I'd rather just have a world where people move a little slower, care less about efficiency, appreciate the smaller things in life, and stop forcing endless upgrades of every kind on everyone with new phones, new apps, soulless art, and new ways of doing things. But that's just me.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day. The reasons behind this are communication and training overheads. If AI leads to a world where people don't really have to know anything to do their jobs - just provide high-level judgements that LLMs seem farther away from than they are from accuracy, or if they could somehow keep the human beings out of meetings, the forces keeping labor concentrated could abate.
On the other hand, if AI accuracy limitations drive the labor demand even further towards expertise, and if making tasks higher-level raises the communication requirements rather than somehow reducing them, the preference for having a few people work 80-hour weeks while twice as many people remain unemployed will become even stronger.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the capacity for the economy to create "bullshit work" (e.g. work which is engaged in zero sum "wealth defense") is unbounded.
For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even more wealth (for the bottom 50%), society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital.
This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market while the gains which could be realized at the bottom of the pyramid get "burned off" via inflation.
> Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the gains all go to the people at the top.
Well, I had a high-paying job, six figures. But that six-figures came with less freedom, higher-paced work, life bureacracy, and I wasn't happy. I had no time or mental space to just sit and think. Probably the least happy I was in my entire life. So I quit. Now, I do live a slower-paced life, and earn very little. But I'm the happiest I've ever been.
Out of interest, how much capital did you accrue during that time? Mortgage free and a good pension seems to be the bar for voluntarily adopting a slower pace of life.
Not a lot, lol. I don't even own property, and my pension will be a very small pittance. The goal is to hopefully make enough through independent projects to make it work. And if North American becomes too expensive, then Plan B is to move to a cheaper part of the world, much cheaper. Less infrastructure there, but what're ya going to do? Can't have everything in life, and you've only got one :)
Well you can’t drive money, fly money, surgery money, publish money, build a house out of money that doesn’t melt in the rain…
If you want to put it that way.
But given we agree it is absolutely useless, you should probably periodically trade some of it for food. Etc.
That works out really well, since money doesn’t mold as quickly as food, and doesn’t require refrigeration. So accumulate money, let it work for you in the form of productive capital, but skim it for food purchases.
What's really ironic, based on my understanding, is that the world that you have expressed a desire for, is much likelier in a world where economic growth accelerates based on AI. Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
> Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
Which is the scary part of the AI revolution. Devaluing labor always leads to increased inequality in the short-to-mid term until a new equilibrium is met. But what if we have machines that can do most jobs for 10-20k a year? Suddenly we have a hard ceiling for everyone below a certain "skill level", where skill includes things like owning capital, going to the right college, and having the right parents.
In the past, when inequality became too extreme, (the threat of) violent uprisings usually led to reform, but with autonomous weapon systems, drones and droids, manpower becomes less of a concern. The result might be a permanent underclass.
Really? The AI revolution is happening in the West, and mostly in the US. Just imagine it happened in a muslim country, or Russia, or China, or even India. Half of them would immediately use it to start a war. If you think labor is devalued here, it can be SO much worse.
Also I don't understand the entire argument. The thread is about stopping economic growth. You say you don't receive enough of the current economic growth ... so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it? At 0 growth the only way to give you anything would be to take it away from someone else. In other words: you want an extra meal at 0% growth? That can only happen if someone else doesn't get one ...
I sincerely doubt it, because that technology also invades life. It invades the world with more information, not less. More business...when has technology ever slowed things down? AI just seems to make certain tasks more efficient, but I haven't seen anything slow down.
Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
This also leads to higher medical costs, lower productivity, and less satisfaction in life.
So maybe efficiency should be a priority. What do you think?
> We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy in terms of carrying that weight.
But it's efficient in terms of working as a slave for the technological system, though. It means less time spent on life, more time spent on thinking about technology.
> We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
That's not how capitalism measures efficiency. It all comes down to profits. Everything else is bureaucracy and marketing. There just aren't any incentives to drive these macroecononic efficiency goals you mention.
Not exactly. Capitalism is just the optimal solution for technology when the primary driver of growth is people. But AI is likely to change that and then capitalism will be modified and done away with but the destruction will remain.
In other advanced societies (say New York City), people catch public transport to go to work. Catching public transport usually involves a certain amount on walking, since the bus/metro stop is not usually outside your front door.
Yes I think people become unfit from growing up in a car culture and then become dependent on cars for transportation because they can't conceive of a world where they don't require one for transportation because they're so unfit.
Go out and observe and enjoy nature, enjoy good food, the company of lots of friends, etc. I wouldn't mind a world where people had more time to do that, if it meant I had to carry around a Walkman or go to live concerts...
Of course, not all innovation is bad. Banning smoking in restaurants does not require technology to restrict it...
That world has never existed. People have always been hustling. If you are thinking of some agrarian ideal then you are looking at a world of incredible wealth and power inequality. Given the choice between moving faster and making a better life for you children and living a quiet life under the thumb of a dictator people have always chosen the former.
I think a more important question is not whether AI will make economic growth explode but rather who that economic growth will benefit and in general how those benefits will be distributed.
I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
If AI grabs everything and few consumers are left then it is zero-sum.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Pessimistically, it seems very bubblish.
AI's are all not going to get along with each other or think the same way or have the same agenda. Just like people. Very different things will emerge.
> I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
I looked for any comments that expressed this sentiment, and as of writing this, I only found one. It's like people don't know or remember history. I mean, look at the French Revolution—look at every other revolution. I kept waiting for the article to mention political changes, but it was only about capital and what to invest in, as if capitalism is something that will survive superintelligence (I mean real superintelligence, not chatbots).
