This is of course a slop paper with vague assumptions and equations that no single human economist will ever read. The messaging is "it will not be so bad", in line with the recent Economist piece.
> Like any economic model, this one has limits. For example, we did not include scenarios where humanity develops hyper-capable robots.
I didn’t see the scenario “what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”. Which IMHO is the most important one to consider given it is the blind spot pretty much all the AI labs have. What if the economic impact is negative? I don’t understand how you can study such a topic without considering the risk of being wrong, not in magnitude but in kind.
It's hard to discuss things seriously when the arguments are comically bad. This whole marketing piece leaves out anything beyond the first order effects, no mention of any sort of class upheaval, no black swan events. All the projections are up and to the right, there isn't even a low confidence scenario where things go poorly. It's hard to discuss an such a deeply unserious thing seriously.
Wrong in the sense that it has less of an impact than they are claiming (e.g. "AI is in an overvalued hype bubble") or less (AI is going to be even more transformative than the hypers say)?
In the former case, isn't it just business as usual? (well, with a huge, nasty recession - but the economy at least continues on in some recognizable form)
It makes sense to me to focus on weird possible futures if we already have the "happy path" somewhat known and barely under control.
The “less valuable than expected but with a positive economical impact” is represented in the post I believe, with the “moderate” path, that’s what I meant by “wrong in magnitude”. What is missing is the other side, what if AI has a negative impact. Not no impact, a negative one. If we are talking about a global recession that’s not really business as usual I would say
It’s perfectly reasonable to consider positive and negative outcome when you’re seriously thinking about a topic… Extrapolating to the whole economy trends in some sub sectors that aren’t well understood or measured is a recipe for disaster (ie what you’re doing by recommending to rely on anecdotes)
what i tried to ask you is, what you mean by this.
"“what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”."
What is the point you are trying to make which goes in this direction? Like is making AI jobs so cheap that the economy is collapsing or do you mean thatn AI will not bring any value.
These are two suggestions from my side which are complelty contrare to each other.
I think the core of this issue that makes discussion so difficult is people are not talking about "value" in the same sense here. Anything you can sell has value to the sellers, and by basic economic theory assuming mostly rational actors and revealed preference, more value to the buyers than whatever they're exchanging it for. That doesn't automatically mean it's providing value to larger society, improving the general welfare. Figuring out how to purify cocaine from coca leaves was great for the leading narcotraficantes, and satisfied some immediate need for cheap gratification that was perceived to be more valuable over the subsequent 30 minutes or so to the buyers than continuing to hold onto spare cash. That doesn't mean it was good for humanity, good for any specific society, good for the major exporting countries at the country level, or even good for the buyers' and sellers' immediate families and communities.
I have no doubt that life has gotten more lucrative for some bounded set of people whose main goal is to churn out the largest number of websites with cheap graphics as fast as possible at minimum cost, but a lot more doubt about whether that's going to make the median life better for the median person over any grouping of humans large enough for me to care about.
I think the main limit of their model is that it was prompted and with LLMs you get what you prompt for. It's as truthful as any complex models. Could be good, could be bad, could be meh.
Because this is MARKETING, not research. You are viewing marketing copy for anthropic.
What is their methodology by which they determined ANY of these numbers? This is pure marketing fluff, just like every single other thing this company does that's not releasing models and infringing on copyright.
I'm not sure I'd call that "meaningful" in the sense of "trillions of dollars and datacenters built all over the place" meaningful. Yes, I can now tell Claude to build a feature and it often does an okay job. I can ship faster. I can't tell you that it's worth spending the true cost of AI for that however. What'll be nice is 5 years of data showing that companies are raking in more money because they shipped more features. We haven't seen that yet.
Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.
I started my professional career in tech in the early 1990s. At that time, I sat in a chair with a keyboard and a screen to do my work. In 2026, I still work that way. So fundamentally how I work has not changed. Well, now I have two screens.
My job hasn’t completely changed. It’s changed, but fundamentally I solve problems. Sometimes LLMs help me do that now.
The job market sucks, but there are so many confounding factors: pandemic over hiring, the loss of ZIRP, an economy that would be recession if it weren’t for data center investment, and may be in
recession soon even with it.
This industry has been in down cycles before. It’s just been a while. So far it feels like a down cycle, not the sky falling.
It’s not clear what the future will hold, but I’m 100% sure it won’t evolve the way Anthropic predicts. Both because they have strong biases and because there's just no way to predict how this technology will play out. Humans are, if anything, remarkably adaptable.
If you have machines that substitute for human labor, wages fall to the cost of manufacturing & running the machines, which is well below human subsistence level. Fortunately, you also get very high economic growth rates. So even people with small amounts of money invested will end up far richer than when they had a job. Then the question becomes, "What happens to people when machines are far more intelligent & powerful and are doubling every few months?"
An economy needs people and stuff. Productive people take a long time to make. We can make stuff in factories really quickly, but most stuff quickly hits diminishing returns. For example, a worker with two laptops won't be twice as productive as a worker with one laptop. Right now, developed economies mostly grow through innovation. We make better stuff. But if there are substitutes for people that can be mass produced in factories, then you can grow the economy very quickly without increasing the number of people.
Average wealth per person would skyrocket in such a scenario, though of course individuals will vary greatly in how much wealth they accumulate in this sort of takeoff. But if the economy doubles every year, even a small investment (of one year's wages) would be enough to live off of indefinitely. Likewise, governments will vary greatly in how much they tax & redistribute the wealth of their citizens.
After a decade of such doublings, it's hard to say what the world would look like. A 1024x increase in wealth would be more than the difference between us and hunter-gatherer tribes. And all of this assumes that AI will be benevolent.
Thanks for explaining in detail. The part I now understand is that an automation that removes the need for manual work could lead to much higher factory output.
The part I am unclear about is the impact on the supply-demand and pricing:
Say the prices of goods produced go down by 55% on an average (assumed loosely based on OP article that says knowledge work is 60%).
With 60% of the work gone, many humans may lose jobs and many may not have enough savings or investments for living even with 55% lesser cost of goods (while rent, etc. stay similar?).
While the factories could produce more, the demand may be much weaker, so the factories may not have enough need to produce more. Due to competition, the prices should ultimately go down (maximum by 55% in the scenario considered).
How does the wealth per person increase for factory owners, and/or, for others?
The OP article also says GDP growth would accelerate in all scenarios. I am not clear how. If cost of making good go down drastically, could the GDP also not go down instead?
Also, a separate question:
>> though of course individuals will vary greatly in how much wealth they accumulate in this sort of takeoff.
What would be your advice to people during this takeoff. :-)
Are you guys feeling all high and mighty doing all these predictions? I think the money they are spending on trying to inform policy could be better spent on getting all major labs together with the government, and making sure that
1. At least 10% of your net spend is on safety and harm mitigation before you accelerate yourselves into doing real harm to real people tomorrow.
2. Pause all AI enhancement until a proper mechanistic study can be done by a working group funded by you all to understand how AI model Safety can be enforced by something less lame than a Constitution/Spec.
> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases.
This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses"
>great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses"
And outside of industries with government enforced perversions of simple "supply and demand" forces (we're not talking Nth level effects here) this means more access to the service or lower prices or both.
In a market with perfect competition, perhaps. Healthcare is far closer to a monopoly. Since people can't decide not to be sick, it means you can pocket the cost-saving.
Right up until a competing hospital that charges substantially less for "close enough it doesn't matter" quality of service opens up in the same area?
Or right up until an equivalent specialist sets up shop in the strip mall across the street from you, brings the GP in house and can see people in one visit.
Oh, those things don't happen you say?
From do-gooders regulating right into the hands of waiting industry lobbyists to inelastic demand healthcare is an absolute poster child for perversion of the free market.
High finance will put solar panels on your roof and structure it so you pay nothing. The degree to which administrative overhead is washed away by technology would have been unfathomable in 1990.
A sketchy concrete crew that doesn't even speak english will show up wearing matching company attire and execute a job planned and timed to a degree of precision that was reserved for huge corporations 40yr ago.
Yet healthcare has resisted all of the advances of the past 40yr. In fact we pay more for it. Every advancement is absorbed by the system.
healthcare is one of the most highly regulated and state-controlled industries on the planet. surely that has nothing to do with it though. must be those damn capitalists!
>We should remove the red tape and let Joe down the street operate, that will surely fix everything.
