I've had a chance to use Opus 4.6 a bit, not just for coding tasks, but for other typical corporate management activities too, like reading and writing policies, understanding bookkeeping, etc.

And I have some scary news. Sure it makes mistakes, but for a person treating it as an extended information processing tool instead of outsourcing thinking to it, not more so than your average junior developer, outsourcing partner, big four consultant below partner level. It just delivers results much, much faster.

It's not hard to imagine a world in which racking up a €1000 AI bill per day per person driving it isn't just considered normal, but cost effective.

We'll see exponential hunger for AI compute, in a world in which chip production scales linearly at best. And the implications for energy consumption are shocking.

We'll also see the market for junior developers dry up. And no one has an idea where new senior developers who actually can meaningfully manage AI dev work will come from.

We live in interesting times, and not in the best sense of this phrase.

@ela I could take a similar perspective, running around in IT at the moment - but I still don't, because my intuition won't follow. I don't have answers - let me ask questions:

* How much AI hunger can actually be satisfied?
* How fast will AI input become scarce?
* What's the societal reaction?
* Wouldn't there be emergent economic reactions?
* Are we sure that real-economic effects are accounted for?
* It could boost the real-economy?
* If AI input becomes valuable, it becomes a product?

@promovicz Have you tried buying RAM or SSD lately? Scarcity has already hit, and it will only be getting worse. So far, economic effects have largely been on the stock market, but apparently investors see a lot of industries losing their base for existence. Just look at the dip e.g. LexisNexis took.
@ela @promovicz If we get rid of all the jobs and opportunities, who will be the customers for the industry?
@Nfoonf @promovicz Well, according to billionaire ethics (longtermism, effective altruism, that kind of stuff), most people will die and that's a good thing?
@ela @promovicz I think they have a plan if people refuse to die, don’t they.
@Nfoonf @ela A plan? It's fascism. It has every plan. That's why it's bad.