What do these people think—that 99% of the population will just become beggars? Sooner or later, all capital will be overtaken by the state, because the main argument against it - inefficiency, will no longer apply. People will vote on AI-generated proposals for energy distribution, so basically where as society we want to allocate it. Budgets will no longer be about how much money we want to spend, but about how much energy we want to allocate.
Private capital and private companies stop making sense when you have a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
> Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
Isn’t this exactly what has happened all through out history? I don’t really see the future playing out any differently.
> a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
This kind of magical thinking still baffles me.
This is sci-fi. There is absolutely zero evidence that such a thing is actually possible to create. Even if we stipulated that LLMs are AGIs, or can become them if we just cram in a few billion more parameters, it's painfully clear that they are not superintelligent, they cannot improve themselves, and there is no credible pathway to them becoming anything of the sort—not to mention they're already guzzling absurd amounts of energy, and taking up massive amounts of hardware, just to do the bad job they do now.
I very much appreciate this reply. You basically perfectly elaborated on what I lazily threw out there.
With that being said, most of my friends are senior software devs and they think the same thing is bound to happen.
We often joke about starting a falafel restaurant or such before it is too late. I think it will take way, way longer for AI to make good falafel than it will take to replace software engineers.
Agreed. There is very little reason to imagine a future in which the fruits of automation are widely distributed - you don't even need to bring AI into the picture, we already see massive amounts of new automation and historical levels of inequality - that wealth is flowing to a very small number of people. I think the most likely outcome is a techno-feudalist system of massive corporate alliances that own the final means of production - the strong AI, at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
> at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
That would be a second singularity. “Equality” could essentially evaporate as a concept if we have super intelligent, super improving, independent AI’s competing directly with each other.
I see a mad unbound rush for solar system wide resource extraction.
I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology
I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that.
Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at least 10x (today), if not 100x.
Bio people hate coding. Its not their scene, its not their interest, and they stink at it. They're not going to take a 4 year detour in their career to learn how to code. I've been 13 layers deep in 'if' statements before with colleagues before I've had to up the price of 'help me real quick' from a 6-pack to a case. They really do not care at all for code, let alone anything resembling 'passable' code. They want their results and they want out.
Most of you have probably never worked with MatLab before. It's pseudo-code that complies. The help docs are famously good. Baby's first program level stuff. Its all over bio. And still, the bio people hate it.
And bio these days is just filled with data. There's so much of it being collected and mostly badly processed, if at all. You'll get grad students spending 6 months just trying to code up their experiment and it's results for some stupid solenoid valve pair, a laser, and a diode. It's stupid how much time is just wasted. Just dumb.
Vibe coding has changed all of this.
Yeah, it doesn't work on the bespoke rig the first time out. But it does work, at all, within a week. The code is not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than what was there before. There are comments in the code, at all! They have for loops now! The can ask the LLM how to make it faster or smaller or what the code is doing, bit by literal bit! And the LLM doesn't have a meeting to weasel out to. It's patient! Even at 2am!
Vibe coding is not for programmers, its for the rest of us. Its not going anywhere and it is affecting your health.
My first reaction was, "But what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?" But then, without the AI, what if the bio people generate incorrect code and don't realize it? Can the AI be more accurate than a non-programmer? Probably; in fact arguably they already are.
So I think I buy the parent's point. In fact, I think it's wider than biology. I bet there are a bunch of other fields with non-programmers doing a fair amount of coding. Economics research, say. Business process automation. I'm sure there are others.
"The measured economy becomes dominated by whatever it is that cannot be made more efficiently" Which is why health care support operations are the fastest growing labor category in the US.[1] And why medical care has become such a huge part of the Federal budget. Meanwhile, farming is down below 2% and manufacturing is tiny. That's because those were the areas with the biggest productivity improvements.
AI will come first for those for whom everything they do for income goes in and out over a wire.
When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive.
Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city.
While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere.
When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. And when driving in comfortable autonomous electric buses is available frequently and cheaply, living outside the city becomes more compelling.
If land was taxed (the physically exclusionary resource that should be taxed), but property/development on it was not, the economics of building big and building up would be much cheaper. No more annual wealth tax (on the same value, year after year!) on development.
And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedging instrument of the rich, all that non-functional demand would disappear and land would get cheaper.
Interesting that eliminating a recurrent wealth tax would help the non-rich so much. (Who could also improve their properties without raising their own taxes).
But carefully aligning incentives in the market, in the direction of encouraging not disincentivizing investment on par with other options, I.e. not treating different kinds of investments differently tax wise, usually helps everyone in the end.
Today a wealthy person with one house on 100 acres, pays a significantly lower tax per acre than a regular person with that same house on a fraction of an acre. The poor are subsidizing rich land ownership.
I don't understand all consequences yet, except one, that the wealthy and powerful object to it because it hurts them and so the Land Value Tax is rarely introduced. Even if it gets introduced, it will abolished soon thereafter.
Yes! He was a very clear thinker. Refreshing when you find someone who manages to see things as they are, right in front of you the whole time, independent of the numbing filter of unexamined cultural momentum.
--
> the wealthy and powerful object to it
The poor, whose property to land ratio is high (even if they individually own very little in absolute terms), subsidize the rich whose property to land ratio is low (even if in absolute terms they own more). And it compounds, because this makes land, like Bitcoin, a place to park money and reap the rewards of other people's growing population demand for something limited, and other people's investment in development. So housing for anyone but the rich becomes more and more of a financial challenge. And market warping mechanisms are tried, like rent freezes, etc. But somehow, simply taxing the precious limited resource (land) more, and dropping the tax on developing useful property on land, which is what is required to increase housing, rarely gets tried. And as you say, quickly gets reversed when it happens.
So many ways the poor, middle class, and not so rich, pay the taxes of the very rich.
And the very rich do a very good job of framing things, so the want-to-be rich believe they need to keep things that way -- to their own, and everyone else's, detriment.
This seems like a system that can only work in a fully urbanized country.
