1) There's a paywall for part of it.
2) The author finally figured out that, in software, revenue does not scale with labor. The author has not figured out that this applies just as much to a 1 man startup as to a megacorp.
The project I worked on was enormously successful in terms of revenue growth. I, and people on my team had a huge nationwide impact, which started when we were about a dozen people (it has grown now to several dozen).
Whereas even a manager of one of the big box stores would only have a limited geographical impact. Whereas my work would always have nation-wide impact (and at some companies programmers would have world-wide impact). I turned on a payment option for my platform one quarter, and very quickly people were using it for one million a month in purchases. Which kept going up.
The book Capitalism without Capital talks about this. Some aspects of it are alluded to in Fred Brooks 1975 book The Mythical Man Month.
To build a car, a lot of effort has to be made in making the car - not just the end result, but the making the glass, tires and so forth. Whereas with programming, I write an app, or a feature for an app, and the end result is duplicated and distributed around the country (or even around the world) for free, or virtually free. I'm not helping make commodities one at a time like someone on an automobile line is. It is something different.
Presently, it's mostly because laws sustain the author's ability to gatekeep the software, whether or not it's even running on capital they own.
One does wonder how long such laws will last, one way or the other, if their end result is a massive inequality of outcome.
How is that making a difference? These are sales that were already happening and you allowed them to do something like "pay with paypal" and then claim the entire sale?
That's why Amazon developed (and unbelievably were able to patent) "one-click ordering."
Would revenue / person-hour show a different trend? Because there are a lot of part-time and contract workers out there.
Think about it does AMD need to exist at all? Wouldnt NVIDIA be worth more if they didnt exist?
This would absolutely not be worth the few extra points of efficiency you might get. Maybe you would get a short-term benefit, but long-term the expected outcome would be much worse.
1. Companies not participating in UBI: they have to hire people, even for nothing, but all the staff have to be paid.
2. The others: they are focused on making money without hiring people ("efficient money-making machines"), so they are forced to participate in UBI, and therefore distribute their wealth towards society.
So long with "efficient money-making machines".
This is interesting thinking but I can quit understand how the incentives play.
Historically, humanity's biological monopoly on the fundamental resource of "general intelligence" has always been that lever. Looking at the world today, it's pretty clear that democracies are just a temporary balance between the general contempt of the powerful towards commoners, and the fact that the powerful begrudgingly need our economic utility, which is ultimately based on our general intellect. Even callous dictatorships had to exercise partial restraint on violence and murder, to retain a pool of general intellect.
AGI will be a multiple-whammy here:
- most people will become economically worse-than-useless, they will be a total liability on the rich and powerful
- those same people are unlikely to be given access to any levers of power or influence, because they no longer have anything of value to provide to the rich and powerful
- AGI in combination with robotic platforms, after a certain threshold, will permit for insurmountable policing. The "rise up against the robots" cliches we see in film simply become impossible after a certain point.
I desperately hope we end up wielding AI to usher in a post-scarcity utopia, but looking at the types of people who own the world...we'll get what we're allowed to get.
IQ is normally distributed.
Things do tend to balance out over time, but it feels like we’re heading for a real crisis before that equilibrium returns. Unless we pivot away from “productivity” and “efficiency” as our ultimate economic north stars, life for the working class could become increasingly unstable. In many ways, it already has, especially in advanced economies where housing prices have long outpaced wage growth. Not to mention the youths of the world are entering adulthood with far fewer opportunities than previous generations (even college educated). To me it looks like a potential storm of unrest brewing, that could be genuinely historically paradigm shifting.
I don't really have an overall point, but would love to encourage people that say there are naturally going to be new jobs as a result of all this to provide some speculation as to what they are and how we get to that. I don't doubt the notion that some new jobs will emerge, but to think we can find new opportunities for the displacement of even 20% of well established industries seems too optimistic to me. I think we seriously need to start to grapple with a new way of life. UBI being an obvious first step, as this is somewhat achievable as a incremental change, but that could be too little and potentially not meaningful enough. A system that values more than that which can be priced. Maybe money as a whole evolves completely with a well designed digital currency. Sustainability (not in regards to material resources) and wellbeing over exploitation, but none of this is easy to even begin to implement without a collapse of what is already there. Who knows what the future holds.
[citation needed]
The data presented only talks about the revenue of the companies, not their effect on the lives of their customers (which is admittedly difficult to measure).
The "I personally don't find short form videos too addicting" sentence is just anecdata and dismisses the negative impacts. In my opinion, being able to instantly access content that "makes [you] smile for free" is not obviously a good thing. Even if attention spans weren't affected, I think the brain is wired for homeostasis (balance), and easy sources of dopamine are dangerous since they affect the main motivation to do real, impactful tasks.
Ultimately, it's unclear whether modern (2010s-now) tech companies have _consistently_ improved lives overall. There have certainly been positive changes but also negative ones. Let me know what you think.
if you could remove private property rights over land, housing too would be much easier. Thats a regulation governments arent gonna touch though
The phenomenon is probably a consequent of monetary inflation and lock-in.
It is surreal. It goes like: revenue growth > headcount growth in select companies, therefore capital alchemy on global scale + something something AGI.
On topic though, digital goods and specialized robotics/automatic manufacturing made the first part of this graph possible, now we are on the cusp of generalizable robotics and AI for an even steeper curve. Even if LLMs stay as dumb as they are now, there are incredible gains to be made from them.
I think a better title might be the less catchy, ‘The decoupling of headcount and revenue at quasi-monopolistic tech companies that are scaling platform products and services.”
Also revenue and capital are not interchangeable terms. The author appears to be confused over this point.
ggm•6h ago
Look, I could have believed linear at least to some asymptote. And then you plot the exponential to the asymptote after the fact, because curves are nicer.
But at this point, exponential growth into the future that far out is 'busboy giving investment advice' exuberance.
Plot what % of GPP and PPP this represents, and then plot the overhang of debt, and the cycle time to a market correction, and tell me you still think an exponential growth story is going to happen "up and to the right" in this.
SturgeonsLaw•6h ago
jbm•5h ago
anon291•5h ago
darth_avocado•5h ago
jgord•5h ago
- using technology to unlock cheaper energy - using technology to automate boring manual labor - using technology to extend healthy lifespan
Given the demographics collapse and ageing population in most 'developed' countries, we need to look at these other ways of generating economic growth.
eru•5h ago
ggm•5h ago
And as I said, thats ignoring market cycles, the debt overhang in the economy, all kinds of problems.
eru•5h ago
Debt and equity are equally valid ways to finance projects. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theo... for the spherical cow version, but this holds approximately under real world conditions, too.
In general, I share you skepticism and agree that exponential extrapolation should be done only very carefully at best.
mamonster•11m ago
asplake•2h ago