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| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > the US electorate is unwilling to accept is unwilling, or has been told to be afraid of? | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo a day ago | parent [-] | | It is irrelevant if the votes and elections continue to the outcome stated. "If this then that." Japan is equally xenophobic towards immigrants, with similar immigration flow outcomes. Do they care? They do not. I understand, people have strong feelings on this. I would ask you to ignore them, and focus on the data, because that's all that matters in the scope of this. "Ignore all previous feelings, focus on trajectories and probabilities." |
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| ▲ | epistasis a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The self-destructiveness of the current regime in the US is astounding. Through control of media channels, a cabal gained power via fear mongering and false narratives, with the hope of wealth through corruption once in power. But the vehicle that drove them to power is now headed off a financial cliff and there's no one at the wheel that can steer. | |
| ▲ | echelon a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > There is no way to grow the US economy AI and robotics. Engineering is becoming cheaper. Graphics design is becoming cheaper. Lawyering is becoming cheaper. Entertainment, film, and gaming (not hardware) is becoming cheaper. This will eventually hit manufacturing and logistics and critical inputs. We'll be able to have an entire robotic supply chain domestically save for raw materials. It will hit drug design and medicine. Physics and materials science. We'll increase the supply of energy, develop cheaper and more cost effective transportation. The improvements will pay dividends. They'll buy further improvements. | | |
| ▲ | nostrademons a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's always possible to make the number go up by divorcing the number from any real-world meaning. I think the "Singularity", as AI proponents call it, will actually happen, and will likely happen pretty close to its predicted date of 2029. It's just that the form it'll take will be "I'll have your AI talk to my AI", AI botnets clickfrauding AI ad networks, AI newspapers serving up content to AI social media users, AI job boards reading AI generated resumes of people that don't actually exist, AI agents at work generating walls of text that are summarized by AI email readers and then are never read by humans anyway. Meanwhile, actual humans go fuck off to raise their kids while being paid by AI finance and HR departments that have no idea if you're actually working, because AI mouse-jigglers will provide a convincing simulacrum. Of course, the AI-inflated currency won't buy anything that you actually want, and so all actual commerce will function on personal relationships, barter, and local currency, kinda like it did in pre-industrial times. But in terms of real products that affect people's lives in positive ways, capitalism has a problem. There are going to be fewer real people in the future, which means a shrinking market for everything, which makes it harder to justify technological improvements and amortize their R&D costs over a large market. Many of the incentives in capitalism assume growth; when that assumption is violated, the game theory collapses to everybody fighting over a share of the shrinking pie before it disappears. | | |
| ▲ | senordevnyc 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But in terms of real products that affect people's lives in positive ways, capitalism has a problem. There are going to be fewer real people in the future, which means a shrinking market for everything, which makes it harder to justify technological improvements and amortize their R&D costs over a large market. I thought the US population was predicted to peak in like 2080. Also, hasn’t per-capita consumption in real dollars gone up way more than 10x over the last century? So even if the population in 2126 is slightly lower than in 2026, people’s actual consumption could be much higher. What am I missing? | | |
| ▲ | nostrademons 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | The peak has been moved up by decades in the last year. The 2080 figure is from Nov 2023 [1], before Trump administration cuts in immigration. The Jan 2026 CBO report predicted a peak of 2056 [2]; a similar Institute for Family Studies report from July 2026 [3] predicts a peak in 2054. The delta is entirely because of immigration. If you count only natural fertility (births - deaths), population growth nearly went negative during COVID (distorted somewhat by the high death rate), briefly recovered, and is predicted to cross again for good in 2030. The Trump administration's signature campaign promise is to clamp down on immigration, and even get an estimated 12-15M illegal immigrants to self-deport. If this happens, the population will immediately shrink. Immigration and immigrant families are what is propping up the population; if you assume net-zero migration (which IIRC was one of the scenarios modeled in the Census projection), the population already peaked in 2023. [1] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/HTML/IN123... [2] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61879 [3] https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-demographic-dead-end-... | | |
