Thread

1. bunderbunder · 1790711630 · focus · HN ↗

   They talk a bit about where the AI companies are supposed to get their revenue from. I’d like to see these analyses go a step further and talk about how those AI customers are supposed to come up with that money as well.

   For example, the article suggests $1T from enterprise productivity tooling. A quick Google suggests the global enterprise productivity tooling market is only worth about $0.1T right now.

   Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?

   1. nicce · 1790712741 · focus · HN ↗

      > Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?

      If they keep replacing employees with AI, that is indeed the direction.

      1. raesene9 · 1790713046 · focus · HN ↗

         But if all those peolple are unemployed will they still be able to buy all the products the corporations sell…..

         1. ben_w · 1790713409 · focus · HN ↗

            The historical precedent is those people get other jobs, and/or everyone else in the economy gets richer faster than they get poorer.

            If this does or doesn't happen with AI kinda depends how fast it makes multiple different sections of the population unemployed, rather than just one group like "software developer" or "vehicle driver".

            1. TheOtherHobbes · 1790714248 · focus · HN ↗

               That's very much not what happened in the Industrial Revolution. Hand weavers were relatively well-paid, and the new factories were more likely to employ the urban poor - including kids - than to give jobs to people who used to be hand weavers.

               It took maybe a century and a half for the modern consumer economy to appear. And it didn't happen until money started being shared into the wider economy for political reasons, not technological ones.

               Meanwhile the enclosure of common land was catastrophic for rural populations. Sources of food and pasture disappeared as the Big Houses took them over and turned them into huge single family estates.

               1. ben_w · 1790751822 · focus · HN ↗

                  Your claims are mostly orthogonal to mine; I'm not saying "this was fun for all involved" or "the specific people who were laid off got better jobs" or anything like that, though with the benefit of hindsight I can see how:

                  > those people get other jobs, and/or everyone else in the economy gets richer faster than they get poorer.

                  Could be read the way you seem to have read it. With this quotation "other jobs" was "a job" rather than "a good job", while "everyone else" was intended to refer to the aggregate economy, not to all other individuals within it personally and individually benefitting. And the "and/or" because this isn't just about the initial phase of the industrial revolution but all technological job displacement that has continued to this day.

                  Not even saying it was fast or error-free; another comment I made around the same time used a colourful metaphor to reference various economic depressions that keep on happening.

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