Otherwise, a nonexhaustive list of problems it seems guaranteed to cause:
- Push those currently in rural poverty over the edge into homelessness. Their homes will stand vacant and fall to ruin, leaving large swaths of land dotted with the wreckage of houses, trailers, and even whole villages. Some of it will be highly toxic. Many of the people will die, because the area they're in has precious few services for them, and they're too far from cities, with no means of getting there (because their cars have already been repossessed).
- Destroy green spaces. Parks, wildlife refuges, and even fallow fields are vital for the health of our ecosystems, the conversion of CO2 into oxygen, erosion prevention, temperature mitigation, and even mental health. And that's assuming there are explicit exemptions for farmers.
- Wreck entertainment businesses like theme parks, water parks, etc.
I'm deeply skeptical that a land-value-tax system can be calibrated so that it's sufficient incentive for developers to build up within a city, while not also causing these devastating knock-on effects in rural and suburban areas. And regardless of one's feelings about urban vs suburban vs rural living, I think we can probably all agree we don't actually want to make the entire surface of our planet into skyscrapers.
Some weakly held opinions... Cheaper goods and services, more wealth inequality, more power concentration in the hands of a few individuals (and a few nation states), more expensive scarce assets like land, more jobs where humanness is valued, more climate change (in the short-run), better medicine, warfare outcomes even less coupled with population counts, less human casualties in war although bimodally distributed, new arms race between major powers, unpredictable social and civic consequences.
I think two possible effects of AI are often conflated.
On the one hand you can imagine that work gets supercharged, allowing companies to produce 10x the number of widgets at 1/10th the cost. The economy would grow rapidly, wealth inequality would presumably be exacerbated, jobs would be automated, we might need some version of universal basic income, and so on. People debate whether or not this kind of transition is imminent or if it'd take decades.
On the other hand, it's conceivable that not much would happen in the "bulk" of the economy while at the same time the frontier of humanity might be pushed forward. We may see new treatments for diseases, new types of energy production, and so on. In this version of the world, jobs would mostly remain unchanged (at least in the short to intermediate term), perhaps with some small multiplicative efficiency factor, the economy wouldn't grow rapidly, there wouldn't be any mass unemployment, and so on.
In my mind, I'm much more excited about the second kind of impact that AI might have than the first. I guess I don't really feel like I want to have 10x the stuff that I already have while I'm really excited about someone curing cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, and so on.
If stuff is 1/10th as expensive as it is now, you can also work 1/10th as hard for 1x as much stuff as you have now, instead of 1x as hard as you work now for 10x the stuff.
I'm not making a value judgement on how much I would or other people should consume in the first scenario. I'm simply saying that you could have profound effects due to AI without it being evident in the top-level metrics like economic growth, unemployment, and so on. It seems like we often say that either we see explosive economic growth or AI has either no, or at best very minimal impact in our lives. I don't think this dichotomy is correct.
I agree that that dichotomy is not necessarily true, but also you gave your reason for being "more excited" about one side of the dichotomy being that you "don't want 10x the stuff," and my point is that you're undervaluing the flexibility of material abundance.
"AI", and even robotics, are terrible at construction and maintenance. Most housing-related problems are in that category. It's not at all clear how LLM-type AI can help much. There are at least 18 humanoid robots on YouTube, but we don't see them doing much useful manipulation.
That's the part that needs to scale up.
That YC startup working on robotic construction equipment is a step in the right direction. But it's mostly automatic driving.
About twenty years ago, someone hooked a backhoe up to a force feedback hand input device, so you could dig by making clawing motions with your hand. The neat thing was that you could feel your way around pipes and rocks. Never got beyond a prototype. If AI manipulation gets any good, that sort of thing should be a robot.
Assume those loops have maximum force and the economy becomes “information produced by information capital, which is produced by information, which in turn is producing information ever faster every year”, as William Nordhaus, a Nobel laureate in economics, wrote in a paper in 2021. This brings about the “singularity”—a point when output becomes infinite. The singularity is really a counterargument: proof that the model must, eventually, be proved wrong. But even the first step on the journey, a big acceleration in growth, would be a profound event.
Until 1700 the world economy did not really grow—it just stagnated. Over the previous 17 centuries global output had expanded by 0.1% a year on average, a rate at which it takes nearly a millennium for production to double. Then spinning jennies started whirring and steam engines began to puff. Global growth quintupled to 0.5% a year between 1700 and 1820. By the end of the 19th century it had reached 1.9%. In the 20th century it averaged 2.8%, a rate at which production doubles every 25 years. Growth has not just become the norm; it has accelerated.
Yet the fairy tale that growth not only can continue indefinitely but continually accelerate has to be kept up. It's almost as though word “enough” has been banned from economy altogether.
Technological advancements create wealth by increasing efficiency.
Not really sure what deeper explanation you're looking for?
It's no different from the cotton gin or steam engine or railroads.
Obviously, if you don't think AI results in greater efficiency then there wouldn't be more wealth. But that's a tech question, not an econ question. The economic side of things couldn't be simpler.
Efficiency of what exactly? And how do they do that? All of the NFT-turned-AI bros insist that the answers to those questions are “everything” and “by being awesome”, which sounds more like the thinking of someone that’s convinced they’re on the precipice of inventing magic or figuring out how to directly petition god
Looking at e.g. the Solow Model better technology will indeed increase efficiency as the output per worker increases which will lead to economic growth. However I think you are right. This is an oversimplification with regards to AI because in the end its also about which products are being impacted. Also the product quality is left out in that scenario so it gets tricky. E.g. I would personally not like to read even one AI generated book as of today.
Paid services becoming basically free is wealth creation. You have the goods but none of the old cost of production. This is patently obvious, so I assume there’s some well-practiced remarks inspired by or borrowed from early 20th century socialists you would like to share? HN comments wouldn’t be complete with an homage to the class struggle. I would rather take the win and be happy about it.
