In 1999 I dropped out of university to join an internet startup. Like Musk I had grown up on a diet of techno-optimistic golden age SciFi ( I have grown up since), and while I had already accepted that I would not become an astronaut, this seemed a way to take part in an exciting future. Otoh I had grown up in very modest circumstances, amongst people who seriously believed that the way to wealth was hard and meaningful work, so my new environment was a bit alien to me. What puzzled me was that nobody seemed to have either a business plan, or indeed an idea that businesses are supposed to make money, and that the product was glorified ads which should not be worth a lot; rather the idea was "we are having a party, and we even pay our friends to join the party". I was told that I suffered from "old thinking" and I guess that was true, and still is. I am not sure if this was international the case, but when things eventually collapsed it was, here in Germany, not so much a market breakdown as a redistribution scheme. Lots of only recently privatized infrastructure (most notably Telekom, previously advertised as "Die Volksaktie", "the people's stock") profited first from the influx of money from small investors, and then the sudden concentration of stocks when the small investors had to divest from stocks in favour of food and rent and stuff. For me, that remained the lesson of what "economic bubble" means, big stakeholders taking temporary losses if that means they can disenfranchise the majority in the long term. I see nothing right now that would convince me I am wrong. There still seems a party going on, but a lot less people are getting invites.
To Paul not Eike: Do make your own cat food sourced from chicken thighs. It’s the most nutritious and it’s cheaper than inferior factory-made cat food. And it’s fun knowing what you are doing for your fur baby. I know I have 7 of them. Bye it’s time to grind the chicken.
Given the, ehm, conciseness of your reply I don't think you have gotten around to reading Cervantes yet (or anything, really). You really should try - if you broadened your vocabulary, you might actually be able to express what offends you. It would help the conversation along.
Don’t pay any attention to whomever or whatever produces those one-word responses (another ploy is to repeat what you posted). They or it are here for trolling purposes only, it appears.
the money laundering crypto bros who run the government now have been angling for a government bailout - sorry, i mean a "strategic bitcoin reserve" or a "digital assets stockpile* - for years now. https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/of-tech-bros-and-trumpers
100%. All I see here is that musk and Trump et al are way over leveraged on all their ridiculous projects that don't turn any real profit and while they have the valuations on paper, who could loan them so much to keep their own schemes going? Meta layoffs, x/Tesla layoffs, other techs losing market share, deepseek plummeting nvidia, all signal they know what they aren't admitting which is that they are upside down. Keep in mind how quickly just a bank ponzi scheme over default swaps flattening out here among over leveraged investors destroyed the econs of the rest of the world in 2010 - and who the US workers bailed out again in addition to having lives and livelihoods and retirement values destroyed. Trump is dementia sundowner and gave keys to Elon to literally rip off the US Treasury. His bringing programmers to the Treasury to rewrite code so engineers can't see transfers out or blocked payments only doesn't make sense if you believe he isn't stealing directly from T and depositing/transferring funds into a private stockpile/reserve. I don't understand the lack of imagination about someone who is clearly pathological in his insistence on colonizing mars which actual scientists say isn't possible, that it's a shame story. These are conmen with the largest grift in the history of the world going. This isn't just absurd speculation on tulip valuations, they've taken all our real resources hostage and are tying them to a non-transparent ponzi instrument and cleaning out the kitty.
if you think musk and trump are badly overlevered on bullshit take a look at the rest of the crypto cabal (marc andreessen, brian armstrong, david sacks, howard lutnick, etc). https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/the-trumpcoin-cometh
What are you going to do about it? DOGE is now in charge with the keys to the US Treasury and the details about to be loaded onto the Dark Web if anyone tries to stop them.
There are lots of good stickers around, I bought my Tesla 3 years ago and I really love it, was my first new car after working all my life. I realised that he was only the salesman (and very effective and I guess he had the chutzpah to carry it off) and Martin Eberhard/ Marc Tarpenning were the real engineering entreprenours and behind them not only the actual electrical & mechanical engineers at Tesla there has been many many electrical engineering researchers at univetsities around the world publishing in IEEE and other journals. The thing about Tesla was Eberhard & Tarpenning realisation was that they had to develop an EV that was really cool and honouring Nikolai Tesla who was the father of induction fields was so appropriate and respectful.
While Musk is the largest individual or corporate shareholder at 12% I wonder if the institutional investors if they think he is just too crazy not only for Tesla stock but for capital markets and do something. King George III comes to mind
The correct question is what are WE going to do about it.
This battle will 100% be fought in our court systems. It will be slow and painful. We will tie them up and slow them down, the same way Trump avoided all prosecution. Crooked POLS do NOT own our courts.
sports betting is considerably fairer than cryptocurrency trading and doesn't (usually) double as a money laundering vehicle for terrorists and rogue nuclear states... if anything bailing out sports bettors would be far more reasonable.
i mean it's obviously just a taxpayer bailout of MIchael Saylor, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and the rest of the malefactors of great crypto wealth plaguing global society like locusts recently... but at the same time i'm reasonably sure it's actually going to happen. This is what the bros bought with their money (half of all corporate super PAC donations in 2024 were from the crypto cabal).
Beyond the federal level bailout 14 individual states have already proposed their *own* "digital assets stockpiles". Wisconsin teacher's pension funds have been buying bitcoin for a while now.
I decided to bypass Crypto. I actually ghought the whole Y2K was a bit of a rort, back then in the real world such things as electricity generation, controlling the national grid were not date dependent. And it was not as if computet networks never crashed. Interesting the Russians didnt bother and as far as I know nothing dire hsppened there unless you count that Putin became acting president December 31 1999.
i don't think it's a different issue considering almost all the tech bros in donald's orbit right now are actually crypto bros other than elon (who is still something of a crypto bro considering 1/4 of Tesla's income in the last quarter was just a revaluing of the company's large bitcoin holdings as well as his relentless DogeCoin promotion)
AI, the type that, we, consumers, are exposed to, isn't quite ready for prime time. I had my little test with it on LinkedIn via their Premium trial period. I wrote about my experience recently. I know we've been treated to all kinds of articles about how great it is at medical diagnoses in certain cases, but I don't think I'd want my life to depend entirely on it. Do I think it will never be dependable? No. It's just not there and it can't get there until a lot about how we think about the way businesses should run changes in some very fundamental ways.
Artificial intelligence is really still machine learning. That machine learning is happening under very flawed ethical conditions. The biggest one, one that I've been writing about for years, is the notion that corporations' only duty is to their shareholders. Yes, you guessed it, the ethical plague we have been suffering thanks in large part to Milton Friedman's 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom^. We are now seeing its effect on hyper-steroids, with the complete takeover of the oligarchy.
