Before AI, my worldview was that our monetary system was concentrating wealth in a negative-sum game; essentially; every so often, taking wealth from 100 people, destroying half the underlying value and giving the remaining value with a 2x nominal markup to 1 rich person who is already spending more than they can physically spend and so they won't realize that the 2x amount of wealth they got on paper only buys them a quarter of the stuff compared to the previous decade (for example). They won't know how frothy their wealth is until they start selling large quantities of their stocks. It's just buying nominal 'growth' at the cost of risk/fragility/frothiness.

In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.

Now I think AI will deliver real efficiency gains but also, it provides a convenient narrative to explain why people might be losing jobs in a way which distracts from much bigger systemic issues which existed prior to AI.

My negative-sum economy example with 'booming GDP' is possible without AI even as net economic value is being destroyed. So basically we won't be able to tell if people are losing jobs to AI or to systematic wealth transfer mechanisms which predate AI.

I suppose if we see people losing jobs permanently and workers in other sectors aren't seeing wage increases with more openings, that may be the most reliable indicator we have that the system is losing real wealth faster than AI productivity can offset it.

The bad news is that we won't see any problem in the numbers; the problem would show up as polarization and radicalization of the masses... Which is more qualitative . Since almost everyone is being radicalized concurrently as everyone is affected by the same pressures (both from monetary system and AI automation). The question is not "how many people became radicalized this quarter?" but "how much more radicalized is everyone feeling this quarter?"

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zahlman 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.

Putting aside the numbers, how does your quality of life compare to decades ago?

	▲	teamonkey 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. It’s difficult to measure objectively, due to being physically younger and in an earlier stage of my career and so worser-paid, but adjusting for that, I think quality of life 20 years ago was pretty much the same as now, slightly better in some regards, slightly worse in others. Of course there are fun new gadgets and gizmos and TV on demand and social media and such, but honestly they’re just toys, and in some cases have made my quality of life worse. The biggest tangible improvement I can think of is one particular medical advancement, which has allowed a family member to survive a disease when they absolutely would not have 20 years ago. That’s incredible. But otherwise the quality of life change over the last 20 years is minimal by most important metrics I can think of. Which makes one wonder what the dogged pursuit of GDP growth has achieved for the last decade or two.
	▲	jongjong an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I appreciate the question. It kept getting slightly worse every year since I joined the workforce. My salary is 2x when I started 14 years ago but it buys less than half what it could back then. Most of it goes into rent. It's almost impossible to save. I was never given a salary increase even with excellent reviews of my work as a software developer. I even built a popular open source project with 6k stars on GitHub which was a lot back then but it didn't yield any good opportunities. I only got increases by changing companies which I did at least 10 times over the last 14 years (a lot of contract jobs). I also changed countries several times. I only worked for one company which grew pretty well and got some shares as early employee but they're not liquid currently and maybe worth $150k USD tops but who knows where it will end up with AI disruption. Anyway I can't cash out. I work non-stop, still working side projects nights and weekends. Feels like there are no opportunities at all and all media channels are full of bots so I can't promote my product. When I tried social media ads years ago, it felt like it was only shown to bots so I've been skeptical of this approach since (especially now with LLMs around). Also, the internet is full of fake products which claim to have similar features as my product but they don't actually deliver so my target customer grew distrusting of all small projects like mine, making it impossible to gain trust. So yeah my work life sucks. I struggle to save. Can rarely go on holidays. Can't even take leave without raising eyebrows at work. Day job is more demanding, less fulfilling. I don't have much personal life because I work weekends. If I started talking about my career in detail, it just gets awful and Kafkaesque. So it's pretty bad. I regret having hustled so hard. While others were out partying, I was working and improving myself through open source, now my open source work was scraped by AI and sold for a profit while I get zero opportunities from it and copyright laws which I based much of my career strategy around are being dismantled. Also, there is another terrible thing that happened to me in my personal life but it's just bad luck. So I can't blame that on "the system." I appreciate improvements to medicine like another commenter also said but that's essentially the only improvement.