frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

The Economic Impacts of AI: A Multidisciplinary, Multibook Review [pdf]

https://kevinbryanecon.com/BryanAIBookReview.pdf
29•cjbarber•2h ago

Comments

leakycap•2h ago
Posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284985

Zero comments there, too. Likely because direct-linking a PDF to a "book" on the multi-multi impacts of something that has barely started and we don't understand... seems less than useful.

cjbarber•2h ago
Thanks for the note, yes, I suppose this is a format that's a bit hard to engage with. I'm not the author, but I've interacted with them and think they're very sharp!
cjbarber•2h ago
This is written by Kevin Bryan from University of Toronto. He has good tweets on the economics of AI, too (https://x.com/Afinetheorem).

My recap of the PDF is something like:

1. There are good books about the near-term economics as AI.

2. There aren't many good books about "what if the AI researchers are right" (e.g. rapid scientific acceleration) and the economic and political impacts of those cases.

3. The Second Machine Age: Digital progress boosts the bounty and widens the spread, more relative inequality. Wrong on speed (e.g. self driving tech vs regulatory change).

4. Prediction Machines: AI = cheaper prediction. Which raises the value of human judgement, because that's a complement.

5. Power and Prediction: Value comes when the whole system is improved not just from smaller fixes. Electrification's benefits arrived when factories reorganized, not just when they added electricity to existing layouts. Diffusion is slow because things need to be rebuilt.

6. The Data Economy: Data is a nonrivalrous asset. As models get stronger and cheaper, unique private data grows in relative value.

7. The Skill Code: Apprenticeship pathways may disappear. E.g. survival robots prevent juniors getting practice reps.

8. Co-Intelligence: Diffusion is slowed by the jagged frontier (AI is spiky). Superhuman at one thing, subhuman at another.

9. Situational Awareness: By ~2027, $1T/yr AI capex spend, big power demand, and hundreds of millions of AI researchers getting a decade of algo progress in less than a year. (Author doesn't say he agrees, but says economists should analyze what happens if it does)

10. Questions: What if the AGI-pilled AI researchers are right, what will the economic and policy implications be?

tuatoru•1h ago
This all sounds like it has been covered in detail by the "AI as a Normal Technology"[1][2] guys (formerly AI Snake Oil - they decided they preferred to engage rather than just be snarky).

Invention vs innovation vs diffusion - this is all well-known stuff.

It's a completely different episteme than the one IABIED guys have ("If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies").

I don't think there can be any meaningful dialogue between the two camps.

1. Substack: https://www.normaltech.ai/ book: https://www.normaltech.ai/p/starting-reading-the-ai-snake-oi...

2. "Normal technology" like fire, metals, agriculture, writing, and electricity are normal technologies.

catigula•55m ago
If AI researchers are wrong they're gonna have a lot of explaining to do.
blibble•54m ago
they'll just move onto the next grift

quantum? quantum AI? quantum AI on the blockchain?

Yoric•35m ago
Quantum AI is definitely an existing research topic.

Not aware of Quantum Blockchain just yet, though.

rhetocj23•46m ago
TBH its far more likely they are wrong than right.

Investors are incredibly overzealous to not miss out on what happened with certain stocks of the personal computing, web 2.0 and smartphone diffusion.

catigula•44m ago
There's a certain anthropic quality to the idea that if we lived in a doomsday timeline we'd be unlikely to be here observing it.
Animats•14m ago
"This essay reviews seven books from the past dozen years by social scientists examining AI’s economic impact."

Going back that far may not be too helpful. Three years ago, ChatGPT wasn't out. A year ago, LLM-type AI only sort of worked. Now, it's reasonably decent in some areas. If you look at AI impacts retrospectively, you probably underestimate them.

Feedmaker: URL + CSS selectors = RSS feed

https://feedmaker.fly.dev
27•mustaphah•1h ago•4 comments

An untidy history of AI across four books

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/lessons-of-babel/articles/perplexity
67•ewf•4h ago•23 comments

Ants that seem to defy biology – They lay eggs that hatch into another species

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-ant-queens-seem-to-defy-biology-they-lay-eggs-tha...
283•sampo•10h ago•86 comments

Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years?

