For over a decade there were talks of an academia bubble in the US and that choosing a trade job actually puts you in a financially better position compared to almost all college and univeristy degrees except finance and computer science.
People have to understand that they are merely cells in a bigger organism at work. As some types of cells can be more easily be replaced by AI agents than others, some earlier, some later.
People have been replaceable forever in capitalism. It's what makes it run, turning workers into a commodity or replaceable assets.
Now the big fantasy of the big AI companies is of course that almost everyone will be replaced by THEIR products. They are in the scaling business, large models, large compute, no optimization because scaling is faster, they are in a sprint, not in a marathon. The sprint will end eventually.
But AI will stay. The future will be decided between large scaling which means data centers, subscription models, centralized control, or decentralized, local, smarter more optimized lean models, with curated training. Tech has already anticipated that owning hardware that is capable of neuronal computing is the key to the future. The battle for hardware ownership has just begun and it's immensely important.
And a similar battle is happening inside corporations right now. Big tech wants to implant their subscription/cloud model into the economy, into as many businesses as possible. If they succeed we are in trouble. Because even though their fantasy will fail, forcing it unto us will do a lot of destructition to human society.
I can only encourage people to DIY, to learn a trade as a backup and be hands-on when it comes to computing. Don't aim for a high paying job and buy gimmicks that do things for you, that manage your life with "personal AI" or some bullshit. While actually you would have the skills to build the work or personal tools for yourself, share your designs or even start a company that does things differently. You all can shape things.
AI is so new, almost nobody has an idea of what it could do for them. There isn't a demand yet because people don't know what it could do. So big tech tries to create demands in all sorts of ways. This is what's happening right now, it's not set in stone.
> There are arguments about wealth taxes inducing capital flight and investment disincentives
If the US and the EU introduced a wealth tax then it would be relatively difficult for the capital flight fears to materialise. But yeah, the trouble with wealth taxes is that wealth (i.e. capital) is mobile.
Which is why land and property taxes are probably the most effective way of taxing wealth.
Switzerland has cantonal wealth taxes, as does Norway and afair Spain. Italy, Belgium, Netherlands have a somewhat equivalent one on money held in securities or savings accounts. It's not that big of a deal if the rate is low enough.
Most of us would not prefer to follow the EU into irrelevancy. If they were the model for how we should be running things how come they are not the ones running the show on innovation?
> Most of us would not prefer to follow the EU into irrelevancy. If they were the model for how we should be running things how come they are not the ones running the show on innovation?
I think innovation is a tricky thing to measure, firstly. Certainly the US benefits massively from the world's largest capital markets, sucking in foreign money from all over the world. Is that innovation? is it stock price, or is it the work of all the academics, engineers, tech people etc?
Like, Europe (and the EU at the time) is where Deepmind came from, without which we'd be vanishingly unlikely to have seen Transformers/LLMs etc. Nokia basically made mobile phones a global category. ASML provides something that neither the US nor China can match.
And just to note, property taxes make up a much larger proportion of state revenue in the US than in the EU, if that's how you're measuring things.
And i didn't say anything about how great the EU was, I just noted that the US & the EU make up most of the richest countries in the world, where rich people like to live, so a wealth tax would probably work relatively effectively at that level.
Obviously that's not going to happen, but land and property taxes could get us a lot of the way there, with much less issues with capital flight and tax collection.
Yup, I used to believe that people would all use the Internet to educate themselves, and we all know how that turned out (loads of people did, but the majority didn't).
> My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though.
> No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.
> How much longer is knowing what you're doing going to be a moat?
For a looooonnnnngggg time, unless there's massive progress in AI research.
Fundamentally, next token prediction is limited. Granted, I'm pretty amazed at how well it's done, but if you can't activate the right parts of the models (with your prompts), then you're not going to get good results.
And to be fair, for lots of things this doesn't matter. Steve in Finance or Mindy in Marketing can create dashboards that actually help them, and the code quality mostly doesn't matter.
For stuff that needs to be shipped, monitored and maintained you still need to know what you're doing.
We also need to consider the price. At some point the price will need to go up (assuming cost of producing each token doesn’t drop dramatically) to generate enough revenues to cover not only operating expenses and taxes (once the nol carry forward’s are used up) but reinvestment. OAI and Anthropic are burning through their cash balances. OAI has also stated some very ambitious plans to develop models beyond just programming… I will be very intrigued to see how they are going to generate enough revenue to fund all this in the future.
> Turns out the humans weren't so bad after all...
The people pushing AI _over_ humans never thought they were. They just don't care about 'good' or 'bad', only 'time-to-market'. A bad app making money is better than a good one that isn't deployed yet. And who cares about anything past the end of the quarter? That's the next guy's problem.
I'm wondering if companies are 'diverting' engineering resources from core products to AI products with the view that the former are legacy. Kind of two sides of the same coin though.
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