[Sept 2001] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-sep-27-fi-50296...

"Exodus Communications Inc., which never made a profit since it went public in March 1998, filed for bankruptcy protection after losing customers in the collapsing Internet economy."

"Exodus, which runs 44 Internet data centers on four continents, listed $5.98 billion in assets and $4.44 billion in debts in Chapter 11 papers filed Wednesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. The company operates so-called server farms that provide Web site services for businesses."

"The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s losses increased more than tenfold in the second quarter, and it fired workers as it failed to win new contracts fast enough to replace those it lost. Exodus counted Yahoo Inc. and AMR Corp.’s American Airlines among its customers."

"Trading in Exodus shares was halted before the markets opened Wednesday. The shares fell 33 cents to 17 cents Tuesday and have plunged 99% from a record $89.81 in March 2000."

"Analysts say Exodus, with eight different junk bond offerings totaling about $3.4 billion, ran up more debt than it could handle."

“We sacrificed profitability in exchange for growth and market share, over-expanding in some areas in advance of demand, not anticipating the decline as the dot-com bubble burst and the economy weakened,” Krause said.

"Exodus’ second-quarter loss grew on acquisition and restructuring costs to $583.4 million, or $1.05 a share, from $51.8 million, or 13 cents, a year earlier. Sales rose 79% to $318.7 million but missed analyst estimates. The company lost $256 million on sales of $818.4 million in 2000."

Fewer humans will be needed per dollar of output. Those gains will not go to labor, they will go to capital, the capital that owns the data centers, the factories, the stores, et al.

In the physical space (AI + robotics) it'll be a chaotic, slow'ish moving change, slower than the hypsters are predicting now, but it will happen regardless.

That barista job largely won't exist in the future. China will replace them with $3,000 bots with high-functioning AI software, and they definitely won't be powered by expensive Nvidia GPUs.

Slow changing service & manufacturing spaces will see a high wipe out ratio in terms of human labor being eliminated.

Walmart has 2.1 million employees, most are doing repetitive tasks that require modest levels of intelligence. If they could eliminate one million of those with AI + robotics, for a cost of less than ~$15,000 per year, they'd do it immediately. It's hard to imagine a future where that isn't going to happen. That human labor pool is costing Walmart probably $80-$100 billion per year. Amazon is even more forthright in their desperation to remove the humans from retail.

Or to grab a bunch of $200 per month accounts from OpenAI or Anthropic for a team to use?

The calculations is: I'm in the US, if I have ten median software developers, what's my cost? Then versus using AI instead.

The human labor can't keep up. Even if we freeze things right here, and then hyper optimize Fable 5.2 by etching it straight to silicon, the human developers are obsolete. And the future isn't going to stop coming.

It's also worth noting that it's far easier at present to press a human into doing something highly illegal than it is to get Claude or GPT to do so.

A frontier AI is at least as capable as ten median human software developers. It's likely well beyond that now. Over the course of a year, would you have to spend $1.5 million to get the output of those ten median humans? No chance in hell. You'd have to spend less than 10% of that.

Then on top of that: the AI is improving rapidly; the humans go on vacation, the humans decline, the humans get old, the humans get sick, the humans take parental leave, the human struggle to adapt, the humans are resistant to change, the humans riot, the humans protest, the humans need healthcare, the humans want paid more, the humans can only work for 4-6 hours at peak while writing software (slowly).

Do you know any humans that are experts at a dozen programming languages? That human does not exist. The frontier AI are omnimaths.

It's all going away. Here's a prediction: HN will effectively die with the software developer.

So whether that's a CEO at the top instructing a human manager that then instructs AI systems, which then put into motion plans that include the harnessed humans getting prompted, or however it's decided to best configure the top operational tiers - that's all fairly irrelevant ultimately. All human labor, and all AI labor, will be in harnesses. Realistically all human labor has always been in a harness.

The people in charge will be the people that control the capital. They will instruct the AI to their bidding, they will control the data centers the AI lives in, they will own the robots doing the labor in factories, they will own the factories, they will control the grid, they will control the electricity generation, et al.

It's true now, it'll be true tomorrow. Nothing fundamental will shift at that tier: don't be labor, own.

If you're a software developer, you're increasingly depreciating labor. Every unit of improvement the AI systems see, the average human software developer's labor value diminishes. It's diminishing extraordinarily fast, kind of like a confrontation between increasingly productive machines and physical human labor during the industrial revolution. You might as well picture a human with a hand plow taking on a modern industrial tractor.

Sub 1% of the planet has any practical use for the top tiers of AI systems. That will likely always be true.

The gap between the haves and have nots will drastically widen further, and very quickly. The bottom ~95-97% will be left behind in a way that will be impossible to overcome. The age of AI + robotics will just make it that much harder to climb for most people, these are systems that are in aggressive, direct competition with human labor. And in short order the AI + robots will be vastly superior to human labor (it doesn't really matter if we're speaking in terms of 10 years or 30 years).

AI will consolidate the winnings. The gigantic gains by the elite rich related to AI over the past few years, is merely a hint of what's to come. Capital will win as it always does.

There will be some gains for most everybody else, those gains will be comparatively trivial though. A house bot that saves people an hour of labor here and there, AI that automates some trivial life tasks.

AI has no money, it has no wealth, it owns no capital. For now. If you want to avoid the brutal human vs AI/robot competition arena: own capital, own the AI, own the robots.

Within three years most software developer jobs will consist of taking instruction from the AI systems. The humans won't see it that way, but that's what it will actually be. Realistically the thing that will happen is the humans will be put into harnesses (cubicles) and prompted by the AI (I need you to plug that server in; I need you to give me access to such and such; now do this, then do that). Most tech jobs will consist of AI telling the human what the AI needs the human to do next, de facto the human will be in a harness and will be getting told what to do.

Frankly Tesla is dumb lucky the Europeans and Japanese have botched the EV market so badly overall. Tesla shouldn't even exist at this point with how trivial their lineup is.

At present all Tesla has propping it up is bubble dust and one car model (one increasingly dated car model). Somehow after 14-15 years (Model S released in Summer 2012) these people still can't release a real SUV of any sort. The model Y is a grotesque joke of a fake SUV, a mutilated model 3 that doesn't really look like an SUV in any regard. The model Y is an SUV like the Cybertruck is a truck. They might as well have unlimited money to do it, and they can't do it. Same reason they couldn't release the roadster even after all this time. It's a fundamentally broken company because Musk won't get out of the way. Whatever Musk is good at it, it's not running a large scale automotive company.

The US is more powerful in relation to the rest of the globe than it has been at any other point since the late 1990s. In terms of foes China is the new USSR for the US, a gigantic adversary that is considered at every move. China is spurring the US into a more competitive mode, which is ideal for not becoming fully lethargic.

Well that one is false. They print and debase any income or wealth held in USD.

So their print-against base is any and all assets held in USD globally.

The Japanese are also not broke, they've merely spent the past two decades destroying the Yen and chopping down the Japanese standard of living. Print, print, print.

War with Russia does not mean nuclear war with Russia. As we can clearly see from what Ukraine is doing to Moscow et al.

Also, an aggressive stance in fighting Russia, would have caught them early on when their military was entirely a disaster. The beating would have been an epic humiliation. Instead Russia has spent years re-learning how to wage war, which is not what you actually want.