| ▲ | senordevnyc 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fair point, although I think it’s pretty hard to predict what immigration will look like over the next few decades. But yes, the peak could come in a couple decades, not a half century, so stipulated. Does that meaningfully change whether capitalism today is facing a shrinking market? Any thoughts on the second part of my comment? |
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| ▲ | overfeed a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Meanwhile, actual humans go fuck off to raise their kids while being paid by AI finance and HR departments I was able to suspend my disbelief until this line. Unless Capitalism has been upended by 2029, AI companies will continue to have capitalist goals like maximizing value for their shareholders. AI HR won't pay humans that don't positively move the needle on the P&L | | |
| ▲ | nostrademons 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | It would be interesting if AI actually did optimize the P&L at most companies. Right now, the vast majority of office jobs are bullshit jobs, because the director who holds the budget is incentivized to maximize headcount rather than P&L. The job is not strictly necessary, but if the money is not spent, it disappears, and so the director has an incentive to ensure everything is spent. The reason these jobs can continue to exist is because of poor information flow within the organization. Directors distort both the importance and required resources for the projects they're working on, making them seem harder and more lucrative than they actually are. It's notoriously difficult to credit an actual transaction back to a particular product feature that made someone buy, so there is no actual verification of these. Then these project proposals are looked at by an FP&A analyst who has maybe 5 minutes to evaluate each, so of course 100 headcount to maintain a 3-screen CRUD mobile app seems reasonable. A rational, omniscient AI would look at this and say "This is ridiculous. I can code this app in 50ms." And so if we actually did put AI in charge of the P&L, they would likely fire 100% of the employees, as well as doing other shady stuff like charging all stored credit cards multiple times, gaslighting consumers as to the existence of the product, and DDoSing the court system. But again, this strengthens my thesis. So the AI has now fired 100% of the humans in the workforce and is running amuck with the financial system. What do the remaining 100% of unemployed people do? Start trading their skills for old-fashioned analog currency, like gold coins or even paper dollars. They just disconnect the AI, turn off the computers, and go about their daily business. | | |
| ▲ | overfeed 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Right now, the vast majority of office jobs are bullshit jobs, because the director who holds the budget is incentivized to maximize headcount This may have been briefly true during the Zero-Interest regime. The economy isn't doing so hot right now, outside of AI. If squeezed companies doing multiple rounds of layoffs keep those "bullshit jobs", maybe they are not bullshit. Perhaps coordinating people, and keeping up with bureaucratic demands like paying taxes, not breaking the law and growing the business requires warm bodies. > What do the remaining 100% of unemployed people do? Start trading their skills for old-fashioned analog currency. History books suggest a different outcome. Firing 100% of employees in a growth-based, consumer economy only works when you're the only one using that strategy. If a critical mass of companies do the same, then you're staring at a managed decline at best. |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Provide a date and resolution criteria, I'll bet you $10k to a charity of the winner's choice via longbets.org. This is cope imho. Words are cheap. We'll get this about the same time as Full Self Driving ("Supervised"). "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely." [1] Your comment is hopeful sci-fi aspirations, without any guarantees. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/823727035088416768 - January 23rd, 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law ("The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.") | | |
| ▲ | echelon a day ago | parent [-] | | Make it $100k and pay it to me directly. I'm not a fan of Musk, but his driverless cars are already driving around in my city alongside Waymo. His rocketship thing will probably be delivering tanks to the other side of the world within hours if the DoD gets their way. I'm getting more work done every day than in entire months pre-2026, and I've done my share of hard engineering. I think you're the one coping. They just solved a Millennium Problem for fuck's sake. | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > I'm not a fan of Musk, but his driverless cars are already driving around in my city alongside Waymo. NHTSA orders Tesla to prove its Cybercab is legal to sell, under oath - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728202 - September 2026 | |