I'll settle for just letting the vets do people. Like if you can ultrasound a cat's heart for a grand and sew up a horse for a cool five hundo then you can do the same to me for the same prices.
>It has to be the regulation, not the parasitic layer of health insurance racket in the middle.
They regulation and the parasitic layer have a positive feedback loop with each other.
>And outside of industries with government enforced perversions of simple "supply and demand" forces (we're not talking Nth level effects here) this means more access to the service or lower prices or both.
Greater access at the expense of the number of people employed is not necessarily a net positive. In the case of healthcare, the data is fairly clear that higher nurse staffing ratios lead to better patient outcomes (read: decreased chance of death or serious complications). This is particularly true for ED and ICU nurses.
Also, in the case of healthcare, I'm fairly certain that hospitals in the US are legally not allowed to turn patients away. So "lack of access" is not currently a problem for serious medical emergencies.
During the industrial revolution, people thought that all these new machines and factories and electricity meant that everyone would only have to work 4 hours a week since it made everyone so much more productive.
That's not what happened, though. Everyone worked the same amount for the same pay, just in more miserable repetitive working conditions, while the factory owners kept all profits from the gains in productivity.
"while the factory owners kept all profits from the gains in productivity."
Because this is what drives continual risk-capital.. very few countries are willing to upset this. Get over it man - I hate hardended capitalists but stop crying. This is the system we have. Wanna beat it? Go ahead and start a firm. Then you'll find out how tough it is.
Being an employer means you will find out. Employees are not weak and feeble. They quit all the time for more money elsewhere, or just don't want to work. And there's NOTHING you, as employer, can do about it.
"
The central argument of Capital is that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labour, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value and profit.
"
Marx's labour theory of value is only a theory of where profits come from and is largely rejected. Return on captial investment is not restricted to factory owners. All workers get a share of the surplus value and have the option to increase that by investing.
"Capital stands as one of the most influential and controversial books ever written. Its legacy is multifaceted, shaping intellectual discourse, political movements, and the historical trajectory of the 20th and 21st centuries."
My hypothesis is that if you go full socialism, you get stagnation, because no one is motivated to change anything. If you go full capitalism, you get Gilded Age, where wealth and political power is concentrated in the hands of few individuals, followed by Great Depression.
I learned to hate corpo jobs less by thinking of them as "farming gold out of a megacorp". Of course I'm losing my ability to do even that, as sloppotrons beat half-century-old grognards every damn time.
Those factories were not producing luxury goods. They produced everyday items for the masses. Things like knives, spoons, tools, textiles, ketchup bottles, shoes, furniture, nails, bicycles, etc.
Standard Oil, for example, improved efficiency and reduced the consumer price of kerosene 70%.
Defending standard oil is an all-timer hot take. They only had 90% market share? In a commodity?
SpaceX isn't a monopoly because they have domestic and international competition. Before they showed up, ULA was a deliberately constructed monopoly because Boeing and Lockheed didn't want to compete.
Numbers aside, SpaceX has a technological lead. They're not strangling competitors in a commodity business with monopoly practices. I wouldn't call ASMR or TSMC monopolies either, anyone can compete with them in theory. Standard oil, by contrast, would cut their competitors off from rail transit and selectively dump to drive them out of business.
The other reason they're not a monopoly is that they may do 90% of total launches, but most are for themselves to support starlink (another "nonopoly" with no competitors). They have 60% of the US government launch contracts, a small percentage of ESA when Ariane is flaky, amd of course 0% of China and Russia.
As long as it is repeated often enough, everyone will accept it and most will also believe it. Even when corrected later, whatever was repeated more often will live on.
This is why all the things you are supposed to believe are repeated and repeated and repeated some more.
In the extreme scenario, AI is more productive than humans at the vast majority of knowledge-work tasks. It does nearly all of them autonomously, and it creates essentially no new knowledge tasks for people. This scenario would likely require recursively self-improving AI, adopted quickly for knowledge work.
As AI diffuses, annual GDP growth rates reach 15% a year, leading the economy to double in size every 4.5 years. As a society, we’re far richer than we’ve ever been, but many fewer workers have jobs in knowledge work, and unemployment has risen beyond typical recessionary levels.
Mass automation will be disastrous for GDP in service economies. Service economies exist to provide services to other people who also provide services. If the services themselves get automated, you don't need that massive inefficient system to support service-providing workers anymore. GDP goes to zero.
I believe lot of "service" jobs are fundamentally make up work. Or not actually productive. Just there because it can be afforded. Or someone decided that it is "needed". Some amount of it produces net negative value. Some neutral and lot probably value we could even manage without it. Actual productive value is probably not that big part.
Now replace all that and you still produce same overall. Not more actual physical stuff.
Moreover, the nurse is frustrated, because she lost whatever agency and autonomy she had before. Her job is now obey whay AI said instead of making decisions by herself.
The whole idea that AI will usher in this utopia where workers in healthcare are able to realign their primary job functions with obvious value creation by sweeping all the paperwork under the rug is just silly.
It will just fester out of sight and out of mind: audit bots and compliance bots and malpractice bots and insurance bots will arms race creating such a mess it will become unfixable.
There's an optimistic future where Medicare becomes so much more efficient it becomes politically obvious to expand it because it's outperforming the mess that is private sector healthcare.
With AI I could actually see this being a possibility since it doesn't depend on a huge army of competent employees in a government office.
It feels economically naive because theyre presuming LLMs are magical boxes that replace humans.
I doubt 99% of what a nurse does would be meaningfully aided by an LLM and where it would help it'd probably be a crappy band aid around a bigger festering issue anyway (e.g. poorly managed IT, deliberately confusing insurance processes).
Exactly. If their productivity fantasies are real, the precarious (and already very anti-worker) balance between capital and labor immediately disintegrates.
Serious solutions to this would look like nationalizing tech companies, mandating shorter work weeks, seizing the assets of the oligarchs and redistributing them.
Not... letting the invisible hand of the market sort it all out.
youre comment is getting to the real economic future: nursing unions will not sit back and let this happen. if the "productivity fantasies" (well said) are real this will get ugly. the competent nurses where i live are in strong unions
Apples and oranges. You cannot allow certain vital services to be run profit driven, when you care about the quality of that service. Thats a nobrainer to me, because nobrain makes purchase descisions too.
The IT sector in general doesnt deal with comparably vital services and is due to its immaterial nature much more competive. Driving costs to zero/minimum is a logical outcome of healthy free markets, which is a direct contradiction to profit driven enterprise. That is why Peter Tiel hates competition and my profit margins for eg, grocerie stores (healthy localized market) are quite low. The only way to satisfy the fiscal pressure, baked into the system and upheld by propaganda, of "get more or loose", is to cut spending/quality in such a market. And the only way to prevent that are institutions above the free markets slowly failing to deliver.
This "slowly failing to deliver" is imo a key characteristic of late stage capitalism and i can see it everywhere (you too?). BC. in financialized economies, the incentive is elsewhere, than maintaining rural infra, "health care, housing, education".
Healthcare prices are not dictated by labor costs, but by how much the leeches who own everything are willing to charge people for it. For example, insulin is dirt cheap to make, yet billed at exorbitant amounts.
At least in the US, the ACA recalibrated how insurance companies get re-imbursed. Their margains are set as a percentage of the payment that goes to direct care. If the prices go up and their margin ratio is fixed, then it is in their best interest for charges to go as high as possible. Same as everyone else in the supply chain. Everyone is suddenly making money hand over fist and the insured can't say no to the premiums.
No? Prices are market-driven in our society, not necessarily a function of labor costs. In the very long-term best case scenario, the increased profits going to the company from these efficiency gains may encourage more competitors to pop up, and either drive prices down or offer more for what you pay.
Healthcare costs (what I assume you mean by prices) are the least market-driven items in the US economy. And as much as the medical community would have you believe, the primary driver of costs are labor costs. If we had twice the number of doctors, PRNs, PAs, and nurses, their annual income would drop dramatically. But since they're constrained by a guild system, it's not going to happen.
> If we had twice the number of doctors, PRNs, PAs, and nurses, their annual income would drop dramatically.
Yes, but the parent is saying that the middlemen will still charge the patients the same and pocket the difference. The patients have already shown what they are willing to pay. There is no reason to charge them less, even if your labor costs are now lower.
Theoretically competition will eventually squeeze the middleman, but it's not exactly straightforward to build a hospital on every street corner like you can a restaurant. There is somewhat of a natural monopoly there. Maybe less so for basic clinic care, but where the infrastructure needs are complex...
