alt Hacker NewsWhat will our economic future look like?
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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.
> The result: the nurse’s job changes
> 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.
Finding 4 is a must-read:
> 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. (note: all of their estimates are for 2030, not for a distant future)
Very dystopic indeed.
> Only humans can do some tasks
> For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient.
Until there are robots. Or the AI gets creative in an attempt to find a solution to this "problem" and orders a fatal dose of morphine for the patient.
> And new tasks will appear
> Historically, new technologies have also created new tasks for workers. For a nurse, that might be checking how well an AI triages patients, or reviewing an AI-proposed care plan.
You can see where they're going with this.
> At the individual level, it means coders and call service center agents may have to switch to jobs like electrician and nurse, which are less exposed to AI.
It's weird they call nurses "less exposed to AI" when the earlier section discusses how AI could turn nurses into underlings for AI taskmasters.
> How might powerful AI change the economy?
Worth noting that this discussion is built around 2030, which is now less than 3.5 years away.
The hedges that make the Extreme scenario sound less bad fail to explain how anyone is going to pay electricians when the highest paid group (human knowledge workers) is being decimated. It sounds like the theory is that everyone is either going to become an electrician or a totally fair and efficient wealth redistribution scheme will magically appear.
> 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.
It's funny that this is missing the negative effects or the possibility of an economic crisis scenario. Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all. This is why XAI is already renting compute to Anthropic. This goes as well without saying that in few years, compute pricing will drop heavily.
Another effect is increased inequality in the US and other Western countries as software/AI/hardware companies are able to do more with less.
The increase in manual labor wages is not systemic. It affects only the labor used to build data centers.
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.
> 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"
People get income from one of three places: capital income, labor income, or the welfare state. If this technology truly unlocks a holy panacea of productivity with a commensurate drop in employment then capital’s share of the national income can and should provide for a wider and deeper welfare state. Nothing new need be invented here. Anthropic’s elaborate scenario-building makes appropriate preparedness sound like a problem requiring heroic prognostication when a simple theory of distribution will suffice.
I think we have a real problem because we know what we still need to build and as soon as it is build, it will work.
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.
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.
Those with the money and influence have always been in conflict with the masses that actually make the economy run. They would love nothing more than to do away with that problem. It allows them to control the terms of the economy.
I think (hope?) the fundamental fallacy in arguments like these is assuming that individual task-level productivity improvement will ladder up to economy-wide transformation.
IMO knowledge work productivity has gone up a massive amount since 1990, and companies could in fact fire most of their knowledge workers while still getting their most critical work done. (These are the bullshit jobs/email jobs.) But companies mostly haven't done this, which implies other reasons for employing so many knowledge workers.
Even if AI becomes capable of doing everything, I would predict there will be a period of many years/decades where companies still employ a similar number of people to sit around and babysit/watch what the AI does.
This lost me at “the economy is composed of tasks”
There’s so many assumptions packed into that assertion that tell you the horizon of possibility considered here is uselessly shallow.
While they describe how GDP is shared between workers and capital in the three reference scenarios, they don't offer political economy ideas about how wealth redistribution shall be rethought, and the role of the State, if any. If a share of knowledge workers are about to be driven out of market, the real consequences of this deserves deeper reflection.
You’d think the most powerful AI could make a website that doesn’t completely break usability by destroying scroll.
If it's anything like that web page, I'd say the future looks... slow.
It seems obvious that labor displacement due to AI will create labor surpluses in existing fields.
Which will feel quite bad for many of us in the present, but net-net be good for society in the long run.
Wages will go down, but cost of goods and services will decline even more.
Markets will be more competitive than ever, which limits the moat/margin capability of many businesses.
It's only really particularly bad for those earning very high wages where there likely won't be any way to materially fill the gap.
This presupposes that the practice of exchanging things for dollars will remain stable and merely the number of those dollars will go up.
But that model is showing its age. I'd be supprised if, equipped with a heightened ability to develop and evaluate alternatives, we decided that it was worth preserving.
Money is a lousy proxy for consent, yet that's what were using for. Surely we can do better.
Software company pens speculative narratives about impact of not-yet-realized features. This reminds me of the corny old copies of The Futurist magazine that my dad kept around. Fun, hopelessly naive, and not at all aligned with how reality unfolded. Nice that Anthropic can afford a team of economists somehow though.
Good or bad, nothing ages as poorly as economic or market predictions.
One guy will die with "all the things" and the rest of us will just die.
I like how the nurse gets to check if the AI is doing the right thing as one of her new tasks. AI is going to have to get to the point where it can do things on its own or it will only transform problem domains where verification is fast and inexpensive. Otherwise something is getting traded and people will notice, eventually.
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.
The biggest critisism from my side is not how AI will take over jobs but I believe we will see peak of certain things.
Creating images (menues, flyers, whatever) became so cheap, that we reached peak graphi design GDP generation. This will go down.
