So in this interview Brockman talks about transforming the economy and the one example of how is that an AI agent can buy concert tickets without your consent.
is the Trillons spent on AI worth it? I know it’s helped people with developing apps feel they can build faster or do not need to learn how, but outside of some coding tasks, is AI worth it?
I use it all the time but if I could press a button and make it so that it never existed, I would. We are gaining much on one hand but losing so much on the other. I’m not religious but would even say we are losing part of our soul. A false economy at the most fundamental level.
Outside of development, what else do you use it for?
And this is the main mistake.
Sure. There’s a lot of domain where AI can be useful… if you use it for what it worth and don’t trust everything from AI.
Unfortunately I think we will need to take the good with the bad, like every other tech we’ve gotten this century.
So now AI comes around and is a bit of the same: really cool for some things, but probably comes with a price tag we haven’t fully grasped yet. I guess we’ll see
One example, I will be moving across the country soon. It’s a lot of work. I have AI finding homes, rentals, hotels, distances from the places that I want to be close to. All within the parameters I am telling it to. It also is finding flights for me at the best price within the parameters I set as well. Doing this move years ago would have been so much manual work for me. But I had it find everything, put it in taskPilot for me, which I built with AI. And also drop everything on a google map so I can visualize it as well. So, just the monotonous work that I don’t have time to do, I now let AI do that for me. So it’s very helpful.
I have many other examples that I won’t go into here, but it has been a game changer for me. 
There’s no way I’m offloading any of this to AI any time soon. Big nope from me
@fede.bubble Haha, it didn’t actually book anything for me. It just gave me all the options so I didn’t have to search for it using Google Flights, etc. It’s just a better search engine. 
It’s just compiling all the information for me so i can make the decisions. There is still a ‘human in the loop’.
Thanks for the example. It definitely saves time researching things. I use it primarily to provide me with some quick answers and sources so I can verify.
But, none of this is actually changing the economy or worth trillions of dollars which is what I’m getting at. Brockman says buy concert tickets in linked video, last year it was book your holiday, and as your example, it’s similar in nature. Tasks that might save people a bit of time here and there, but not fundamentally changing the economy.
I’m still wondering where it all leads. I don’t think it’s a dramatic increase in productivity that society gets world changing benefits from it all. It all just seems like we can outsource our design, translation, and content generation for 5-25 cents instead of $5-$25, or deploy it on tasks for which we have to trust it to really know us so it doesn’t skip over that perfect house, or better seat.
Personally, I enjoy using AI for stuff, I just couldn’t help but shake my head when Brockman in same statement of changing economy backs that up with buying concert tickets.
Interesting discussion.
I do think this is one of the big questions. Is spending over 1 trillion dollars a year on AI worth it for people who want to buy concert tickets or book a flight?
I mean, we talk about app building, etc., here on the forum, but realistically, maybe only 2% of the population is interested in that.
I live in Ohio, and the big thing now is whether data centers should be allowed to be built in this state. Millions of gallons of water a day, higher utility bills, etc. It’s a big thing that is shaping up to sway people in the next election. People on both sides of the issue.
I use AI almost daily. I don’t have a problem with it. It has also helped a lot in the medical field, etc., although there have been some horror stories about that.
So, the question, as you said, is really whether or not it’s worth the cost? And also, when does the reality of the cost versus the good start to hit home?
Eventually, the cost to use AI will explode…
an industry cannot continue to lose so much money and not have a correction?
I think of it as how electricity came and impacted the world. It permeated across much of what we do and way beyond of what anyone would have been able to foresee.
Are the trillions invested in it worth it? Not sure I would go with that question as my take is that there is pretty much no way back.
This thing seems like a wave of Tsunamis coming at us…
From what I understand is the AI that the data centers are being built for and that is constantly in the news and likely to crash the US economy is the ‘generative’ AI from OpenAI, Anthropic and Grok, which is different from the AI that has been around for decades helping in fields like medicine and science.
It seems most benefits of AI have been through use of AI that has been around for a long time already, which is a different form of AI that is all the buzz.
Oh my goodness, no.
The medical field is one of the fastest-growing segments in the use of generative AI, which is not the same as the AI you are referring to.
The medical field is using it in a ton of ways now.
The horror stories I mentioned are a lot of lawsuits, etc that have arisen from the use of generative AI in the medical field.
Insurance claims and operations, etc being automatically denied by AI.
The list is pretty long.
Also, people are using AI now to self-diagnose themselves… and often AI is getting it wrong.
