revenue to keep up payroll indefinitely.
That last part is probably the biggest risk, but we're in kind of a niche industry. Not really a big, juicy target.
Now, does the AI write good code? Often not. But the codebase is already terrible, so it's no big difference.
Doesn't that mean your org could find someone 10% as productive as you and fire you? We seem to ignore that side of things.
Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work, making you interchangeable unless that 10% is really important.
I think this is partly why it's so hard for people to find jobs right now. Everyone is interchangeable thanks to AI, so skill gives you less of an edge than it did in the past.
> Concretely: if you can do 90% of your work with AI, someone else can also do that same work
That's the part that is not true. Prompting and guard-rails and generally harness engineering do matter a lot lately. Seen it first-hand multiple times, especially after I used Fable 5 for a week.
How long does it take to learn all that then? Can't imagine it would take that long.. At least compared to, eg, becoming an experienced Rust or C programmer.
And if it does take that long, why is it so great anyway?
Making labor hyper-interchangeable is kinda like the whole pitch here. It's two steps away from b2b SaaS labor if the PR is to be believed.
Maybe you can say you're an elite prompter or whatever, but it always kinda sounds to me like "I know the secret menu at taco bell." Like the whole point of the product here is precisely to not need such pretense or complexity. You are paying hundreds (at least) a month to use something, but also you are using it in a special way? I really don't get it.
You are kind of ranting here and your point seem to mostly be "but we should not do harness engineering at all" which I agree with btw.
I am describing the reality we are currently in. If I don't do some harness engineering then my bots crap on the floor and I start questioning whether I should delegate to them at all and if me doing it manually wouldn't still take less time.
And you are describing a desired reality. I sympathize, mind you, it's just not the one we are currently living in.
I'm not being prescriptive here, just agreeing with the gp about greater labor interchangability!
Like maybe step outside yourself for a second. We are arguing both that agential blah blah makes everything fast and easy and you don't need to be as knowledgeable about any X anymore, but also at the same time we want to argue that its not easy, and you better know XYZ about it, and actually its not a magic bullet.
How can it be both? Where else do you allow this kind of dissonance in something you think?
And also, not all of us have sold our soul to it, and we're still putting food on the table! I am happy I am not in your reality I guess.
> We are arguing both that agential blah blah makes everything fast and easy and you don't need to be as knowledgeable about any X anymore
I do not know who "we" is but I sure as hell am not arguing this -- that's demonstrably false for like 95% of all tasks I threw even at frontier/SOTA models.
I am on the side of "not as easy as many easily-hyped-up people make it out to be". Some things Opus one-shots in 10 minutes much better than I could in a full day. Most of them though, I have to keep pointing out mistakes and it missing the forest for the trees... constantly.
> And also, not all of us have sold our soul to it
Why are even engaging if you don't even agree with the contention this thread started with?? Do you like actually disagree with gp's original point or not? Is the implication you agree there is maybe a bit of bluster and hype when we talk about this? Such that maybe your "new reality" here is maybe not as radical or comprehensive as those words would imply?
Like its nice to be in agreement if we are but surely you got something better to be doing if you don't actually have some counter argument to my framing here? this forum is getting quite odd I must say.
And yes was being cheeky at the end there but I guess you're a little too used to being on the defense with this stuff? Or not? Still not sure. But I think your agent just finished another task, better go check!
I am unsure where your confusion comes from, the very first of my comments which you replied to was already expressing disagreement with my then-parent poster.
No idea why you are escalating and are trying to mock either, so I'll bow out.
Judging by the students I have seen, it will take longer. You could become a mediocre programmer in months, and still be useful by doing grunt work. I don’t see how people will become master architects steering fleets of agents without a deep understanding of the fundamentals, which takes longer to master.
Yes, you can vibe up a demo in no time. But LLMs still need guidance to produce an architecture that will hold up to real world scenarios.
Sure, a good senior director or technical CTO could phone it in and do my job, but there aren't as many of those.
Jobs were hard to find in the drawback after the COVID hiring boom in uncertain times as the result of Trump, inflation, tariffs, war, and the constantly impending but pushed off market crash we've been expecting since before COVID started. I'm not saying AI isn't contributing, but it's hardly the only factor.
