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What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?
(www.newyorker.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Technology
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You're still doing it. "recalling factoids" is not how they work. At all.
Me saying you're wrong about them being an economic threat isn't a strawman. It's me disagreeing about the severity of the issue. You having an ignorant opinion is not me strawmanning you. It's me calling you ignorant.
Fine, you want me to be pedantic? When prompted with tokens that appear in an order that humans understand as a question that corresponds to some aspect of the universe as we understand it, the tokens predicted by the LLM correspond to an answer that humans agree is more representative than the tokens provided by the average human.
Tell me where in my initial comment I said they weren't an economic threat. I never said they weren't. I said they aren't an existential economic threat. Please read my comment.
And I disagree about them being existential threats to many, and to the whole current layout of the economy. It's not designed to perform well for everyone with high unemployment rates in the first place, let alone in The Gilded Age 2.0, let alone with a machine that supposedly can perform such a variety of jobs driving up unemployment, let alone during an economic depression caused by lunatic politicians, let alone during a time where the climate is changing drastically and changing the dynamics of many markets.
This is, indeed, a recipe for economic collapse, and "AI" is a key part of the economic turmoil already happening, let alone any unforseen speed bumps and pitfalls the other issues have in store.
Don't forget this is all under the umbrella of the initial hypothetical where AI stalled at it's current level. I don't believe that existing LLMs systems will destroy the economy. They're a tool that people are trying to fit into every hole, much like blockchain during the crypto bubble. We've already seen companies fire their customer service departments, try to replace them with LLMs, then have to go crawling back when that failed catastrophically.
If AI systems continue to improve, however? As I said previously, all bets are off.
Ehh, even current LLMs are good enough to fool the fools who hold the purse strings. Even you are directly admitting that. We're already aimed for a massive recession/depression, and the extra turmoil from AI, regardless of how permanent its job losses are, may be enough to ensure it hits much greater lows to the point where it will take decades to recover if ever.
This is how bubbles always go, see the Gartner hype cycle. People always overextend, try to apply new tools/tech into places that it doesn't belong, and only then do people realise the limitations of technology. This is common in business, C-suites explicitly exploit the hype cycle to secure naive investor funding, but investors always become wise eventually - it's a game to see how much money can be extracted from them before they become increasingly aware of the limitations of the technology. There will be niches where the tech actually settles, but it's always much smaller than what's promised. I'm a programmer, I've been listening to people say that LLMs are going to take my job for the past five years, and yet every time I've actually tried to apply an LLM directly to my work it's failed in a pretty drastic manner. I find existing systems useful as a tool, but that's about it.
The fact bubbles grow only means that this partivular cycle's downfall will be particularly harsh, given all of the factors I've already cited are lining up.
That's the point! The fact that it is a bubble only reinforces my point.
Bubbles are not an existential threat to society. We've had like four bubbles in the past 20 years.