America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints
AI has been the only new investment our company has made (half hearted at that). I definitely get the sense that everyone pretending things are fine to investors, meanwhile they are playing musical chairs.
Back in my economics classes at college, a professor pointed out that a stock market can go up for two reasons: On one hand, the economy is legitimately growing and shares are becoming more valuable. But on the other hand, people and corporations could be cutting spending en masse so there's extra cash to flood the stock markets and drive up prices regardless of future earnings.
Guess what happened next?
Not sure how comparable they are.
I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
That sounds pretty black swan to me, I'm guessing you never felt the need sheet any previous election? Being predictable and being unique are different things.
Trump is the direction taken by U.S. politics for decades now. I could see it post- 9/11, and I was not the most enlightened teenager. Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
Trump is the direction taken by U.S. politics for decades now. I could see it post- 9/11, and I was not the most enlightened teenager. Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
While it is kinda the same direction, it also has two Black Swan components:
1) What he's doing actually matches the rhetoric, e.g. actually trying to kick out illegal immigrants even though they're the (underpaid) farm workers holding back food price inflation.
2) It definitely wasn't on my metaphorical bingo card that someone with multiple felony convictions and who had been impeached twice for trying to interfere with the democratic hand over of power, went on to become the popular choice for president.
Sure, the election of a convict was a risky bet, but the appearance of the policies he is pushing was really not.
America has two options; either become the slave of China and enter our century of humiliation, or deny Chinese access to free trade by competing in market economics. Protectionism does not balance America's trade deficits, and US citizens cannot compete against Mexican labor (let alone Chinese prison labor). The economics of it genuinely don't get any simpler than this; American manufacturing will be for naught if we cannot compete in a free market. We already have a successfully financialized economy, throwing out Reaganomics for an even more shit deal is peak neoreactionary nonsense.
Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
I saw the signs of the beginnings of it decades ago (shortly following the Reagan era) but I had zero clue that it would (or even could) ever get as completely mad-house outta-control as it has. I've watched the situation devolve year after year for decades now, and all the while I kept foolishly believing "It can't keep getting worse forever. People are gonna wake up any second now." Well, here we are. Not entirely sure how we got here, or how we'll ever get back, but... This is how it is, I guess. :shrug:
"It can't keep getting worse forever. People are gonna wake up any second now."
That's exactly where I am. I keep wondering what rock bottom looks like. And I fear the day that we'll find out.
I moved all of my money out of the US the week following the election.
I did it a little more than a week following the election, but same. I even sold any ETFs with exposure to the US market I previously owned. People thought I was overreacting selling my VGRO, but the YTD returns for my ex-US portfolio are about 150% of what I could have expected with my old holdings and the peace of mind is priceless.
in fact, you should just put it all in gold and keep it under your pillow
This year is the first time that fund outperformed the rest of my portfolio. Not massively, since I do have some holdings that benefited from the AI boom, but noticeably. Just adding 1 to n here. Thanks for reminding me to rebalance, and maybe find another non-AI-related hedge just in case.
In 2020 Biden won 3 swing states by 200k votes. Trump won in 2016 by 80k swing state votes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570973
It's the swing states that matter, not the popular vote.
And his moves after winning were not unexpected either - he is doing what his opponents predicted he will do.
Trumps victory was within expected possibilities.
While people felt that polls indicated a Harris victory and the margin of Trump's win was a surprise and a failure of forecasters, in reality it was always a toss-up in forecasts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for...
Firstly - The average market behavior is average.
From experience, most people could not imagine anything of what was predicted, would come true. There is a large … debt of intellectual work that is being underwritten, allowing people to sell narratives which do not correspond to reality.
This is a direct result of a captured, unfair information environment.
As a result, the average behavior of the market is not pricing in these things, even if the plans were made clear.
Even people with visas or permanent residency, or who even look like they might be Hispanic are justifiably worried about a random car pulling them over and breaking their window. If you aren't aware or concerned, I call that oblivious or a denial of reality. Or privilege (edit: corrected spelling).
It's different in some ways of course than with covid.
It is possible that 2025 could be the opposite, the software jobs market os already spooky for juniors, and could get much worse with an AI bust - guess what companies will do to show investors they are making up for written-off AI investments? A recession will lead to a drop in demand for online services like streaming, online shopping as people tighten their belts, upward ratcheting of subscription prices will only make the drop worse.
Rare Earth exports was a known lever that the CCP uses in a trade war, and Trump was very likely to restart his previous one.
However, the Pentagon putting money into MP Materials was quite unexpected, and people are still throwing money at them.
Covid was a black swan event
I beg to differ. Epidemiologists and public health planners always knew such a pandemic would happen eventually. In fact, it wasn't even surprising that it came from a coronavirus as this virus group was the most likely contender with the influenza family.
The only open question was when. We dodged the bullet several times over the past two decades with SRAS, H5N1, MERS and H1N1 (notice, two influenza and two coronaviruses), but one virus slipping through was definitely the most likely outcome.
And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.
If you can forsee the event, but not predict the time, it's just as bad as an even you cannot forsee.
If all rivers suddenly turned to wine and killed all the crops? Not a black swan event, water gets turned to wine in the bible.
As you can see this attitude makes the phrase "black swan event" very useful.
You guys should really go get some nuance at the retail store.
Pandemics and pandemic scares are really friggin' common.
This is a very pedantic counter argument that leans on the fact that "pandemic" has too broad of a definition. There was nothing else like COVID in my (40 year) lifetime.