For as long as AI is used to, primarily, increase profit, rather than improve our collective lot, we will continue to see a worsening of our collective condition, rather than a general improvement and the kind of societal renaissance Paul describes here.
Anything that doesn't have at least some component of doing good turns out to be inherently bad. There are many examples I can think of that we all experience. Social media is one such example, with Facebook and X on one side and, for now, Bluesky on the other. Bad, bad, and pretty good.
Maybe, after this terrible stage of the American Experiment is over, however it ends, when we start over (and we will), those who plan our reconstruction will remember that a society that doesn't provide their young with a well-rounded education steeped in social ethics and a long historical memory, that society is doomed to fail by virtue of becoming hostage to those who operate out of evil intent. One can only hope...
* My Notes on Paul Krugman's 'Capitalism, Socialism, and Unfreedom'
The comments that I've read by people who have used it, such as attorneys, just describe to me how useless white collar labor will become. If there is no need to hire a jr associate who learns on the job by writing/researching/doing (unless jr associate is jr of the law firm partner in real life) then there will be no reason for job creation/workforce development. The NYT article about the founding CEO of Klarna using AI as a workforce replacement is the future writing on the wall.
The applications it works well in the most are those that are employed by people who are very proficient in performing text based searches using exact search terms. Lawyers are definitely in this category.
They are mutually exclusive when the many lose the ability (a.k.a. wages) to pry wealth from the hands of the few. Wages are increasingly ineffective, but it is better than zero, which is where we will be once the wealthy are able to replace the rest of us with robot labor. At that point, it will be all profit for me, and no wages for you. Given capitalism's stellar record of only providing goods and services those with money, it isn't going to end well for you.
When Krugman talks about dreary hotel rooms, I am reminded of the 30% or more of my work-life that I spent staying at various hotels across the country. It gave me an opportunity to see from a computer programmer's perspective what was important to Life Insurance companies and banks and to understand how they make their money.
Having been in IT since the mid-1970's the biggest period of activity and change was in the 1990's. And this was totally due to Y2K. The 1980's and early 1990's saw a major uptick In regulations within the Financial services industry. DEFRA, TEFRA, TAMRA, Universal Life Model Regulations, HIPAA, etc. But then it all pretty much ground to a halt because every single company was preparing their (mostly) legacy systems for Y2K.
Y2K changes were basically 1/3 analysis, 1/3 modifications and 1/3 testing and implementation. Tens of thousands of off-shore programmers were imported from India, Russia, the Philippines, etc. And they came her on the cheap. The Indian consulting firms were paying programmers in Indian between $6,000 and $12,000 a year in 1990 while US companies were paying 5 -10 times as much for American programmers with experience.
When the Y2K mods wound down, there was a glut of programmers. Companies thought of programmers as widgets and laid off most of the American programmers. I know, I saw it first hand. And Congress was complicit. The H-1B program capped minimum salaries at $60K which translated into static salaries of $60K. To maximize profits the Indian consulting firms brought entire families here and then changed them travel and living expenses getting around the $60k minimum.
Dozens of American programmers either took large pay cuts or quit when they couldn't find work.
The Federal government and the state insurance departments curtailed most new regulations, which also reduced the need for computer professionals. And the server based technologies started replacing or augmenting the computer assets within companies.
I could write a book about the myriad disruptions in our economy, but this is a start.
Damn are you ever singing my song. I too have been replaced by dirt cheap "offshore" labor. I actually got my start in programming right at the peak of tackling the Y2K time bomb. Having had a firsthand look at it, I get thoroughly disgusted when climate deniers point to Y2K as perfect example of alarmist much ado about nothing.
In fact, Y2K was a perfect example of how answering that alarm >prevents< disaster. Why can't people get that? We've been in the middle of the biggest mass extinction event for the last quarter century now - losing over one thousand species per year - and the Big Pollution (AKA Big Oil/Coal) industry (and Faux News) is still screaming "alarmism!", and idiots are buying into it.
Yes, an alarm is going off. It's not politics! It means the house is on fire!
Krugman (I think it was him) wrote about this over 10 years ago. If your job is at a keyboard, it can be done anywhere in the world that has internet connectivity. These jobs will inevitably migrate to low wage countries. This accounts for much of India's economic growth! The only secure jobs (for now) are those that must be done "hands on": plumbers, carpenters, mechanics... But Beware of robots....
Yes. They're already working on those - and not just for the trades. They want to replace doctors and nurses and medical technicians of every kind too.
It surprises me how slow this migration has actually been. I think there is a bit of a moat to software. Namely there is no such thing as the man month, mythical or otherwise. The guy who wrote the code is going to be 1000x more productive with it than the software engineer seeing it for the first time, and it may take a year or three to catch up.
Yes, you can move your entire software organization to Bangalore and hire new labor, because the old labor will still expect the old wages, but when you do, you can expect that your software organization will be in a shambles for years and you can't rely on them for anything. The best you can hope for is to start new units in the remote country. Apple is only just now getting around to doing this, but they did not select India. They have ongoing software operations in other western nations like UK and Canada though.
Same thing has been happenning in Engineering ( other than software) with consultancies off shoring to India et al, and the engineers on home country tasked to coach, correct projects. With most laid off, as one of the civil engineers ironically said to a graduate "Did you think when you started your engineering degree your career was going to be on Teams explaining to the Indian office what to do and having to stsy back to midnight to talk to them. "
And all the FPI's are increasing bookable hours to the off shore office.
Then the gall when looking for work withon the parent US company (this was in the water waste water infrastructure sector) that their clients (City municipalities ) required the engineering to be done by engineers sitting in the county.
That's also how China was able to so easily and suddenly "pirate" so much our top secret military technology. Our military contractors handed it to them on a silver platter.
Sure they deny it, but our military contractors have hired hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers in China, and surreptitiously installed them in high enough positions to have access to everything.
My spouse experienced the exact same scenario. One minute he's on the phone 24/7. The next? Given 90 days to find another job in the company.... He had to train his replacement who would fall asleep during her training session. He quit. Funny... his next job was as a consultant. Pay was lovely.
A lot of what is going on in Washington and the disruption of government departments and mass layoffs/firings, immigrant deportations, tariffs, and so forth are just distractions and bones being thrown to the MAGA faithful.
Donald and Musk and company have their eyes set on hard cash which they hope to get from the feds. It might be through the use of crypto, sovereign investments funds, or other means, but when the dust settles expect them to emerge much richer.
