jameslk

That's wild. If Anthropic is willing to risk ruining the trust of their userbase for the sake of protecting their moat, it makes me wonder how strong of a moat they have to begin with

That overall drop in share of income since 2000 is related to the "giant sucking sound" Ross Perot warned about in 1992:

"It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care, that's the most expensive single element in making a car, have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south."

While Perot was warning about NAFTA, the jobs did go elsewhere: China and other countries with cheaper labor. Globalization led to labor competition, which increased the supply of workers.

Meanwhile, companies captured the value of the increased supply of workers. More cheap labor = more production, for a world that had latent demand for cheaper output. It ended up a net benefit for businesses (capital owners), and overseas workers. This is at least partially if not significantly where the growing gap between wage growth % and GDP growth % comes from.

The macro economists were right that globalization would be more efficient overall for the world, economically. But that came at the expense of the US labor that saw its wage growth eroded as a consequence.

The submitted title is a bit sensationalist given the article’s conclusion:

Is this decline a distinct change from the recent behavior of the labor share in the U.S.? Along the two key dimensions we investigate, our answer is no. First, the labor share’s trajectory post-COVID broadly follows the cyclical patterns observed in earlier recessions, with a decline during the recovery phase that mirrors historical dynamics. Second, the decline in the labor share since COVID is driven primarily by within-industry changes rather than shifts in economic activity across sectors. Taken together, these results suggest that the post-COVID decline follows the same cyclical patterns as earlier recessions and is driven by the same within-industry forces, and they provide little evidence that it will evolve differently from past episodes.

What I find more interesting is the sharp drop around the early 2000s

The great aging of working populations:

China: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Populati...

Japan: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Japan_po...

South Korea: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/South_Ko...

United States: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/US_Popul...

Europe: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Europe_p...

Also the technology carries over to defense purposes

And then there’s the fact that tremendous investment is going into all things AI, and now hard tech

I'm highly anticipating the answer to the great question of life, the universe, and everything

On a more serious note, I found this interesting from TFA:

The biggest question, though, is what sorts of rules should be put in those constitutions in the first place. Philosophers have zeroed in on two main ethical frameworks. One is deontology. Popular with Kant, among others, this imposes strict rules that prohibit things like lying, coercion and treating people as a means rather than an end, even if it is for a greater good. Anthropic’s constitution incorporates many deontological strictures. These can make AI behaviour more consistent, says Dr Powers—a plus for deploying robots in homes and public spaces.

The other approach to ethics of interest to philosophers of AI is called consequentialism. It weighs costs against benefits to decide what to do. Models more sympathetic to consequentialism include OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Google’s AI models are designed to produce “likely overall benefits [that] substantially outweigh the foreseeable risks”, a classic consequentialist goal.

As a big fan of the trolley problem thought experiment, I am very curious what led to this ethical split between these model makers. I find it darkly humorous and also scary to think about the choices these models could make to influence people and decisions, especially if it's under a utilitarian perspective

Most big companies attract rule followers. They err on the side of avoiding taking risks like this, which is why they work there (and why there’s so many in this thread talking about rules). It benefits big companies to have mostly rule followers because you can’t have a too many people going in different directions. You need stability and a unified direction, that usually comes from the rulers making the rules. The fewer rule breakers generally find their way to the top, or get canned

This employee’s decision to break the rules, while addressing a real need in the market, must have really pissed off some people above, for better or worse. Google could have just rolled with it but I’m sure it would have stepped on someone else’s plans. Career defining moment, but they didn’t have the political capital it seems. I don’t think they will have much trouble finding work elsewhere though

See also: Power: Why Some People Have It--And Others Don't

I honestly can't think of a reason why you bothered say it, given that the quote from TFA addresses it

That's the point of why they're doing it. From TFA:

"Private equity investors are turning to AI-generated replicas of software to assess whether acquisition targets have a competitive advantage

[...]