Russian invasion is not a black swan event, we had many of them before and there are people whose day job is to plan for them.
Tsunami, earthquake are another examples. We had them before and there are plans for such events.
According to Polymarket, there's a >50% chance that happens: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-supreme-court-rule-in-...
Trump’s Commerce Secretary Loves Tariffs. His Former Investment Bank Is Taking Bets Against Them: https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-r...
And the senate probe into said conflict of interest: https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-wa...
Guess what happened next?
Stimulus and zero interest rate followed by 10% inflation.
Do you think Trump and the GOP will do that anytime soon?
Would the GOP have to eat large quantities of excrement, yes. Have they become used to doing that (cf Epstein), yes.
Back in my economics classes at college, a professor pointed out that a stock market can go up for two reasons
Reason #1 is lower interest rates, which increase the present value of future cash flows in DCF models. A professor who does not mention that does not know what they are talking about.
On one hand, the economy is legitimately growing and shares are becoming more valuable
The implication here is that output and productivity is growing. Not that money is becoming less valuable. A more precise term than “valuable” is purchasing power.
Are Americans gaining purchasing power? Not really, because equity gains are being cancelled out by currency losses, if you’re an American that is lucky enough to even own significant equity.
I was discussing with a friend that my biggest concern with AI right now is not that it isn't capable of doing things... but that we switched from research/academic mode to full value extraction so fast that we are way out over our skis in terms of what is being promised, which, in the realm of exciting new field of academic research is pretty low-stakes all things considered... to being terrifying when we bet policy and economics on it.
That isn't overly prescient or anything... it feels like the alarm bells started a while ago... but wow the absolute "all in" of the bet is really starting to feel like there is no backup. With the cessation of EVs tax credits, the slowdown in infra spending, healthcare subsidies, etc, the portfolio of investment feels much less diverse...
Especially compared to China, which has bets in so many verticals, battery tech, EVs, solar, then of course all the AI/chips/fabs. That isn't to say I don't think there are huge risks for China... but geez does it feel like the setup for a big shift in economic power especially with change in US foreign policy.
For AI, the pivot to profitability was indeed quick, but I don't think it's as bad as you may think. We're building the software infrastructure to accomodate LLMs into our work streams which makes everyone more efficient and productive. As foundational models progress, the infrastructure will reap the benefits a-la moore's law.
I acknowledge that this is a bullish thesis but I'll tell you why I'm bullish: I'm basically a high-tech ludite -- the last piece of technology I adopted was google in 1996. I converted from vim to vscode + copilot (and now cursor.) because of LLMs -- that's how transformative this technology is.
If we removed "modern search" (Google) and had to go back to say 1995-era AltaVista search performance, we'd probably see major productivity drops across huge parts of the economy, and significant business failures.
If we removed the LLMs, developers would go back to Less Spicy Autocomplete and it might take a few hours longer to deliver some projects. Trolls might have to hand-photoshop Joe Biden's face onto an opossum's body like their forefathers did. But the world would keep spinning.
It's not just that we've had 20 years more to grow accustomed to Google than LLMs, it's that having a low-confidence answer or an excessively florid summary of a document are not really that useful.
In 2001, if Google had gone under like a lot of .com bubble companies, I think the economic impact visible to people of the time would have been marginal. There was no Google News, Gmail, Android, and the alternatives (AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, MSN Search) would have been enough. Google was a forcing function for the others to compete with the new paradigm or die trying. It wasn't itself an economic behemoth the way it is today.
I think if OpenAI folded today, you'd still have several companies in the generative AI space. To me, OpenAI's reminiscent of Google in the late 90s in its impact, although culturally it's very different. It's a general purpose website anyone with an internet connection can visit, deep industry competitors are having to adapt to its model to stay alive, and we're seeing signs of a frothy tech bubble a few years after its founding. People across industry verticals, government, law, and NGOs are using it, and students are learning with it.
One counterpoint to this would be that companies like Google reacted to the rise of social media with stuff like Google+, but to me the level to which "AI" is baked into every product at Google exceeds that play by a great margin. At most I remember a "post to plus" link at the top of GMail and a few hooks within the contact/email management views. In contrast, they are injecting AI results into almost every search I make and across almost every product of theirs I use today.
If you fast forward 20 years, I would be surprised if companies specializing in LLMs were not major players the way today's tech giants are. Some of the companies might have the same names, but they'll have changed.
I would be surprised if companies specializing in LLMs were not major players the way today's tech giants are
I wouldn't.
The OG Internet gold rush was about centralization. (Aka "the cloud".)
This LLM bubble makes most sense if you go the other direction towards bespoke self-hosted self-owned solutions.
Hardware manufacturers will probably come on top after all this. Especially those who figure out commodity user-facing LLM hardware.
I default to Claude for almost everything where I want to know something. I don’t trust Google’s results because of how weighted they are to SEO. Being good at SEO is a separate skill set.
The answers are not low confidence, cite sources, and can do things that Google cannot. For example: I used Claude to design a syllabus to learn about a technical domain along with quizzes and test suites for verification. It linked to video series, books, and articles grouped by an increasingly complex knowledge set.