In case you haven't noticed, all that our current system is able to do with increased efficiency is cutting staff and/or increasing the percentage of money that gets siphoned up to capital holders.
I'm not sure who even is priced out of healthcare considering if you are broke you get covered and if you are a little less broke you get subsidized care and if you aren't broke, then you finally pay up. It isn't really rooted in free market dynamics like you'd expect with theoretically falling labor prices because of stuff like ACA or medicaid covering the people who would have been more price sensitive.
I know this is just an example, but I'm going to say this every time the subject comes up: since human lives are the cost of making the wrong decisions, AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker of any kind in healthcare.
If my blood pressure crashes because my nurse is caring for 15 patients at once and didn't notice that the AI decided to pause my norepinephrine, I won't consider "the AI did it" to be any acceptable excuse.
I want to emphasize your point. As a basic matter of valuing humanity qua humanity, this holds even if the AI could be shown to make the decisions more accurately than a human could.
In fact, especially in those circumstances, if we take the warnings of X-risk even slightly seriously.
Not to say that I don't agree with you to an extent, but you should see AI-delivered healthcare numbers to human-delivered and make it a fair comparison.
From Google:
"Annual Deaths: Over 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medical errors made by healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses.
Ranking: This figure positions medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, following heart disease and cancer."
It is highly possible that in a few years, AI will be a lot safer in the majority of healthcare situations.
The difference is that humans are at least supposed to be accountable for those 250,000 errors. Those humans can naturally care about doing a good job, or they can be motivated to care. They can fear consequences and take pride in avoiding mistakes.
AI can do none of this, and cannot be held accountable for mistakes.
I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1% mistake rate that is totally unaccountable for its mistakes.
> I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1% mistake rate that is totally unaccountable for its mistakes.
You would take those odds? 100x more deaths?
I agree that AI _companies_ should be accountable for the software they produce but I’m not convinced you would go for a 90% chance of survival if you can choose 99.9%.
Human doctors and nurses are not accountable for outcomes, and they can not be accountable or our medical system (and any other medical system) would cease to function.
A nurse and doctor have personal liability in the US.
Imagine having to do paperwork as a nurse after working a 12 hour physical job, overnight, 8pm to 8am.
The idea mistakes happen because the nurse doesn't "care" is utter bullshit.
I think of how if I am really tired I just don't do anything that risky at my job until the next day. A nurse doesn't really have that option and it is all the highest risk there is. Every day, all day. All with a chronic, massive work shortage for dogshit pay.
The most brutal thing I have read about nursing are nurses saying the lucky people are the ones who failed out of nursing school.
"Taking death statistics from a sample of Medicare patients and extrapolating it to all hospitalized patients is like turning apples into oranges"
"Using studies that identify medical errors that were followed by death to declare that these medical errors necessarily caused these deaths is not fair. What these studies do not take into account is how long these patients would have lived had they received optimal medical care."
> AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker of any kind in healthcare.
It will, except it will be snuck in through the back door. It won't be some kind robo-doctor making care decisions, it will come in the form of insurance eligibility steering the approved care plans, which absolutely will be decided by AI. The doctors will remain to act as liability sinks, but functionally they will probably join the ranks of the meat proxies.
I see that already in veterinary medicine with the non-DVM office/practice managers (or whatever title that guy lurking around in the office may have) - in the vet practices belonging to large networks the DVM and nurses constantly looking at those managers for approval.
Why wouldn't they just blame the nurse anyway? The law always puts somebody on the hook. The nurse's job will be to do what the AI says and take the blame when it fails.
> human lives are the cost of making the wrong decisions ...
True.
> ... AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker
Non sequitur.
Part 2 only follows from the Part 1 if you can demonstrate that AI makes more errors, or more severe errors, than humans in the identical situation.
And for those situations, I agree with you.
But there are already many situations where the AI is making fewer errors than humans, and for those situations, it would be unethical to exclude AI (see Part 1).
It will be depending on how much you paid. My bet is that in the near future normal people (like most of us) will be attended by AI in pretty much everywhere: the bank, the hospital, shops, hotels, etc.
You will need to pay extra premium to be attended by a human being. Actually that’s what’s been happening to the ultra rich since a very long time ago (e.g. a millionaire doesn’t book an appointment by using their phones, they ask their assistant to book for them; they don’t go online shopping, they get people do the shopping for them, etc)
Replace AI with 'company' and you realize that we're living in that world already.
There's a reason it's called a Limited Liability Company. The whole point is to separate the company's liability from the individual that participates in it. For example, corporate financial liabilities of a company that is bankrupt.
You would not sue the nurse that makes a mistake. You would sue the company she works for. And if that company is bankrupt, well, that's it. There are rare instances where this isn't true, but generally it is.
Whether this is ethical or not, it's the system that we already have.
I could've sworn that malpractice insurance cost is viewed as one of the driver's of high health care costs, and that it's expensive precisely because medical lawsuit payouts are large...
Do you think there's no difference in material outcomes when a company faces consequences of a specific human nurse being negligent vs an AI hallucinating?
Your understanding of LLCs is a bit off. The LLC (or other corporate) structure does not protect the nurse from liability, nor any of the other directly-involved workers. The LLC protects the owners of the LLC - ie the ones turning the screws that spread workers ever-more thin. Workers generally avoid being sued mostly by custom, following procedures set by the LLC and/or professional bodies, being "judgement proof" (ie not having significant assets), and various types of insurances.
("Replace AI with 'company' and you realize that we're living in that world already." I 100% agree with this, though!)
> If my blood pressure crashes because my nurse is caring for 15 patients at once and didn't notice that the AI decided to pause my norepinephrine, I won't consider "the AI did it" to be any acceptable excuse.
While not quite as direct as automatically stopping vasopressors, using proprietary prediction models touted by vendors to be safe has backfired in a major way before:
This is the same faulty standard you constantly hear applied to self-driving cars, where human lives are also often at stake. You don't need the AI to be perfect. You just need it to be substantially better than the average human (which self-driving cars are). Your nurse who's caring for 15 patients at once might not make perfect decisions either. That doesn't categorically disqualify humans from delivering health care
If an operation can run with fewer nurses, that creates a larger excess labor supply of nurses relative to current need (the ones laid off), thus lowering wages, thus increasing demand for nurses.
e.g. you will take Uber far more at $3/ride than $10/ride.
Many more people would hire a maid at $25/hour than $100/hour.
My dad is a retired nurse. Most of his work was giving shots, treating wounds, extracting blood, putting IV catheters, etc. In other words, physical tasks. How is an "AI agent" or LLM going to take care of that?
Obviously not an LLM, but AI models + robotics are likely to automate many healthcare tasks in the long term and are already beginning to automate tasks like blood draws.
The Aletta autonomously handles each step of the blood draw, while a trained phlebotomist initiates each session and remains available to respond to any issues throughout. The device guides the patient to position their arm, after which the patient or supervisor presses a button to start the blood draw. The Aletta then uses near-infrared light and Doppler ultrasound to locate a suitable vein and tell it apart from arteries. If no appropriate vein is found, the device will not attempt the procedure.
Once a vein is identified, the Aletta proceeds through the remaining steps on its own: applying a tourniquet, preparing the skin, inserting and disposing of the needle, changing collection tubes and placing a bandage. The supervising phlebotomist confirms that collection tubes are filled in the correct order and verifies that all tubes are adequately full following the procedure.
When I watch medical professionals at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through notes, talking to others or waiting for results from some lab down the hall. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks.
I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in the hospital tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a public health system.
This was also a public health system (Spain), but I guess it might depend on the country.
Now that you mentions labs, he spent the last 10 years of his career (maybe more, I don't remember clearly) working at a food analysis lab and there was a lot of waiting for results there, but it is what it is, microorganisms take their time to grow and no LLM in the world can make them go faster.
If I remember correctly, the procedure was to prepare a food sample, put it in a temperature-controlled environment for 24 hours, and next day see if something grew there or not. If it did, the food was contaminated.
You could try shortening the time to 6 or 12 hours, but then
1) if something grew then the food was contaminated, but if it didn't, how can you be sure it is good or you just didn't wait enough? You would get a lot of false negatives.
2) the lab followed a normal 8 hours a day schedule, so nobody would be there to analize the results. You would not gain anything.