185•ncarlson•1h ago•119 comments

R MCP Server

https://github.com/finite-sample/rmcp
48•neehao•2d ago•5 comments

Show HN: WeUseElixir - Elixir project directory

https://weuseelixir.com/
39•taddgiles•2h ago•7 comments

Three-Minute Take-Home Test May Identify Symptoms Linked to Alzheimer's Disease

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/three-minute-take-home-test-may-identify-symptoms-linke...
33•pseudolus•3h ago•4 comments

The Economic Impacts of AI: A Multidisciplinary, Multibook Review [pdf]

https://kevinbryanecon.com/BryanAIBookReview.pdf
29•cjbarber•2h ago•10 comments

Time Spent on Hardening

https://third-bit.com/2025/09/18/time-spent-on-hardening/
30•mooreds•2h ago•11 comments

Internet Archive's big battle with music publishers ends in settlement

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/internet-archives-big-battle-with-music-publishers-en...
238•coloneltcb•3d ago•98 comments

Your very own humane interface: Try Jef Raskin's ideas at home

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/your-very-own-humane-interface-try-jef-raskins-ideas-at-h...
41•zdw•4h ago•1 comments

Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems [pdf]

https://pup-e.com/goodbye-rubygems.pdf
558•jolux•14h ago•172 comments

How to waste CPU like a Professional

https://mostlynerdless.de/blog/2025/09/19/how-to-waste-cpu-like-a-professional/
9•tanelpoder•1h ago•1 comments

Kernel: Introduce Multikernel Architecture Support

https://lwn.net/ml/all/20250918222607.186488-1-xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com/
76•ahlCVA•6h ago•12 comments

Show the Physics

https://interactivetextbooks.tudelft.nl/showthephysics/Introduction/About.html
126•pillars•3d ago•7 comments

YouTube downloaders (and how Google silenced the press)

https://windowsread.me/p/best-youtube-downloaders
124•Leftium•10h ago•35 comments

Revamping an Old TV as a Gift (2019)

https://blog.davidv.dev/posts/revamping-an-old-tv-as-a-gift/
49•deivid•7h ago•21 comments

Safepoints and Fil-C

https://fil-c.org/safepoints
54•matt_d•3d ago•25 comments

Tonemaps

https://mini.gmshaders.com/p/tonemaps
3•bpierre•1d ago•0 comments

Shipping 100 hardware units in under eight weeks

https://farhanhossain.substack.com/p/how-we-shipped-100-hardware-units
87•M_farhan_h•1d ago•47 comments

Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/trump-mulls-adding-new-100000-fee-h-1b-visas-bloom...
445•mriguy•2h ago•474 comments

I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-regret-building-3000-pi-ai-cluster
382•speckx•7h ago•293 comments

Dynamo AI (YC W22) Is Hiring a Senior Kubernetes Engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dynamo-ai/jobs/fU1oC9q-senior-kubernetes-engineer
1•DynamoFL•10h ago

Nostr

https://nostr.com/
293•dtj1123•16h ago•263 comments

Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/ticketmaster-intentionally-screwed-fans-out-of-billio...
247•dthread3•3h ago•104 comments

The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/09/17/the-health-benefits-of-sunlight-may-o...
164•petethomas•17h ago•152 comments

Lethal Trifecta attack leaking private data in Notion AI agents

https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1969111931152634010
9•abirag•37m ago•2 comments

Dialing Up the Internet Phonebook

https://pketh.org/internet-phonebook.html
5•surprisetalk•1d ago•0 comments

Statistical Physics with R: Ising Model with Monte Carlo

https://github.com/msuzen/isingLenzMC
99•northlondoner•13h ago•60 comments

Frying Eggs and Air Quality Tests

https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/frying-eggs-and-air-quality-tests
60•crescit_eundo•3d ago•123 comments