In what sense is AI like paying for ads? In one case you legitimately lose to the competition if you stop (prisoner's dilemma). In other case, whether and how much you lose depends almost entirely on how much it actually impacts your productivity in practice (or not).

If you're referring to the public perception benefits (supposing those even exist, which isn't clear to me), then it seems easy to make a lot of noise via PR while doing the minimal amount internally to explore the use case and not actually push it as hard as you say.

▲

pianopatrick 8 hours ago | parent [-]

If we assume everyone has access to the same AI tools and those tools do help improve output a lot then you get the same prisoner's dilemma as ads.

The people using the AI tools to improve their output will set higher consumer expectations for their product or service. If you do not also use AI, you will not be able to keep up, and so you will lose business over time.

So you have to pay for AI just to keep up with the other people who pay for AI.

But then if everyone is paying for and using AI to improve their product or service, no one can steal market share from each other. So you are all now paying a lot and AI is doing a lot and the buyers are getting better results, but that does not necessarily lead to better financial results in terms of market share, revenue, costs or profits for the business that is now using AI

	▲	eslaught 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If AI works the way you suggest then we've literally been here before and we know exactly how this goes. When tractors came along, farmers became dramatically more productive. Were the farmers who did things the old way "forced" to buy tractors in order to stay afloat? Over time, sure. But this was in no way zero-sum. More products made it to market (literally), more of the workforce was able to shift away from manual labor, and society became much better off overall. The people who moved to cities made dramatically more money, and the farmers who remained made more money too. Edit: this is literally on the front page right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48775979 This is not a prisoner's dilemma in any meaningful sense, unless you just like being inefficient and wasting a bunch of human effort. (I'm not convinced yet whether AI actually works this way or not. I'm just saying, if it works this way, the economic theory is well-developed and we can predict fairly accurately how it's going to play out.)