I, too, don't understand the OP's point of quickly pivoting to value extraction. Every technology we've ever invented was immediately followed by capitalists asking "how can I use this to make more money". LLMs are an extremely valuable technology. I'm not going to sit here and pretend that anyone can correctly guess exactly how much we should be investing into this right now in order to properly price how much value they'll be generating in five years. Except, its so critical to point out that the "data center capex" numbers everyone keeps quoting are, in a very real (and, sure, potentially scary) sense, quadruple-counting the same hundred-billion dollars. We're not actually spending $400B on new data centers; Oracle is spending $nnB on Nvidia, who is spending $nnB to invest in OpenAI, who is spending $nnB to invest in AMD, who Coreweave will also be spending $nnB with, who Nvidia has an $nnB investment in... and so forth. There's a ton of duplicate-accounting going on when people report these numbers.
It doesn't grab the same headlines, but I'm very strongly of the opinion that there will be more market corrections in the next 24 months, overall stock market growth will be pretty flat, and by the end of 2027 people will still be opining on whether OpenAI's $400B annual revenue justifies a trillion dollars in capex on new graphics cards. There's no catastrophic bubble burst. AGI is still only a few years away. But AI eats the world none-the-less.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09275...
Is that a bit hyperbolic? isn't this just the same as dotcom and housing bubbles before where we pivoted a bit too hard into a specific industry? maybe... but I also am not sure it would be wise to assume past results will indicate future returns with this one.
When we wired the world for the Internet in the 1990s, or built railways across the continent in the 1800s, we eventually reached a point where even the starriest-eyed investors could see they've covered effectively the entire addressable market. Eventually AOL ran out of new customers no matter how many CDs they mailed out, or we had connected every city of more than 50 people with steel rail, and you could hear the music was slowing down.
By dangling the AGI brass ring out there, they can keep justifying the expenditure past many points of diminishing returns, because the first thing we'll ask the Omnipotent AGI is how to earn the quadrillions spent back, with interest.
It also has the benefit of being a high-churn business. The rails laid in 1880, or the fiber pulled in 2000, were usable for decades, but in the AI bubble, the models are obsolete in months and the GPUs in years. It generates huge looking commercial numbers just to tread water.
many verticals are simply uninvestable in the US because of labor costs and the gap of cost to manufacture is so large it's not even worth considering.
I think this is covered in a number of papers from think tanks related to the current administration.
The overall plan, as I understood it, is to devalue the dollar while keeping the monetary reserve status. A weaker dollar will make it competitive for foreign countries to manufacture in the US. The problem is that if the dollar weakens, investors will fly away. But the AI boom offsets that.
For now it seems to work: the dollar lost more than 10% year to date, but the AI boom kept investors in the US stock market. The trade agreements will protect the US for a couple years as well. But ultimately it's a time bomb for the population, that will wake up in 10 years with half their present purchasing power, in non dollar terms.
For now it seems to work: the dollar lost more than 10% year to date
...and I thought American Labor was having something of a moment in 2024-2025. The law of unintended consequences may have surprises in store for the planners in the coming years.
The accord also appears to contradict the stated goals:
Miran proposes a modern equivalent of the 1985 Plaza Accord, which he refers to as the Mar-a-Lago Accord. The goal would be coordinated currency appreciation among U.S. trading partners to address the dollar's overvaluation
which makes everyone more efficient and productive
There is something bizarre about an economic system that pursues productivity for the sake of productivity even as it lays off the actual participants in the economic system
An echo of another commenter who said that its amazing that AI is now writing comments on the internet
Which is great, but it actively makes the internet a worse place for everyone and eventually causes people to simply stop using your site
Somewhat similar to AI making companies more productive - you can produce more than ever, but because you’re more productive, you don’t hire enough and ultimately there aren’t enough people to consume what you produce
We should be forward looking in what we can do outside of manufacturing.
For example?
Basically IP generation at all levels, and high-touch face-to-face service businesses.
The US already had the foundations for a post-industrial economy, but the cancer of extractive financialisation ate it alive. Instead of expanding into diversity it contracted into a startup culture that's always been a thin front for Wall St.
So the result is that it's very hard to start a mid-rank IP or service business. You have small-scale cottage-level producers like authors, musicians, video creators, and indie app developers relying on huge monopolies like Amazon, Spotify, Google, and Apple, and you have bigger projects playing the startup game and scrambling for funding rounds, where anyone who doesn't become a unicorn is a loser.
There's plenty of space for businesses between those extremes, but the economy isn't set up to support them. The space isn't dead yet, but it could be much, much bigger.
Universities and corporate R&D have similar issues. Metrics support conformist publishing and resume-development, not risky original talent and exploration.
Tariffs and brain drains are absolutely toxic and are going to nuke all of these spaces.
I’m reminded of recent-grad architects whose proposed ideas are bereft of consideration of material properties and pitfalls.
I’m also reminded of Air Force aircraft engineers needed to be told their parts have to be adjusted because they can’t be machined. And the person who knows what needs to be done is Bob whose hands are covered in grease and oil because there’s not enough orange Zep on this planet to clean that guy.
To use China as an example: their entire pipeline from conception of idea to the end-customer is in China. They don’t even need to sell it externally (and frequently they don’t).
The West is fucked because they think pushing things around is being productive. GDP is a reflection of this failure because it’s a flawed, abused metric that’s devoid of where money actually ends up (most often it’s Chinese firms doing the work), so your GDP is looking great meanwhile you are incredibly unproductive over all. It’s a meme tool used for nonsensical political posturing.
Simply put: you can’t start R&D in the middle and not take into consideration a pipeline. It doesn’t work that way. People don’t have the experience or knowledge.