'We are leveraging vibecoding to show what a software company can and can’t do, to understand where it fits in the value chain and to understand whether it is the actual code that is the defensible part of the business or something else,'"

In the article, they explain the goal of vibe coding prototypes is not to rebuild software, but to test the defensibility of businesses based on their software so they can decide whether to acquire them or not

From TFA:

“We are leveraging vibecoding to show what a software company can and can’t do, to understand where it fits in the value chain and to understand whether it is the actual code that is the defensible part of the business or something else,”

The common thread here is that it is China. Before the 2010s and earlier, the US wasn't so concerned about China, but ever since then, China has been a big US concern for it being a technology and military rival

e.g. the Investigative Report on the U.S. National Security Issues Posed by Chinese Telecommunications Companies Huawei and ZTE report from 2012:

https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:rm226yb7473/Huawei-ZT...

From that point forward, that concern has only grown. So you can view these actions as screaming "we were only for the free market until there was no competition" but if you want to genuinely know the answer to your question, the publicly stated concern is "China is a national security threat"

If every company uses the same AI tools to optimise the same metrics, the optimisation itself becomes commodity. Everyone has the same chatbot, the same personalisation engine, the same churn predictor. The floor rises for everyone simultaneously, which means relative advantage disappears. The only remaining differentiator — the actual moat — becomes the irreducibly human: genuine empathy in a crisis, a person who actually cares, a brand that feels run by real people who listen.

Yes, this is what every article proclaiming AI will be the end for human jobs completely misses. Ultimately businesses must compete and things that become scarce or harder to attain, such as human connection, will become their real differentiator. Businesses are still selling to humans at the end of the day.

This article was great and provides a lot of wonderful examples of how to build high touch businesses. It reminds me a lot of Delivering Happiness by the late Tony Hsieh and his experiences building a high touch culture for Zappos to differentiate with the ecommerce businesses he was up against who all resorted to bad customer support, poor return experiences. A famous example being Tony calling into Zappos' support line pretending to be a customer ordering a pizza as a joke, and his customer support actually caring enough to ensure a pizza was delivered to him. Probably a book more relevant than ever

Rationalizing the policy is a serious error, I think. It's a political move by a group that has more power in conditions of nationalism, economic and otherwise.

I think both are true and feed on each other to gain populist momentum

As another example, many countries in very different positions, with very different policy needs than the US, are behaving similarly.

This may be influenced by the wave of populist nationalism but it again may also be a reaction to the reality that there isn't just one hegemony pulling the strings anymore (the US, or the west in general). Especially if said hegemony is acting unpredictable and other countries are now acting belligerent. That seems like a self-reinforcing cycle. I'm sure there's more reasons beyond these

Well that's kinda my point. If we could all afford yachts tomorrow because AI robot factories made it a commodity like Swiss watches of yore[0], we'd all be buying yachts. And instead of bickering about not being able to afford yachts, people would be bickering about the rich asshole with the limited edition Aston Martin space yacht, while they could only afford the 3-speed helipad Temu yacht

0. https://www.paulgraham.com/brandage.html

You are correct that there are additional steps here, but wealth is growing increasingly concentrated, and the burden of proof is on the person claiming that trend won't continue.

Whoa there internet friend! I don't think I said anything about wealth concentration not being a trend. I'm just talking about AI. I'm still waiting for someone to explain coherent, undeniable watertight reasons that we're on a one-way track that goes from AI companies to infinite money glitch or robot death factories. I've already made my arguments against why I don't think it will happen before[0][1]

Maybe the argument is some already-rich fella with magic robot factories will have everything they will ever need, so they brush away all of humanity like an unsightly bit of dandruff on their shoulder with their kill bot drone army.

I guess if you squint at it long enough, that kinda sounds plausible. In the same way someone could press a giant red nuke button and have us all wiped out like a Terminator movie. But it's making a lot of fantastic assumptions without a lot of concreteness. That is, many people seem to be claiming "this is the AI endgame" rather than seeing other possibilities that aren't so ridiculously cynical or nihilistic with leaky abstractions

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48330434

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966936

We can’t magically skip steps. It’s like South Park’s underwear gnomes. We’re missing steps in between and hand waving them away

I’m talking about how many people lived in the past

OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves

This discussion thread is so full of slippery slope fallacies and plot holes it’s so hard to take seriously. I think it’s safe to say nobody knows for sure how AI will exactly change the economy in the long term. Humans are complex and often unpredictably irrational (see also: behavioral economics), let alone stacking on assumptions about how technology might progress. It might as well be noise

It’s fun to speculate on a sci-fi level, but I don’t think the long term endgame is worth losing any sleep over yet

They will corner finite resources and land.

