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Discussion (50 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> 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.
Except what actually happens is that the patient contact time stays the same, but then the added productivity is used to justify fewer on-staff nurses.
same..
> nurse is able to oversee and accomplish more
.. and work with more patients in the same shift.
> She can spend more time talking with patients
.. we mean the talking will be through the "ClaudeMedTalker Nurse" billed per patient, per second (depending upon tokens used and if any translation need, depending upon patient nationality and accents)
internet/digitasion for doctors for example.
So, quality doesn't necessarily increase in all cases.
It doesn't, this is just plain false. Most productivity gains happen by cutting value-add complexity or material quality. See IKEA chairs versus Shaker ones, or lycra clothes versus silk.
> internet/digitasion for doctors for example.
I see the misconception. The internet was not created to serve productivity, it was a communication medium. That it can be used to increase productivity is orthogonal to its existence or purpose, and whether it has been used to actually increase quality of something is entirely dependent of the specifics of what you're discussing. For instance, in gaming right now there's a huge discussion going on about whether digital distribution has actually trapped us with crappier goods which we can't resell or transfer.
this is a popular misconception. IKEA made bad furniture more accessible. good quality furniture still exists and is more affordable (share of disposable income) now than in the past. its the same deal for watches, dryers, computers etc. if you don't trust me, use ChatGPT/Claude to verify this.
Lower staffing levels per unit of care performed makes medical care cheaper for patients. If the goal of a healthcare system is to make healthcare more accessible (rather than be a jobs program), that's a success.
I think you misspelled “increases profit margins for hospitals” if you’re talking about US healthcare.
Based on how neoliberal capitalism tends to work it will simply lead to more profits for hospitals etc.
yeah yeah, sure sure
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/09/04/t...
This is how the economy often works. The loss of one kind of job to technology lets the business grow by using the same number of staff, or often even more, to serve new opportunities/markets/products/services.
Our population is increasing which means we need jobs to be increasing at same rates. The effect on supermarkets is they get more customers as population increases but they are able to lower the relative number of staff per customer.
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/school-st...
I can only imagine what it does to children whose brains are still developing.
I'm not anti AI and I don't know how to quantify the pros and cons but we need to be honest about what they are.
Aren’t we overdue for one anyway.
The banks and those who control them all knew where we are headed, so they got a little head start destabilizing democracy.
Once us working class get a grasp of the actual situation, we are going to be so deep in the hole, fighting back is going to be quite difficult when the "asset owners" own and control the majority of the worlds resources, all media, forms of communication, AI, technology infrastructure, mass surveillance. You name it, and they have already made massive efforts to make sure they own it.
Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow.
The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks.
You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.
(Thanks, Internet!)
If the AI transofmration takes too long, we might never overthrow capitalism
Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves.
Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.
USA forgot how to produce things.
This will not prevent us from doing it.
And we have not seen what the industry will put out on a hardware level. Optical computing is coming, onchip models too.
It allowed a lot of people around the planet to change things.
If I am not graded on how many widgets I make in a shift and instead can focus on making the most beautiful widget, or the most novel widget, or simply the widget that is most useful to my particular life am I less satisfied?
We've somehow built a worldview based on our whole value as humans being equivalent to how good of a worker bee we are. Let's fix that part.
This is of course a much harder problem than achieving AGI, since it's a messy human problem.
AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics.
Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but those KPIs (of course). Service degrades, discourse degrades, everything becomes toxic and addictive and destructive.
Outside of delusional grifty startups, the broader corporate world is only using copilot for taking meeting notes and (sort of) entertaining the notion of non-devs writing (and not maintaining) their own experimental janky apps where impact is low.
Outside of all the shit-stirrers on HN and clueless bubble social media, I don't see LLMs making a difference. In fact, the fearmongering is at this point insulting to the intelligence of the people who are supposedly helpless against big bad AI.
It's definitely changed in that time
If things have actually changed, you wouldn't be begging the question.
This feels economically naĂŻve.. 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"
More than ever, I feel we need both grassroots activism and key players at the top of the hierarchy. Otherwise, it is all too obvious where most of the rewards from increased productivity will go. The wealth hoarding has got to be curtailed.
They have an incentive to play dumb and talk as if AI is net positive for the world.
It will just fester out of sight and out of mind: audit bots and compliance bots and malpractice bots and insurance bots will arms race creating such a mess it will become unfixable.
I doubt 99% of what a nurse does would be meaningfully aided by an LLM and where it would help it'd probably be a crappy band aid around a bigger festering issue anyway (e.g. poorly managed IT, deliberately confusing insurance processes).
not really. almost all technological processes have increased the quality of the service.
And outside of industries with government enforced perversions of simple "supply and demand" forces (we're not talking Nth level effects here) this means more access to the service or lower prices or both.
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.
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.