I will repeat my comment from 70 days ago:I was discussing with a friend that my biggest concern with AI right now is not that it isn't capable of doing things... but that we switched from research/academic mode to full value extraction so fast
lol, I read this few hours ago, maybe without enough caffeine but I read it as "my comment from 70 *years* ago" because I thought you somehow where at the The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence 1956 workshop!
I somehow thought "Damn... already back there, at the birth of the field they thought it was too fast". I was entirely wrong and yet in some convoluted way maybe it made sense.
That is why mortgages are (future) taxpayer subsidized. Without the subsidies from the future, the real estate prices would not be able to rise so much.
There is also economic agglomeration to exacerbate the issue.
You should not look towards pensions and healthcare, but rather the actually wealthy old men. Those are who the ones stealing your future.
You should look at other countries where pay is much less and real estate is at similar levels of cost: from Europe, Canada, China, Australia and India.
Condos in Mumbai are priced similar to those in the major cities in the US.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mumbai/comments/zxsl8l/mumbai_real_...
And Mumbai is one of the more affordable cities globally.
In the United States, elections were held on November 2020. A new administration would’ve started in January 2021.
IRA's pie in the sky green energy cost reductions were going to take years at least to show any benefits - assuming there were any benefits.
High inflation belongs to Democrats just as much as it belongs to Republicans.
They have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
A normal person who doesn't want to upend their life might have a few easier baby-steps: buy as little stuff as possible, and buy used whenever possible. The original country doesn't see any real direct benefit when you buy used.
Makes you wonder how much we've been ripped off for years.
Fstopper has one or two nice videos about it. Can't even buy US made glass bottles that fits his needs in the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xewpuM1eJRg
AI, or whatever a mountain of processors churning all of the worlds data will be called later, still has no use case, other than total domination, for which it has brought a kind of lame service to all of the totaly dependent go along to get along types, but nothing approaching an actual guaranteed answer for anything usefull and profitable, lame, lame, infinite fucking lame tedious shit that has prompted most people to.stop.even trying, and so a huge vast amount of genuine human inspiration and effort is gone
Farmers get screwed twice because our tariffs increase the costs of their inputs and the retaliation reduces the value of outputs.
If I was a farmer I’d be tearing my hair out about now.
Milton Friedman - I, Pencil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws and https://thenewinquiry.com/milton-friedmans-pencil/
"Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it is made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make steel, it took iron ore. This black center—we call it lead but it’s really graphite, compressed graphite—I’m not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, this eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native! It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule? [Self-effacing laughter.] I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from. Or the yellow paint! Or the paint that made the black lines. Or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people co-operated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language, who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met! When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no commissar sending … out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate, to make this pencil, so you could have it for a trifling sum.
That is why the operation of the free market is so essential. Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world."
And almost all economic activity and production is mediated and coordinated by firms. Very few transactions happen between unaffiliated individuals independently making and trading goods according to direct market incentives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...
Any attempt to not have market as part of the loop just leads to long term inefficiency, punished as it should be. I wont be buying overpriced pencils from bad planners unless they are the only ones in the world, and in such case I may be motivated to look for alternatives.
Most companies resemble a command economy on the inside.
A whole lot of people need to be frequently reminded of this.
They didn't want to pay for the H-2A paperwork, but didn't like that undocumented laborers would move from farm to farm depending on conditions.
but as far as this article, the "tech capex as a percentage of GDP growth" is an incredible cherrypicking of statistics to create a narrative... when tech became a boodbath starting in 2022, the rest of the economy continued on strong. all the way until 2025, the rest of the economy was booming while tech layoffs and budget cuts after covid were exploding. so starting that chart in early 2023 when tech had bottomed out (compared to the rest of the economy) is misleading. tech capex as a percentage of the overall GDP has been consistently rising since 2010 - https://gqg.com/highchartal-paper-large-tech-capex-spend-as-... this is obviously related to the advent of public cloud computing more than anything. why this chart appears to clash with the author's chart is the author's chart specifically calls out just percentage of GDP growth, not overall GDP. so the natural conclusion is that while tech has been in borderline recessionary conditions since 2022, it is now becoming stable (if not recovering) while the rest of the economy that didn't have the post-covid pullback (nor the same boom during covid, of course) is now having issues largely due to geopolitics and global trade.
is there an AI bubble? who cares. it's not as meaningful to the broader economy as these cherrypicking stats imply. if it's a bubble, it represents maybe .3% of the GDP. no one would be screaming from the mountain tops about a shaky economy and a bubble if that same .3% was represented by a bubble in the restaurant industry or manufacturing. in fact, in recent years, those industries DID have inflationary bubbles and it was treated like a positive thing for the most part.
I think a lot of this overanalysis and prodding for flaws in tech is generally an attempt at schadenfreude hoping that tech becomes just another industry like carpentry or plumbing. in particular, hoping for a scenario where tech is not as culturally impactful as it is today. because people are worried and frustrated about the economy, don't understand the value of tech, and hope it stops sucking up so much funding and focus by society in general.
they're not 100% wrong in being untrusting or skeptical of tech. the tech industry hasn't always been the best steward of the wealth and power it possesses. but they are generally wrong about valuations or impact of tech on the economy. like the people spending all this money are clueless. the stock market fell 900 points on friday, wiping out over $1 trillion in value over the course of a couple hours. yet the hundreds of billions invested in datacenters is a sign of impending economic doom.
is the economy good? I don't think it's doing great. but it has little to do with AI one way or another. "AI" is just another trend of making technology more accessible to the masses. no more scarier, complicated, or impactful than microcomputers, DSL, cellular phones, or youtube. and while the economy crashed in 2008, youtube and facebook did well. yet there was none of this dooming about tech specifically at the time simply because the tech industry wasn't as controversial at the time.
