alt Hacker NewsWhat will our economic future look like?
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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!
How about we instead make Earth be a planet good for humans and living beings?
We can slow down AI development and make it a companion for us, not a replacement.
We don't need to automate ourselves out of it. Or take the risk of extinction.
Just like with nukes, we decided to not blow up the planet. We can too change this.
GDP is a terrible measure. I bet we will see a huge drop on HDI with so many suicides and people going through hell because their job got automated or they no longer see meaning in life, feeling powerless.
Instead they should run an estimate on how many would suicide until 2030 if the 'extreme scenario' happens.
Big GDP growth and a lot of people no longer finding purpose in their lives, going bankrupt, losing their homes and family etc.
For Anthropic, you are just clearly a number. They only care about output.
They have long forgotten the human being.
Before AI, my worldview was that our monetary system was concentrating wealth in a negative-sum game; essentially; every so often, taking wealth from 100 people, destroying half the underlying value and giving the remaining value with a 2x nominal markup to 1 rich person who is already spending more than they can physically spend and so they won't realize that the 2x amount of wealth they got on paper only buys them a quarter of the stuff compared to the previous decade (for example). They won't know how frothy their wealth is until they start selling large quantities of their stocks. It's just buying nominal 'growth' at the cost of risk/fragility/frothiness.
In such system, you could hit record nominal GDP numbers every year while simultaneously destroying the real economy. This was my view of the economy before AI.
Now I think AI will deliver real efficiency gains but also, it provides a convenient narrative to explain why people might be losing jobs in a way which distracts from much bigger systemic issues which existed prior to AI.
My negative-sum economy example with 'booming GDP' is possible without AI even as net economic value is being destroyed. So basically we won't be able to tell if people are losing jobs to AI or to systematic wealth transfer mechanisms which predate AI.
I suppose if we see people losing jobs permanently and workers in other sectors aren't seeing wage increases with more openings, that may be the most reliable indicator we have that the system is losing real wealth faster than AI productivity can offset it.
The bad news is that we won't see any problem in the numbers; the problem would show up as polarization and radicalization of the masses... Which is more qualitative . Since almost everyone is being radicalized concurrently as everyone is affected by the same pressures (both from monetary system and AI automation). The question is not "how many people became radicalized this quarter?" but "how much more radicalized is everyone feeling this quarter?"
Judging the quality of this blogpost/presentation, AI is centuries away from being able to replace humans.
LLMs replace doctors, not nurses
> Think of a day in the life of a nurse You can think of any job as a bundle of tasks that someone does. She does rounds to check on a sick patient. She draws blood.
Why is the nurse a she?
the make your own predictions part is a nice touch. how sensitive are the outcomes to the capability assumption
Like others in the thread have pointed out, the nurse example is interesting.
From my point of view, the point about the nurse is especially relevant because, in the future, dealing with an aging population is going to become a major undertaking and a major burden.
Demographically, we simply don't have the number of people we need to give elders the care that they'll probably have to have near the end of their life, so we have to rely on AI to help us get through it.
Probably, we will see this happen in Japan and South Korea before it hits the United States.
It would have been useful to use the internet from 1995-2015 as a reference model for economic impact, and then ask how the trajectory of AI will resemble it.
> As the nurse incorporates AI into her job,
But she won't, will she? Her employer will do the incorporating. With very different objectives.
AI productivity discussion go!
The model seems defensible, but for some reason it isn’t passing the sniff test. Maybe its that the extreme scenario seems wildly optimistic, or that the observed modest productivity gains are framed as either the trend or “just the start of something amazing !”.
The issues are that
1) The median AI use case isn’t increasing productivity but expanding capability and reducing the need to communicate across teams. Ex: if someone needs a dashboard or a ppt designed, now they don’t have to ask another team. AI is substituting for intern and early career workers in someone else’s firm.
This is also borne out in the hiring data.
2) The cases that show maximal productivity gains are when AI is leveraged by experts.
This is a problem, because the evidence for automation gains is poor. AI automation seems to be going to the same place ML projects went to die.
If augmentation is the primary lever that lifts up productivity, and it is dependent on AI being matched to experts, then the limiting factor is expertise.
This makes the fact that AI is both, taking out early career roles AND one shooting education, a divine irony.
Where exactly are those future experts supposed to come from? The ones with taste and the ability to deliver us this AI driven GDP growth?
AI is also setting up a conflict between liability, insurance and productivity, and thats a whole point in itself. However it will be expressed as a drag on productivity.
I found myself interested in the papers analysis of wages, so I did some digging.
The researchers model says the following about hourly wage growth in the substantial and extreme scenarios:
- the hourly wage* in the knowledge workers group will fall (-1.1% and 11.5% respectively)
- but the hourly wage* of labor across the rest of the labor force will grow (5.9% and 33.6% respectively)
*Important to note, AFAIK this hourly wage decline/growth is a not measured against 2026 dollars, but the counterfactual of what hourly wages would be in the absence of AI.
Okay, so my first take away from reading these numbers is that declining wages in one group appears to be offset by rising wages in the other group. Not terrible all things considering.
But then I started to think about the difference in hourly wages between the knowledge workers group and the non-knowledge workers group (which I'll now refer to as *K* *N*). I had a sneaking suspicion that the inter group wages gap could be large enough where growth in the non-knowledge share of labor doesn't offset the loss in hourly wages from displaced knowledge workers who find themselves migrating occupations.
