Does this mean they’ll invest the money in paying workers? No… they’re just have to double down.
hello, welcome to taco bell, i am your new ai order specialist. would you like to try a combo of the new dorito blast mtw dew crunchwrap?
spoken at a rate of 5 words a minute to every single person in the drive thru. the old people have no idea how to order with a computer using key words.
Once again we see the Parasite Class playing unethically with the labour/wealth they have stolen from their employees.
Imagine what the economy would look like if they spent 30 billion on wages.
This is where the problem of the supply/demand curve comes in. One of the truths of the 1980s Soviet Union’s infamous breadlines wasn’t that people were poor and had no money, or that basic goods (like bread) were too expensive — in a Communist system most people had plenty of money, and the price of goods was fixed by the government to be affordable — the real problem was one of production. There simply weren’t enough goods to go around.
The entire basic premise of inflation is that we as a society produce X amount of goods, but people need X+Y amount of goods. Ideally production increases to meet demand — but when it doesn’t (or can’t fast enough) the other lever is that prices rise so that demand decreases, such that production once again closely approximates demand.
This is why just giving everyone struggling right now more money isn’t really a solution. We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Of course, it’s only profitable to increase production if the cost of basic inputs can be decreased — if you know there is a big untapped market for bread out there and you can undercut the competition, cheaper flour and automation helps quite a bit. But if flour is so expensive that you can’t undercut the established guys, then fighting them for a small slice of the market just doesn’t make sense.
Personally, I’m all for something like UBI — but it’s only really going to work if we as a society also increase production on basic needs (housing, food, clothing, telecommunications, transit, etc.) so they can be and remain at affordable prices. Otherwise just having more money in circulation won’t help anything — if anything it will just be purely inflationary.
We could take the assets of the 100 richest people in the world and redistribute it evenly amongst people who are struggling — and all that would happen is that there wouldn’t be enough production to meet the new spending ability, so so prices would go up. Those who control the production would simply get all their money back again, and we’d be back to where we started.
Then we should do that over and over again.
There are more empty homes than homeless in the US. I’ve seen literal tons of food and clothing go right to the dump to protect profit margins.
Do you have any sources to back up the claim that we need to make more shit?
This is not true. We have enough production. Wtf are people throwing away half their plates at restaurants? Why does one rich guy live in a mansion? The super rich consume more than people realize. You are wrong on so many levels that I do not know where to start. You sound like a bot billionaire shill.
We have enough production in some areas — but not in others. Some goods are currently overly expensive because the inputs are expensive — mostly because we’re not producing enough. In many cases that’s due to insufficient competition. And there are some significant entrenched interests trying to keep things that way (lower production == lower competition == higher prices).
And FWIW, the US’s current “tariff everything and everybody” approach is going to make this much, much, much worse.
I am certainly not the friend of billionaires. I’m perfectly fine with a wealth tax to fund public works and services. All I’m against is overly simplistic solutions which just exacerbate existing problems.
You sound like a dad after reading the morning press.
You are repeating indoctrinated capitalist think patterns. In reality the market most often does not react like that.
The example as given by you is how you basically teach the concept of market balance to middle schoolers. However, it’s a hypotetical lab analogy. It’s over simplified for lay people. Comparable to the famous “ignore air resistance” in physics.
Markets are at times efficient, at other times inefficient. They may even be both concurrently.
First, economists do not believe that the market solves all problems. Indeed, many economists make a living out of analyzing “market failures” such as pollution in which laissez faire policy leads not to social efficiency, but to inefficiency.
Like our colleagues in the other social and natural sciences, academic economists focus their greatest energies on communicating to their peers within their own discipline. Greater effort can certainly be given by economists to improving communication across disciplinary boundaries
In the real world, it is not possible for markets to be perfect due to inefficient producers, externalities, environmental concerns, and lack of public goods.
If we’re just talking about the USA, then the ~200 million working people would get $150 each.
We could always just confiscate all fortunes over 900 million dollars.