Anything he says on any topic should be treated as suspect, and probably best ignored.
TFA is asserting that non-AI growth is negative, which is contrary to the authors claims during the election last year. This supports the post I was replying to.
How I read the thread (paraphrasing)
Itsnowandnever: author has a questionable reporting record... GDP growth has been consistent since 2022...adastra22: Agreed, an absolute partisan hack! Author even dishonestly claimed GDP grew in 2024.
overfeed: wut?
since 2022, there's been many times a recession has been declared but commentators have said it was all "vibecession" and the economy was strong. now that the same commentary is happening under a new administration, the messaging is that the sky is falling.
There's also a significant number of people (e.g. Doctorow) who have made their entire brand on doomerism; and whether they actually believe what they say or have just become addicted to the views is an irrelevant implementation detail.
The anti-AI slop that dominates HackerNews doesn't serve anything productive or interesting. Its just an excuse for people to not read the article, go straight to the comments, and parrot the same thing they've parroted twenty times.
The anti-AI slop that dominates HackerNews doesn't serve anything productive or interesting.
To you. I find the debate quite valuable, as there is a wide open future and we're in the midst of figuring out where "here" is.
"HackerNews AI Slop" is not that. HackerNews AI Slop (tm) is "Dropbox won't succeed because its just a wrapper around SFTP". It is low-effort drivel written by people who know a lot about one domain (software), and that gives them authority to speak on all domains (marketing, macroeconomics).
I read and appreciate articles that leave a mark on my heart; that raise novel viewpoints, or that are researched extraordinarily well. Yapping for the sixteenth time "they spend so much money markets crashy crashy bad bad" is so deeply boring, just another parroting voice in the echo chamber of ideas that everyone already knows. Challenge yourself. Be original. An AI could have written this article.
So what if other people downvote you for being too critical.
Other than collapsing the internet when every pre-quantum algorithm is broken (nice jobs for the engineers who need to scramble to fix everything, I guess) and even more uncrackable comms for the military. Drug and chemistry discovery could improve a lot?
And to be quite honest, the prospect of a massive biotech revolution is downright scary rather than exciting to me because AI might be able to convince a teenager to shoot up a school now and then, but, say, generally-available protein synthesis capability means nutters could print their own prions.
Better healthcare technology in particular would be nice, but rather like food, the problem is that we already can provide it at a high standard to most people and choose not to.
It would be unsurprising to me if a biotech gold-rush resulted in healthcare becoming a larger proportion of GDP, even if it produced miraculous results. We'd just have to scrimp and save and take out a reverse mortgage for generic re-transcription therapy or whatever instead of chemo and nursing homes.
And to be quite honest, the prospect of a massive biotech revolution is downright scary rather than exciting to me because AI might be able to convince a teenager to shoot up a school now and then, but, say, generally-available protein synthesis capability means nutters could print their own prions.
Yep this type of pandora's box is scary. Our culture demonstrably has no good mechanism for dealing with these kinds of existential risks.
Humans are fortunate that nuclear weapons turned out to be very difficult and expensive to build even with the theory widely known. If they were something anyone with an internet connection could create we would probably be extinct by now. There is absolutely no guarantee that future developments will have similar restrictions.
If bio-engineering gets accessible enough that any random motivated individual can create a new super bug we're pretty much doomed. Seems like something to worry about!
Crispr would clash with the religious fundamentalists slowly coming back to power in all western countries. Potentially it will be even banned, like abortions.
quantum" and "biotech" have been wishful thinking based promises for several years now, much like "artificial intelligence
we need human development, not some shining new blackbox that will deliver us from all suffering
we need to stop seeking redemption and just work on the very real shortcomings of modern society... we don't even have scarcity anymore but the premise is still being upheld for the benefit of the 300 or so billionaire families...
The premise of AI is that it replaces humans.
Even if AI creates, say, 200 million new jobs - you would just fill those jobs with AI. Why would you fill them with humans? That's stupid.
The main difference is that a plow cannot replace a human because a plow is a machine operated by a human.
A single human with a plow replaced 20 humans with shovels.
Do you believe the ratio of AI replacement will actually be higher? I doubt it.
A single human with a plow replaced 20 humans with shovels.
Right, my point is, that single human cannot now be replaced with a plow because a plow and a human are two distinctly different things.
This is the opposite of the premise of AI, which is that AI and humans should be as similar as possible.
I can't get a plow to ride a plow because it doesn't have legs. It's made of metal.
I CAN get an AI to prompt AI because that's what AI does.
So again, even if you create X Y Z jobs, surely the goal then is to replace those jobs with AI? Like we can get rid of programmers, okay great. Now we need more people to write specs. Okay great.
Um... Why not have the AI write the specs? They can be different AIs. It's software, it's trivially copiable, unlike flesh and bones.
Farmer Joe then claims he can train ox + border collie teams to eliminate the need for humans entirely when it comes to plowing. But by that point no one cares because the cost to plow a field is so low that it really doesn't matter, other things are the bottleneck.