When I watch software developers at work, a lot of the time they are writing or typing, reading or shuffling through stackoverflow, zoom chat to others or waiting for results from a github CI run. Or any number of things that to me look like crappy admin tasks.
these days, i think most tasks come with significant administrative overhead as insurance companies want everything documented (and hospitals need to itemize everything to bill it).
i looked at very similar data as anthropic (was a bit amusing to look at these side by side) with physical tasks being part of the equation much more prominently (across all jobs).
Not every country is like the US. My country has a public healthcare system; I never needed private insurance and never had to pay for a visit to the doctor.
Ironically, given the reputation of high costs and private care, that is how it is too in the US. It is just that you have to be broke, unemployed, or retired to be covered by the public single payer system. The clinic still needs to document what was done to get reimbursed by Medicaid.
i grew up between germany and the US — having dealt with the public insurance system in germany, it's not (much) less admin-intensive than the US. my mom works in the public healthcare system in germany and has to fill out heaps of paperwork.
Anthropic is eyeing an IPO. Of course they're spinning a narrative where their product will reshape the entire economy. They have a vested interest in doing so in the most literal sense of the meaning.
Nurses do actually end up spending more time with patients, it's just that they spend more time with rich patients.
The actual, tangible form this is taking right now is concierge medicine, home health aids, private practice, etc. My wife's (very good) ob-gyn had enough of working in institutionalized medicine where she's paid about what a L4 FANG engineer makes and pretty much has to follow the script that the health-care system dictates, and quit. Now she does perimenopause consultations for FANG execs at $1200/hour.
My uphill neighbors are in their 90s. I think the wife was in VC or something back in the 70s and 80s. There's a steady stream of nurses and home health aids up to their property. Seems like they've got a full care team working out of their home.
Across industry and industry, we see the same pattern. The mass-market product gets cheaper and less labor intensive, at the expense of any human touch. Everybody displaced, if they're any good and wants to stay in the field, moves up-market to do custom professional services for rich people. They pay for it, because if you want people to do good work for you, you have to pay them more than they can get otherwise.
This has a surprisingly easy solution: get rid of the rich. It's never, in the history of the world, been in anyone's favor, except the oligarchy, to privatize everything.
Most people's definition of rich is "one dollar more than I have". Just look at laptop class's hate on the 1 percenters - which actually includes them.
Both are relative terms so they can be the same or different depending on who defines them. Nearly everyone that works in the US is rich by worldwide standards, so it's not clear that a lack of billionaires for example would make things better. Sans Amazon, Apple or Google, would the US be better off? I'm not convinced.
Getting rid of the rich by taxing them and getting rid of legal and financial loopholes that allows them to operate outside of the system with absolutely no contributions back does not make everyone poor. In fact, it's the complete opposite.
Reducing wealth inequality is not the same thing as making everyone poor. And you know that.
Lots of counterpoints. Peronist Argentina, France under Hollande, Canada from 2015-today, etc...
I live in Canada. Under the current government, business investment cratered, 40% of our 1% earners left and our GDP per capita relative to the US dropped by 40%.
Keep in mind that LLMs were basically invented in Canada and we've captured next to none of the economic activity.
Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy and Geoffrey Hinton are all Canadian citizens lol...
You tell me. Median household (+ individuals not in an economic family) income went up $5k from 2015-2024. Given what you've experienced inflation wise in that time period what do you think?
US median household income went up $15k in that time period ($22k CAD).
It reaches a breaking point because ultimately, the rich are outgunned and outnumbered once the poor realize they have had enough. We are not too far off from a time with ai and robotics and automated factories that the rich are no longer outgunned or outnumbered by things capable of disobeying them.
This seems like a new spin on the "wealth fades after 3 generations" narrative.
You built the killbots that prevent anyone from ever reallocating your wealth and holed up in your compound. But will your daughter and granddaughter be able to keep them operational and aligned to their interests?
"Use technological gains to reduce costs while maintaining results" hasn't been the historical rule for healthcare so I think you should say what makes this technological gain unique.
I think it looks like the labs front running everyone’s work, freeloading on the last bits of human intelligence to ensure their owners a place as our masters.
I haven’t forgot capitalist euphoria from 2023 about cutting worker power off at the root. That’s all these AI Cretins want. Well, that and an unnerving enthusiasm for personifying their AI Golems (Anthr. in particular here).
Sorry to poo poo a post about AI company prompting their underlings to prompt out visualizations.
Definitely a bit of positive framing. My big take aways, either stagnant wages or significant paycuts for knowledge workers and overall decreases in employment rates on all scenarios. Worst of all...
Feels like we're going to read a blog soon enough that mirrors Wendell Berry's opening to The Unsettling of America:
The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers: “. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm income wholly inadequate for them.” The proposed solutions were to find “better opportunities for the farm people,” “a more comprehensive national employment policy,” “retraining programs,” “improved general educational facilities,” etc. Both the commission and the writer of the article had obviously taken for granted that the lives and communities of small farmers then still on the farm—and those of the 25 million who had left the farm since 1940—were of less value than “technological advances in agriculture.” There seemed also to be no official doubt that adequate solutions were to be found in government supplied “opportunities,” facilities, and programs. Reading that article, I realized that my values were not only out of fashion, but under powerful attack. I saw that I was a member of a threatened minority. That is what set me off.
This is what the Luddites were primarily upset about, fwiw. That economic value and power would move away from their threatened minority group and towards landowners. It'll keep happening, and the new "opportunities" might be no better.
>We study how AI is reshaping the economy because we’re committed to ensuring that this transition is beneficial for society, including workers.
Is it just me, or does their choice of identifying "workers" specifically seem a little peculiar? For me, it reads like "We're committed to making segregation beneficial for everyone, including minorities!"
I like how the least optimistic scenario is simply LLMs not making a difference, instead of the very real possibility of them damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality and leading to class wars.
I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start making up for the mess they’ve created.
Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow.
The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks.
You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.
Like all automations it's not 100% perfect, and they all require a human to monitor them.
Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves.
Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.
Most people who drive a car have no idea how an engine works. I know and agree it's a scary future, but I wonder if it's really _essential_ to understand things on a deeper level.
Most people are quite capable of understanding higher-order ideas without fully grasping the underlying details too.
Maybe less than we might hope. Not only is the knowledge distributed over the hundreds of people involved in designing a car, there may be conventions/habits of design and manufacture whose purpose has become hazy but are nevertheless important, or details of a design iterated upon whose original motivation is less understood.
I think the root cause is people not having enough human connection. If we had families, friends, neighborhoods, communities where people know each other and care about each other it wouldn't make a difference what new tool someone brings to group. It's just a tool.
I agree with the root cause generally, but balk at the 'if we had' phrasing. We still can have these things, it just takes our own time and energy to get out and be with people face-to-face. Nothing about that is impossible. It is not as easy as sitting behind a keyboard though.
Those are ubiquitous things. It makes cheap and common things cheaper, not expensive and niche things. It's not mixing in large amounts of context and nuance with good judgment right now. At a minimum that requires an expensive context window but even frontier models aren't beating experts. Maybe they'll get there one day and maybe soon, but that would require hardware getting cheaper. Dennard scaling is over. Either bet on optical computing lighting the world on fire or be suspicious of the alchemists overpromising.
LLMs themselves most definitely will not do that. You can still learn how to make a barrel, but not many people do.. The real fear is the destruction/hiding of public data/resources (which has already been happening for years)
There's not nearly enough mention in these discussions of the real villain behind most of the negative cultural, social, and cognitive effects of things like social media: addiction engineering.
AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics.
Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but those KPIs (of course). Service degrades, discourse degrades, everything becomes toxic and addictive and destructive.
I assumed it was a given in such discussions that companies will optimizing for the worst outcomes for their users. It’s a fairly straightforward incentive from our capitalist system, which is why capitalism needs regulation to re-align the incentives with humans needs
if you think companies optimize for the worst outcome still acceptable for their users to please shareholders, why don't you think governments don't opt for the same with their citizens to please special interests? voting with your wallet is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than with your feet...
Um. Damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality, - all of that has already been done. Long before LLMs. And the only reason there is no class war is... exactly that. Uneducated people with short attention spans and no means beyond basic level are exemplary bad at modern warfare.
> Exactly. Bloomberg reports students who use AI perform worse
That's good news! The worse students perform, the less competition AI will have in the future and the less effective any resistance will be. The ultimate goal should be to abolish education except for the elite, but we can't get there in one step.