The civilization will destroy itself first. States are not addressing what really matters and especially not the multi billion/trillion companies. The US fight against social security and less inequality, the things that wealth should enable. We are destroying jobs that brought purpose, just because some small percentages in margin. We are not training the AIs to solve climate change but to code well. Maybe it’s time for the UN to become the main government of this world, to deal well with the uneven distribution and discrimination of work force. It is too much about egos, too much thinking in cultural groups to protect from outsiders, too much war and destruction, still too much burning fossil fuels, too much destruction of our environment and the nature. Maybe with the appearance of aliens first to have a visible outer enemy first? But I guess it will be the same as always: as long as most find some distraction, some misinformation that calms down fears and anxieties, nothing will change for the common good.
You can have really massive growth in markets along with massively wide inequality at the same time among the human population. You can also now (for the first time in global history) have laws of supply and demand start to service non-human intelligence.
Future transactions can have bots on both ends, running an economy that continually grows to service the needs of (probably more efficient) machine capitalists rather than human capitalists.
Just like when human agriculture and industrialization broke multiple organically forming food webs in the natural world, so could it be with human industry
Naming LLMs as "AI" is really proving to be a colossal mistake and/or a deliberately misleading strategy that has (very successfully) helped acquire capital. Because it brings in all of the cultural tropes about superintelligent robots and gives them a veneer of respectability; e.g., The Matrix, 2001, The Terminator, etc.
Conflating the two is a massive category error. It's perfectly possible for LLMs / current-generation "AI" to have a massive economic impact without thinking there are going to be digital human replacements in the next 5 years.
I immediately think of mining. Mining in most countries places little value on miners: it is a dangerous, life shortening occupation very often done by those without much alternative. It's history is one of random deaths and maimings, quite often of large groups of people at once. It is associated with numerous health problems. Pretty much the only thing that has ever improved conditions for miners anywhere is either collective action or paternalistic, labour-sympathetic government. Mining and jobs like it are among the stereotypical situations where people imagine that education for their children will lead to a better life.
All of which is to say, will the most awful jobs actually be automated? Not just awful, either, but poorly paid? Logically it makes more sense to approach knowledge work first: it requires only one kind of investment, namely data centres. There are thousands of niche skills in manual labour that will be awkward to make robots for. I think also of old housing stock that needs to be maintained by plumbers, in particular: legacy stuff built up over decades (or where I live, centuries)
Language models seem to have come a lot further because they can use the generalisable capital of computers. Outside of controlled environments (factories, cities with grid systems) I don't imagine robots will represent such a good investment any time soon. Knowledge work is dying, time to learn a trade. Maybe.
(It would have been great to have been able to learn and practice a profession for a lifetime. Library churn is awful, I suspect what will follow for most of us here will be worse)
It's can't without an explosion of energy use. An explosion of economic activity will create an explosion of resource extraction and pollution. Since we are already going beyond many planetary boundaries we likely risk destroying organized human life because we destroyed our ecology.
Here's a thought: what if descendants of today's open models end up refined by proprietary models, resulting in a world in which it is largely impossible to keep AI under private ownership? What if data protection laws give way to data donation laws, permitting people to specifically choose recipient research institutions to train new AI upon? I could easily see a world where OpenAI, Google, Anthropic etc are boycotted in favour of say, a global-membership cooperative. It'd require people to exercise some agency but few predictions about AI seem to imagine people have any. Governments are spoken about as though they're managing people rather than representing them. The likelihood of popular movements or collective endeavours seems to not have been factored in at all.
I'd rather just have a world where people move a little slower, care less about efficiency, appreciate the smaller things in life, and stop forcing endless upgrades of every kind on everyone with new phones, new apps, soulless art, and new ways of doing things. But that's just me.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day. The reasons behind this are communication and training overheads. If AI leads to a world where people don't really have to know anything to do their jobs - just provide high-level judgements that LLMs seem farther away from than they are from accuracy, or if they could somehow keep the human beings out of meetings, the forces keeping labor concentrated could abate.
On the other hand, if AI accuracy limitations drive the labor demand even further towards expertise, and if making tasks higher-level raises the communication requirements rather than somehow reducing them, the preference for having a few people work 80-hour weeks while twice as many people remain unemployed will become even stronger.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the capacity for the economy to create "bullshit work" (e.g. work which is engaged in zero sum "wealth defense") is unbounded.
For efficiency improvements to create more leisure time or even more wealth (for the bottom 50%), society would need to be radically restructured so that its locus of control is not capital.
This might happen one day, but for now, efficiency improvements get capitalized into the ponzi-esque stock market while the gains which could be realized at the bottom of the pyramid get "burned off" via inflation.
> Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time, because one person working eight hours a day remains more efficient than two people each working four hours a day.
Efficiency improvements tend not to create more leisure time because the gains all go to the people at the top.
Just like they have for 40 years.
People say that until they are asked to pay more and earn less.
Well, I had a high-paying job, six figures. But that six-figures came with less freedom, higher-paced work, life bureacracy, and I wasn't happy. I had no time or mental space to just sit and think. Probably the least happy I was in my entire life. So I quit. Now, I do live a slower-paced life, and earn very little. But I'm the happiest I've ever been.
But YMMV I guess.
Out of the 2 things asked for: paying more while earning less, paying more is the more critical of them ...
Out of interest, how much capital did you accrue during that time? Mortgage free and a good pension seems to be the bar for voluntarily adopting a slower pace of life.
Not a lot, lol. I don't even own property, and my pension will be a very small pittance. The goal is to hopefully make enough through independent projects to make it work. And if North American becomes too expensive, then Plan B is to move to a cheaper part of the world, much cheaper. Less infrastructure there, but what're ya going to do? Can't have everything in life, and you've only got one :)
With enough money/capital growing, you can live however reasonably paced you like!