The cost of things where AI can produce value will trend downward and human labor will move to other things, like entertainment, services. IMO there will always be demand for things like human-given massages, human chefs, human teachers, etc.
The cost of things where AI can produce value will trend downward and human labor will move to other things, like entertainment, services. IMO there will always be demand for things like human-given massages, human chefs, human teachers, etc.
Thereby suppressing the wages of jobs that are already at the lower end of the compensation ladder.
- Where we have intelligent computers and robots that can take over most jobs
- A smarter LLM that can help with creative work but limited interaction with the physical world
- Something else we haven't imagined yet
Depending on where we end up, the current investment could provide a great ROI or a negative one.
At one business I know they fired most senior developers and mandated junior developers to use AI. Stakeholders were happy as finally they could see their slides in action. But, at a cost of code base being unreadable and remaining senior employees leaving.
So on paper, everything is better than ever - cheap workers deliver work fast. But I suspect in few months' time it will all collapse.
Most likely they'll be looking to hire for complete rewrite or they'll go under.
In the light of this scenario, AI is false economy.
skyrocketing electricity costs
You said it right here. No one is going to give up energy at such a cheap rate anymore. Those days are over. Darkness for the US is coming.
scarcity isn't real anymore, it is enforced politically for the benefit of the owning class
scarcity isn't real anymore, it is enforced politically for the benefit of the owning class
Whatever the reason, it nonetheless seems like higher electricity prices are inbound.
I remember how everyone raved about cheap EV charging a decade ago, how it would save costs etc. And today a commercial fast DC changing is more expensive (per km of range) than an ICE car of the same class and size.
The raving was over the cost of home charging vs gasoline, and that advantage still holds today, even in very expensive electricity markets like MA or CA.
The way most people will feel the hit is air conditioning costs, since their usage can't cheaply be moved off peak rate hours, and an array of home batteries isn't cheap enough for households that have high energy burden.
PS: this comment sounds a bit weird I admit, but I'm not against EVs and I'm not a climate change denier. I'm just severely disappointed in how EV integration in the society actually happened.
This china rare earth thing may slow down the battery price drop somewhat but not for long because plenty of chemistries don't rely on rare earths, and there will soon be plenty of old EV packs that have some life left in them as part of grid storage.
Both parties seem to agree we should build more electric capacity, that does seem like an excellent thing to invest in, why aren't we?
As the cost of material goods decreases, they will become near free. IMO demand for human-produced goods and experiences will increase.
I use AI on a day-to-day basis, and by my best estimates, I’m doing the work of three to four people as a result of AI — not because I necessarily write code faster, but because I cover more breadth (front end, back end, DevOps, security) and make better engineering decisions with a smaller team. I think the true value of AI, at least in the immediate future, lies in helping us solve common problems faster. Though it’s not yet independently doing much, the most relevant expression I can think of is: “Those who cannot do, teach.” And AI is definitely good at relaying existing knowledge.
At present rate, there is a good argument to be made that the economic value is teetering towards negative
A comment on a post or an article on the internet has value ONLY if there are real people at the other end of the screen reading it and getting influenced by it
But if you flood the internet with AI slop comments and articles, can you be 100% sure that all the current users of your app will stick around?
If there are no people to read your articles, your article has zero economic value
In the process of making better wheels, you’ve made the roads unusable and now no one wants to leave the house - or buy wheels
But yes, a lot of wheels are being sold. For now
Comments written by fucking humans barely have any value. All their value comes from the fact you can manipulate humans into buying shit - advertising.
You can't manipulate AI into buying shit because it doesn't have money because it's not a laborer and doesn't have a right to a fair wage.
Automation over teaching sounds terrible in the long run, but I could see why learning languages and skills could improve productivity. The "issue" might be here that there's more to gain in developing nations with poor education standards, and so while capital concentrates more to the US because they own the tech, geographical differences in labour productivity reduces.
Little things that historically would get me stuck as I switch between database work, front-end, and infrastructure are no longer impeding me, because the AI tools are so good at conveying the existing knowledge of each discipline. So now, with a flat org, things just get done — there’s no need for sprint masters, knowledge-sharing sessions, or waiting on PR reviews. More people means more coordination, which ultimately takes time. In some situations that’s unavoidable, but in software engineering, most of the patterns, tools, and practices are well established; it’s just a matter of using them effectively without making your head explode.
I think this relay of knowledge is especially evident when I can’t tell an AI comment from a human one in a technical discussion — a kind of modern Turing Test, or Imitation Game.
Can we still have a financial crisis from all this investment going bust because it might take too long for it to make a difference in manufacturing enough automation hardware for everyone? Yes.
But, the fundamentals are still there, parents will still send their kids to some type of school, and people will trade good in exchange for health services. That's not going to change. Neither will the need to use robots in nursing homes, I think that assumption is safe to make.
What's difficult to predict change in is adoption in manufacturing, and repairs ( be that repairing bridges or repairing your espresso machine ) because that is more of a "3D" issue and hard to automate reliably (think about how many gpus today would it actually take to get a robot to reason out and repair a whole in your drywall), given that your RL environments and training data needs grow exponentially. Technically, your phone should have enough gpu performance to do your taxes with a 3B model and a bunch of tools, eventually it'll even be better than you at it. But to tun an actual robot with multiple cameras and stuff doing troubleshooting and decision making.... you're gonna need a whole 8x rack of gpus for that.