Looking through the paper, it breaks these groups down as follows:
K — Knowledge / Cognitive:
- Management, Business and Financial Operations, Computer and Mathematical, Architecture and Engineering, Life, Physical, and Social Science, Community and Social Service, Legal, Educational Instruction and Library, Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media, Healthcare Practitioners and Technical, Sales and Related, Office and Administrative Support
N — Non-Knowledge / All Other:
-Healthcare Support, Protective Service, Food Preparation and Serving, Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance, Personal Care and Service, Farming, Fishing, and Forestry, Construction and Extraction, Installation, Maintenance, and Repair, Production, Transportation and Material Moving
So I had GPT Sol 5.6 take each of these occupations and find the mean hourly wage using BLS data [1]. The findings suggest that as of 2026, the simple group average for K is $45.17 vs. $23.67 for N. But this is short sighted as this doesn't take into consideration the different levels of employment in each occupation. I asked ChatGPT to account for this using the same BLS data, which gives a weighted average of $41.50 for K and $23.40 for N.
This means that knowledge workers are currently making ~double what non-knowledge workers make in the US. The crucial question is how does this change when considering the wage decline/growth between K and N across the papers three scenarios?
Here's the breakdown using the simple mean for hourly wage:
Scenario Knowledge Non-knowledge Gap K -> N penalty
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Current $45.17 $23.67 $21.51 47.6%
Modest $45.35 $23.93 $21.42 47.2%
Substantial $45.03 $25.07 $19.97 44.3%
Extreme $39.98 $31.62 $ 8.35 20.9%
Here's the breakdown using the occupation weighted mean for hourly wage:
Scenario Knowledge Non-knowledge Gap K -> N penalty
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Current $41.50 $23.40 $18.10 43.6%
Modest $41.67 $23.66 $18.01 43.2%
Substantial $41.38 $24.78 $16.59 40.1%
Extreme $36.73 $31.26 $ 5.47 14.9%
Looking at these tables, both in the current moment and across all three of the papers scenario, there is a large wage gap between K and N. Outside of the extreme scenario, this gap is >40%!
My immediate takeaways having done this bit of research is that if Anthropic is right and we're on track for either the substantial or extreme scenarios, *then many of us in this thread could see a large loss in hourly wages in the short term future.*
NOTE: I'm not an economist. I push pixels for a living. But if you are an economist and you find gaps in the following analysis, please inform me.
When children behind a battleship with child like mentality try to predict the future.
This could be the most cringe main-character-syndrome thing I've ever seen produced by a company in the history of silicon valley.
And the people treating this as serious economic forecasting rather than a marketing puff post are even more cringe.
If Anthropic truly believed LLMs were going to raise GDP growth to 8% permanently (or even just a few percent), instead of going public to raise capital they could just go massively leveraged long on the S&P 500 and get funding for eternity.
They are not doing that, because AI is largely only good at coding, their models barely have a 6-12 month lead over free ones, and software is only 1% of GDP.
And by making software cheaper and easier to produce, they might increase the amount of software in the world by 10X or even 100X, but it will become a smaller percentage of GDP as AI models become autonomously good at creating it. Things that are abundant and cheap don't raise GDP.
Hey Anthropic: before we worry about raising GDP growth to 20%, maybe we focus on making blog posts that don't crash your browser window if you try to resize it?
>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!"
Slick bullshit. That's AI.
The sociopaths running the show at present are probably hoping for a future that looks like the film "Elysium".
Man I wanted to dunk on this, but it’s honestly not terrible. Their predictions - while still firmly rooting for the extreme results - feel more grounded. I also appreciate the little simulator where I could plugin my own predictions (echoing many here, that AI won’t amplify productivity/lift standards so much as replace workers by shitty bosses), and that it seems to caution that, yep, most of these gains will trickle up given current incentives.
Where I remain resoundingly annoyed is how useless this is. It’s pure ass-covering by Anthropic ahead of an IPO, victim-blaming the populace for the outcomes of decisions made by Anthropic leadership and the investor class. Forgive the grisly analogy, but it’s akin to a mugger telling you “only you can stop this” mid-violence: Anthropic could have chosen to allocate more of its capital to reforms that benefit the populace, but they’ve chosen to focus on personal wealth instead via this IPO and for-profit rented access schemes.
It’s nauseating. Their actions still paint a picture of greed and exploitation rather than building a better tomorrow for everyone with AI, and the fact their PR puff pieces keep getting wallpapered up here is gross.
EDIT: I guess another way to look at this is Anthropic making it unequivocally clear that they will not stop of their own accord, and thus it falls to others to stop them. Which if that’s their position, then at least they’re honest about the challenge.
Cut the fucking crap Anthropic. While I personally benefit from AI at the moment I think with the way our society is organized / managed / ruled AI will help us to a major disaster
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So far LLMs seem to be a dead end technology. The work product is so poor that it can't effectively replace workers as advertised. If it was priced to margin it'd be more expensive than humans as well. It's objectively a failure.
> [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.
Hopefully free from the burden of LLM companies.
CEOs will make AI drive into the office for culture.
Knowledge workers are safe until FSD.