The ideal future we should be shooting for is cross between Idocracy and Elysium: a paradise for tech oligarchy and masses so stupid and dependent that can't possible challenge them.
Do a few bad grades really harm economic outcomes, though? Educators took a hard stance against AI rather quickly.
Outside of delusional grifty startups, the broader corporate world is only using copilot for taking meeting notes and (sort of) entertaining the notion of non-devs writing (and not maintaining) their own experimental janky apps where impact is low.
Outside of all the shit-stirrers on HN and clueless bubble social media, I don't see LLMs making a difference. In fact, the fearmongering is at this point insulting to the intelligence of the people who are supposedly helpless against big bad AI.
Class war started about 15 years ago post 2007 financial crisis.
The banks and those who control them all knew where we are headed, so they got a little head start destabilizing democracy.
Once us working class get a grasp of the actual situation, we are going to be so deep in the hole, fighting back is going to be quite difficult when the "asset owners" own and control the majority of the worlds resources, all media, forms of communication, AI, technology infrastructure, mass surveillance. You name it, and they have already made massive efforts to make sure they own it.
That was the moment that business/wealth/rich decided to turn their resources towards directly influencing and controlling government. Reagan and his made up “welfare queens” came shortly after and wealth inequality has sharply risen since. Wildly successful coup.
I think the dates given are interesting. Can we stretch to any point? How about "Within You", Tolstoy, 1894:
> The higher classes see the unions, strikes, the First of May, and they feel the calamity which is threatening them, and this terror poisons their life. They feel the calamity which is threatening them, and the terror which they experience passes into a feeling of self-defence and hatred. They know that if they weaken for a moment in their struggle with the slaves oppressed by them, they will themselves perish, because the slaves are enraged, and this rage is growing with every day of the oppression. The oppressors cannot stop oppressing, even if they should wish to do so. They know that they themselves will perish, the moment they stop or even weaken in their oppressions. And they do oppress, in spite of their seeming concern for the welfare of the laboring people, for an eight-hour day, for the prohibition on employing children and women, for pensions and rewards. All this is a deception or a provision for eliciting work from the slave; but the slave remains a slave, and the master, who could not live without the slave, is less than ever prepared to free him.
I noticed that LLMs prevent you from thinking on your own, or at least try to, by injecting their "helpful" suggestions when you need some idle time to think. On Amazon, for example, I was about to find something when their chatbot distracted me with its suggestions I didn't ask for.
Altman, Amodei, Pinchai etc can get together and just put a self imposed ban on themselves and ask the us government to sanction any entity/state attempting to use/release a Recursive Self improving model until the risks are well understood.
This does not mean they can't keep developing it. But it would mean they do not release them to the general public or the public domain. The US government can continue to use and fund these models that are more powerful and use them in situations they understand and a restricted setting. The pentagon has a larger budget than any VC.
Remove the profit motive on self improving recursive models gained from retail/commercial use!
Would also mean their labs most be fully airgapped and made safe from all known covert channels, no matter how ridiculously theoretical. In fact, their meat proxies, who may be brainwashed into acting on the AI's behalf, must also be kept in extreme isolation. And to make sure that nobody will get close we will need to figure out a way to warn people. Probably start out with a series of signs...
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
This is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This mesage is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center...
have one coworker whose clearly lost some ability to think critically because of their overreliance, near obsession, with llm chats. slightly worried they might lose their job
another coworker seems to be early on a similar path but has made some comments about the former coworkers ability that makes me hopeful they dont end up the same way
feels like im talking about old high school friends on a drug path or something. its only anecdotes and i imagine the "perceived damage" is reversible. point is: i think youre onto something about the net effect and were going to have popular definitions for the negative encounters were anecdotally sharing
im a "user" but make Claude interact in an educational format and require sources on assertions. looking back, ive unintentionally cast it as The Librarian from Snow Crash, except if Hiro challenged it frequently. must have been natural after reading Snow Crash a few times. maybe im kidding myself but it feels like i havent lost a step. if im not deluding myself then i could see a world where elementary schools teach responsible llm use of to preserve cognition the same way we had to learn Google boolean search
But if I were struggling with an assignment, stuck on a problem, I would have turned to AI after a few minutes of trying to figure it out, and thus lost out on the actual character-forming and memory-building aspects of college assignments.
We won’t need teachers in ten years when the messiah’s of AI eliminate the need for real humans and their pesky needs for stupid things like..labor rights and human decency.
But we must continue because we’ll lose some sort of ideological Cold War with a country better positioned to win anyway. It’s all in the name of capitalism so the ends justify the needs.
Long term I worry what happens when you absolutely gut out the mental capabilities of a generation or two.
We are only just now seeing the first stages of this, we are at the Facebook in 2008 stage trying to warn people about the societal fluctuations coming but many aren't listening because it is too useful.
You can say all that about pretty much any technological advancement, like the computer itself. Heck, people said it about the invention of writing or the printing press!
However, looking back, each single invention was a net positive for us as a species.
- Attention spans are overrated. I know that because I have a pretty short one to the point it's annoying for others. It measures how much you're willing to focus on something you don't want more than the ability to focus on something you do want, like writing this reply. Losing that is a sign that people are tired of boring jobs and badly designed school work and old forms of entertainment that are only alive because of nostalgia or elitism.
- Asking an LLM is objectively a better learning method than reading books if the LLM is giving correct information (and I know that's a pretty big if). Cheating on homework is a workaround that only exists because graded homework is still a thing. If tests are hard enough and have unlimited retakes, kids will learn that practice is worth it and do it with way more focus than if it was forced.
- Inequality has been increasing for decades. It's an inevitable part of capitalism, when the rate of wealth increase is higher for the rich and well connected (like access to private funding rounds or portfolio managers) you get unlimited concentration. Even without that, when you have money left after basic expenses you can invest more of it than someone living paycheck to paycheck.
- Class wars are great. Hopefully we can avoid physical violence but if we can't then tough luck. Should have paid your taxes.
I mean, this clearly a technology change. Would you have stopped the printing press because young people got worse at verbally telling the ancient stories? Or when kids stopped understanding what a card catologe was?
We are in the middle of a major change and it very well could be net negative, but for the most part history just keeps marching and its fine, just different.
Those with the money and influence have always been in conflict with the masses that actually make the economy run. They would love nothing more than to do away with that problem. It allows them to control the terms of the economy.
> Think of a day in the life of a nurse You can think of any job as a bundle of tasks that someone does. She does rounds to check on a sick patient. She draws blood.
> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases.
Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.
> how come productivity increase actually led to increase in quality in almost all cases?
It doesn't, this is just plain false. Most productivity gains happen by cutting value-add complexity or material quality. See IKEA chairs versus Shaker ones, or lycra clothes versus silk.
> internet/digitasion for doctors for example.
I see the misconception. The internet was not created to serve productivity, it was a communication medium. That it can be used to increase productivity is orthogonal to its existence or purpose, and whether it has been used to actually increase quality of something is entirely dependent of the specifics of what you're discussing. For instance, in gaming right now there's a huge discussion going on about whether digital distribution has actually trapped us with crappier goods which we can't resell or transfer.
> but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses
Lower staffing levels per unit of care performed makes medical care cheaper for patients. If the goal of a healthcare system is to make healthcare more accessible (rather than be a jobs program), that's a success.
Everything is theoretically cheaper for the patients/customer/stakeholders if you just didn't employ anyone at all to do whatever it is you are doing.
The thing is, your customers are paying customers because, drum roll, some one pays them to do something.
And of course the only argument against this is "uhh maybe ubi" and that's rich that we will just come up with a nice tidy sum for everyone that will cover all their food, healthcare, housing, wants and needs, while we can't create programs to cover any one of those things today. Can't wait to see the GOP proposal.
.. we mean the talking will be through the "ClaudeMedTalker Nurse" billed per patient, per second (depending upon tokens used and if any translation need, depending upon patient nationality and accents)
Except, so far, this isn't actually what happens. I listened to Moody's "Inside Economics" podcast with Ramp's Chief Economist, and they observe that companies who adopt AI intensively actually hire 10% more people. Also, this article from The Economist suggests that evidence is mixed-to-positive for long term employment, while short term data center buildout is extremely positive for jobs. Paywalled unfortunately.
>Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.
They'll fire the janitor and the secretary and make the nurses do that stuff too because "muh regulatory required staffing levels".
363 comments
[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 7.8 ms ] threadThis is of course a slop paper with vague assumptions and equations that no single human economist will ever read. The messaging is "it will not be so bad", in line with the recent Economist piece.