They have their EYES on much much more....Panama, Greenland, Canada, Mexico and Gaza this week....and the World will just roll over ??? Houston, WE HAVE A PROBLEM....AND the ONLY solution is that the 3.5 million American People DO NOT LET HIM STEAL THIER COUNTRY FIRST = all freedoms gone !!!!! NO DISRESPECT but truthfully....they will make Nazi Germany look like kindergarten. Period , full stop
Do you think Musk was paid in cash or crypto by the Pentagon and USAID for the thousands of $1500 a pop Starlink terminals (was a bulk purchase at a high price) and the hundreds of millions in annual fees for Ukraine and South Africa's internet connections?
I tend to be an AI skeptic with my long 48 year IT experience. The overall effect is going to be less than people realize. Current neural net based AI systems are very complex search engines which as I have learned need human guidance at the end to work well. The hype around these systems which have been touted as achieving general AI where the systems are actually sentient is very misleading. Unfrotunately, the general public buys this hype and believes this is part of why the AI driven tech stock rise is higher than it should be.
Exactly! This stuff is so oversold/overblown. They're trying to convince us that it's already sentient. I keep repeating this mantra: The "A" in "AI" stands for "artificial" and it means exactly that. It does not have, nor will it ever have, human judgement.
It’s easy to bamboozle them because most people have no understanding of tech. They use it (and not necessarily well) but that’s about it. I believe one of the reasons HRC’s “private server” issue was such a “scandal” is because people thought it sounded bad without actually knowing what a server is or what it does. I am certainly no expert in all things tech but it never surprises me how little so many people know.
So, in manufacturing parlance, the west German Mercedes Benz auto manufacturing worker sees that EVs only require a third of the working parts of an ICE auto, therefore only a third of the ICE manufacturing work force going forward just as his union contract expires the same year as Mercedes Benz will quit manufacturing ICE autos: 2030, and he's going to be roughly a decade from retirement age.
Elon won't need any bailout. He's going to force government payments to go through X and cream off a transaction fee from every Social Security, Medicare, and other government payment.
As for the rest? I think what kind of bailout they get will depend on how the other techbros flatter Trump and Musk
Being old enough to remember Black Monday, dot comm, Asia, Lehman and GFC - yes this has all the makings of another crash. The kind that most mainstream economists totally fail to see coming.
You are correct about the irrationality, but irrationality alone only makes for a correction. Crashes come from malfeasance. DotCom had IPOs without a business plan. The Great Recession had people making a fortune simply by holding a house 6 months. I'm not seeing that part yet.
I do think the AI industry is greatly inflated by hopium though. Maybe the business plan is missing there too.
the AI hype is all smoke and mirrors, it isn’t making any difference to the fundamentals yet. The US market PE is now 30, it was 33 at the height of the .com boom, that concerns me.
That and every “world” ETF is now 70% US. There’s an enormous amount of dumb money being poured into the US market via ETFs.
Nvidia accounts for more of the US market right now than Cisco did during the .com boom.
The mag 7 are driving most of the return, with the rest of the S&P performing on a par with the EU market (which trades at far lower PE)
Then there’s the ESG risk, heavy emphasis on the G.
We don't have to wait for Skynet. RFK Jr. is going to kill most of us and Elon will make sure the rest of us starve to death. Say hello to techno-feudalism.
I figured 'DOGE' (even when it was just a 'coin') was a nod to Venetian mercantilism. Surprised to still not notice any such references in even the 'nerdier' commentary spaces
Didn't mean to pretend to broad media awareness; never have followed NYT regulars. Good to know it was obvious to someone with a platform. There were a lot of doges as long as they had a naval empire...
I was expecting to wake up to substack articles about Trump saying the USA will "own" Gaza while sitting next to Netanyahu yesterday, and that the Palestinians should be cleared out (war crime) and should want to go.
Then Trump implied we would use our military to get them out.
When Trump says "own" and "USA" I think he now means Trump, in my view. He is also running things as if he alone owns the USA and can do as he pleases.
Many months back, WaPo reported that Trump's son-in-law had mentioned the value of beach front real estate in Gaza, as buildings were being flattened in the war.
Honestly, it is not a stretch to think that Netanyahu, who had been in communication with Trump, postponed the ceasefire deal, because he wanted to wait for a Trump win since he did not want a 2 state solution which Biden would have pushed for.
However, I doubt he knew Trump would take it for himself and announce it in front of the cameras.
I have noticed that Trump tends to do this to embarrass anyone who is complicit with him and to implicate them, as a power play.
I could not tell if Netanyahu looked surprised that Trump would mention the "clearing out" (a war crime) live on TV with him sitting there, or if he thought Gaza would belong to Israel, not the USA or if it was all a shock. The fact that he did not interject an opposing view, or say they had not discussed this, was rather telling, I think.
After winning election Trump announced a real estate developer would be his advisor to the middle east. This made this outcome seem obvious to me then, as well.
Then the shuttering USAID - which is only 1% of our spending and millions may die as a result of it shuttering.
Is this genocide intentional?
How can it not be when an agency responsible for feeding the starving as well as providing medicines is suddenly shut down with no alternatives?
It can't not be intentional when the result is clear - death.
We hear about the outrage on a political level and it is discussed that congress had a hand in this agency so only they can dismantle it - but we are not talking about death - what is really going to happen as a result.
Are people in denial as to how really horrific this is?
It also may send these desperate nations into the arms of China and Russia, as well.
The lack of any remote sense of morality or concern coming from this administration or the GOP in congress regarding these pending deaths, is sickening.
Not a word from the GOP.
Also, with the USA ignoring all trade agreements (including ones Trump made last time) and all international laws, who will even trust us again?
We are actually sending our trading partners as well as developing nations into looking for agreements with others, weakening our nation.
They may now wonder who may end up being worse to do business with or who may end up having a worse record on humanitarian and democratic rights, USA or Russia or China.
We are certainly now not taking the moral high ground.
I mean, what I say sounds extreme, but someone has to state the obvious, even if it is horrific.
Nobody is in denial. This just what happens when you vote for the catastrophically wrong dude. He has 4 years to make a mess of things. The alternative is sedition and revolution. Is it worth going there?
I simply meant that people starving to death because of what Trump via Musk did should be the number 1 headline and then add to it that it seems clear that they clearly do not care what happens to most folks in crisis like in Gaza, either, plus since when do we go and take others over for profit in the modern age? All the evil we learned as kids in our history books, as things to never be repeated, seems to be acceptable to these folks with zero conscience.