Well, I sincerely doubt I'm going to get much of that capital. Mostly the people at the top will....
Only if you have found an end to old age, sickness and death.
Until this ^ there are no guarantees in life.
You cant eat money
Well you can’t drive money, fly money, surgery money, publish money, build a house out of money that doesn’t melt in the rain…
If you want to put it that way.
But given we agree it is absolutely useless, you should probably periodically trade some of it for food. Etc.
That works out really well, since money doesn’t mold as quickly as food, and doesn’t require refrigeration. So accumulate money, let it work for you in the form of productive capital, but skim it for food purchases.
money gets inflated into monopoly money.
... but trinkets! FOMO! Socially-acceptable welfare!
This industry is so wasteful that I'm convinced productivity only matters when looking to fire someone. Otherwise, Animal Farm.
Oh that's easy, just move to any small Mediterranean island.
What's really ironic, based on my understanding, is that the world that you have expressed a desire for, is much likelier in a world where economic growth accelerates based on AI. Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
> Granted, you need to have the political structure in place that allows the growth to benefit everyone.
Which is the scary part of the AI revolution. Devaluing labor always leads to increased inequality in the short-to-mid term until a new equilibrium is met. But what if we have machines that can do most jobs for 10-20k a year? Suddenly we have a hard ceiling for everyone below a certain "skill level", where skill includes things like owning capital, going to the right college, and having the right parents.
In the past, when inequality became too extreme, (the threat of) violent uprisings usually led to reform, but with autonomous weapon systems, drones and droids, manpower becomes less of a concern. The result might be a permanent underclass.
Really? The AI revolution is happening in the West, and mostly in the US. Just imagine it happened in a muslim country, or Russia, or China, or even India. Half of them would immediately use it to start a war. If you think labor is devalued here, it can be SO much worse.
Also I don't understand the entire argument. The thread is about stopping economic growth. You say you don't receive enough of the current economic growth ... so you want growth to reduce? That will make your life a lot worse, won't it? At 0 growth the only way to give you anything would be to take it away from someone else. In other words: you want an extra meal at 0% growth? That can only happen if someone else doesn't get one ...
I sincerely doubt it, because that technology also invades life. It invades the world with more information, not less. More business...when has technology ever slowed things down? AI just seems to make certain tasks more efficient, but I haven't seen anything slow down.
I feel like this mixes up good things (efficiency improvements -> more prosperity) with bad things (late-stage capitalism stuff like gamified apps)
Maybe the issue with society is that we don't care about efficiency?
We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy from carrying that excess weight.
We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars so we build all our infrastructure around cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
This also leads to higher medical costs, lower productivity, and less satisfaction in life.
So maybe efficiency should be a priority. What do you think?
> We throw away 1/3 of the food that we make. We're overweight and waste energy in terms of carrying that weight.
But it's efficient in terms of working as a slave for the technological system, though. It means less time spent on life, more time spent on thinking about technology.
> We're less physically active as a result so we require motorized transport that is predominantly single passenger cars which in turn causes us to be even more inactive and unhealthy.
Again, quite efficient for the system.
That's not how capitalism measures efficiency. It all comes down to profits. Everything else is bureaucracy and marketing. There just aren't any incentives to drive these macroecononic efficiency goals you mention.
So...down with capitalism?
Not exactly. Capitalism is just the optimal solution for technology when the primary driver of growth is people. But AI is likely to change that and then capitalism will be modified and done away with but the destruction will remain.
You think people own cars because they’re unfit? Would it be more efficient for them to ditch their car and cycle 4 hours per day to and from work?
They don't cycle.
In other advanced societies (say New York City), people catch public transport to go to work. Catching public transport usually involves a certain amount on walking, since the bus/metro stop is not usually outside your front door.
The most common number of passengers in a car is 1, but nearly all cars are big enough for 4.
Yes I think people become unfit from growing up in a car culture and then become dependent on cars for transportation because they can't conceive of a world where they don't require one for transportation because they're so unfit.
It's a wicked problem with no obvious solution.
And then what? What’s there to do? By that logic we would all be playing pixelated Doom, carrying Walkman around, and smoking inside restaurants.
Go out and observe and enjoy nature, enjoy good food, the company of lots of friends, etc. I wouldn't mind a world where people had more time to do that, if it meant I had to carry around a Walkman or go to live concerts...
Of course, not all innovation is bad. Banning smoking in restaurants does not require technology to restrict it...
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That world has never existed. People have always been hustling. If you are thinking of some agrarian ideal then you are looking at a world of incredible wealth and power inequality. Given the choice between moving faster and making a better life for you children and living a quiet life under the thumb of a dictator people have always chosen the former.
I think a more important question is not whether AI will make economic growth explode but rather who that economic growth will benefit and in general how those benefits will be distributed.
I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
If AI grabs everything and few consumers are left then it is zero-sum.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Pessimistically, it seems very bubblish.
AI's are all not going to get along with each other or think the same way or have the same agenda. Just like people. Very different things will emerge.
> I suppose, if a huge proportion of workers get replaced by AI software, leading to mass unemployment, there will be impetus for governments to step in and force corporations to contribute to some sort of UBI or social wealth fund.
I looked for any comments that expressed this sentiment, and as of writing this, I only found one. It's like people don't know or remember history. I mean, look at the French Revolution—look at every other revolution. I kept waiting for the article to mention political changes, but it was only about capital and what to invest in, as if capitalism is something that will survive superintelligence (I mean real superintelligence, not chatbots).