Software development for complex systems is enhanced but not yet solved. But a lot of small software development stuff for sure. We reached Peak Software Development and this GDP will go down, not up.
A thought experiment: robot bees can do everything biological bees do --- pollination for the crops and making honey, but they are tireless and cheaper to maintain.
Would beekeepers and farm owners still want to keep biological bees?
For me the ideal scenario would be us having humanoid robots with AI.
This would free up so much time for me and even in the worst case if I lose my job, I can live in village side growing my own food and being fully self sustained with the help of humanoid robots and solar energy. That would actually be a dream come true
I just wonder when we will see 8ft tall humanoid robots walking through the streets.
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.
> Only humans can do some tasks
> For instance, AI can’t bathe a patient.
Oh sweet, we're left with literally cleaning up feces. Thanks AI!
It would be interesting to know what percentage of global inference is spent on projects/problems that would otherwise "wait"/"decay" (if generative ai wasn't a thing). Or maybe the question is: What percentage of global inference is spent on cleaning up and migrating old systems? "New" vs "Old". The decisions I make today can now incorporate what I once termed as "nice to have" when developing a sytem.
Nowhere in any of the scenarios they let you model, do they consider the cost of computation for inference, nor training of new models. It may be that after the subsidies can no longer be offered, most AI use becomes cost prohibitive.
This would lead to a much, much smaller "total addressable market", rendering the massive AI build out into a rapidly depreciating asset that can't even be operated without a loss.
Even if the hardware was effectively free following a market crash, and bankruptcy sale, the power required to run it might be more expensive than the compute it generates is worth.
At which point, unlike dark fiber after the .com crash, all the hardware becomes scrap metal.
Now factor in the macro picture, in which this AI bubble is holding up the stock market, and by proxy, the US economy. I think we're in for Global Depression II, worse than 1929.
At least they are thinking about this. The possibilities still seem to limited though. A coder and a designer will 'retrain' to electrician or nurse, because we are busy having a construction boom. But do all of the individuals in this system get to choose the construction boom? Or are we swept up in the desires of the capital deploying owners?
I thought for a moment "our" might refer to Anthropic's future
One simple thing can’t make everything better or everything worse—every, big change is the sum of time, actions, and many actors. The thing you describe as a result is only the end of a process. I hate simplicity when people talk about the future.
I dont think in the future people will run these overpriced frontier models and instead have their specialized local models.
Even then, assuming the difference is that huge between frontier and open-source, a specialized „human worker“ _should_ be able to fix the gap.
I'm surprised to not find the word "deflation" anywhere. It doesn't necessarily seem likely in the end given governments would presumably just print money, but intuitively AI seems like the ultimate deflationary technology. Fairly generally, not just for labor.
That's an incredible webpage. Still not going to read all that, but incredible nonetheless.
So basically workers are about to get screwed and it’s just a question of how badly
I can't scroll through this site on Firefox and a recent mac, anyone else?
Watch Ann Droid on the Beeb for a dark but funny prediction of what it will be like wrt to nursing care for the elderly.
This is a spherical cow model. Here are their stated assumptions:
• Production involves a combination of tasks, where each task is performed by labor or by capital. The final goods market is perfectly competitive.
• Labor is supplied exogenously while capital is supplied along an upward-sloping schedule.
• There are two groups of occupations, of which only the cognitive group is exposed to AI.
For the amount of money Anthropic can spend on this, that's a very lame model.
The "two groups of occupations" assumption is so naive as to be embarrassing.
The assumption that only the "cognitive group" is exposed to AI is way too optimistic. We're close to automating drivers out of existence, and there's political pushback against that. Logistics is about half automated now and the rest is only a matter of time. Store shelf inventory taking is already done by mobile robots, and shelf restocking is coming.
India can't even mechanize agriculture to the level of, say, 1980s US without generating massive unemployment. Peasants rioted against that. "In India, farming transcends mere employment; it embodies a lifestyle. Nearly half of the Indian population relies on agriculture, either directly or indirectly."[1] (The US is under 2%.) That's what a desperate attempt to hold back modernization to preserve employment looks like. Most people are poor but alive.
There's no consideration of land and water constraints. Not so much a US issue, because the US is well-supplied in those areas. India and China are much closer to the physical limits there. AI won't help much.
"The final goods market is perfectly competitive." Oh, please. Everybody wants a "moat", and that generates a strong desire for monopoly if possible, oligopoly if not.
This comes across as a model where they started with the desired results and worked backwards. They should have done at least an input-output table of occupations and products/services.
[1] https://indiadatamap.com/2025/08/19/number-of-farmers-in-eve...
it will cause unprecedented growth AND widespread unemployment of course. A distopian horror, not by the AI itself, but by its owners.
I try to never be that guy who complains about the way a web page scrolls, but this page is completely unreadable.
These social science/econ style jobs at frontier labs are the ultimate free ride. Get paid bank with absolutely zero need to publish anything of quality.
> 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"