My learning of economics was limited to the basic class of macro economics (my major was international history/relations.
But with easy money flushing all over the world, since before Covid-19 but especially after it, isn’t it natural for people to misperceive that they have easy money (even if that easy moneys are very unevenly distributed in fact)?
As a Japanese, I can’t help thinking of the early 1990s shut down of the easy money by Japanese Minister of Finance, and the flush of Japan’s bubble economy.
I wonder if the MoF could make a soft landing. It might not be possible then: after all Washington was pressing Tokyo heavily to stop Japanese economy juggernaut those days (And it did sink the Japan juggernaut completely, not without negative effect on the US economy.) But I always wonder if that was possible: thought that in 2007-8, think that these days.
In terms of productivity gains form AI people seem to be ignoring something that is very real right now, and with little so far in the way of remedy: the damage AI is doing to the education system. Unless a remedy comes soon, any gains in TFP from AI will have to balanced against losses in human capital to education, especially at the high end. In-person exams do not teach advanced critical thinking skills, but only the skills that are most easily replaced by AI (rote memorization, summarizing of current knowledge).
They test basic critical thinking skills but not advanced. They test analysis of simple arguments, but not the analysis of extended (article or book-length) arguments, the synthesis of arguments with evidence, evaluation, comparison of competing arguments etc., etc. This requires essays that cannot be produced in the time-limited context of an exam setting. That's why blue book exams are only used at the introductory level where one is mostly testing for rote-learned knowledge of simplified, standard positions and arguments.
I agree they can't do it very well (yet), but they often do it as well as someone just learning to do it. Graders can actually tell the difference or at least have a sense of it, but it is very hard to be more than 80% or so sure. Moreover, it is almost impossible to prove it if the student grieves the grade. The consequences of falsely accusing students of cheating with AI are probably even more destructive than letting through those that do.
It's beyond dumb because an entire crypto currency reserve can be created in about a minute. Instead of brute force cracking the cypher the hard way, just start at the last crypto dollar you want to make and trivially derive the next trillion in the reverse easy direction normally reserved for verification and then demand everyone pay their taxes using this new cryptodollar. Since we can do that so easily, there is no reason to keep a reserve. Just make the currency as needed. Having a "reserve" just invites thieves.
The only "benefit" of making a reserve is to reserve /other people's/ crypto schemes, and why would you want to do that? They are the federal government with the friggin' power to print *US dollars* of all things and you want to prop up some amateur's currency? Why? Why? Why? Arnold Palmer does not go to John Candy for golf tips.
I worked in the state judiciary for 30 years. As I matured and was promoted to different jobs, I observed the types of civil cases won and lost. It became obvious that those with reserves could withstand loses and those without, mostly disappeared or were folded into larger organizations. Stability and reserves were the lesson for me. I’m not wealthy, but I thought my modest pensions plus social security would get me to the end game. Now it’s clear, those with millions and billions are gambling with our society and stability is teetering on the edge along with everyone’s reserves.
From the original post: "AI clearly has significant real-world applications. Even if you’re one of those who describes it as “souped-up autocorrect,” well, that could describe many white-collar jobs. Also, you could equally well describe heavy earth-moving machinery as a souped-up version of a guy with a shovel. So?"
You're missing a critical point about white-collar "souped-up autocorrects": responsibility.
Here's an example I know something about: clinical pharmacy. Pharmacists don't often dispense meds. They have two critical jobs: making sure the medicine won't harm the patient, and making sure that the proper medicine is dispensed. This is why they have doctorate degrees, pass multiple certifications, are required to do continuing education, and have various legal responsibilities. Those notes in your medical record are legal documents that they're responsible for.
Why? It's to keep patients safe. And, if a pharmacist screws up, they're held responsible, with penalties ranging from loss of job to loss of career to prison time. They know this too.
Can they be replaced by AI? Of course. But who's responsible when an AI screws up?
With a human pharmacist, there are powerful incentives to not screw up: a good salary for doing a good job, loss of job/career/freedom for making a mistake. With an AI dispensary, there's only "acceptable error rate," which is determined by shareholders like the Vanguard index funds and insurance company AIs, neither of whom can in turn be held responsible for their lousy decisions.
Would you trust an AI pharmacist? I wouldn't.
This doesn't mean that pharmacists don't benefit from expert systems. Of course they do! But when responsibility matters, especially legally, it's better to have a human held responsible than an AI.
That need to hold people responsible is why you need a bunch of those white collar auto-corrects. Don't disregard the law in the pursuit of economics.
If this is too abstract...
Let's talk about one of those optical fiber mains, which cost millions to repair if broken. If an excavation company has to dig around such a line, do you want the backhoe to be operated by a gal who has her family's livelihood as well as her own professional pride on the line? Or do you want it operated by an LLM with significant latency issues at the work site? You, in this case, are someone whose livelihood depends on that cable working so that you can meet deadlines, and who will sue if your work is interfered with?
In 1999 I dropped out of university to join an internet startup. Like Musk I had grown up on a diet of techno-optimistic golden age SciFi ( I have grown up since), and while I had already accepted that I would not become an astronaut, this seemed a way to take part in an exciting future. Otoh I had grown up in very modest circumstances, amongst people who seriously believed that the way to wealth was hard and meaningful work, so my new environment was a bit alien to me. What puzzled me was that nobody seemed to have either a business plan, or indeed an idea that businesses are supposed to make money, and that the product was glorified ads which should not be worth a lot; rather the idea was "we are having a party, and we even pay our friends to join the party". I was told that I suffered from "old thinking" and I guess that was true, and still is. I am not sure if this was international the case, but when things eventually collapsed it was, here in Germany, not so much a market breakdown as a redistribution scheme. Lots of only recently privatized infrastructure (most notably Telekom, previously advertised as "Die Volksaktie", "the people's stock") profited first from the influx of money from small investors, and then the sudden concentration of stocks when the small investors had to divest from stocks in favour of food and rent and stuff. For me, that remained the lesson of what "economic bubble" means, big stakeholders taking temporary losses if that means they can disenfranchise the majority in the long term. I see nothing right now that would convince me I am wrong. There still seems a party going on, but a lot less people are getting invites.
To Paul not Eike: Do make your own cat food sourced from chicken thighs. It’s the most nutritious and it’s cheaper than inferior factory-made cat food. And it’s fun knowing what you are doing for your fur baby. I know I have 7 of them. Bye it’s time to grind the chicken.