They need a lot of money to do that. Where do they get it all from? Not the jobless masses I presume?

Investors don’t usually like to invest in companies that aren’t going to eventually earn any revenue either

That’s quite a lot of slippery slope hand waving to get there. I’d wager those obstacles will pose a larger challenge than most people in this article’s thread seem to think

But you can do away with all that messiness of all that exchange and just have AI micromanage the economy. AI should be able to figure out how much to produce, how to limit waste, who should get what, etc. in a very fair and efficient manner.

In other words, a planned economy

Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat

Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive

The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work.

The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more

But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless.

There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions

Very few will accumulate all of the wealth of world.

Where do these few acquire all their wealth?

What happens when these remaining few need to compete?

That doesn't happen between democracies and hasn't for generations, except for one democracy recently.

Neoliberalism and globalization is what guaranteed this. That is, Pax Americana. The US thought it was a great idea to become the reserve currency of the world, and became a net importer to spread the dollar. The dollar hegemony gave the US great influence and it defended it with its military. Becoming a net importer hollowed out the US industrial base as it moved overseas, which was fine until China speedran owning large parts of the industrial production and exportation. They also very quickly moved up the ranks of economic and geopolitical sway.

Now the US is ditching globalization for more mercantilist policies. That means the US will be less influential in a multi-polar world, as it can no longer strongarm so easily through the dollar. Trade will become more closed off as other countries rush to do the same now that they are less supported by the US military and economic influence and need to defend themselves more.

Thus, I wouldn’t discount the possibility that the EU stops cooperating as much with SK in the future

I think this sounds very cool! It sounds similar to Agent Vault (github.com/Infisical/agent-vault) but with an added feature of having security policies for denial/human-in-the-loop of traffic based on the contents of requests?

The nice thing about Agent Vault is the encryption of credentials and other ways they handle making sure those don't leak from storage. I suppose you could potentially wrap the two in layers as well (agent -> Claw Patrol -> Agent Vault -> external network)

EDIT: looking at some of the comments, it sounds like Claw Patrol can work with protocols beyond HTTP/S, so potentially covers more surface area than AV

Eric, thank you for taking time to answer questions! I read The Lean Startup early in my career and it shaped a lot of it. I’m keen to read your new book

As I read through your comments, one question popped into my head: what’s your thoughts about the Friedman doctrine? Do you address it in your book?

Specifically, the Friedman doctrine makes the argument that the social responsibility of the firm is to increase its profits. That policy making should be left to governments.

Milton Friedman states in his essay:

Insofar as [a business executive's] actions in accord with his "social responsibility" reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers' money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.

His theory was introduced in 1970 and it seems has since become the standard for the corporate world

How does this square with what you present in your book? Do you disagree with his theory?

Title is too long to include both so the submitter probably cut it off (I tried submitting it myself)

A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., said in a statement that it is “completely false” that Israel spies on the U.S. “Israel does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone US government officials,” the spokesperson said. “Israel intelligence collection efforts are aimed at its enemies, not its allies. Any claims to the contrary are either misinformed or politically motivated.”

Not even a teeny weeny bit of spying on your allies?

It's a good idea to bet on this. There's a lot of business and domain knowledge trapped in random places and mostly aggregated in employees heads. Not very accessible to AI agents currently.

That said, this is the ultimate moat. Once everything about how to operate a business lives in your product, the business must rely heavily on it. I personally would only use something like this if I knew it was open source and that data could live on my own servers. If agents and my own team are consulting Hyper for things and you go out of business or move upmarket or something, it's pretty much back to the stone age for us.

Very useful idea though with a lot of potential, especially for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic looking for a moat!