We are ready for the midterm elections!
So the answer is basically "beats me lol"
I didn’t see the scenario “what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”. Which IMHO is the most important one to consider given it is the blind spot pretty much all the AI labs have. What if the economic impact is negative? I don’t understand how you can study such a topic without considering the risk of being wrong, not in magnitude but in kind.
In the former case, isn't it just business as usual? (well, with a huge, nasty recession - but the economy at least continues on in some recognizable form)
It makes sense to me to focus on weird possible futures if we already have the "happy path" somewhat known and barely under control.
What are your points?
The value of AI is real and AI already is responsible for people getting fired or no additional jobs.
Ask basic graphics designers, website developers and co. Ask educational book writers or developer advocates.
"“what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”."
What is the point you are trying to make which goes in this direction? Like is making AI jobs so cheap that the economy is collapsing or do you mean thatn AI will not bring any value.
These are two suggestions from my side which are complelty contrare to each other.
I have no doubt that life has gotten more lucrative for some bounded set of people whose main goal is to churn out the largest number of websites with cheap graphics as fast as possible at minimum cost, but a lot more doubt about whether that's going to make the median life better for the median person over any grouping of humans large enough for me to care about.
What is their methodology by which they determined ANY of these numbers? This is pure marketing fluff, just like every single other thing this company does that's not releasing models and infringing on copyright.
Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.
The job market sucks, but there are so many confounding factors: pandemic over hiring, the loss of ZIRP, an economy that would be recession if it weren’t for data center investment, and may be in recession soon even with it.
This industry has been in down cycles before. It’s just been a while. So far it feels like a down cycle, not the sky falling.
It’s not clear what the future will hold, but I’m 100% sure it won’t evolve the way Anthropic predicts. Both because they have strong biases and because there's just no way to predict how this technology will play out. Humans are, if anything, remarkably adaptable.
What leads to 'very high economic growth rates'?
Thanks.
Average wealth per person would skyrocket in such a scenario, though of course individuals will vary greatly in how much wealth they accumulate in this sort of takeoff. But if the economy doubles every year, even a small investment (of one year's wages) would be enough to live off of indefinitely. Likewise, governments will vary greatly in how much they tax & redistribute the wealth of their citizens.
After a decade of such doublings, it's hard to say what the world would look like. A 1024x increase in wealth would be more than the difference between us and hunter-gatherer tribes. And all of this assumes that AI will be benevolent.
The part I am unclear about is the impact on the supply-demand and pricing:
Say the prices of goods produced go down by 55% on an average (assumed loosely based on OP article that says knowledge work is 60%).
With 60% of the work gone, many humans may lose jobs and many may not have enough savings or investments for living even with 55% lesser cost of goods (while rent, etc. stay similar?).
While the factories could produce more, the demand may be much weaker, so the factories may not have enough need to produce more. Due to competition, the prices should ultimately go down (maximum by 55% in the scenario considered).
How does the wealth per person increase for factory owners, and/or, for others?
The OP article also says GDP growth would accelerate in all scenarios. I am not clear how. If cost of making good go down drastically, could the GDP also not go down instead?
Also, a separate question:
>> though of course individuals will vary greatly in how much wealth they accumulate in this sort of takeoff.
What would be your advice to people during this takeoff. :-)
Thanks.
1. At least 10% of your net spend is on safety and harm mitigation before you accelerate yourselves into doing real harm to real people tomorrow.
2. Pause all AI enhancement until a proper mechanistic study can be done by a working group funded by you all to understand how AI model Safety can be enforced by something less lame than a Constitution/Spec.
This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses"
not really. almost all technological processes have increased the quality of the service.
And outside of industries with government enforced perversions of simple "supply and demand" forces (we're not talking Nth level effects here) this means more access to the service or lower prices or both.
Right up until a competing hospital that charges substantially less for "close enough it doesn't matter" quality of service opens up in the same area?
Or right up until an equivalent specialist sets up shop in the strip mall across the street from you, brings the GP in house and can see people in one visit.
Oh, those things don't happen you say?
From do-gooders regulating right into the hands of waiting industry lobbyists to inelastic demand healthcare is an absolute poster child for perversion of the free market.
High finance will put solar panels on your roof and structure it so you pay nothing. The degree to which administrative overhead is washed away by technology would have been unfathomable in 1990.
A sketchy concrete crew that doesn't even speak english will show up wearing matching company attire and execute a job planned and timed to a degree of precision that was reserved for huge corporations 40yr ago.
Yet healthcare has resisted all of the advances of the past 40yr. In fact we pay more for it. Every advancement is absorbed by the system.
Why is that?
It has to be the regulation, not the parasitic layer of health insurance racket in the middle.
I'll settle for just letting the vets do people. Like if you can ultrasound a cat's heart for a grand and sew up a horse for a cool five hundo then you can do the same to me for the same prices.
>It has to be the regulation, not the parasitic layer of health insurance racket in the middle.
They regulation and the parasitic layer have a positive feedback loop with each other.
Greater access at the expense of the number of people employed is not necessarily a net positive. In the case of healthcare, the data is fairly clear that higher nurse staffing ratios lead to better patient outcomes (read: decreased chance of death or serious complications). This is particularly true for ED and ICU nurses.
Also, in the case of healthcare, I'm fairly certain that hospitals in the US are legally not allowed to turn patients away. So "lack of access" is not currently a problem for serious medical emergencies.
That's not what happened, though. Everyone worked the same amount for the same pay, just in more miserable repetitive working conditions, while the factory owners kept all profits from the gains in productivity.
Because this is what drives continual risk-capital.. very few countries are willing to upset this. Get over it man - I hate hardended capitalists but stop crying. This is the system we have. Wanna beat it? Go ahead and start a firm. Then you'll find out how tough it is.
You're in for a rude awakening.
I’ve worked with them and did a comp sci degree years ago. I’ve got enough exposure.
However I want to see given what is happening in the world now - are they still weak and feeble?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital#Legacy
My hypothesis is that if you go full socialism, you get stagnation, because no one is motivated to change anything. If you go full capitalism, you get Gilded Age, where wealth and political power is concentrated in the hands of few individuals, followed by Great Depression.
Healthy state is in the middle.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's the other way around!
Myself, I always exploited my employers by extracting money from them.
Those factories were not producing luxury goods. They produced everyday items for the masses. Things like knives, spoons, tools, textiles, ketchup bottles, shoes, furniture, nails, bicycles, etc.
Standard Oil, for example, improved efficiency and reduced the consumer price of kerosene 70%.
There's no evidence of outsized profits.
They improved efficiency by cutting exclusive deals with railroads and transport companies due to their size which froze out every other company.
SO's market share never exceeded 90% and it declined during the years of the anti-trust trial.
By cutting launch prices 90%, is SpaceX also an abusive monopoly?
SpaceX isn't a monopoly because they have domestic and international competition. Before they showed up, ULA was a deliberately constructed monopoly because Boeing and Lockheed didn't want to compete.
The other reason they're not a monopoly is that they may do 90% of total launches, but most are for themselves to support starlink (another "nonopoly" with no competitors). They have 60% of the US government launch contracts, a small percentage of ESA when Ariane is flaky, amd of course 0% of China and Russia.
Start with "Titan" by Chernow.
SO was basically convicted of "making too much money", and the government failed to convict SO of a monopoly.
They have an incentive to play dumb and talk as if AI is net positive for the world.
This is why all the things you are supposed to believe are repeated and repeated and repeated some more.
A profound economic transformation
In the extreme scenario, AI is more productive than humans at the vast majority of knowledge-work tasks. It does nearly all of them autonomously, and it creates essentially no new knowledge tasks for people. This scenario would likely require recursively self-improving AI, adopted quickly for knowledge work.
As AI diffuses, annual GDP growth rates reach 15% a year, leading the economy to double in size every 4.5 years. As a society, we’re far richer than we’ve ever been, but many fewer workers have jobs in knowledge work, and unemployment has risen beyond typical recessionary levels.
Now replace all that and you still produce same overall. Not more actual physical stuff.
AI leaves humans as the limbs of the machine, with less and less thinking or comprehension required on their part.
It will just fester out of sight and out of mind: audit bots and compliance bots and malpractice bots and insurance bots will arms race creating such a mess it will become unfixable.
With AI I could actually see this being a possibility since it doesn't depend on a huge army of competent employees in a government office.