Given the, ehm, conciseness of your reply I don't think you have gotten around to reading Cervantes yet (or anything, really). You really should try - if you broadened your vocabulary, you might actually be able to express what offends you. It would help the conversation along.
Don’t pay any attention to whomever or whatever produces those one-word responses (another ploy is to repeat what you posted). They or it are here for trolling purposes only, it appears.
the money laundering crypto bros who run the government now have been angling for a government bailout - sorry, i mean a "strategic bitcoin reserve" or a "digital assets stockpile* - for years now. https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/of-tech-bros-and-trumpers
Thus proving that they >know< it's a scam.
100%. All I see here is that musk and Trump et al are way over leveraged on all their ridiculous projects that don't turn any real profit and while they have the valuations on paper, who could loan them so much to keep their own schemes going? Meta layoffs, x/Tesla layoffs, other techs losing market share, deepseek plummeting nvidia, all signal they know what they aren't admitting which is that they are upside down. Keep in mind how quickly just a bank ponzi scheme over default swaps flattening out here among over leveraged investors destroyed the econs of the rest of the world in 2010 - and who the US workers bailed out again in addition to having lives and livelihoods and retirement values destroyed. Trump is dementia sundowner and gave keys to Elon to literally rip off the US Treasury. His bringing programmers to the Treasury to rewrite code so engineers can't see transfers out or blocked payments only doesn't make sense if you believe he isn't stealing directly from T and depositing/transferring funds into a private stockpile/reserve. I don't understand the lack of imagination about someone who is clearly pathological in his insistence on colonizing mars which actual scientists say isn't possible, that it's a shame story. These are conmen with the largest grift in the history of the world going. This isn't just absurd speculation on tulip valuations, they've taken all our real resources hostage and are tying them to a non-transparent ponzi instrument and cleaning out the kitty.
if you think musk and trump are badly overlevered on bullshit take a look at the rest of the crypto cabal (marc andreessen, brian armstrong, david sacks, howard lutnick, etc). https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/the-trumpcoin-cometh
The answer to a crypto bailout is an easy NO! Next will be asked to bail out gamblers losing their rent money on sports betting apps.
Except the Republicans in control will say - sure! We will take money from starving children and reallocate to bail out our money launderers.
What are you going to do about it? DOGE is now in charge with the keys to the US Treasury and the details about to be loaded onto the Dark Web if anyone tries to stop them.
One thing I am doing is divesting of everything Musk. And I am demaning the mutual fund folks do the same. The companies include
Meta
Tesla, Inc.
SpaceX
X Corp. (formerly known as X, Inc.)
The Boring Company
xAI
Neuralink
OpenAI
Anyone still driving a Tesla needs to put an apology in their rear window and offer to sell.
There are lots of good stickers around, I bought my Tesla 3 years ago and I really love it, was my first new car after working all my life. I realised that he was only the salesman (and very effective and I guess he had the chutzpah to carry it off) and Martin Eberhard/ Marc Tarpenning were the real engineering entreprenours and behind them not only the actual electrical & mechanical engineers at Tesla there has been many many electrical engineering researchers at univetsities around the world publishing in IEEE and other journals. The thing about Tesla was Eberhard & Tarpenning realisation was that they had to develop an EV that was really cool and honouring Nikolai Tesla who was the father of induction fields was so appropriate and respectful.
While Musk is the largest individual or corporate shareholder at 12% I wonder if the institutional investors if they think he is just too crazy not only for Tesla stock but for capital markets and do something. King George III comes to mind
It's just a car.
It is not a political platform.
Welcome to the club. It was clear he was a dickhead a long long time ago, what surprises me is how long it took for so many people to notice.
The correct question is what are WE going to do about it.
This battle will 100% be fought in our court systems. It will be slow and painful. We will tie them up and slow them down, the same way Trump avoided all prosecution. Crooked POLS do NOT own our courts.
sports betting is considerably fairer than cryptocurrency trading and doesn't (usually) double as a money laundering vehicle for terrorists and rogue nuclear states... if anything bailing out sports bettors would be far more reasonable.
LMAO. Thank you.
Have you listened to Michael Lewis's podcast "Against the rules" season 5?
"Against the Rules" is only up to season 4?
Hmm on apple podcast we have season 5, season 4 was about Sam FB trial,
i mean it's obviously just a taxpayer bailout of MIchael Saylor, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and the rest of the malefactors of great crypto wealth plaguing global society like locusts recently... but at the same time i'm reasonably sure it's actually going to happen. This is what the bros bought with their money (half of all corporate super PAC donations in 2024 were from the crypto cabal).
Beyond the federal level bailout 14 individual states have already proposed their *own* "digital assets stockpiles". Wisconsin teacher's pension funds have been buying bitcoin for a while now.
I decided to bypass Crypto. I actually ghought the whole Y2K was a bit of a rort, back then in the real world such things as electricity generation, controlling the national grid were not date dependent. And it was not as if computet networks never crashed. Interesting the Russians didnt bother and as far as I know nothing dire hsppened there unless you count that Putin became acting president December 31 1999.
Dorothy....I don't think we're in Kansas ANYMORE !
i don't think it's a different issue considering almost all the tech bros in donald's orbit right now are actually crypto bros other than elon (who is still something of a crypto bro considering 1/4 of Tesla's income in the last quarter was just a revaluing of the company's large bitcoin holdings as well as his relentless DogeCoin promotion)
AI, the type that, we, consumers, are exposed to, isn't quite ready for prime time. I had my little test with it on LinkedIn via their Premium trial period. I wrote about my experience recently. I know we've been treated to all kinds of articles about how great it is at medical diagnoses in certain cases, but I don't think I'd want my life to depend entirely on it. Do I think it will never be dependable? No. It's just not there and it can't get there until a lot about how we think about the way businesses should run changes in some very fundamental ways.
Artificial intelligence is really still machine learning. That machine learning is happening under very flawed ethical conditions. The biggest one, one that I've been writing about for years, is the notion that corporations' only duty is to their shareholders. Yes, you guessed it, the ethical plague we have been suffering thanks in large part to Milton Friedman's 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom^. We are now seeing its effect on hyper-steroids, with the complete takeover of the oligarchy.
For as long as AI is used to, primarily, increase profit, rather than improve our collective lot, we will continue to see a worsening of our collective condition, rather than a general improvement and the kind of societal renaissance Paul describes here.
Anything that doesn't have at least some component of doing good turns out to be inherently bad. There are many examples I can think of that we all experience. Social media is one such example, with Facebook and X on one side and, for now, Bluesky on the other. Bad, bad, and pretty good.
