[logtrees]

"There is no way the trillions of dollars of valuation placed on AI companies can be backed by any amount of future profit."

This is just a case of the user being unable to see far enough into the future. Yes, there's huge future profit to be had.

[potato3732842]

I think a lot of this viewpoint comes from the fact that the median software engineer doesn't really have a lot of exposure to mature, and often therefore regulated industries and how much make-work paper pushing and ass-covering paper pushing there is.

I have no idea what fraction of our economic productivity is wasted doing these sort of TPS reports but it's surely so massive that any software that lets us essentially develop more software on the fly to cut that back even slightly is highly valuable.

Previously only the most moneyed interests and valuable endeavors could justify such software, like for example banks flagging sus transactions. Current AI is precariously close to being able to provide this sort of "dumb first pass set of eyes" look at bulk data cheaply to lesser use cases for which "normal" software is not economically viable.

[bryanlarsen]

AI will not reduce the amount of time wasted on paperwork. It'll massively increase the amount generated and consumed.

[_DeadFred_]

The problem is that those same workers have like 5% key stuff they do, based on knowledge and depth they probably wouldn't have without all the surrounding 'TPS' style bs. Definitely not knowledge you can take from 10 seperated workers with their 5% and somehow get 1 worker working on that stuff 50% of the time.

Boring ass code reviews come in super handy because of the better familiarity, getting exposure to the code slowly, exposures to the 'whys' as they are implemented not trying to figure out later. The same with buyers overlooking boring paperwork, team leads, productions planners. Automating all that is going to create worse outcomes.

In a sane world if we could take the fluff away we would have those people only working 5% of the time for the same pay, but we live in a capitalist system where that can't be allowed, we need 100% utilization.

[DocSavage]

Aside from the better versions of what AI is visibly doing now (software dev, human language translation, video gen, etc), many of the AI bears are dismissing the potential impact of hooking AI up with automated experimentation so it's able to generate new types of data to train itself. The impact on drug discovery, material science, and other domains are likely to be very significant. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold is just a glimpse of this future.

[logtrees]

Completely agreed. It won't even displace the people who were diligent in all of those crafts. It will supercharge them. And there will be novel combinations producing new services/products. It's going to be great.

[AtlasBarfed]

"automated experimentation so it's able to generate new types of data to train itself"

AIs don't understand reality. This type of data generation would need a specific sort of validator function to work: we call this reality. That's what "experimentation" requires: reality.

We already have this right now, with the AI training ingesting AI crapgen, with StackOverflow posts no longer happening. That would seem to point to a degrading AI training set, not an improving one.

[gjsman-1000]

A more sane answer is garbage in, garbage out, and this future never materializes.

[pants2]

If AI kicks off another "industrial revolution" level of productivity gains the profits could be well into the quadrillions of dollars. Sounds ridiculous but remember that the $10 T-shirt you're wearing would have taken a week of expert human labor to produce before the loom, cotton gin, etc.

[computerphage]

Indeed. There are trillions of dollars /per year/ paid to workers in the US alone.

[computerphage]

Like, there is an argument that can be made here, but "there's just not enough money in the world to justify this" definitely isn't it

[moffkalast]

Trillions of dollars is pocket change if you wait for enough inflation.