AI is far cheaper to fire than a person.
"Everyone is interchangable" isn't quite right, a tremendous amount of people don't actually add all that much value and a lot of work is just running on a hamster wheel and now instead of taking time we've got a machine for running on hamster wheels for us.
The delusion of engineers is that finally we have the means to stop compromising on quality to deliver, and fix all the garbage we’ve had to put out rationalizing about “cost-benefit”.
Trouble is management, who has the signature on the bank account which ultimately controls if and when the bailiffs are going to knock down your front door and throw you onto the street.
Management thinks we can now continue putting more, much more, of the same compromised garbage. Cheaper, faster.
They didn't say a word about "our profession". Where is the upside for humanity? Everyone is bearing the cost of hardware going up 4x. Anyone purchasing a computer feels the downside of components costing 4x. Anyone who likes interesting things being hosted on the internet feels the downside of small-scale projects shutting down when they can no longer be sustainably hosted at 4x cost. Anyone who likes interesting consumer hardware feels the downside when 4x cost means there is no longer room for small or new businesses to innovate and find new products to bring to market because nobody can afford them, and when game consoles and other electronics spike in price. Anyone who browses the internet feels the downside of it being >50% bot content. Anyone who uses software feels the downside of "AI" being shoved into everything while performance, security, and reliability of their programs deteriorate to new lows. Anyone who participates in society feels the downside of police, military, lawyers, healthcare professionals, and all manner of other foundations of society outsourcing their life-altering decisions to a hallucination machine.
What have we gained for all this? Not "software developers", I mean "average humans". We gained a bot that can be mildly amusing and that can sometimes provide educational value although that value is diminished because 10% of the time the results are poisoned but you don't know which 10% of the time it's hallucinating which brings the value of the rest of its answers down.
I read "fewer jobs" and "massive increase in hardware cost" as issues principally pertaining to programmers. I can't tell if any of the rest of this argument applies if we stipulate that's what I'm talking about.
Why would massive increase in hardware cost pertain only to programmers? You do realise that programmers make up perhaps 1% of the people who buy hardware, which number in the billions?
Decrease in jobs doesn't necessarily relate only to software dev either. Translation and customer service are fields that are likely to suffer greatly, for example, and end consumers also suffer when those jobs are outsourced because LLMs do a shit job at both but for cheaper than a human does it. Their comment didn't read as pertaining to "our profession" at all to me.
The massive increase in hardware costs we're talking about here are Hetzner servers. Normal people don't acquire any kind of server space. Apple is now shipping the Macbook Neo, one of their better laptops ever, at mid-hundreds of dollars.
Normal people don't acquire server space, but they do interact with things hosted on servers. We are going to see a proliferation of small services shutting down and other services raising their prices as a natural consequence of hardware going up 4x. Of course, it's not just Hetzner hardware going up, but virtually all consumer computation.
Apple has always placed a >5x markup on their hardware that well-to-do consumers would pay for brand name and status culture reasons. That they released a 'budget' option (for their standards) does not counteract the fact that the entire bottom of the consumer hardware market is now rising to Apple prices.
What's the thing that relies on servers that got 4x more expensive for consumers? I think this is something you want to be true more than it's something that is true.
...which I will throw in my anecdote to, that I will have to shut down some hobby servers I was hosting because I can't afford to host them at these prices. Not right away because the current price is grandfathered in, but probably sometime soon, and this has the immediate chilling effect that I won't be starting any new hobby servers.
For paid services, hosting is not 100% of their costs nor are they priced at-cost, so there is no reason to believe they will go up exactly 4x to match hardware costs, but it's inevitable that if the hosting line item has gone up 4x, various services will find the need to raise their prices.
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rate-limited, so:
> Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad".
I am not hosting services for programmers. There are thousands of non-programmers who interact with the servers I host. You seem extremely fixated on this weird idea that you can relate everything back to programmers suffering and that everything is fine if this only sucks for programmers.
tptacek is arguing that he, specifically, does not care about the Hetzner price increase. Anything outside of that (eg the cost spike in consumer computing https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20260310-12959.h...) isn’t relevant. There’s no point in making an argument about the material reality of things here because he’s objectively right that he, personally, does not care about it.
