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@davidgerard For sure, outsourcing to AI, Google, etc is creating widespread atrophying of mental faculties. Fortunately that can be a temporary matter. But after enough time I suspect you cannot resume where you used to be.

Spoiling people with too much stuff on tap and too many easy ways to be lazy is gonna hit many hard when they realise very late what has happened to themselves.

@davidgerard when AI bubble pops (if - it might merge with robotics bubble) - it will leave lots of cheap ram and gpus and lots of open source/weights llms, what will happen then - it’s hard to predict, but you will not put it back… And quite a few of the tech trees it spawned are quite scary as is. So there will not be back to normal, I don’t think - it will be more crazy, decentralized and more hard to regulate…

@davidgerard are there any companies currently developing handcrafted software tools that serve the users?
And making a profit?
… those few companies might be in a great position to inherit the market pretty soon

@davidgerard bailout something like PPP 'loans' from the government but to pay for more tokens

@davidgerard turns out those who took the plunge are losing money because they need to rehire staff that ai never could replace

@davidgerard tell me more about these screeching noises

@davidgerard I think that when the bubble pops there will be SOO many people struggling to find work that they'll take a pay cut for twice the responsibility.

I lived through the bubble at the end of the 90's...that's exactly what happened then. You had folks with doctorates and masters degrees taking entry level work just to pay the bills. I do not expect this to go any differently.

@davidgerard Realistically speaking - a bunch of businesses will collapse.

The ones that survive will continue with the code they have and there will not be a "superfund" investment in cleaning up AI nonsense code. Instead programmers will just have to "deal with it" like they have to deal with any other tech debt in a codebase

Google may come up with specialized models for programming that are easier to train and keep up to date once the mania around general models collapses

@davidgerard The internet didn't go away, nor the car or steam machine. I guess there will be changes in the use of AI when the payment model changes soon. Today companies pay a monthly fee but soon they will pay for the use of tokens.
This might not be the bubble to pop but a change that will forces companies to think twice.

@davidgerard Customer Service/IT Support organizations have already designed the most ignorant mechanism ever (I blame CTOs). It's level 0 (zero) call handlers. They are hourly or per call temps, somewhere offshore of whatever nation you are in, who don't even know what company they represent. All they do is re-verify your credentials (after IVR has done the same prior) and frustrate efforts to ever reach level 1 support. This is the human backstop to AI now, and will replace it in the future.

@davidgerard as someone that entered the job market in 2008 (things got "interesting" ON the day that I was fully expecting a permanent offer at the end of my trial period) I just hope that some of the people responsible get caught in the blast zone this time around 🙄

@davidgerard They'll pivot to quantum computing.

@davidgerard like, it's not the depression we wanted but the depression we deserve

@davidgerard I think the "AI" bubble is one of the more obvious aspects of a long-developing system of social crises coming to a head. "GenAI" is bent on absorbing everything and turning it into slime.

I think there may be opportunities coming out of its inevitable collapse. Part of the difficulty for any radical movement has been that any success gets co-opted or integrated; nothing remains ours. A positive response to the collapse of the "AI" bubble would have to be concerned with things like authenticity and human dignity, with resisting that co-optation.

In cyberpunk, the point is the oppressed survive. We want thriving, not just survival, of course.

There are also the reactionary responses, fantasies of return to an idealized past. Fascism is a species of reaction, that embraces aspects of the new, but older forms of reaction will likely become more prominent.

I imagine decades to come will be filled with grief and profound loss, but some hope if we work towards it.

@davidgerard Consider then a good time to #AbolishCaptialism and #RedistributeWealth in return for not turning #Billiomaires' pronouns into was/were and instead merely sentencing them to lifetime community service without parole…

@davidgerard

They'll contract with Accenture and IBM to 'rebiild and modernize' and end up paying double what they were per AI agent (about triple what they were paying per original employee).

@davidgerard lol yeah a lot of people seem to be pretending this wont happen the same way all these tech companies pretend there would be free effortless economic recovery after 2020 that never came and now they have to pretend the layoffs are because of ai

no one wants to just look at the numbers and conclude what they convey.

@davidgerard

There is going to be a major shift to land and mineral speculation in a major socioeconomic & public health crisis.

People want to buy the United States for pennies on the dollar.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/440353/the-world-for-sale-by-javier-blas-and-jack-farchy/9781847942678

@davidgerard

They will not hire the people who know how shit works.

They will try to make the few remaining such people clean up all shit, en passant.

@davidgerard I think the idea that the bubble will pop is the optimistic viewpoint. I think it's more likely we will increasingly see money and resources poured into AI technologies for the next 5-10 years, either through promises of growth or government buy-ins/bail-outs.

If the AI bubble goes away it won't be with a pop, but a gradual decrease in growth until it levels.

@davidgerard

Most academic economic pundits treat this bubble like the dot com or Railroad mania bubble, even though it’s more like Enron with a touch of GFC.

They are thinking that after a crash, there’ll be all this infrastructure laying around like the aftermath of dotcom.

Railroad and fiber optic infrastructure last something like 30 years. Data center components last 1 to 3.

There is no there, there for whatever survivors to swing in and pick up infrastructure for pennies on the dollar

@davidgerard I'm still betting on a huge bailout to prevent an actual bubble pop, or at least delay it indefinitely.

Unfortunately LLMs work quite well for many coding tasks so the value of the technology is not zero (as opposed to crypto), and it will take a long time to figure out what that value actually is.

@davidgerard now that you mentioned it, I think those companies will collapse/significantly shrink and a new class of companies will emerge. Same as what happened with dot-com bubble.

@davidgerard What series of events (if any) would cause you to revisit or revise this hypothesis?

For comparison: the "dot com bubble popped" in 2000, but this did not lead to people abandoning commerce on the internet. It just destroyed short-term value, but overall shook out the weak players and made room for better competitors.

@davidgerard I agree that a depressing to rival the Great Depression is coming, but the ultra rich are not going to suffer like they should.

@davidgerard "the surviving companies will hire the people who know how shit works to clean up", anyone thinking that clearly hasn't worked in tech. I've been in this shit for over 30 years, no one gets paid to clear up anything.
It's rare for a company with paying customers to care if their product is rubbish. This becomes truer the more the customer pays. (and prices charged are rarely proportional to the quality of the product.

@davidgerard

When the bubble pops, everyone will be left too poor to drive any rehiring of subject matter experts. The job losses are already locked in.

@davidgerard a combination of outsourcing, underpaid internships, and just pulling more work on remaining staff.

@davidgerard

Umm Anyone checked if any LLM Model was trained in FreePascal? 😏

@davidgerard I have been telling folks that my naively optimistic take is the tech displaced will go back to work cleaning up the aftermath of AI slop. I think a massive tech collapse is more likely.

@davidgerard Consulting firms will step up and offer "AI Abatement" solutions. Companies will pay $1000/hour to Accenture for a fresh grad making minimum wage. The code will end up worse.

@davidgerard local models. It's already where LLMs make "the most sense", and I'm sure there will be a wave of hype once "Gen AI is around the corner" stops convincing investors. It'll be "streamlined Lean AI that knows Your Business and doesn't talk about goblins!".

@davidgerard outsourcing, because it went so great the last dozen or so times.

@davidgerard Realistically, it'll depend a whole lot on whether and to what extent a worker's movement will take power and remove/counteract billionaire and asset manager financially accumulative tendencies. It's not exactly rocket science to see what kinds of changes and investments need to be done to improve society, and while it does require expertise to effect those changes, that expertise is generally speaking available to some extent.