Maybe, after this terrible stage of the American Experiment is over, however it ends, when we start over (and we will), those who plan our reconstruction will remember that a society that doesn't provide their young with a well-rounded education steeped in social ethics and a long historical memory, that society is doomed to fail by virtue of becoming hostage to those who operate out of evil intent. One can only hope...
* My Notes on Paul Krugman's 'Capitalism, Socialism, and Unfreedom'
https://rimaregasblog42.substack.com/p/my-notes-on-paul-krugmans-capitalism-socialism-and-unfreedom-democraticsocialism?r=bfvi
** David Hogg appears to be the target of centrist Democrats? https://rimaregasblog42.substack.com/p/david-hogg-is-a-target-of-centrist?r=bfvi
Things Trump Did Day 16
https://rimaregasblog42.substack.com/p/things-trump-did-day-16-blog42?r=bfvi
My substack https://rimaregasblog42.substack.com/
"Maybe, after this terrible stage of the American Experiment is over, however it ends, when we start over (and we will)..."
Assuming the oligarchs don't succeed at driving us to extinction first.
The comments that I've read by people who have used it, such as attorneys, just describe to me how useless white collar labor will become. If there is no need to hire a jr associate who learns on the job by writing/researching/doing (unless jr associate is jr of the law firm partner in real life) then there will be no reason for job creation/workforce development. The NYT article about the founding CEO of Klarna using AI as a workforce replacement is the future writing on the wall.
hear hear ....and oh no .... karma
Thanks.
The applications it works well in the most are those that are employed by people who are very proficient in performing text based searches using exact search terms. Lawyers are definitely in this category.
They are mutually exclusive when the many lose the ability (a.k.a. wages) to pry wealth from the hands of the few. Wages are increasingly ineffective, but it is better than zero, which is where we will be once the wealthy are able to replace the rest of us with robot labor. At that point, it will be all profit for me, and no wages for you. Given capitalism's stellar record of only providing goods and services those with money, it isn't going to end well for you.
As I wrote... I wasn't saying it doesn't work at all.
When Krugman talks about dreary hotel rooms, I am reminded of the 30% or more of my work-life that I spent staying at various hotels across the country. It gave me an opportunity to see from a computer programmer's perspective what was important to Life Insurance companies and banks and to understand how they make their money.
Having been in IT since the mid-1970's the biggest period of activity and change was in the 1990's. And this was totally due to Y2K. The 1980's and early 1990's saw a major uptick In regulations within the Financial services industry. DEFRA, TEFRA, TAMRA, Universal Life Model Regulations, HIPAA, etc. But then it all pretty much ground to a halt because every single company was preparing their (mostly) legacy systems for Y2K.
Y2K changes were basically 1/3 analysis, 1/3 modifications and 1/3 testing and implementation. Tens of thousands of off-shore programmers were imported from India, Russia, the Philippines, etc. And they came her on the cheap. The Indian consulting firms were paying programmers in Indian between $6,000 and $12,000 a year in 1990 while US companies were paying 5 -10 times as much for American programmers with experience.
When the Y2K mods wound down, there was a glut of programmers. Companies thought of programmers as widgets and laid off most of the American programmers. I know, I saw it first hand. And Congress was complicit. The H-1B program capped minimum salaries at $60K which translated into static salaries of $60K. To maximize profits the Indian consulting firms brought entire families here and then changed them travel and living expenses getting around the $60k minimum.
Dozens of American programmers either took large pay cuts or quit when they couldn't find work.
The Federal government and the state insurance departments curtailed most new regulations, which also reduced the need for computer professionals. And the server based technologies started replacing or augmenting the computer assets within companies.
I could write a book about the myriad disruptions in our economy, but this is a start.
Damn are you ever singing my song. I too have been replaced by dirt cheap "offshore" labor. I actually got my start in programming right at the peak of tackling the Y2K time bomb. Having had a firsthand look at it, I get thoroughly disgusted when climate deniers point to Y2K as perfect example of alarmist much ado about nothing.
In fact, Y2K was a perfect example of how answering that alarm >prevents< disaster. Why can't people get that? We've been in the middle of the biggest mass extinction event for the last quarter century now - losing over one thousand species per year - and the Big Pollution (AKA Big Oil/Coal) industry (and Faux News) is still screaming "alarmism!", and idiots are buying into it.
Yes, an alarm is going off. It's not politics! It means the house is on fire!
Krugman (I think it was him) wrote about this over 10 years ago. If your job is at a keyboard, it can be done anywhere in the world that has internet connectivity. These jobs will inevitably migrate to low wage countries. This accounts for much of India's economic growth! The only secure jobs (for now) are those that must be done "hands on": plumbers, carpenters, mechanics... But Beware of robots....
"But Beware of robots...."
Yes. They're already working on those - and not just for the trades. They want to replace doctors and nurses and medical technicians of every kind too.
It surprises me how slow this migration has actually been. I think there is a bit of a moat to software. Namely there is no such thing as the man month, mythical or otherwise. The guy who wrote the code is going to be 1000x more productive with it than the software engineer seeing it for the first time, and it may take a year or three to catch up.
Yes, you can move your entire software organization to Bangalore and hire new labor, because the old labor will still expect the old wages, but when you do, you can expect that your software organization will be in a shambles for years and you can't rely on them for anything. The best you can hope for is to start new units in the remote country. Apple is only just now getting around to doing this, but they did not select India. They have ongoing software operations in other western nations like UK and Canada though.
Same thing has been happenning in Engineering ( other than software) with consultancies off shoring to India et al, and the engineers on home country tasked to coach, correct projects. With most laid off, as one of the civil engineers ironically said to a graduate "Did you think when you started your engineering degree your career was going to be on Teams explaining to the Indian office what to do and having to stsy back to midnight to talk to them. "
And all the FPI's are increasing bookable hours to the off shore office.
Then the gall when looking for work withon the parent US company (this was in the water waste water infrastructure sector) that their clients (City municipalities ) required the engineering to be done by engineers sitting in the county.
That's also how China was able to so easily and suddenly "pirate" so much our top secret military technology. Our military contractors handed it to them on a silver platter.
Sure they deny it, but our military contractors have hired hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers in China, and surreptitiously installed them in high enough positions to have access to everything.
My spouse experienced the exact same scenario. One minute he's on the phone 24/7. The next? Given 90 days to find another job in the company.... He had to train his replacement who would fall asleep during her training session. He quit. Funny... his next job was as a consultant. Pay was lovely.
It is a good start. Keep writing.
Thanks to the Professor.