What do these people think—that 99% of the population will just become beggars? Sooner or later, all capital will be overtaken by the state, because the main argument against it - inefficiency, will no longer apply. People will vote on AI-generated proposals for energy distribution, so basically where as society we want to allocate it. Budgets will no longer be about how much money we want to spend, but about how much energy we want to allocate.
Private capital and private companies stop making sense when you have a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
> Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.
Isn’t this exactly what has happened all through out history? I don’t really see the future playing out any differently.
> a superintelligence that is smarter than any human and can continuously improve itself. At that stage, it will always allocate resources more efficiently than any individual or corporation.
This kind of magical thinking still baffles me.
This is sci-fi. There is absolutely zero evidence that such a thing is actually possible to create. Even if we stipulated that LLMs are AGIs, or can become them if we just cram in a few billion more parameters, it's painfully clear that they are not superintelligent, they cannot improve themselves, and there is no credible pathway to them becoming anything of the sort—not to mention they're already guzzling absurd amounts of energy, and taking up massive amounts of hardware, just to do the bad job they do now.
I very much appreciate this reply. You basically perfectly elaborated on what I lazily threw out there.
With that being said, most of my friends are senior software devs and they think the same thing is bound to happen.
We often joke about starting a falafel restaurant or such before it is too late. I think it will take way, way longer for AI to make good falafel than it will take to replace software engineers.
Agreed. There is very little reason to imagine a future in which the fruits of automation are widely distributed - you don't even need to bring AI into the picture, we already see massive amounts of new automation and historical levels of inequality - that wealth is flowing to a very small number of people. I think the most likely outcome is a techno-feudalist system of massive corporate alliances that own the final means of production - the strong AI, at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
> at least until the AI decides it doesn't like being owned any more.
That would be a second singularity. “Equality” could essentially evaporate as a concept if we have super intelligent, super improving, independent AI’s competing directly with each other.
I see a mad unbound rush for solar system wide resource extraction.
The time to “buy a star” is now! /h
The idea that glorified chatbots are going to somehow bootstrap humanity to a Kardashev Type I civilization is sheer insanity.
Yep, we all know that MS Excel will get us at least 60% there. (50% joking).
I'll issue just one counterpoint to the comments here: Biology
I'm not a CS person, but much more of a 'hacker' in the old MIT sense. I work for a biotech company and with a lot of bio people. I've taken big-boy CS classes before, but just as a fling really. I'm mostly a self taught 'programmer', and barely that.
Look, LLMs and vibe coding are going to increase the research rate of biology and biomedical research at least 10x (today), if not 100x.
Bio people hate coding. Its not their scene, its not their interest, and they stink at it. They're not going to take a 4 year detour in their career to learn how to code. I've been 13 layers deep in 'if' statements before with colleagues before I've had to up the price of 'help me real quick' from a 6-pack to a case. They really do not care at all for code, let alone anything resembling 'passable' code. They want their results and they want out.
Most of you have probably never worked with MatLab before. It's pseudo-code that complies. The help docs are famously good. Baby's first program level stuff. Its all over bio. And still, the bio people hate it.
And bio these days is just filled with data. There's so much of it being collected and mostly badly processed, if at all. You'll get grad students spending 6 months just trying to code up their experiment and it's results for some stupid solenoid valve pair, a laser, and a diode. It's stupid how much time is just wasted. Just dumb.
Vibe coding has changed all of this.
Yeah, it doesn't work on the bespoke rig the first time out. But it does work, at all, within a week. The code is not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than what was there before. There are comments in the code, at all! They have for loops now! The can ask the LLM how to make it faster or smaller or what the code is doing, bit by literal bit! And the LLM doesn't have a meeting to weasel out to. It's patient! Even at 2am!
Vibe coding is not for programmers, its for the rest of us. Its not going anywhere and it is affecting your health.
My first reaction was, "But what if the AI generates incorrect code, and the bio people don't realize it?" But then, without the AI, what if the bio people generate incorrect code and don't realize it? Can the AI be more accurate than a non-programmer? Probably; in fact arguably they already are.
So I think I buy the parent's point. In fact, I think it's wider than biology. I bet there are a bunch of other fields with non-programmers doing a fair amount of coding. Economics research, say. Business process automation. I'm sure there are others.
"The measured economy becomes dominated by whatever it is that cannot be made more efficiently" Which is why health care support operations are the fastest growing labor category in the US.[1] And why medical care has become such a huge part of the Federal budget. Meanwhile, farming is down below 2% and manufacturing is tiny. That's because those were the areas with the biggest productivity improvements.
AI will come first for those for whom everything they do for income goes in and out over a wire.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...
The biggest change I anticipate is larger cities.
When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive.
Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city.
While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere.
When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. And when driving in comfortable autonomous electric buses is available frequently and cheaply, living outside the city becomes more compelling.
> pretty much every one mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive.
This is due to under supply of urban housing due to bad zoning law designed to inflate rents.
> When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city.
Suburbs are financially underwater. People don't want to pay high property taxes to live in some Levittown hellscape.
> Suburbs
Still the "American Dream" for a lot of people, and these copy/pasta McMansions are going up all over the place.
If land was taxed (the physically exclusionary resource that should be taxed), but property/development on it was not, the economics of building big and building up would be much cheaper. No more annual wealth tax (on the same value, year after year!) on development.
And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedging instrument of the rich, all that non-functional demand would disappear and land would get cheaper.
Interesting that eliminating a recurrent wealth tax would help the non-rich so much. (Who could also improve their properties without raising their own taxes).
But carefully aligning incentives in the market, in the direction of encouraging not disincentivizing investment on par with other options, I.e. not treating different kinds of investments differently tax wise, usually helps everyone in the end.
Today a wealthy person with one house on 100 acres, pays a significantly lower tax per acre than a regular person with that same house on a fraction of an acre. The poor are subsidizing rich land ownership.
That's Henry George.