The 5 richest billionaires have a combined $1.154 trillion, which divided by $340 million gives us $3,394 per American citizen. That’s literally just the top 5. According to Forbes there were 813 billionaires in 2024. Sounds pretty damned substantial to me. We’re talking life-altering amounts of money for every American without even glancing in the direction of mere hundred-millionaires. And all the billionaires could still be absurdly wealthy.
Does the 30 billion also account for allocated resources (such as the incredibly demanding amount of electricity required to run a decent AI for millions if not billions of future doctors and engineers to use to pass exams)?
Does it account for the future losses of creativity & individuality in this cesspool of laziness & greed?
I’ll take no shit for $500, Alex.
With how much got wasted on AI, that $500 might not be there anymore. Would you take $5?
They’ll happily burn mountains of profits on that stuff, but not on decent wages or health insurance.
Some of them won’t even pay to replace broken office chairs for the employees they forced to RTO.
Wages or health insurance are a very known cost, with a known return. At some point the curve flattens and the return gets less and less for the money you put in. That means there is a sweet spot, but most companies don’t even want to invest that much to get to that point.
AI however, is the next new thing. It’s gonna be big, huge! There’s no telling how much profit there is to be made!
Because nobody has calculated any profits yet. Services seem to run at a loss so far.
However, everybody and their grandmother is into it, so lots of companies feel the pressure to do something with it. They fear they will no longer be relevant if they don’t.
And since nobody knows how much money there is to be made, every company is betting that it will be a lot. Where wages and insurance are a known cost/investment with a known return, AI is not, but companies are betting the return will be much bigger.
I’m curious how it will go. Either the bubble bursts or companies slowly start to realise what is happening and shift their focus to the next thing. In the latter case, we may eventually see some AI develop that is useful.
It’s a game to them that doesn’t take into consideration any human element.
It’s like the sociopathic villains in Trading Places betting a dollar on whether or not Valentine would succeed. They don’t really give a shit. It’s all for the game that might result in throwing more money on their pile.
But it’s okay, because MY company is AHEAD OF THE CURVE on those 95% losses
How bad to you think this collapse gonna be? We gonna see a big name collapse into dust or we gonna see something akin to the Great Depression?
We’ll see the beginning of a crash in about a year and the crash probably won’t end for 7-10 years.
We’re looking at a full scale shift in the way large scale orgs are running their businesses; and it’s a shift a lot of them will need to pivot from once they realize it’s not working.
The AI bubble is going to be like the dot com bubble I think, but with the world being so heavily financialized it might spiral into something like 2008 or worse…
It won’t be like the dot com bubble. The AI bubble is far more corporate investment with far fewer entities having money thrown at them.
That’s true yeah, there is a lot less retail investment in those companies.
What is similar to the dot com bubble though is many “smaller” companies (i.e. not Google or Meta) are buying into AI as an investment into infrastructure for their company, just like was happening with useless websites during the dot com bubble.
Yeah, most individuals don’t have money to invest in techbros’ latest boondoggle.
Which means we’ll be paying for their bailouts instead.
I’ve started using AI on my CTOs request. ChaptGPT business licence. My experience so far: it gives me working results really quick, but the devil lies in the details. It takes so much time fine tuning, debugging and refactoring, that I’m not really faster. The code works, but I would have never implemented it that way, if I had done it myself.
Looking forward for the hype dying, so I can pick up real software engineering again.
There are still employers bitching about how no one wants to work anymore. I doubt any lessons will be learned here.
it makes sense to someone like me who is not a dev but works with coding at times, I don’t get the experience to be quick with it.
- Your code will be significantly more insecure. Expect anything exposed to world+dog to be hacked far quicker than your own work.
- You will code even slower than if you just did the work yourself.
- You will fail to grow as a coder, and will even see your existing skills erode.
Yea
Vibe coding is for us armatures, who want the occasional hello world
I use it for programing home assistant, since I just can’t get my head around the YAML.
5% is Nvidia.
There are not enough 💯 emoji in the world for this post.
“Ruh-roh, Raggy!”
It’s okay. All the people that you laid off to replace with AI are only going to charge 3x their previous rate to fix your arrogant fuck up so it shouldn’t be too bad!
