I'm pretty cynical about the outcomes of capitalism in general. But I can buy a new 10TB HD for $300. Or a gigabit internet connection for $100/mo. Think back 10 or 20 years. How is this not a radical price-per-bit decrease for consumers?

There are a thousand medicines that have experienced literally infinite deflation over 50 years: not available at any price to having a finite price. GLP-1s, Trikefta, Mavyret, Checkpoint inhibitors to name just a few recent blockbusters. People complain about insulin prices, but the insulin from 50 years ago costs 25-50 $/mo (https://www.walmart.com/cp/relion-insulin/8418641), it's the new stuff that wasn't available 50 years ago that's more expensive.

Spending on food as a percent of income has declined significantly (~30%) over the past 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa.... The decline has flatlined over the past ~20 years, but at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home.

House spending as a percent of income also seems to have declined over the past 50 years (https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2023/04/26/spending-on-...). To be honest, this one surprised me, I would've bet the other way.

Since about the late 1500s, a bushel of wheat has cost within an order of magnitude of £1. By contrast, in the late 1500's a farmhand's wage was 1 pound + room and board.

Right now it's £5.60, but that says more about the decline of the British Pound than an increase in the price of wheat.

Massive food price deflation has been one of the wonders of the modern world. Hopefully the last few years were only a small blip on this overall trend.

Expectations have also increased. Friend from a middle class family grew up with 4 siblings in a 75m2 apartment. You'd get raised eyebrows for that today.

Cheap food is still cheap. If some doomsday scenario ever comes along, I'll be forever sorry to not have stocked up on 6 years worth of calories that now cost less than a monthly salary. World market prices per metric ton: wheat like $300, rice $500.

But that's not mutually exclusive with absurd levels of wealth concentration.

A popularly-shared graph on that subject, with everything pegged to 2000 as a baseline:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/inflation-chart-tracks-pric...

Doesn't include foods, but it certainly punctures the "That family isn't aaactually in financial trouble, they have a refrigerator and a phone and a TV" statements from certain pundits. (A class of people who are often disconnected from the average person's budgeting situation.)

>basic necessities like food, housing, and medicine have become dramatically more expensive across the board.

they haven't. In the early 1900s an American household spent roughly 50% of its income on food. And mind you food didn't mean an exotic fruit you flew in from the other end of the world or pounds of meat per week.

Today an American household spends 9% of their income on food, the 'dramatic increase' may have bumped that up to 10% by some measures. The size of the average house of the average American family in the last half century has doubled while the family size has halved. In the 1960s 12% of households had AC access, today it's over 80%. Generics of basic medicines cost virtually nothing, you've just started to consume more sophisticated medicine over time.

If you're an ordinary guy you are already living in luxury, you just don't notice it because you kept moving the goalpost on what luxury is. Which isn't per se wrong but you ought to be at least aware of it

> No, programming and math is basically what AI research is.

Most importantly, in these fields results can be easily verified which means that if you have enough compute, that you can generate correct training data. OpenAI had an early story - which could be a lie of course - about how they tried to train a robot but the actuators would be toast before the robot would have learned. Math and programming doesn't have such problems.

> It’s completely obvious what the play is here and it has nothing to do with pay. We pay peanuts for tokens so automating a developer for 200-500 a month worth of tokens ain’t getting you to a trillion a year.

Could be hallucinating by I just asked Gemini to estimate global average compensation of developers and multiply by estimate of total number of developers in the world, and it came up with $1 trillion to $2 trillion.

So the total addressable market is the right order of magnitude, let alone all the other automatable high wage occupations..

> RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.

No it isn't. Doing work more efficiently through the use of LLMs is not RSI. RSI requires a closed loop automated LLM iteration process which we are not at all close to right now.

Exactly. AGI is explicitly the goal, where AGI is defined as an AI that can improve itself autonomously. Training an AI to make improvements to itself is training an AI to program.

> RSI is the play and it’s already happening.

Sure, if you redefine what that means.

Before this year, "recursive self-improvement" in the context of AI research meant the holy grail: an artificial intelligence that was capable of improving itself, unattended, in ways that humans can't even imagine, so that within a relatively short period of time, it reaches superintelligence and ignites the Singularity.

What's happening now is emphatically not that. And if you think it is, you are buying straight-up propaganda. "I gave an LLM a tool that lets it make largely-random decisions about how to train its next iteration when I tell it to do so" bears little to no resemblance to RSI. Because it is, beyond a rounding error, completely missing out on the "improvement" part.

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3 parts of the economy least impacted by Info Tech, also two of them are heavily regulated (housing, healthcare) which can mute tech impact on prices.

300 years ago 97% of workers were farmers. We automated almost all those jobs away. Is there extraordinary unemployment?

I know, this time it’s different, AI is different, blah blah blah.