You’ve probably also read the reports of people in growing numbers using AI for therapy? Which isn’t always the best idea. Several lawsuits over people who have self harmed themselves after talking to AI, etc.
So no, the medical field is a big contributor to the need for data centers.
But, as I said, AI has also helped in a lot of ways in the medical field.
Good question… On reflection, not as much as I thought. It’s mainly all for work related to my business: development, legal, research, automations.
In my personal world, it’s only really used as a search engine/information tool. For example I purchased a cool drum machine a few days ago and it came with really poor 1 page manual - so I asked the Ai to create me a doc to explain it’s main features and how to use them including updating firmware etc. Also used it to help me assemble an ebike, which again came with very poor/incorrect instructions - I took photos and it helped me identify what had to be done. Super helpful.
I think one of the big areas it’s being used, unfortunately, is the military and surveillance, and there will be an ai arms race, which is pretty concerning. Who knows where this all leads 
One last thing on this subject I forgot to mention…
I don’t believe this would ever cause the economy to crash.
There are just too many differences in how money is invested now in this instance compared to past crashes.
In the past, the banks held a lot of the debt.
Just like the late 1990s dot-com era, a correction in AI would be a valuation reset for tech companies, not a systemic collapse of the financial system.
Still do, now it’s just cloaked as private equity to get around the regulations put in place after 2008.
Private equity is lending, but it’s taking the money from the banks it lends out.
So, maybe not crash the economy but it will create a large correction in stock market valuations. Like the dot com bubble, big IPOs preceded the crash, as the investors wanted their pay day before things took a turn for worst. Now we are seeing SpaceX IPO as an AI company, not a rocket ship company, and OpenAI and Anthropic itching to IPO in next 12 months.
I could be wrong about stock valuation correction or economy crashing, but this stuff is not leading to any rewriting of how the economy works and a take over of white collar jobs as has been proclaimed by AI companies for past few years.
Yes, in college we did study the dot-com boom and bust in an economics class.
The whole age of computers was going to put people out of work and end the need for paper, etc.
Can’t remember their names, but there were a couple of popular books written about how it was the end of the age of work.
We all have seen what happened. Some companies that were big time during that time sort of faded out, and others we had never heard of became something.
Seems like we’re there again?
Yes, Musk had the biggest IPO in history to date. Some say Anthropic and OpenAI might overtake that role?
One thing about Musk is that if his Grok thing goes sideways, he still has Starlink, his rockets, Tesla… and hopefully he keeps updating Cursor 
He plans to do away with data centers by putting them into outer space using his rockets.
Obviously, Anthropic and OpenAI have a couple of things to fall back on also… but it’s not as secure, I wouldn’t think, as what Musk has?
I guess in the next 5 years or so, we’ll probably not recognize AI as we know it now. I’m guessing it will change a lot and be even better.
I don’t think anyone could come up with a plausible argument, though, for AI going away.
Maybe in 5 or 10 years, if this forum is still around, we can look back and read some of the posts about AI and see how early we were in our predictions and how it actually did change over time?
I’ve been using AI to do the boring tedious work that I really don’t want to do.
The big unlock was: sales/lead research, moving that lead to a database (Airtable), enrichment on over 20 columns, research the key decision maker, extract links (socials, linkedin, etc.), use that data to draft up insight and personalization, classifier, and then review the row for improvements, loop if need to, then clean up.
I’ve done this process for 14 years in marketing (music clients and brands), I already know the steps, where to find my leads, and how to do the proper outreach.
After 1 month of building mini programs (pretty much each sales step to ensure quality) in Codex, then connecting each step (program) with a lot of test runs, I’ve automated my sales with AI.
All I do now is have a beer, watch it do its thing, and saved 8-10 focused hours per week. The job gets done in under 45 mins with AI.
My Dad keeps telling me I should do a course on how I built it, maybe one day lol
That’s a great example of productivity gains.
Out of curiosity, how much does that cost you to run for the 8-10 hours saved work the AI does in the 45 minutes? Do you pay tokens or a monthly subscription plan?
Would you be willing to pay a multiplier more to do it, like 10X , 20X or even 40X more to still use the agent?
I’d suppose it’s a matter of how many more clients you can bring on using AI instead of manual approach if you can outreach to 5X the number of clients and theoretically onboard and serve 5X number of clients it wouldn’t really matter if you had to pay 40X current cost of AI since it would possibly be paying for itself.
We are Evolving.
