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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

It was one thing for technology to replace agricultural jobs, then manufacturing jobs.  Take away white collar jobs....and I sure as shit haven't seen anyone talking about what the next frontier of employment is.

At this point in the conversation is when you usually hear "UBI".  Edit:  Which to me, sounds like a tech-y way of saying the tech oligarchs will allow a little to trickle down to the masses.

Edited by Goredho
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Posted
3 hours ago, Captainant said:

if they build a $5B datacenter and it turns out a $1B build could have done the same work that's not the end of the world - they just adjust their capitalization schedule for the asset and adjust their revenue model.

Let’s say you overbuilt capacity by 80% and extend that thinking to the possibility that revenue is going to be 80% less than you predicted. That is definitely end of the world for any company that finds itself in that situation. They would be proper fucked. 

Posted
22 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Let’s say you overbuilt capacity by 80% and extend that thinking to the possibility that revenue is going to be 80% less than you predicted. That is definitely end of the world for any company that finds itself in that situation. They would be proper fucked. 

If it turns out your hardware can do 5x the work you planned it to do, it's just a matter of finding customers to consume your available capacity. If there's a better LLM they'll just run that one instead, there's not a lot of architectural lock in.

But still thats not the problem - there's simply not enough customers willing to actually pay to cover the costs of development and deployment. Companies have been playing accounting games to hide that unsustainable net revenue and trumpet their gross numbers instead

Posted (edited)
4 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

It was one thing for technology to replace agricultural jobs, then manufacturing jobs.  Take away white collar jobs....and I sure as shit haven't seen anyone talking about what the next frontier of employment is.  A world with a couple hundred billionaires and 8.2 billion peasants doesn't sound super rosy to me.

The thing I wonder to this point is, "do the businesses pursuing AI with abandon and the governments of the world (ours excluded at the moment for reasons) realize that they are entering the same mutually assured destruction situation that we have with nukes?"

You have companies racing to develop AI to sell to other companies, promising that those buying the AI will exponentially increase their productivity while simultaneously massively reducing their reliance on and the cost of human capital.   You can cut coders, call center agents, lawyers, data entry, accountants, and on and on as you go down the rabbit hole.  Now these same companies buying the AI to do all this ostensibly have some product/service they are looking to sell. They in turn, use the revenue from those sales to pay the AI company for their product, service/support, the next new toy etc.  But this cycle happens in enough places and suddenly all these people out of work across all these industries no longer have the money to ya know....buy your shit.  Demand plummets, prices spiral down, you can't pay for the new AI with the kung fu grip and on and on infecting everything in the economy everywhere.  So even the companies that are first to the game in terms of AI and all that end up slitting their own throat as assuredly as the first country that launches a nuke is slitting its own throat.  

Unemployment peaked out at 14.9% during Covid in April 2020, and was already back down to below 7% by October of that year with the average for the year somewhere around 8%.  You start getting deep sustained unemployment of 15, 20, 25, 30% and it all comes down and real quick.  

Uncontrolled AI is going to destroy the economy long before it has the need to kill us with a virus or some other shit.  

Edit: And don't talk to me about UBI as a solution, even our government at its very best isn't moving on something like that fast enough to stop the chaos.  

Edited by Surly Bevo
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