A lot of what is going on in Washington and the disruption of government departments and mass layoffs/firings, immigrant deportations, tariffs, and so forth are just distractions and bones being thrown to the MAGA faithful.
Donald and Musk and company have their eyes set on hard cash which they hope to get from the feds. It might be through the use of crypto, sovereign investments funds, or other means, but when the dust settles expect them to emerge much richer.
They have their EYES on much much more....Panama, Greenland, Canada, Mexico and Gaza this week....and the World will just roll over ??? Houston, WE HAVE A PROBLEM....AND the ONLY solution is that the 3.5 million American People DO NOT LET HIM STEAL THIER COUNTRY FIRST = all freedoms gone !!!!! NO DISRESPECT but truthfully....they will make Nazi Germany look like kindergarten. Period , full stop
I believe the term for this is "kleptocracy".
"Kakistocracy" has had an uptick in searches as well.
No surprise there.
Do you think Musk was paid in cash or crypto by the Pentagon and USAID for the thousands of $1500 a pop Starlink terminals (was a bulk purchase at a high price) and the hundreds of millions in annual fees for Ukraine and South Africa's internet connections?
All of the above.
I tend to be an AI skeptic with my long 48 year IT experience. The overall effect is going to be less than people realize. Current neural net based AI systems are very complex search engines which as I have learned need human guidance at the end to work well. The hype around these systems which have been touted as achieving general AI where the systems are actually sentient is very misleading. Unfrotunately, the general public buys this hype and believes this is part of why the AI driven tech stock rise is higher than it should be.
Exactly! This stuff is so oversold/overblown. They're trying to convince us that it's already sentient. I keep repeating this mantra: The "A" in "AI" stands for "artificial" and it means exactly that. It does not have, nor will it ever have, human judgement.
It’s easy to bamboozle them because most people have no understanding of tech. They use it (and not necessarily well) but that’s about it. I believe one of the reasons HRC’s “private server” issue was such a “scandal” is because people thought it sounded bad without actually knowing what a server is or what it does. I am certainly no expert in all things tech but it never surprises me how little so many people know.
Sadly, I think you're right. They're just not paying attention.
Awwww
So this means that the Terminator can’t learn to to human after all?
Affirmative (spoken in a monotone voice with a thick Austrian accent)
Completely agree. Clearly PK overvalues “AI” whilest still having no clear vision or evidence that it can improve TFP or GDP.
> need human guidance at the end to work well.
Toddlers need human guidance to work well too. It just comes from lack of experience with the real world. This will change in time.
So, in manufacturing parlance, the west German Mercedes Benz auto manufacturing worker sees that EVs only require a third of the working parts of an ICE auto, therefore only a third of the ICE manufacturing work force going forward just as his union contract expires the same year as Mercedes Benz will quit manufacturing ICE autos: 2030, and he's going to be roughly a decade from retirement age.
Wow Sarah Jarosz what a great piece thank you!
Another nice article by Krugman - thank you sir.
And that cover is wonderful. I believe the bassist is Jeff Pickens.
Elon won't need any bailout. He's going to force government payments to go through X and cream off a transaction fee from every Social Security, Medicare, and other government payment.
As for the rest? I think what kind of bailout they get will depend on how the other techbros flatter Trump and Musk
He's a master scammer.
Being old enough to remember Black Monday, dot comm, Asia, Lehman and GFC - yes this has all the makings of another crash. The kind that most mainstream economists totally fail to see coming.
And who knew you had such good taste in music!
My entire investment thesis is now that a major crash is coming. It couldn't be more clear. The market has abandoned any presense of rationality.
You are correct about the irrationality, but irrationality alone only makes for a correction. Crashes come from malfeasance. DotCom had IPOs without a business plan. The Great Recession had people making a fortune simply by holding a house 6 months. I'm not seeing that part yet.
I do think the AI industry is greatly inflated by hopium though. Maybe the business plan is missing there too.
See my post re musk and treasury reprogramming, if you're looking for malfeasance theres plenty of opportunities being 'created'
the AI hype is all smoke and mirrors, it isn’t making any difference to the fundamentals yet. The US market PE is now 30, it was 33 at the height of the .com boom, that concerns me.
That and every “world” ETF is now 70% US. There’s an enormous amount of dumb money being poured into the US market via ETFs.
Nvidia accounts for more of the US market right now than Cisco did during the .com boom.
The mag 7 are driving most of the return, with the rest of the S&P performing on a par with the EU market (which trades at far lower PE)
Then there’s the ESG risk, heavy emphasis on the G.
We don't have to wait for Skynet. RFK Jr. is going to kill most of us and Elon will make sure the rest of us starve to death. Say hello to techno-feudalism.
I figured 'DOGE' (even when it was just a 'coin') was a nod to Venetian mercantilism. Surprised to still not notice any such references in even the 'nerdier' commentary spaces
You didn't see PK's post with the pic of some Venetian historical figure at the top while he was still at NYT?
Didn't mean to pretend to broad media awareness; never have followed NYT regulars. Good to know it was obvious to someone with a platform. There were a lot of doges as long as they had a naval empire...
I was expecting to wake up to substack articles about Trump saying the USA will "own" Gaza while sitting next to Netanyahu yesterday, and that the Palestinians should be cleared out (war crime) and should want to go.
Then Trump implied we would use our military to get them out.
When Trump says "own" and "USA" I think he now means Trump, in my view. He is also running things as if he alone owns the USA and can do as he pleases.
Many months back, WaPo reported that Trump's son-in-law had mentioned the value of beach front real estate in Gaza, as buildings were being flattened in the war.
Honestly, it is not a stretch to think that Netanyahu, who had been in communication with Trump, postponed the ceasefire deal, because he wanted to wait for a Trump win since he did not want a 2 state solution which Biden would have pushed for.
However, I doubt he knew Trump would take it for himself and announce it in front of the cameras.
I have noticed that Trump tends to do this to embarrass anyone who is complicit with him and to implicate them, as a power play.
I could not tell if Netanyahu looked surprised that Trump would mention the "clearing out" (a war crime) live on TV with him sitting there, or if he thought Gaza would belong to Israel, not the USA or if it was all a shock. The fact that he did not interject an opposing view, or say they had not discussed this, was rather telling, I think.
After winning election Trump announced a real estate developer would be his advisor to the middle east. This made this outcome seem obvious to me then, as well.
Then the shuttering USAID - which is only 1% of our spending and millions may die as a result of it shuttering.
Is this genocide intentional?
