What will our economic future look like?

righthand

Hopefully free from the burden of LLM companies.

yodon

I try to never be that guy who complains about the way a web page scrolls, but this page is completely unreadable.

elliotec

You’d think the most powerful AI could make a website that doesn’t completely break usability by destroying scroll.

129876

What a reversal from Amodei's doom marketing! This is of course a slop paper with vague assumptions and equations that no single human economist will ever read. The messaging is "it will not be so bad", in line with the recent Economist piece. We are ready for the midterm elections!

dkdbejwi383

> Ultimately, what the economy looks like in 2030 depends on many factors, like what AI can do, and how companies and workers choose to adopt it. So the answer is basically "beats me lol"

altcognito

Good or bad, nothing ages as poorly as economic or market predictions.

dgellow

> Like any economic model, this one has limits. For example, we did not include scenarios where humanity develops hyper-capable robots. I didn’t see the scenario “what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”. Which IMHO is the most important one to consider given it is the blind spot pretty much all the AI labs have. What if the economic impact is negative? I don’t understand how you can study such a topic without considering the risk of being wrong, not in magnitude but in kind.

oxqbldpxo

It's been 4 years. Nothing meaningful.

mentos

Prices will fall to their raw material costs?

epolanski

Judging the quality of this blogpost/presentation, AI is centuries away from being able to replace humans.

ghm2199

Are you guys feeling all high and mighty doing all these predictions? I think the money they are spending on trying to inform policy could be better spent on getting all major labs together with the government, and making sure that 1. At least 10% of your net spend is on safety and harm mitigation before you accelerate yourselves into doing real harm to real people tomorrow. 2. Pause all AI enhancement until a proper mechanistic study can be done by a working group funded by you all to understand how AI model Safety can be enforced by something less lame than a Constitution/Spec.

JacobiX

> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job, the nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more. She can spend more time talking with patients and helping them understand diagnoses. Productivity increases. This feels economically naïve.. If AI lets one nurse do the work that previously required two, the default pressure in a cost-driven system is not "great, now nurses can spend twice as long with patients" It is "great, now we can run the same operation with fewer nurses"

orange_joe

I think it looks like the labs front running everyone’s work, freeloading on the last bits of human intelligence to ensure their owners a place as our masters.

keybored

> [we don’t know] I haven’t forgot capitalist euphoria from 2023 about cutting worker power off at the root. That’s all these AI Cretins want. Well, that and an unnerving enthusiasm for personifying their AI Golems (Anthr. in particular here). Sorry to poo poo a post about AI company prompting their underlings to prompt out visualizations.

KoolKat23

Definitely a bit of positive framing. My big take aways, either stagnant wages or significant paycuts for knowledge workers and overall decreases in employment rates on all scenarios. Worst of all... That's only forecasting out to 2030.

grantpitt

Feels like we're going to read a blog soon enough that mirrors Wendell Berry's opening to The Unsettling of America: The commission said, according to an article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, that the country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers: “. . . the technological advances in agriculture have so greatly reduced the need for manpower that too many people are trying to live on a national farm income wholly inadequate for them.” The proposed solutions were to find “better opportunities for the farm people,” “a more comprehensive national employment policy,” “retraining programs,” “improved general educational facilities,” etc. Both the commission and the writer of the article had obviously taken for granted that the lives and communities of small farmers then still on the farm—and those of the 25 million who had left the farm since 1940—were of less value than “technological advances in agriculture.” There seemed also to be no official doubt that adequate solutions were to be found in government supplied “opportunities,” facilities, and programs. Reading that article, I realized that my values were not only out of fashion, but under powerful attack. I saw that I was a member of a threatened minority. That is what set me off.

alphawhisky

>We study how AI is reshaping the economy because we’re committed to ensuring that this transition is beneficial for society, including workers. Is it just me, or does their choice of identifying "workers" specifically seem a little peculiar? For me, it reads like "We're committed to making segregation beneficial for everyone, including minorities!"

Toutouxc

I like how the least optimistic scenario is simply LLMs not making a difference, instead of the very real possibility of them damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality and leading to class wars. I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start making up for the mess they’ve created.

blooalien

One guy will die with "all the things" and the rest of us will just die.

amelius

I just wonder when we will see 8ft tall humanoid robots walking through the streets.