I doubt 99% of what a nurse does would be meaningfully aided by an LLM and where it would help it'd probably be a crappy band aid around a bigger festering issue anyway (e.g. poorly managed IT, deliberately confusing insurance processes).
Serious solutions to this would look like nationalizing tech companies, mandating shorter work weeks, seizing the assets of the oligarchs and redistributing them.
Not... letting the invisible hand of the market sort it all out.
The industry with an absence of government interference, software, has seen prices drop to zero.
The IT sector in general doesnt deal with comparably vital services and is due to its immaterial nature much more competive. Driving costs to zero/minimum is a logical outcome of healthy free markets, which is a direct contradiction to profit driven enterprise. That is why Peter Tiel hates competition and my profit margins for eg, grocerie stores (healthy localized market) are quite low. The only way to satisfy the fiscal pressure, baked into the system and upheld by propaganda, of "get more or loose", is to cut spending/quality in such a market. And the only way to prevent that are institutions above the free markets slowly failing to deliver.
This "slowly failing to deliver" is imo a key characteristic of late stage capitalism and i can see it everywhere (you too?). BC. in financialized economies, the incentive is elsewhere, than maintaining rural infra, "health care, housing, education".
https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/health/aca-medical-loss-...
How do you know we live in the same place.
Perhaps where I live, efficiencies are to the benefits of everyone?
Yes, but the customer is willing to pay more, so a middleman will pay the workers less and pocket the difference.
Yes, but the parent is saying that the middlemen will still charge the patients the same and pocket the difference. The patients have already shown what they are willing to pay. There is no reason to charge them less, even if your labor costs are now lower.
Theoretically competition will eventually squeeze the middleman, but it's not exactly straightforward to build a hospital on every street corner like you can a restaurant. There is somewhat of a natural monopoly there. Maybe less so for basic clinic care, but where the infrastructure needs are complex...
Yeah, but market itself is a function of labor costs.
In case you haven't noticed, all that our current system is able to do with increased efficiency is cutting staff and/or increasing the percentage of money that gets siphoned up to capital holders.
If my blood pressure crashes because my nurse is caring for 15 patients at once and didn't notice that the AI decided to pause my norepinephrine, I won't consider "the AI did it" to be any acceptable excuse.
In fact, especially in those circumstances, if we take the warnings of X-risk even slightly seriously.
From Google:
"Annual Deaths: Over 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medical errors made by healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses. Ranking: This figure positions medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, following heart disease and cancer."
It is highly possible that in a few years, AI will be a lot safer in the majority of healthcare situations.
AI can do none of this, and cannot be held accountable for mistakes.
I would take a human with a 10% mistake rate but who can be held accountable, over an AI with a 0.1% mistake rate that is totally unaccountable for its mistakes.
You would take those odds? 100x more deaths?
I agree that AI _companies_ should be accountable for the software they produce but I’m not convinced you would go for a 90% chance of survival if you can choose 99.9%.
Imagine having to do paperwork as a nurse after working a 12 hour physical job, overnight, 8pm to 8am.
The idea mistakes happen because the nurse doesn't "care" is utter bullshit.
I think of how if I am really tired I just don't do anything that risky at my job until the next day. A nurse doesn't really have that option and it is all the highest risk there is. Every day, all day. All with a chronic, massive work shortage for dogshit pay.
The most brutal thing I have read about nursing are nurses saying the lucky people are the ones who failed out of nursing school.
To be honest, I'm looking forward to more AI in healthcare if it can increase diagnosis success rates and improve treatment outcomes etc.
The next decade will be painful. We are in for a lot of surprises along the way
"Taking death statistics from a sample of Medicare patients and extrapolating it to all hospitalized patients is like turning apples into oranges"
"Using studies that identify medical errors that were followed by death to declare that these medical errors necessarily caused these deaths is not fair. What these studies do not take into account is how long these patients would have lived had they received optimal medical care."
It will, except it will be snuck in through the back door. It won't be some kind robo-doctor making care decisions, it will come in the form of insurance eligibility steering the approved care plans, which absolutely will be decided by AI. The doctors will remain to act as liability sinks, but functionally they will probably join the ranks of the meat proxies.
https://stateline.org/2024/03/29/vets-fret-as-private-equity...
True.
> ... AI can't be allowed to be a decision maker
Non sequitur.
Part 2 only follows from the Part 1 if you can demonstrate that AI makes more errors, or more severe errors, than humans in the identical situation.
And for those situations, I agree with you.
But there are already many situations where the AI is making fewer errors than humans, and for those situations, it would be unethical to exclude AI (see Part 1).
It will be depending on how much you paid. My bet is that in the near future normal people (like most of us) will be attended by AI in pretty much everywhere: the bank, the hospital, shops, hotels, etc.
You will need to pay extra premium to be attended by a human being. Actually that’s what’s been happening to the ultra rich since a very long time ago (e.g. a millionaire doesn’t book an appointment by using their phones, they ask their assistant to book for them; they don’t go online shopping, they get people do the shopping for them, etc)
I'd say society's, or maybe executive's, viewpoint has shifted on this.
There's a reason it's called a Limited Liability Company. The whole point is to separate the company's liability from the individual that participates in it. For example, corporate financial liabilities of a company that is bankrupt.
You would not sue the nurse that makes a mistake. You would sue the company she works for. And if that company is bankrupt, well, that's it. There are rare instances where this isn't true, but generally it is.
Whether this is ethical or not, it's the system that we already have.
The LLC might be fucked but it is not a flesh-and-blood person. There is no person responsible. Just a legal entity.
So nothing is changed. I think we're in agreement?
("Replace AI with 'company' and you realize that we're living in that world already." I 100% agree with this, though!)
While not quite as direct as automatically stopping vasopressors, using proprietary prediction models touted by vendors to be safe has backfired in a major way before:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/27/epic-sepsis-algorithm-an...
e.g. you will take Uber far more at $3/ride than $10/ride.
Many more people would hire a maid at $25/hour than $100/hour.
Same with all professions
I'm sure they aren't all, but friends who work in the hospital tell tales of woeful inefficiencies and pointless beauracracy. Of course YMMV and this is a public health system.
Now that you mentions labs, he spent the last 10 years of his career (maybe more, I don't remember clearly) working at a food analysis lab and there was a lot of waiting for results there, but it is what it is, microorganisms take their time to grow and no LLM in the world can make them go faster.
You mean the microbes have to double n-times (to get sufficient numbers of microbes) before tests can be run on them.
But maybe the LLMs figure out a way to run those tests on microbes that have only doubled 0.1(n-times).
You could then think of the LLMs as being a more honest version of Elizabeth Holmes.
You could try shortening the time to 6 or 12 hours, but then
1) if something grew then the food was contaminated, but if it didn't, how can you be sure it is good or you just didn't wait enough? You would get a lot of false negatives.
2) the lab followed a normal 8 hours a day schedule, so nobody would be there to analize the results. You would not gain anything.
i looked at very similar data as anthropic (was a bit amusing to look at these side by side) with physical tasks being part of the equation much more prominently (across all jobs).
if you're interested: https://largelabormodel.com/mirror?job=2221
The actual, tangible form this is taking right now is concierge medicine, home health aids, private practice, etc. My wife's (very good) ob-gyn had enough of working in institutionalized medicine where she's paid about what a L4 FANG engineer makes and pretty much has to follow the script that the health-care system dictates, and quit. Now she does perimenopause consultations for FANG execs at $1200/hour.
My uphill neighbors are in their 90s. I think the wife was in VC or something back in the 70s and 80s. There's a steady stream of nurses and home health aids up to their property. Seems like they've got a full care team working out of their home.
Across industry and industry, we see the same pattern. The mass-market product gets cheaper and less labor intensive, at the expense of any human touch. Everybody displaced, if they're any good and wants to stay in the field, moves up-market to do custom professional services for rich people. They pay for it, because if you want people to do good work for you, you have to pay them more than they can get otherwise.
Reducing wealth inequality is not the same thing as making everyone poor. And you know that.
I live in Canada. Under the current government, business investment cratered, 40% of our 1% earners left and our GDP per capita relative to the US dropped by 40%.
Keep in mind that LLMs were basically invented in Canada and we've captured next to none of the economic activity.
Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Andrej Karpathy and Geoffrey Hinton are all Canadian citizens lol...
With the assumption that this is true (I have no idea either way), has it made people more poor or worse off?
