alt Hacker News> Also, Anthropic is showing that to operate at Anthropic level, you need $300,000 compute spend per employee
That's API-list prices. They have an 80% margin over COGS.
Cost per equivalent output is dropping 10x every 18 months -> so in 3-ish years, if the trend continues, that will be $3k per employee.
Not bad. A lot of companies are already spending about that much or more on IT per employee.
Especially since that $3k bakes in an 80% margin. It's about $600 per year if you DIY at scale - which is about $50 per month - but at the $3k price, hardly anyone is going to.
In the West old-age dependency ratio (retirees per working-age adult) is climbing roughly 0.5 to 0.7 percentage points per year.
We've got to get 0.7% more productive for employees to keep the same quality of life (unless retirees get screwed, and since they vote and make up a huge portion of the voting block, I wouldn't count on that happening).
Further, more and more of the population has to transition into into elder care.
Unless we hit 3%+ GDP growth, us workers are probably going to see declines in quality of life (and we're probably not going to get those levels of growth)...
Replies
[flagged]
> We've got to get 0.7% more productive for employees to keep the same quality of life
There's countless ways compensate for this gap, some of which are regulatory, others merely obvious (like the lack of a multi-trillion AI bubble in the future), the assumption that technological progress continues as modern levels (ie "same quality of life") with the changes that may entail. Ofc, the demographic shift (as you mentioned) changes what "quality of life" even means, making it even less deterministic.
> Unless we hit 3%+ GDP growth, us workers are probably going to see declines in quality of life (and we're probably not going to get those levels of growth)
The USA won't but Besset will claim that it did.