America's Future Could Hinge on Whether AI Slightly Disappoints

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.

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.

Crispr would clash with the religious fundamentalists slowly coming back to power in all western countries. Potentially it will be even banned, like abortions.

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...

scarcity isn't real anymore, it is enforced politically for the benefit of the owning class

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

For example?

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.

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

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.