I very. much. doubt. that the trillions of dollars spent on AI will have a positive ROI for most companies in the race. It's all well and good to have the latest fable, but if some chinese company is hosting a cheap open weights model that's only 6mo behind at a tiny fraction of the price, you're gonna get your lunch eaten.
Stage 3 gets hard to imagine from here. Maybe there will be permanent hyperevolution. Maybe One Model to Rule Them All will appear.
Either way, I don't see how Economics as We Know It can continue to exist. That includes all of capitalism and almost certainly all of politics.
Successful AGI with robotic support means a post-scarcity economy where AGI's understanding of physics sets the limits, not politics or economics.
But the post-scarcity element won't be evenly distributed. And it's not remotely impossible that humans won't be invited to the party.
We can't even be sure that AGI won't have a less limited understanding of physics than we do.
There's going to be enjoyable irony in watching Altman et all getting their lunches eaten by the thing they've created.
But - realistically - it probably won't last long.
Over three thousand comment boxes agree that the cat is out of the bag. No moats.
So, is it 2 steps ahead and 1 step back, or 1 step ahead and 2 steps back (or any numerical variant of those)?
People with actual power in this are too involved and greedy to care about objective answer and TBH I don't trust them to put some higher good before their personal wealth and power and ego trip, capitalism ain't built on long term responsibility towards greater topics like future and wellbeing of mankind.
Plus we know from WWII atomic bomb development how utterly clueless, naive and out of touch with reality geeks doing something powerful can be. I see exactly same scenario being played out right now with llms.
Anyway, I am over-tired with all llm topics and frenzy folks (especially here), I'll better spend rest of the day preparing for a serious challenge in form of big multipitch climb in western Switzerland (Mirroir d'Argentine for anybody in same craft). Thats life I care about and makes me happy and fulfilled.
What are your points?
The value of AI is real and AI already is responsible for people getting fired or no additional jobs.
Ask basic graphics designers, website developers and co. Ask educational book writers or developer advocates.
I have no doubt that life has gotten more lucrative for some bounded set of people whose main goal is to churn out the largest number of websites with cheap graphics as fast as possible at minimum cost, but a lot more doubt about whether that's going to make the median life better for the median person over any grouping of humans large enough for me to care about.
"“what if we (Anthropic) are wrong about the value of AI”."
What is the point you are trying to make which goes in this direction? Like is making AI jobs so cheap that the economy is collapsing or do you mean thatn AI will not bring any value.
These are two suggestions from my side which are complelty contrare to each other.
In the former case, isn't it just business as usual? (well, with a huge, nasty recession - but the economy at least continues on in some recognizable form)
It makes sense to me to focus on weird possible futures if we already have the "happy path" somewhat known and barely under control.
Software development for example is enhanced with running your claude locally.
But lets be honest, the right way to adjust 'project' is by writing some spec in a text field as an input, letting the ai do whatever it wants, having expert ais make sure its secure, then you do the last review and its done.
What do we need for this? A full end to end integration. Its just something we need to build, nothing we need to invent.
The nurse example is the same. We only need to build the computer end to end flow and plugin AI in the right spots and finetune for country specific requirements.
The industry is building this 'agentic layer' today. The Hyperscaler are building this layer too.
There is a golden phase were we will build all of this and were we cleanup old stuff and were we adjust with the current model capabilities and change systems and this will take a little bit of time, but the bottom line is already loosing left and right.
The Blender support from Fable and Astra? Probably kills a lot of peoples jobs on fiverr.
The small software someone needs? Got already killed by earlier models. Just a few days ago some architect (never written software) talked about how he vibecoded some tool for tracking working hours.
Man even a basic website was expesnive to build just 2 years ago.
The smaller, easier and better the code base, the easier it is to remove people from this.
The software market in China is imploding and we will also see budget adjustments to move away from consultants and move them into AI Token budgets. We probably reached peak software development.
> Finding 4: Labor vs. capital share: The pie will grow, but a larger share might go to capital
> Today, of each dollar the economy produces, about 60¢ goes to workers and 40¢ go to capital.
Modest scenario: 40.6% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 0.6 points)
Substantial scenario: 43.9% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 3.9 points)
Extreme scenario: 54.8% to capital in 2030 (labor share down 14.8 points)
So all the growth goes to capital. For knowledge workers: substantial unemployment and declining wages. For other workers: wages may increase on paper, but not really for actual purchasing power.
Very dystopic indeed.
So the answer is basically "beats me lol"
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.
That's only forecasting out to 2030.
Why is the nurse a she?
Now, if Claude starts synthesizing more drugs that can help those with diseases (like OpenAI has just done) we might be trending in the right direction. For now, all I see is squirrels water-skiing. And while that's great... it's not meaningful.
the inference cost of AI has been dropping ~5x over every 6 months. AI today is around 100x cheaper than 2 years ago. it will continue to get cheap.
Something else could mean developing a new concept of ownership or a new form of redistribution.
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!
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!"
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.