How can it not be when an agency responsible for feeding the starving as well as providing medicines is suddenly shut down with no alternatives?
It can't not be intentional when the result is clear - death.
We hear about the outrage on a political level and it is discussed that congress had a hand in this agency so only they can dismantle it - but we are not talking about death - what is really going to happen as a result.
Are people in denial as to how really horrific this is?
It also may send these desperate nations into the arms of China and Russia, as well.
The lack of any remote sense of morality or concern coming from this administration or the GOP in congress regarding these pending deaths, is sickening.
Not a word from the GOP.
Also, with the USA ignoring all trade agreements (including ones Trump made last time) and all international laws, who will even trust us again?
We are actually sending our trading partners as well as developing nations into looking for agreements with others, weakening our nation.
They may now wonder who may end up being worse to do business with or who may end up having a worse record on humanitarian and democratic rights, USA or Russia or China.
We are certainly now not taking the moral high ground.
I mean, what I say sounds extreme, but someone has to state the obvious, even if it is horrific.
Nobody is in denial. This just what happens when you vote for the catastrophically wrong dude. He has 4 years to make a mess of things. The alternative is sedition and revolution. Is it worth going there?
I simply meant that people starving to death because of what Trump via Musk did should be the number 1 headline and then add to it that it seems clear that they clearly do not care what happens to most folks in crisis like in Gaza, either, plus since when do we go and take others over for profit in the modern age? All the evil we learned as kids in our history books, as things to never be repeated, seems to be acceptable to these folks with zero conscience.
My learning of economics was limited to the basic class of macro economics (my major was international history/relations.
But with easy money flushing all over the world, since before Covid-19 but especially after it, isn’t it natural for people to misperceive that they have easy money (even if that easy moneys are very unevenly distributed in fact)?
As a Japanese, I can’t help thinking of the early 1990s shut down of the easy money by Japanese Minister of Finance, and the flush of Japan’s bubble economy.
I wonder if the MoF could make a soft landing. It might not be possible then: after all Washington was pressing Tokyo heavily to stop Japanese economy juggernaut those days (And it did sink the Japan juggernaut completely, not without negative effect on the US economy.) But I always wonder if that was possible: thought that in 2007-8, think that these days.
I call it The Great Slosh. Cash tsunamis rolling from shore to shore, getting spent in ways judicious and especially otherwise.
In terms of productivity gains form AI people seem to be ignoring something that is very real right now, and with little so far in the way of remedy: the damage AI is doing to the education system. Unless a remedy comes soon, any gains in TFP from AI will have to balanced against losses in human capital to education, especially at the high end. In-person exams do not teach advanced critical thinking skills, but only the skills that are most easily replaced by AI (rote memorization, summarizing of current knowledge).
They test basic critical thinking skills but not advanced. They test analysis of simple arguments, but not the analysis of extended (article or book-length) arguments, the synthesis of arguments with evidence, evaluation, comparison of competing arguments etc., etc. This requires essays that cannot be produced in the time-limited context of an exam setting. That's why blue book exams are only used at the introductory level where one is mostly testing for rote-learned knowledge of simplified, standard positions and arguments.
I agree they can't do it very well (yet), but they often do it as well as someone just learning to do it. Graders can actually tell the difference or at least have a sense of it, but it is very hard to be more than 80% or so sure. Moreover, it is almost impossible to prove it if the student grieves the grade. The consequences of falsely accusing students of cheating with AI are probably even more destructive than letting through those that do.
A "national crypto reserve" makes greater fools of all of us.
It's beyond dumb because an entire crypto currency reserve can be created in about a minute. Instead of brute force cracking the cypher the hard way, just start at the last crypto dollar you want to make and trivially derive the next trillion in the reverse easy direction normally reserved for verification and then demand everyone pay their taxes using this new cryptodollar. Since we can do that so easily, there is no reason to keep a reserve. Just make the currency as needed. Having a "reserve" just invites thieves.
The only "benefit" of making a reserve is to reserve /other people's/ crypto schemes, and why would you want to do that? They are the federal government with the friggin' power to print *US dollars* of all things and you want to prop up some amateur's currency? Why? Why? Why? Arnold Palmer does not go to John Candy for golf tips.
The only answer is corruption.
I worked in the state judiciary for 30 years. As I matured and was promoted to different jobs, I observed the types of civil cases won and lost. It became obvious that those with reserves could withstand loses and those without, mostly disappeared or were folded into larger organizations. Stability and reserves were the lesson for me. I’m not wealthy, but I thought my modest pensions plus social security would get me to the end game. Now it’s clear, those with millions and billions are gambling with our society and stability is teetering on the edge along with everyone’s reserves.
From the original post: "AI clearly has significant real-world applications. Even if you’re one of those who describes it as “souped-up autocorrect,” well, that could describe many white-collar jobs. Also, you could equally well describe heavy earth-moving machinery as a souped-up version of a guy with a shovel. So?"
You're missing a critical point about white-collar "souped-up autocorrects": responsibility.
Here's an example I know something about: clinical pharmacy. Pharmacists don't often dispense meds. They have two critical jobs: making sure the medicine won't harm the patient, and making sure that the proper medicine is dispensed. This is why they have doctorate degrees, pass multiple certifications, are required to do continuing education, and have various legal responsibilities. Those notes in your medical record are legal documents that they're responsible for.
Why? It's to keep patients safe. And, if a pharmacist screws up, they're held responsible, with penalties ranging from loss of job to loss of career to prison time. They know this too.
Can they be replaced by AI? Of course. But who's responsible when an AI screws up?
With a human pharmacist, there are powerful incentives to not screw up: a good salary for doing a good job, loss of job/career/freedom for making a mistake. With an AI dispensary, there's only "acceptable error rate," which is determined by shareholders like the Vanguard index funds and insurance company AIs, neither of whom can in turn be held responsible for their lousy decisions.
Would you trust an AI pharmacist? I wouldn't.
This doesn't mean that pharmacists don't benefit from expert systems. Of course they do! But when responsibility matters, especially legally, it's better to have a human held responsible than an AI.
That need to hold people responsible is why you need a bunch of those white collar auto-corrects. Don't disregard the law in the pursuit of economics.
If this is too abstract...
Let's talk about one of those optical fiber mains, which cost millions to repair if broken. If an excavation company has to dig around such a line, do you want the backhoe to be operated by a gal who has her family's livelihood as well as her own professional pride on the line? Or do you want it operated by an LLM with significant latency issues at the work site? You, in this case, are someone whose livelihood depends on that cable working so that you can meet deadlines, and who will sue if your work is interfered with?