And that's what makes it now difficult to predict what's going to happen. The areas under the curve can vary widely. We could get a 1B AGI model in 6 months, or it could take 5 years for agentic workflows to fully automate everyones taxes and actually replace 2/3 of radiology work...
Either way, while theres a significant chance of this transition to the automation age being rough, I am overall quite optimistic given the fundamentals of what governments actually spend majority of their money on.
Talk to an educator. Education is being actively harmed by AI. Kids don’t want to do any difficult thinking work so they aren’t learning. (Literally any teacher you talk to will confirm this)
AI in medicine is challenging because AI is bad at systems thinking, citation of fact and data privacy. Three things that are absolutely essential for medicine. Also everything for healthcare needs regulatory approval so costs go up and flexibility goes down. We’re ten years away from any AI for medicine being cost effective.
Having an AI do your taxes is absurd. They regularly hallucinate. I 100% guarantee that if you do your taxes with AI you won’t pass an audit. AI literally can’t count. You’re be better off asking it to vibecode a replacement for TurboTax. But again the product won’t be AI it will be traditional code.
Trying for AGI down the road of an LLM is insanity sauce. It’s a simulated language center that can’t count, it can’t do systems thinking. It can’t cite known facts. We’re not six months away we’re a decade or a “cost effective fusion” distance (defined as perpetually 20 years in the future from any point in time)
There are at least six Silicon Valley startups working on AGI. Not a single one of them has published an architecture strategy that might work. None of the “almost AGI” products that have ever come out have a path to AGI.
Meh is the most likely outcome. I say this as someone who uses it a lot for things it is good at.
AI in medicine is challenging because AI is bad at systems thinking, citation of fact and data privacy.
main question is if humans are better than that. I have experiences with doctor: he gave prescription of Xmg, I am asking why, he said because some study said so, I go home, pull study, and it is XXmg there. Doctors can make things up all the time without much consequences and likely do. For AI, corps and community can do all kind of benchmarking and evaluation on industrial scale.
I'm going to take his statements at face value and assume that he really does have faith in his own predictions and isn't trying to fleece us.
My gripe with this statement is that this prediction is based on proxies for capability that aren't particularly reliable. To elaborate, the latest frontier models score something like 65% on SWE-bench, but I don't think they're as capable as a human that also scored 65%. That isn't to say that they're incapable, but just that they aren't as capable as an equivalent human. I think there's a very real chance that a model absolutely crushes the SWE-bench benchmark but still isn't quite ready to function as an independent software engineering agent.
So a lot of this bullishness basically hinges on the idea that if you extrapolate some line on a graph into the future, then by next year or the year after all white-collar work can be automated. Terrifying as that is, this all hinges on the idea that these graphs, these benchmarks, are good proxies.
And if they aren't, oh wow.
by next year or the year after all white-collar work can be automated
Work generates work. If you remove the need for 50% of the work then a significant amount of the remaining work never needs to be done. It just doesn't appear.
The software that is used by people in their jobs will no longer be needed if those people aren't hired to do their jobs. There goes Slack, Teams, GitHub, Zoom, Powerpoint, Excel, whatever... And if the software isn't needed then it doesn't need to be written, by either a person or an AI. So any need for AI Coders shrinks considerably.
very smart and intelligent researcher being incredibly bullish on AI on Twitter
A bit offtopic but as time goes by, I believe we can be very intelligent in some aspects and very, very naive and/or wrong in other aspects.
https://www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09/27/failing-to-understand-...
Maybe consumer staples (Walmart, Pepsi etc.)? Dollar stores?
Seriously, if the stock market is going to plunge, Pepsi stock is also going to plunge. The simplest way to reduce your exposure to the stock market is to shift assets toward cash: sell shares, keep dollars, maybe in the money market rather than just as cash. Dollars are exposed to the risk of inflation (hyperinflation hasn't happened yet in the US but it's so common that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation doesn't even attempt to list all historical episodes of hyperinflation, just dozens of notable ones) so investors commonly try to move to metals to balance that risk. Cryptocurrencies have emerged as an alternative, and they have the advantage of being more portable in emergency evacuation situations.
What would have been the exact right month in 2000, the exact right month in 2008, and the exact right month in 2020?
What were the majority of your holdings at those times?
What would have happened if you had diversified a month earlier in all three cases?
Cryptocurrencies have emerged as an alternative, and they have the advantage of being more portable in emergency evacuation situations.
God help us if Crypto is our backup.
It would be pretty fun to see AI fizzle and AR glasses take off. Not a huge zuck/Meta fan but I really do appreciate the actual big bet on something else.
And yet despite those warning signs, there has been nothing even remotely resembling an economic crash yet.
Well... define "economic crash."
The outputs no longer correlate with the inputs. Is it possible it's "crashed" already? And is now running in a faulty state?
It might change if we get into millions of foreclosures like the great recession and the pain really hits home. From what I can tell right now they're in wartime mode where they just need to buckle down until Trump wins and makes other countries pay for tariffs or something.
The economy is great for oligarchs, especially those close to Trump. Congressional politicians generally serve the same masters. Regular Americans do not feature into the equation. We will not as long as the same people are in power. Regular Americans are, of course, feeling it. One spot is at the supermarkets. Food prices are up month to month and particularly year over year (moreso than the historical average).
https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ra...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/su...
Trump won the popular vote. I'd love to just blame a couple oligarchs, but there are a LOT of very normal-looking Americans who really like what is going on with ICE and China. And they're willing to pay higher prices for it.