I charge them more than I would if I was just developing for them from scratch. I USED to actually build things, but now I’m making more money doing code reviews and telling them where they fucked up with the AI and then myself and my now small team fix it.
AI and Vibe coders have made me great money to the point where I’ve now hired 2 other developers who were unemployed for a long time due to being laid off from companies leveraging AI slop.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for the bubble to burst (and it will VERY soon, if it hasn’t already) and I know that after it does I can retire and hope that the two people I’ve brought on will quickly find better employment.
Computer science degrees being the most unemployed degree right now leads me to believe this will actually suppress wages for some time
That was always one of the main goals. They’d rather light a mountain of cash on fire than give anyone a thriving wage
As expected. Wait until they have to pay copyright royalties for the content they stole to train.
I hardly post on any social media besides here and I still feel violated.
Thank god they have their metaverse investments to fall back on. And their NFTs. And their crypto. What do you mean the tech industry has been nothing but scams for a decade?
Tech CEOs really should be replaced with AI, since they all behave like the seagulls from Finding Nemo and just follow the trends set out by whatever bs Elon starts
If I pinged my CEO over Slack and got back “You’re absolutely right! Let me try that again” I might actually die from crying with joy.
If only there was some group of people with detailed knowledge of the company, who would be informed enough to steer its direction wisely. /s
Suppose many of the CEOs are just milking general venture capital. And those CEOs know that it’s a bubble and it’ll burst, but have a good enough way to predict when it will, thus leaving with profit. I mean, anyway, CEOs are usually not reliant upon company’s performance, so no need even to know.
Also suppose that some very good source of free\cheap computation is used for the initial hype - like, a conspiracy theory, a backdoor in most popular TCP/IP realizations making all of the Internet’s major routers work as a VM for some limited bytecode for someone who knows about that backdoor and controls two machines, talking to each other via the Internet and directly.
Then the blockchain bubble and the AI bubble would be similar in relying upon such computation (convenient for something slow in latency but endlessly parallel), and those inflating the bubbles and knowing of such a backdoor wouldn’t risk anything, and would clear the field of plenty of competition with each iteration, making fortunes via hedge funds. They would spend very little for the initial stage of mining the initial party of bitcoins (what if Satoshi were actually Bill Joy or someone like that, who could have put such a backdoor, in theory), and training the initial stages of superficially impressive LLMs.
And then all this perpetual process of bubble after bubble makes some group of people (narrow enough, if they can keep the secret constituting my conspiracy theory) richer and richer quick enough on the planetary scale to gradually own bigger and bigger percent of the world economy, indirectly, of course, while regularly cleaning the field of clueless normies.
Just a conspiracy theory, don’t treat it too seriously. But if, suppose, this were true, it would be both cartoonishly evil and cinematographically epic.
Honestly I think another part is that AI is actually pretty fascinating (or at least easy to make seem fascinating to investors lol) so when company A makes a flashy statement to investors involving AI, company B’s investors ask why company B isn’t utilizing this amazing new technology. This plays into that aspect of not wanting to get left behind.
Yes, people grew with subconscious feeling that cautionary tales of the old science fiction are the way to real power. A bit similar to ex-Soviet people being subconsciously attracted to German Nazi symbolism.
Evil is usually shown as strong, and strength is what we need IRL, to make a successful business, to fix a decaying nation, to give a depressed society something to be enthusiastic about.
They think there should be some future, looking, eh, futuristic.
The most futuristic things are those that look and function in a practical way and change people’s lives for the better. We’ve had the brilliance and entertainment of 90s and early 00s computing, then it became worse. So they have to promise something.
BTW, in architecture brutalism is coming back into fashion (in discussions and not in the real construction), perhaps we will see a similar movement for computing at some point - for simplification and egalitarianism.
I hope every CEO and executive dumb enough to invest in AI looses their job with no golden parachute. AI is a grand example of how capitalism is ran by a select few unaccountable people who are not mastermind geniuses but utter dumbfucks.