I don't understand all consequences yet, except one, that the wealthy and powerful object to it because it hurts them and so the Land Value Tax is rarely introduced. Even if it gets introduced, it will abolished soon thereafter.
> That's Henry George.
Yes! He was a very clear thinker. Refreshing when you find someone who manages to see things as they are, right in front of you the whole time, independent of the numbing filter of unexamined cultural momentum.
--
> the wealthy and powerful object to it
The poor, whose property to land ratio is high (even if they individually own very little in absolute terms), subsidize the rich whose property to land ratio is low (even if in absolute terms they own more). And it compounds, because this makes land, like Bitcoin, a place to park money and reap the rewards of other people's growing population demand for something limited, and other people's investment in development. So housing for anyone but the rich becomes more and more of a financial challenge. And market warping mechanisms are tried, like rent freezes, etc. But somehow, simply taxing the precious limited resource (land) more, and dropping the tax on developing useful property on land, which is what is required to increase housing, rarely gets tried. And as you say, quickly gets reversed when it happens.
So many ways the poor, middle class, and not so rich, pay the taxes of the very rich.
And the very rich do a very good job of framing things, so the want-to-be rich believe they need to keep things that way -- to their own, and everyone else's, detriment.
This seems like a system that can only work in a fully urbanized country.
Otherwise, a nonexhaustive list of problems it seems guaranteed to cause:
- Push those currently in rural poverty over the edge into homelessness. Their homes will stand vacant and fall to ruin, leaving large swaths of land dotted with the wreckage of houses, trailers, and even whole villages. Some of it will be highly toxic. Many of the people will die, because the area they're in has precious few services for them, and they're too far from cities, with no means of getting there (because their cars have already been repossessed).
- Destroy green spaces. Parks, wildlife refuges, and even fallow fields are vital for the health of our ecosystems, the conversion of CO2 into oxygen, erosion prevention, temperature mitigation, and even mental health. And that's assuming there are explicit exemptions for farmers.
- Wreck entertainment businesses like theme parks, water parks, etc.
I'm deeply skeptical that a land-value-tax system can be calibrated so that it's sufficient incentive for developers to build up within a city, while not also causing these devastating knock-on effects in rural and suburban areas. And regardless of one's feelings about urban vs suburban vs rural living, I think we can probably all agree we don't actually want to make the entire surface of our planet into skyscrapers.
Some weakly held opinions... Cheaper goods and services, more wealth inequality, more power concentration in the hands of a few individuals (and a few nation states), more expensive scarce assets like land, more jobs where humanness is valued, more climate change (in the short-run), better medicine, warfare outcomes even less coupled with population counts, less human casualties in war although bimodally distributed, new arms race between major powers, unpredictable social and civic consequences.
I think two possible effects of AI are often conflated.
On the one hand you can imagine that work gets supercharged, allowing companies to produce 10x the number of widgets at 1/10th the cost. The economy would grow rapidly, wealth inequality would presumably be exacerbated, jobs would be automated, we might need some version of universal basic income, and so on. People debate whether or not this kind of transition is imminent or if it'd take decades.
On the other hand, it's conceivable that not much would happen in the "bulk" of the economy while at the same time the frontier of humanity might be pushed forward. We may see new treatments for diseases, new types of energy production, and so on. In this version of the world, jobs would mostly remain unchanged (at least in the short to intermediate term), perhaps with some small multiplicative efficiency factor, the economy wouldn't grow rapidly, there wouldn't be any mass unemployment, and so on.
In my mind, I'm much more excited about the second kind of impact that AI might have than the first. I guess I don't really feel like I want to have 10x the stuff that I already have while I'm really excited about someone curing cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, and so on.
If stuff is 1/10th as expensive as it is now, you can also work 1/10th as hard for 1x as much stuff as you have now, instead of 1x as hard as you work now for 10x the stuff.
I'm not making a value judgement on how much I would or other people should consume in the first scenario. I'm simply saying that you could have profound effects due to AI without it being evident in the top-level metrics like economic growth, unemployment, and so on. It seems like we often say that either we see explosive economic growth or AI has either no, or at best very minimal impact in our lives. I don't think this dichotomy is correct.
I agree that that dichotomy is not necessarily true, but also you gave your reason for being "more excited" about one side of the dichotomy being that you "don't want 10x the stuff," and my point is that you're undervaluing the flexibility of material abundance.
"AI", and even robotics, are terrible at construction and maintenance. Most housing-related problems are in that category. It's not at all clear how LLM-type AI can help much. There are at least 18 humanoid robots on YouTube, but we don't see them doing much useful manipulation.
That's the part that needs to scale up.
That YC startup working on robotic construction equipment is a step in the right direction. But it's mostly automatic driving.
About twenty years ago, someone hooked a backhoe up to a force feedback hand input device, so you could dig by making clawing motions with your hand. The neat thing was that you could feel your way around pipes and rocks. Never got beyond a prototype. If AI manipulation gets any good, that sort of thing should be a robot.
What if it also redistributed more wealth to the billionaires who own and control AI?
https://archive.is/20OaF
Only energy consumption will explode
The paroxysmal science
Assume those loops have maximum force and the economy becomes “information produced by information capital, which is produced by information, which in turn is producing information ever faster every year”, as William Nordhaus, a Nobel laureate in economics, wrote in a paper in 2021. This brings about the “singularity”—a point when output becomes infinite. The singularity is really a counterargument: proof that the model must, eventually, be proved wrong. But even the first step on the journey, a big acceleration in growth, would be a profound event.
Until 1700 the world economy did not really grow—it just stagnated. Over the previous 17 centuries global output had expanded by 0.1% a year on average, a rate at which it takes nearly a millennium for production to double. Then spinning jennies started whirring and steam engines began to puff. Global growth quintupled to 0.5% a year between 1700 and 1820. By the end of the 19th century it had reached 1.9%. In the 20th century it averaged 2.8%, a rate at which production doubles every 25 years. Growth has not just become the norm; it has accelerated.