I'm thinking more about, like, my next door neighbors, who also don't care that my interlocutor had to turn off one of their hobby servers. That's OK, though, because they also think a Macbook Neo would cost $119 without the Apple tax, so I think we're at an impasse.
There are people running sites hosting old religious texts and hymns and a hundred other things that have nothing to do with programmers. A 4x jump in the bill for someone on limited income not gaining anything from it is not trivial. It results in the disappearance of a site that will not come back.
Hosting costs for "sites hosting old religious texts and hymns" have not gone up by 4x. Computationally light hosting has gotten cheaper, not more expensive.
I am trying to parse this post because it sort of reads like “My neighbors are dumb and we care about the same things” but I can’t figure out why someone would write that
How did we get from you saying that you didn’t understand the post that you responded to to neighbor chat in so few posts
My argument is straightforward, but like any argument on a message board things get tangled after back-and-forths and rebuttals. It's that costs for things programmers care about are obviously increasing, and some of those costs are specifically due to AI and not to general supply chain fuckiness. But things can be bad for programmers but better (or not meaningfully worse) for everyone else.
If we’re going to define what’s good for the general public based on a single arbitrary product from a company of our choosing, the Steam Deck just got a $300 price increase for the same hardware.
It literally has 8gb of RAM. It's a great laptop, but its value is specifically in how much it can do with cheaper parts using their infrastructure.
I don't know what rock you're living under, but literally everyone is walking into stores looking for computers, or computer parts, and leaving with nothing, because all GPUs, RAM, and SSDs are triple in price. I don't know where you got the idea that this only affects servers.
What do you think precipitated Hetzner price increases? It was ram tripling for everybody
its anecdotal, but the non software engineers in my social circles wont even consider trying games with rumors of breaking hardware like Jumpspace with GPU bricking[1] because they feel they can no longer afford to replace the hardware in their gaming rigs. I have had several people independently complain to me that they are locked out of the hobby whenever their GPU or ram dies.
Because the alternative is admitting the main upside so far is: a few VCs and early employees get yacht money while everyone else gets a gate-kept chatbot and constant fear mongering. But hey, I guess we all have our own opinion of "upside".
Isn’t this the same thing every other industry and market has been experiencing with technology, automation, etc. for decades, while tech workers basked in their joy at being safe from being replaced because we were the ones powering the replacing?
Yep. 100%. Developers are getting a taste of their own medicine for about the first time ever, and it’s seldom acknowledged. This is why you won’t find me begging for sympathy in any of these conversations. Developers have had it so good for so long. The moment SV startup dweebs are exposed to actual market forces for 0.01 seconds and it’s like the sky is falling. Pathetic.
Don't get me wrong, I think it would be nice if the skillset I happened to hone turned out to be the one field that stays lucrative for my entire career. I just don't think the market owes me or people in my field a job, and if we get displaced and have to learn new roles, we'll be in good company with most other humans alive in our generation.
This isn't about the first time ever though. I've been hearing the phrase "get rid of your developers" for a long time now. Let's see. SaaS is all you need, boot camp devs, no code, low code and buying-off-the-shelf-components and I'm sure I'm missing a few. This time, the automation is coming to most industries and will be felt across the economy(ies).
I mean, that very well could be the case. It often is the case with any kind of automation. There's a plausible claim that things will turn out fine, and another plausible claim that it could be a disaster for the profession. But whether or not it's a disaster for professional developers is separable from whether (a) it's a disaster for, like, society, and (b) whether or not it fundamentally is an important new fact about the world --- like, whether we're OK with it or not, it does appear likely that a huge swathe of professional software development work is fully automatable.
It doesn't seem like it, but there are other people in the world besides programmers and venture capitalists. They will benefit from AI, many already are. Some professionals are not.
A computer used to be a person, it was a job title. They worked in giant offices where they calculated important things on paper.
Fair point... but I feel awash in doom, gloom and other apocalyptic predictions.
I found this book to be a welcome breath of fresh air, and I enjoyed listening to it.