You tell me. Median household (+ individuals not in an economic family) income went up $5k from 2015-2024. Given what you've experienced inflation wise in that time period what do you think?
US median household income went up $15k in that time period ($22k CAD).
You built the killbots that prevent anyone from ever reallocating your wealth and holed up in your compound. But will your daughter and granddaughter be able to keep them operational and aligned to their interests?
I'm surprised they expect people to still believe that stuff.
I haven’t forgot capitalist euphoria from 2023 about cutting worker power off at the root. That’s all these AI Cretins want. Well, that and an unnerving enthusiasm for personifying their AI Golems (Anthr. in particular here).
Sorry to poo poo a post about AI company prompting their underlings to prompt out visualizations.
That's only forecasting out to 2030.
The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers: “. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm income wholly inadequate for them.” The proposed solutions were to find “better opportunities for the farm people,” “a more comprehensive national employment policy,” “retraining programs,” “improved general educational facilities,” etc. Both the commission and the writer of the article had obviously taken for granted that the lives and communities of small farmers then still on the farm—and those of the 25 million who had left the farm since 1940—were of less value than “technological advances in agriculture.” There seemed also to be no official doubt that adequate solutions were to be found in government supplied “opportunities,” facilities, and programs. Reading that article, I realized that my values were not only out of fashion, but under powerful attack. I saw that I was a member of a threatened minority. That is what set me off.
Is it just me, or does their choice of identifying "workers" specifically seem a little peculiar? For me, it reads like "We're committed to making segregation beneficial for everyone, including minorities!"
I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start making up for the mess they’ve created.
Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow.
The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks.
You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.
Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves.
Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.
USA forgot how to produce things.
This will not prevent us from doing it.
Most people are quite capable of understanding higher-order ideas without fully grasping the underlying details too.
If the AI transofmration takes too long, we might never overthrow capitalism
It allowed a lot of people around the planet to change things.
And we have not seen what the industry will put out on a hardware level. Optical computing is coming, onchip models too.
AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics.
Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but those KPIs (of course). Service degrades, discourse degrades, everything becomes toxic and addictive and destructive.
I can only imagine what it does to children whose brains are still developing.
I'm not anti AI and I don't know how to quantify the pros and cons but we need to be honest about what they are.
That's good news! The worse students perform, the less competition AI will have in the future and the less effective any resistance will be. The ultimate goal should be to abolish education except for the elite, but we can't get there in one step.
The ideal future we should be shooting for is cross between Idocracy and Elysium: a paradise for tech oligarchy and masses so stupid and dependent that can't possible challenge them.
Outside of delusional grifty startups, the broader corporate world is only using copilot for taking meeting notes and (sort of) entertaining the notion of non-devs writing (and not maintaining) their own experimental janky apps where impact is low.
Outside of all the shit-stirrers on HN and clueless bubble social media, I don't see LLMs making a difference. In fact, the fearmongering is at this point insulting to the intelligence of the people who are supposedly helpless against big bad AI.
Aren’t we overdue for one anyway.
The banks and those who control them all knew where we are headed, so they got a little head start destabilizing democracy.
Once us working class get a grasp of the actual situation, we are going to be so deep in the hole, fighting back is going to be quite difficult when the "asset owners" own and control the majority of the worlds resources, all media, forms of communication, AI, technology infrastructure, mass surveillance. You name it, and they have already made massive efforts to make sure they own it.
1. When the capitalists wage class war: bussiness as usual, some murmuring about widening wealth gap by progressive, diffuse threats to democracy
2. When workers complain about the system: all hands on deck, class war immiment, please think of the children and the stability of society
That was the moment that business/wealth/rich decided to turn their resources towards directly influencing and controlling government. Reagan and his made up “welfare queens” came shortly after and wealth inequality has sharply risen since. Wildly successful coup.
> The higher classes see the unions, strikes, the First of May, and they feel the calamity which is threatening them, and this terror poisons their life. They feel the calamity which is threatening them, and the terror which they experience passes into a feeling of self-defence and hatred. They know that if they weaken for a moment in their struggle with the slaves oppressed by them, they will themselves perish, because the slaves are enraged, and this rage is growing with every day of the oppression. The oppressors cannot stop oppressing, even if they should wish to do so. They know that they themselves will perish, the moment they stop or even weaken in their oppressions. And they do oppress, in spite of their seeming concern for the welfare of the laboring people, for an eight-hour day, for the prohibition on employing children and women, for pensions and rewards. All this is a deception or a provision for eliciting work from the slave; but the slave remains a slave, and the master, who could not live without the slave, is less than ever prepared to free him.
This does not mean they can't keep developing it. But it would mean they do not release them to the general public or the public domain. The US government can continue to use and fund these models that are more powerful and use them in situations they understand and a restricted setting. The pentagon has a larger budget than any VC.
Remove the profit motive on self improving recursive models gained from retail/commercial use!
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
This is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This mesage is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center...
another coworker seems to be early on a similar path but has made some comments about the former coworkers ability that makes me hopeful they dont end up the same way
feels like im talking about old high school friends on a drug path or something. its only anecdotes and i imagine the "perceived damage" is reversible. point is: i think youre onto something about the net effect and were going to have popular definitions for the negative encounters were anecdotally sharing
im a "user" but make Claude interact in an educational format and require sources on assertions. looking back, ive unintentionally cast it as The Librarian from Snow Crash, except if Hiro challenged it frequently. must have been natural after reading Snow Crash a few times. maybe im kidding myself but it feels like i havent lost a step. if im not deluding myself then i could see a world where elementary schools teach responsible llm use of to preserve cognition the same way we had to learn Google boolean search
Catching cheaters is still hard but it will keep honest people more honest.
Back in my day this was the only way!
Well, scantron cards for testing became more common near the end of school.
But we must continue because we’ll lose some sort of ideological Cold War with a country better positioned to win anyway. It’s all in the name of capitalism so the ends justify the needs.
We are only just now seeing the first stages of this, we are at the Facebook in 2008 stage trying to warn people about the societal fluctuations coming but many aren't listening because it is too useful.
However, looking back, each single invention was a net positive for us as a species.
- Asking an LLM is objectively a better learning method than reading books if the LLM is giving correct information (and I know that's a pretty big if). Cheating on homework is a workaround that only exists because graded homework is still a thing. If tests are hard enough and have unlimited retakes, kids will learn that practice is worth it and do it with way more focus than if it was forced.
- Inequality has been increasing for decades. It's an inevitable part of capitalism, when the rate of wealth increase is higher for the rich and well connected (like access to private funding rounds or portfolio managers) you get unlimited concentration. Even without that, when you have money left after basic expenses you can invest more of it than someone living paycheck to paycheck.
- Class wars are great. Hopefully we can avoid physical violence but if we can't then tough luck. Should have paid your taxes.
Wow, I haven't thought deeply since seeing this comment, but on the surface this is actually a really nice idea.
We are in the middle of a major change and it very well could be net negative, but for the most part history just keeps marching and its fine, just different.
Why is the nurse a she?
> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases.
Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.
internet/digitasion for doctors for example.
It doesn't, this is just plain false. Most productivity gains happen by cutting value-add complexity or material quality. See IKEA chairs versus Shaker ones, or lycra clothes versus silk.
> internet/digitasion for doctors for example.
I see the misconception. The internet was not created to serve productivity, it was a communication medium. That it can be used to increase productivity is orthogonal to its existence or purpose, and whether it has been used to actually increase quality of something is entirely dependent of the specifics of what you're discussing. For instance, in gaming right now there's a huge discussion going on about whether digital distribution has actually trapped us with crappier goods which we can't resell or transfer.
Lower staffing levels per unit of care performed makes medical care cheaper for patients. If the goal of a healthcare system is to make healthcare more accessible (rather than be a jobs program), that's a success.
The thing is, your customers are paying customers because, drum roll, some one pays them to do something.
And of course the only argument against this is "uhh maybe ubi" and that's rich that we will just come up with a nice tidy sum for everyone that will cover all their food, healthcare, housing, wants and needs, while we can't create programs to cover any one of those things today. Can't wait to see the GOP proposal.
same..
> nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more
.. and work with more patients in the same shift.
> She can spend more time talking with patients
.. we mean the talking will be through the "ClaudeMedTalker Nurse" billed per patient, per second (depending upon tokens used and if any translation need, depending upon patient nationality and accents)
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/09/04/t...
They'll fire the janitor and the secretary and make the nurses do that stuff too because "muh regulatory required staffing levels".