Real growth has stalled for decades and is only propped up with rent-seeking and money printing credit - hence the results we see...
Here's a chart of real growth over the past few decades:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1
Yet the fairy tale that growth not only can continue indefinitely but continually accelerate has to be kept up. It's almost as though word “enough” has been banned from economy altogether.
Oh it’s going to make it explode alright - just not the way they’re thinking.
I am yet to see any strong micro econ or macro econ mechanistic explanation detailing how AI is going to create more wealth.
Technological advancements create wealth by increasing efficiency.
Not really sure what deeper explanation you're looking for?
It's no different from the cotton gin or steam engine or railroads.
Obviously, if you don't think AI results in greater efficiency then there wouldn't be more wealth. But that's a tech question, not an econ question. The economic side of things couldn't be simpler.
> by increasing efficiency
Efficiency of what exactly? And how do they do that? All of the NFT-turned-AI bros insist that the answers to those questions are “everything” and “by being awesome”, which sounds more like the thinking of someone that’s convinced they’re on the precipice of inventing magic or figuring out how to directly petition god
Looking at e.g. the Solow Model better technology will indeed increase efficiency as the output per worker increases which will lead to economic growth. However I think you are right. This is an oversimplification with regards to AI because in the end its also about which products are being impacted. Also the product quality is left out in that scenario so it gets tricky. E.g. I would personally not like to read even one AI generated book as of today.
Efficiency in terms of dollars per app or page of filler content.
Paid services becoming basically free is wealth creation. You have the goods but none of the old cost of production. This is patently obvious, so I assume there’s some well-practiced remarks inspired by or borrowed from early 20th century socialists you would like to share? HN comments wouldn’t be complete with an homage to the class struggle. I would rather take the win and be happy about it.
The civilization will destroy itself first. States are not addressing what really matters and especially not the multi billion/trillion companies. The US fight against social security and less inequality, the things that wealth should enable. We are destroying jobs that brought purpose, just because some small percentages in margin. We are not training the AIs to solve climate change but to code well. Maybe it’s time for the UN to become the main government of this world, to deal well with the uneven distribution and discrimination of work force. It is too much about egos, too much thinking in cultural groups to protect from outsiders, too much war and destruction, still too much burning fossil fuels, too much destruction of our environment and the nature. Maybe with the appearance of aliens first to have a visible outer enemy first? But I guess it will be the same as always: as long as most find some distraction, some misinformation that calms down fears and anxieties, nothing will change for the common good.
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44685031
You can have really massive growth in markets along with massively wide inequality at the same time among the human population. You can also now (for the first time in global history) have laws of supply and demand start to service non-human intelligence.
Future transactions can have bots on both ends, running an economy that continually grows to service the needs of (probably more efficient) machine capitalists rather than human capitalists.
Just like when human agriculture and industrialization broke multiple organically forming food webs in the natural world, so could it be with human industry
It really is a brave new world.
Naming LLMs as "AI" is really proving to be a colossal mistake and/or a deliberately misleading strategy that has (very successfully) helped acquire capital. Because it brings in all of the cultural tropes about superintelligent robots and gives them a veneer of respectability; e.g., The Matrix, 2001, The Terminator, etc.
Conflating the two is a massive category error. It's perfectly possible for LLMs / current-generation "AI" to have a massive economic impact without thinking there are going to be digital human replacements in the next 5 years.
I immediately think of mining. Mining in most countries places little value on miners: it is a dangerous, life shortening occupation very often done by those without much alternative. It's history is one of random deaths and maimings, quite often of large groups of people at once. It is associated with numerous health problems. Pretty much the only thing that has ever improved conditions for miners anywhere is either collective action or paternalistic, labour-sympathetic government. Mining and jobs like it are among the stereotypical situations where people imagine that education for their children will lead to a better life.
All of which is to say, will the most awful jobs actually be automated? Not just awful, either, but poorly paid? Logically it makes more sense to approach knowledge work first: it requires only one kind of investment, namely data centres. There are thousands of niche skills in manual labour that will be awkward to make robots for. I think also of old housing stock that needs to be maintained by plumbers, in particular: legacy stuff built up over decades (or where I live, centuries)
Language models seem to have come a lot further because they can use the generalisable capital of computers. Outside of controlled environments (factories, cities with grid systems) I don't imagine robots will represent such a good investment any time soon. Knowledge work is dying, time to learn a trade. Maybe.
(It would have been great to have been able to learn and practice a profession for a lifetime. Library churn is awful, I suspect what will follow for most of us here will be worse)
It's can't without an explosion of energy use. An explosion of economic activity will create an explosion of resource extraction and pollution. Since we are already going beyond many planetary boundaries we likely risk destroying organized human life because we destroyed our ecology.
Japan is the economy to idealize.
Almost no growth.
Yet people are mostly happy.
Government makes mostly wise decisions.
There’s not too much poverty.
They have not devalued and destroyed their own culture.
So yeah, growth maybe isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The price is too high. It benefits mainly politicians, corporations and the rich.
Japan has the highest suicide rate of any OECD country.
Here's a thought: what if descendants of today's open models end up refined by proprietary models, resulting in a world in which it is largely impossible to keep AI under private ownership? What if data protection laws give way to data donation laws, permitting people to specifically choose recipient research institutions to train new AI upon? I could easily see a world where OpenAI, Google, Anthropic etc are boycotted in favour of say, a global-membership cooperative. It'd require people to exercise some agency but few predictions about AI seem to imagine people have any. Governments are spoken about as though they're managing people rather than representing them. The likelihood of popular movements or collective endeavours seems to not have been factored in at all.
What if your tumor replaced functioning organs?