It revealed to me that maybe, just maybe (we can only hope) things aren't
quite as bad as we've been lead to believe... and while ai is obviously not
mentioned, it does help cast modern tech developments in a more favorable light.
With all the AI stuff available everyone, does anyone actually work any less? 4 hours per day instead of 8? Or even less? More vacation days? Anything?
I know a bunch of people who have integrated AI into every aspect of their life, and somehow they all have even less free time than before.
What's your source? The Bureau of labor statistics that is marking most of unemployed people as "not seeking employment" because they aren't walking into workforce centers?
Payrolls are up about 214k in March, 180k in April, and 140k in May. The BLS data is from broad monthly surveys, not people showing up in workforce centers.
Of the 172,000 (adjusted) new jobs in May, 70,000 are attributed to hospitality when 14,000/month is the norm. World Cup temporary jobs. Hourly average earnings rose 12 cents in May while the average price of gas rose $1.17/gallon since the start of the war. One could argue that some of the people participating in the surveys have a vested interest in the numbers looking good.
Ok, still over 100k not including those temporary jobs. I’m not arguing that the overall picture is amazing, just that it doesn’t seem like the narrative that AI is causing massive net job loss is true yet.
Well, it's a mania, it's stupid now and it will correct itself. There will be pain. There's always pain after stupidity. Then we will see if LLMs are as useful as we were told.
The only correction will be anyone not in the concentrated wealth part being left out to rot. There is no upside for pretty much anyone posting on hacker news
The upsides are going to be everyone freed up from their menial corporate jobs so they can be a trader/'investor' and buy nft, crypto, SpaceX, AI stocks. Everyone becomes a millionaire on speculation. There will be Universities offering courses and degrees. Influencers selling their own courses.
Will those new jobs be as good as or better than the jobs that were lost? Will those jobs appear shortly, or will it be decades before they appear? Will the people who lost jobs get free education and training for these jobs that will supposedly appear?
I hold the same job title as 2 years ago but my job duties are vastly different now. So yeah new jobs are being created it's just hard to be creative enough to name them properly
Just trust us bro!!!! Just some more ai investment please! The jobs will totally come from like, the ai and stuff! We promise!! Just another billion dollars!
I’m very on the pro-ai side (check my comment history for proof), but this “ai will give us more free time” logic is seeming more and more patronizing (to be clear, I understand that you are being sarcastic haha).
I was listening to a podcast a couple days ago and Brad Gerstner was on and mentioned that with how AI is boosting productivity that perhaps one member of a household would be able to start staying home from work if they wanted. I shut off the podcast after that (to be fair, the podcast just seemed to be one massive SpaceX IPO pump).
It’s just so divorced from reality and every new advancement is just making *higher expectations for doing more work*.
The unfortunate reality is:
Companies that are selling ai will sell that ai will make life easier.
Companies that are buying ai will demand more from employees using ai (why else would they buy it?).
Just as happened with the horse, with the car, with the steam machine, with the industrialization in general, ... oh wait, we still have to work 8-10 hours 5 days a week, times two, to make enough for a living.
So when exactly is this productivity going to hit that doubles my income?
I guess the argument would go that your income is significantly higher in the sense that the quantity and complexity of stuff that you can afford now is vastly greater than 100 years ago (e.g. washing machines, cars, clothes, computers). I’m not that saying it’s making anyone happier, mind you
I live in country where shrewd salesmen know that people like me would pay extra for quality so they sell me crappy quality still, just for 3x the price.
So yeah, I started resorting to asking acquaintances with big families and also LLMs to desperately try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
It's not impossible and it's indeed doable, just not very quick.
The assumption is that price is supposed to reflect quality. Unfortunately as you say, too often price is a weak signal. And price often signals current fads/fashions rather than quality.
Non-monetary costs are often a better indicator because good quality does cost you more: more time, more expertise, more judgement, more homework.
Plus we usually have narrow needs, which are hard to match. Price reflects a single average market scale, not how a product/service fits our individual conditions.
> Actually good quality stuff is prohibitively expensive for the non-ultra rich, and the rest of the quality stuff is increasingly being hollowed out by private equity and rapidly declining quality. People just can’t afford to pay for quality and things that last due to price gouging, wage stagnation, and increased cost-of-living.
