asdr83

I was just reading Anthropic's post about the way being an AI-maximalist company is affecting the workplace.

Along with that, I was recently reading The Economist talking about the way an AI boom might affect national finances: since most countries get most of their taxes from income tax, if lots of people get thrown out of work by AI, that's going to hit the tax take hard.

All of which is driving home that the standard AI-booster take on the economic effects of AI could be Just Plain Wrong.

They keep saying that AI will cause an endlessly booming economy, but that ignores the elephant in the room: the real economy depends on real people spending real money, y'know, buying stuff.

If those real people no longer have real jobs, they're not going to be buying so much.

And yes, there's the usual argument that society always adjusts to tech disruptions: in the long run, it leads to new, better jobs. But even taking that at face value, it usually ignores the fact that those changes take years, sometimes generations, to work their way through -- there's often a lot of pain along the way.

All of which is made worse by the omnipresent point that AI is wrecking the training process in many fields. The Anthropic article at the top explicitly calls out that yeah, they're hiring ever-fewer junior people, because you often need senior-level skills to use this stuff effectively. So there's a nasty risk of a seriously Lost Generation.

Of course, the AI Zillionaires make nice fluffy noises that "oh, money won't matter any more" and universal basic income and such. Suuuuure that'll work. All it takes is for the arch-capitalist class to surrender a very large fraction of their income, and we know how fond they are of doing that.

Put it all together, and this doesn't smell like a massive ongoing economic expansion. Quite the contrary: it sounds like the recipe for a Depression of truly epic scope.

Am I sure of this? Of course not: anyone who is sure about anything when it comes to our current borderline-Singularity is either overconfident or lying. I still think the likeliest outcome is that the AI Bubble pops and all of this slows down quite a bit.

But this scenario seems plausible enough to be concerning, and IMO much more plausible than the "free money for everyone!" nonsense being peddled by the hypesters.

Interesting times...

Interesting little article from Anthropic, talking about how work works inside the company.

I know that some folks will dismiss this as AI marketing fluff; if so, move along. But I found it an interesting and decently honest read.

It does enthuse about rising productivity per person, but mostly talks about how much work changes in an AI-maximalist organization, not all for the better.

It mentions several times what we’ve all expected: they’re finding less use for junior employees. They admit that’s a problem, and have no solution.

They also observe (as I expected) that jobs start focusing on babysitting all those agents: even the ICs become “managers”, just not for people. And everyone starts automating that in self-defense.

It’s not an entirely happy vision, and that’s why it’s interesting. If you want fodder for dystopian science fiction, it’s a good place to start…

Fascinating post from Anthropic.

tl;dr — since they’re seriously #AI-maximalist over there, with nigh-infinite quotas, they’ve gotten to the point where they’re trying to juggle on the order of 30 thousand code changes per day.

Turns out that git turned into an enormous bottleneck for that, so they gave up and wrote a new agent-focused source control system, Scion; this gives a brief overview of the architecture.

It’s explicitly only relevant at that kind of scale, but it’s an interesting read.

But I’m horribly amused at the way the article makes it sound like server-centric source control is a radical innovation, having been through several of those before git was invented…