It's a red state zero-sum mentality, eg they don't want healthcare just because some black/female/trans person might benefit. Yes that's why they're so poor. Yes it applies to food prices. No they won't ever change. Yes they're trying to turn the whole country into one big red state or even a mafia state like Russia. In the long run (10-20 years) I'd say it's 80-20 they'll succeed.
Basically what I'm saying is that the entire system is so terrible at representing voter preferences that I don't think there is any progress that can be made without a complete overhaul aimed directly at ensuring that government action implements voter preferences.
Many people have looked into it for a very long time. Honestly at this point trying to re-litigate it while Trump is yelling slurs every other day is like a lot of democrats are playing defense for the republican offense.
I guess where I'd disagree with the article you linked is at the end where it says race relations are "the dominant factor" in inequality. I agree more with what it says just before about "disingenuous and superficial takes on race relations that distract from the systemic reforms that two-thirds of Americans desire." It is those systemic reforms that are most important. I tend to think that we cannot solve the racial problems (or nearly any problems we have) until we can fix the nuts and bolts of our political-economic system. The challenge is to avoid letting race relations derail those reforms, while still remaining mindful of the work that does need to be done on race, and alert to opportunities to do what we can without derailing those systemic reforms.
In the end though you are right that a lot of people are just dug into certain mindsets that should not be accommodated or conciliated. That's why I don't have a lot of hope that things are going to get better without some form of "hitting bottom".
However, even despite that, even if not out of solidarity with their fellow man, but for rising costs, fear for their own health and safety or appeals from religious leaders, Americans understand there needs to be a change in healthcare, and their concerns about immigration are easing up a bit (even back in July), probably because they realize that by focusing efforts on law abiding folks, it's not making their communities any safer and is making things more expensive. Silver's polling data that you provide shows that even today, a majority of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/4708/healthcare-system.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigratio...
Edit: In your first link first chart, look at the way the No's jumped up and the Yes's dropped ~2008 when Obamacare was on the table. Democrats got punished so hard they're not making that mistake again https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/under-obama-democ...
In those intervening years, a bunch of AI companies might be unable to pay back their debts.
Dumb question: isn't a lot of the current investment in the form of equity deals and/or funded by existing tech company profit lines? What do we actually know about the debt levels and schedules of the various actors?
If debt is supplied by some pension funds or some sovereign wealth then the real economy would not be affected as much...
more than a fifth of the entire S&P 500 market cap is now just three companies — Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple — two of which are basically big bets on AI.
These 3 companies have been heavyweights since long before AI. Before AI, you couldn't get Nvidia cards due to crypto, or gaming. Apple is barely investing in AI. Microsoft has been the most important enterprise tech company for my entire lifetime.
Microsoft's share price has more than doubled since 2023.
Also, as of last year about 80% of their revenues were from data center GPUs designed specifically for "AI", and that's undoubtedly continuing to grow as a share of their revenues.
All growth is in AI now because that's where all the smartest people are going. If AI were regulated significantly, they'd go to other industries and they would be growing faster (though not as much likely)
However there is the broader point that AI is poised offer extreme leverage to those who win the AGI race, justifying capex spending on such absurd margins.
We can say that if this rotten support beam fails the US is in trouble but the real issue is what caused the rot in the first place.
Remember, when a bear is chasing you and some others, you don't have to be faster than the bear to escape.
Sure, well done, your link in the chain didn't break… but your anchor is still stuck on the bottom of the ocean and you're on your spare anchor (with a shorter chain) until you get back to harbour.
What are these foundational issues?
The effective removal of regulations via winner bribes and a lack of enforcement plus the explicit removal of regulations, to reduce corruption and insider trading. AI is not required to create the systemic exploitations and they are far more efficient at extracting value than any AI system.
the relative economic value of immigrants (as unskilled labor) has gone down
As in "farmers don't find people to do the work (il)legal immigrants did" down?
Declining number of workers in farming are also a factor, but I'm thinking more construction/heavy industry.
It used to be extremely economical to import workers and use them to grow local industry: It does not only save you the cost of educating them, but also the productivity loss on the parents side. It was a huge economical boost, and pretty much a win-win situation all around (exact same thing happened in other countries, like Germany).
But the situation changed, and the same influx of workers to build and staff fields and factories is no longer as helpful; the main current/future need has shifted towards nursing/caretaking, and in that sector its much more about meeting demand cost effectively than fueling growth: The median age citizen does not benefit from more/cheaper nurses to the same degree than they did from a growing economy/industry half a century ago.
We're in extremely unprecedented times. Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit. The old rules don't apply. Etc.
This has taken an effect. A lot of people are strapped and no longer participating in larger purchases beyond the basic needs as just those have gone up in price so much relatively to income. Initially a lot of it was just greed and taking advantage of the pandemic as an excuse, now people are genuinely stretched thin.
How the AI Bubble Will Pop
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45448199
America is now one big bet on AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45502706
Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45464429
etc
etc
Use something closer to market value to GDP (with some adjustments). That is a much better estimate. John Hussman has imo the best of such metrics. Here's his thoughts from August: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc250814/
And this image says a lot: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-content/uploads/comment/mc25...
Yes. A lot now depends on when "growth" stops. But GDP is very hard to grow at an sustained high rate justifying higher valuations. Even through industrial revolutions, assembly lines, transistors, and the internet.