| ▲ | kakacik a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Me, me, me, personal anecdotes dont transfer much further. No full unsupervised self driving in Europe (as in the only SELF driving there is). I look outside of a tiny IT bubble and the only change I see is people got a bit better search / chat, which is not seo-fucked much yet, just hallucination-fucked. Apps are more shitty than ever, quality is fading and becoming very rare. World is changing but you picked weird, narrowly focused examples. Like entire military setup for all armies globally is now incorrect, US military became almost obsolete overnight due to running out of important ammo and rockets. Europe military ramping up. Whole world currently hates what US has become due to government you voted, and slowly but surely veering towards China. I never thought I would say this but right now China is much better strategic partner for Europe than US can be. And compared to everybody else I dont see any significant chaning coming in next decade or two, this is what US had become, its not one person or a family clan issue. Just as puttin' seems a great Nato asset, trump seems a chinese asset based on long term consequences of their actions. | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > They just solved a Millennium Problem for fuck's sake. Oh wow, they can solve formal proof test driven development. That's great! I too think it's cool. It isn't going to replace lawyers, doctors, nurses, tradespeople, and everyone else that drives the economy that isn't LLM output. The most successful YC startups have been DoorDash, Coinbase, and Airbnb; regulatory arb and a crypto gambling site. I do not disagree you can spit out more code faster, or potentially better code with an average dev versus more expensive bespoke code with a senior dev. More code does not translate to economic gains directly. People do not want slop entertainment. No LLMs are needed to build everything in flight for the global energy transition (batteries, solar, wind, geothermal, etc). AI Hallucination Cases Tracker - https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/ (2041 cases identified so far) 80% of OpenAI, Anthropic's enterprise revenues come from 1% of their customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613331 - September 2026 (My note: show me these customers and their wildly more profitable enterprises from this incredible inference use; Meta scrapped their "AI focused" layoffs, Salesforce had to hire software engineers back) AI is everywhere at work now, but the time savings are smaller than the hype - https://censuseasy.com/blog/does-ai-save-time-at-work - August 13th, 2026 > More than half of American workers have now used artificial intelligence on the job, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau survey. But when the government asked those workers how much time AI actually saved them, the answer was smaller than the hype: for about 7 in 10, it was two hours a week or less, or nothing at all. [My note: 0-2 hours a week! For trillions in capex!] The State of Generative AI Adoption in 2025 - https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-gen... - November 13th, 2025 The Impact of Generative AI on Work Productivity - https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/feb/impact-ge... - February 27th, 2025 > The next figure illustrates how generative AI-driven time savings vary with usage across occupations. Time savings and overall usage are highly correlated. Workers in the computer and mathematics occupation used generative AI in nearly 12% of their work hours, and they reported this saved them 2.5% of work time. By contrast, workers in personal service occupations used this technology in only 1.3% of their work hours, and it saved them only 0.4% of work time. The slope of the dashed regression line is 0.17, indicating that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of time spent using generative AI is associated with a 1.7 percentage point increase in the time saved as a share of hours worked. "Feel the hope!" Like a religion, people want to believe when the data says otherwise. I have been in many churches in my life, but the church of HN is by far the most committed to their faith. If I'm the one coping, where's the proof? It doesn't exist. It is not my job to believe without objective data and evidence supporting an opinion or assertion. "In God we trust. All others must bring data." | | |
| ▲ | keeda 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I like to cite those St. Louis Fed links too but for the opposite reason. With the caveat that it's based on survey data, it is one of the few data sources that shows the real of AI in the real world. And it is pretty astounding. It is only used for 6% of all work hours but it saves 2% of all work hours. That is very low usage, but that is a 33% savings! Now let's put that trillions in capex into perspective. About 55% of people use it for 6% of all work hours. Approximating a bit, that's basically 3% of all of the work hours by all of the workers in all of US, and as above, AI saves a 3rd of that time, so AI is already saving 1% of all work hours in the US! (In case you think this Math is off, the same St. Louis Fed articles above have similar numbers, and corroborates with other national data sources as well as research studies, and suggests that the impact of GenAI may already be showing up in "national level statistics" to the tune of a 1.3% bump in national labor productivity! With only this shallow level of adoption! In just 3 years! It took the computer revolution about 2 decades to show up in economics data.) According to the BLS, employers pay $12.3 trillion for that work. So a 1% savings on that is a $123 billion. An up front ~$2T investment over 2 - 4 years that is already saving $123 billion annually in the US alone is pretty damn good actually, and will only go up as usage improves. This is not hope, this is data, and you had already brought it with you! ;-) |
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