Look how expensive things were in the 50s then 1) start buying things as expensive in real terms and evaluate their quality; 2) consider whether more or less people can afford that. People have very rosy view of the past because they compare median worker nowadays to top 1% richest households back in time.
Don't forget most people are stuck renting a small apartment at a significant percentage of income for eternity. Then if you hit the layoff jackpot and become homeless, then I've got good news for you: homelessness is illegal now.
It's not forced on you. If you do a minimal amount of research (which LLMs are very helpful with!), you can still find durable stuff. A Speed Queen washer is still built like a tank. It's just that the less durable stuff is absurdly cheap now. /r/BuyItForLife/ is a decent place to hang out if you care.
If you really like to argue semantics, OK, nobody put a gun to my head and said: "Here, buy this washing machine that will break just two weeks after its meagre two years of warranty, or I blow your head off!". Fine. But it is, shall we say, strongly encouraged with marketing and it makes sure those less quality products are always the most prominent. Happened to me and many acquaintances with extended families.
Thanks for the Reddit link. I'll absolutely use it.
And I disagree it's a minimal amount of research but maybe I'll come around. There are things that were trivial to research indeed, some -- very hard.
Heh I just mean that it's usually not that hard once you learn how to look, and if you care. In some categories, I agree, can be tough, but there usually tends to be at least one old stodgy brand that refuses to cheap out, and usually they're rewarded with premium pricing. But oftentimes, the per-year cost is competitive or better. Speed Queen, Miele, Bosch, that sort of manufacturer tends to still make really solid stuff. In the case of speed queen, they're made in Wisconsin, and tend to use a lot of heavy steel parts, and be very repairable. Consumer Reports likes them, too, worth paying for a subscription if you're on a quest to find long lasting stuff, though they're not perfect.
RE marketing, highly recommend ublock origin and SponsorBlock if you don't have both yet.
Yeah fair, we're all a bit overloaded, would be nice if that was just taken care of. I've been idly thinking about what sorts of tools might help with this stuff. Like, CR has really good data, but it's also one of the least accessible sources of data.
All the growth in our economy since the 70s has been captured by the richest. If purchasing power is a finite ressource, we're getting squeezed out by the 10%.
The typical middle class family 50 years ago lived in a house you’d consider small and dingy, ate food you’d consider poverty meals, and drove a car you’d consider a poorly assembled death trap. Ask your parents or grandparents how often they got to have real butter growing up.
This is a truth very few people are willing to confront. My grandmother lived in a village, on a farm, growing her own food and slaughtering her own animals, with no working plumbing, using a well for water. Of course a lot of that changed even just moving up to the 70s, but at that point there still wasn't quite the consumerist "buy whatever you want from wherever and whomever you want and have it almost immediately" environment. I can go to a grocery store here in Canada, buy tropical fruits year round that grow nowhere near me. I never have to concern myself with "this ingredient won't be here because it is seasonal", it'll be there, it'll just be more expensive out of season, worst case I just have to go a bit farther out to a different grocer than I usually go to.
This point is valid. However, lifestyle improvement rate is something that's slowing over time because of physical constraints.
For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't think another 25 years will result in a noticeable amount of improvement?
In the other direction, some things will become scarcer (and therefore cost more). Real estate is the obvious one; we can't create more land, and we keep having more people. Easily accessible drinking water is another; desalination is getting cheaper, but it's still way more expensive than pumping aquifer water.
And some improvements are necessarily 1 time things. You can get tropical fruits year round, but that's been widely available since the 80-90's from what I can tell. So come 20 years from now, what will people be able to buy in a grocery store that I can't buy right now?
The innovations aren't better versions of things we had in the past, they are more so unique new inventions. Plumbing is not electricity is not globalized food chains is not computers.
Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.
>The innovations aren't better versions of things we had in the past, they are more so unique new inventions. Plumbing is not electricity is not globalized food chains is not computers.
This is only sort of true. Plumbing is an improved version of a well pump, which is functionally (if not technically) an improvement over walking down to the river for a pot of water. Globalized food chains are mostly improvements on the supply chain we had (boats got faster, so things can travel from farther away places more quickly, refrigeration got added to existing modes of travel, etc.).
>Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.
I didn't mean to imply that we can't increase housing density. But I think it's clear that having 2.3x more people than 1950 means that all else being equal, people will need to settle for less land. There's just more demand per square mile.
It's hard to anticipate. If you'd asked me 20 years ago "maybe they'll invent a better apple" would not have crossed my mind, but Cosmic Crisp came out in 2019, and now I routinely eat apples which look and taste better than anything I previously imagined. My parents tell me they had the same experience with meal prep kits and Thai food.
True, but "a better apple" is unequivocally less impactful than "you no longer have to walk to the river any time you want to drink a glass of water."
I think it's easier to see if you think in 20 year increments. The difference between 1920 and 1940 is way larger than the difference between 2000 and 2020, and I don't think it's particularly close. Going from "antibiotics haven't been discovered" to "antibiotics become widely manufactured" in 1945 is a huge difference, just as one example.
Being able to eat pork without cooking it to death for fear of trichinosis is a recent development.
Also, the old movies where someone tries to commit suicide by sticking their head in an oven. That was coal gas and we don't heat homes with it anymore.
Other than coal gas being not very efficient use of coal what was so bad about it? Stockholm still had coal gas in the early 2000s and accidental carbon monoxide poisoning was very rare. Of course the alternatives are better, but only marginally so.
I guess it's "only" 40 years, but my 1985 Civic was an amazing car. Definitely not a death trap, but after I did end selling it for a 99 Acura with airbags. Still kind of regret that one. My house was built in 1970, it's enough for the two of use, but would admittedly be cramped for more. That said at 850 square feet, it's quite a bit smaller than the 1,400 average for 1970.
That's total bullshit. Middle class families in 1976 did NOT live in smaller houses than today, and certainly did NOT eat "poverty meals"... What on earth are you even talking about.
Especially silly that you mention housing because if there's one thing that is absolutely fucked for the middle class of the 2020s is housing.
Again, I would encourage you to research historical statistics or talk to people who lived in 1976 about their practical living conditions, rather than going off of your intuition about what is "bullshit" or which things are "absolutely fucked". Our intuitions about these things are heavily warped by social media, where stories that feel true without being true are easy to tell and often more viral.
In every developed country whose numbers I've seen, the size of the average living space is up 30-50% since 50 years ago.
you can live an 1880's lifestyle working about 5 hours a week. Outdoor toilets, no plumbing, uninsulated housing. Essentially zero healthcare. No lighting after the sun goes down or before it comes up. Little variation in diet and enough calories and nutrition to make you a strapping 130 lbs five foot four.
Yep. With ai tooling I can keep prompting at 3am while sleep deprived. As a result I have mountains of slop plans / code to review. Hours of work which can't be matched by anyone who thinks they can poke a prompt for the day & go
Capitalism, by nature, will want to force everything to the limit.
It's the same thing that happens to housing. People complain housing gets expensive because of "tech workers". No. The reality is greedy landlords can charge 20% more so they charge 20% more. They could be happy with what they make now, but no, they'd rather have the extra 20%. And so housing prices go up 20%.
The thing is, it's not just landlords that are greedy. Everyone is greedy. Companies are greedy. Yeah, you can get the same amount of work done in 1/5 the hours per day. But why not do 5x the work instead?
Your complaints could have been made in the 80s as well. When the personal computer was introduced it removed tons of jobs, Bill Gates became the first 100 billionaire.
But we ended up with lots more jobs than the ones that disappeared. The industry has kept millions of people employed for almost 50 years.
The billionaire founders are usually "worth" far less than the economic activities in the companies they own. Would the same economic activities have happened in a system where billionaires can't appear as a result of the same activity?
I don't see how, and it certainly hasn't happened yet.
Anwyay! Talking to my computer and have it do the things I tell it, like I'm in freggin' Star Trek, feels like a pretty huge upside already! :)
Never. At this point I think the only way out is a Sea Peoples[1] level of collapse. Maybe they'll call it the Late Chip Age collapse. People will not put with with being obsoleted. Americans at least have the means to resist. The rest of us will probably need 3D printers.
When exactly are the upsides going to hit?