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Why "Dark Output", the AI-generated economic value that is currently invisible to national statistics, may be one of the hardest measurement problems in history (SemiAnalysis) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

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Resting the entire economy on the rock-solid foundation of an imaginary metric that even its believers admit they can't substantiate. Great idea. This one's going in the history books. Under "comically stupid boondoggles".

Stock prices are a prediction of future profits, so yeah, kind of.... They're catching up to Trump's obvious economic destruction like high oil prices; most of the profit predictions don't reflect the longer-term damage to the larger economy those profits depend on. AI's effects are even fuzzier.

The mention of treating intellectual property as capital as of 2013 feels about right; that's around when my company started making weird business decisions about "can we do this from the capital budget instead of sensibly expensing it?" It needs to reflect how fast IP depreciates; AI even more so.

Isn't it patently insane that technology being promoted as a "new electricity" cannot produce any measurable economic gains for society? Also, these morons don't seem to realize that their analogy with dark matter and dark energy is completely backwards.

Fuck aaaaaall they way off. “we swear AI makes so much money due to a secret force that’s actually making invisible value, but you just don’t see it” cryptid-ass economics

ven according to the most good faith reading of this article, AI is a bubble which is vastly over-valued. They also don't even address the hallucination problem or any of the foundational issues with the technology that makes it shit at its job.

We've gone from the Invisible Hand to "Dark Output," productivity that only the truly wise can observe. I hope you are deliberately full of shit, because if this is earnest, you've got problems.

I am laughing... and wow. I used to have an imagination but I don't think I could have ever invented "dark output". Is that like /dev/null?