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Unlike many people, I am definitely on the AI-train: this is a revolutionary technology that will transform the way we live. I do think that people and companies that learn to make use of this technology most effectively will gain compounding benefits over time, just like how it seems households that has a computer 30-40 years ago (either through wealthy parents and/or educated parents) really helped prepare their children for big and better things (although obviously having wealthy and/or educated parents already help a lot too).
If one looks at the AI Index of Ramp (corporate spend management platform), one will find that in monthly AI spend, the top 1% of companies are now hovering close to $10k/month/employee, with a big drop off that follows where top 10% of companies are only spending $800/month/employee, and the median company is only spending $15.70/month/employee. In short, being AI-pilled shows up on the balance sheets. In an interview with Derek Thompson (btw, the other author of Abundance) on his podcast Plain English, Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian says: "All of the companies in that top 1% are extremely technically advanced. They are concentrated in the information sector, so software and media or finance or technical services." I do believe these companies are on to something, these are evidentially smart collective of people with clear objectives (increase productivity, reduce cost, maximize profit, etc.)
On a personal level, after 1 year ish of using Claude/Codex as a software engineer, I've noticed many benefits of AI usage (though . I've shared before that it has freed up time, for example, to engage with this forum. I've also been on and know of multiple projects with which would have never even been greenlit if not for AI-use, such as integrating with an external partner on a legacy platform in a computer language no one in my company knows (tbf, it is a C-family language). There has been many complaints about software reliability in the AI-era, with one poster child being GitHub that got bad enough where prominent projects left for supposedly greener pastures. My company did the opposite in that we are migrating from Atlassian's bitbucket to github, I think in part because of what I summed up in an internal message at the time when asked of should we or not: "a migration to GitHub is essentially a bet on AI, because Microsoft/GitHub for sure will be at the frontier of AI features compared to Atlassian/Bitbucket." Regarding the perception of reduced software reliability in the AI-era, I fondly remember early Q2 this year, when the VP of Support and Operations came to my team and the CEO to complain about the increasing amount of outages; I sat down for about a day, counting up number of changes-features-fixes per release and number of incidents caused by each release before presenting to everyone in a meeting my findings: the rate of errors (number of incident / number of changes-features-fixes) actually reduced per release, but because we were releasing so often due to increased cadence and productivity, the raw number of errors increased. The aforementioned VP btw has come to learn to appreciate AI a lot, even if he doesn't quite understand the terminal still.
This brings me to the thread down low between @RandomRanger and @MaiqTheTrue which provoked this chain of thought, bolded mine:
I found a source for the stat btw.
Why is there more stress and suffering now that would lead to the tripling of teenage suicides? Ask the random person on the street, they'll just point everywhere and tell you to look around and say: "everything is so hard now". I think what is so hard about life in the US, and I guess the modern age, is complexity. Life these days are too complext. It's simple enough (heh) to look at computers as a technology that drives societal complexity. Computers makes certain problems extremely simple ("find the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile using this column of data in Excel"), but then it leads to new problems that are more complex ("now that we know the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile, what does that mean to us?"). Fifty years ago, it was simple enough to understand your own finances, at most you had a bank account, paper checks for the monthly payments on car and your house, and pay in cash for everything else. Now consumers look at managing multiple credit cards, point rewards and loyalty programs for various companies, managing their own IRA/401K/brokerage, etc. Fifty years ago, you marry the person you met in school or the person you met at work, now gotta navigate dating apps, hookup culture, shifting and varied interpersonal relationship expectations, etc. The following statement from @FCfromSSC points to it well:
And of course btw, complexity is a subsidy for the rich, because only the rich can afford to navigate all the complexities.
So what will AI do to/for us? Personally again, I think AI has greatly simplified my life. There are many questions that I wouldn't even know where to begin to ask, now I just ask. But a colleague has recently confided in me that he thinks of quitting before the year ends, "the rate at which we're going, it's just too fast". I was perplexed at that because I thought AI would have made his life easier like AI did mine. But maybe it wont? what do you think?
So, if you look at the CDC data, the suicide rate among 15-19 year olds has climbed from 8.5/100k in 1980, to 9.4/100k today.
But at the same time, the accidental death rate among 15-19 year olds has fallen from 57.8/100k in 1980, to 18.9/100k in 2024.
What I'm suggesting is simple: it used to be a lot easier to get yourself killed, so people who didn't want to live didn't have to kill themselves. You could get a dangerous job, engage in a dangerous hobby, drive recklessly, join a street gang, or otherwise just do something stupid. The drop off in accidental deaths of almost 40/100k is more than enough to hide the .9/100k increase in suicide deaths, it would only require 1/40 accident victims to have a death wish in their heart of hearts.
My theory: some portion of people are born with a tendency towards suicide, and this will first express itself through engaging in activities likely to get oneself killed while ignoring safety precautions before manifesting as a formal suicide if the accident doesn't occur. Suicidal ideation and unsafe driving habits are highly correlated among teenagers.
Modern safety measures thwart the teenage suicide in his effort to kill himself accidentally, forcing him to more direct means.
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Objectively, the conditions faced by Americans from 1980 to the present are not stressful. Ask an American teenager today if they would like to switch places with an English teenager from 1346 (during the plague), or a Russian teenager from 1939, or a Yemeni teenager today.
It recently occurred to me that there are perhaps individuals who choose to commit suicide who are actually not suffering all that much. Implicitly we have a mental model that says that suicide is an extreme option that is reserved only for cases of the most severe suffering, but maybe this is not the case. Maybe people do it on a bit of a whim more often than we think. (I have little doubt that the suffering experienced by a young person who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, and who so desperately clings to their final months of life in spite of its futility, is greater than the suffering of at least some individuals who actually do choose suicide.) There are many individuals who, by their nature, do not experience deep passions. They don't get particularly attached to their career, to their favorite TV shows, to their friends; all of these things could be swapped out for alternatives, it's a matter of some indifference to them. Perhaps there are also individuals who do not experience a deep passion for life as such, and for these individuals it would be much easier to simply give the whole thing up over a minor inconvenience.
At any rate, suicide statistics in a vacuum are meaningless without a cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparison of suicide rates in different times and places, cultural attitudes towards suicide, motivations for suicide, etc.
In his seminal work Suicide, one of the first works of Sociology, Emile Durkheim specifically refutes the thesis (from Le Play) that suicide is caused directly by poor material conditions.
He instead provides a now famous two-axis typology wherein the causes come from one's relationship to others and society, which material conditions only effect indirectly by affecting one's relationships.
Your second paragraph seems to me to describe quite specifically anomie, which modern living conditions are often accused of exacerbating:
What better way to describe recent times than dizzyingly extreme constant changes where nobody knows what is expected of oneself and no reliable way of judging one's position in the world can stand?
I dunno. It just seems like first world problems or a skill issue to complain too much about the modern world in any way (I'm only talking about first world western nations for the entirety of this conversation). It's a really nice world we've been given. Just the right difficulty setting, so to speak. I think the years from 1985-2005 in particular were essentially a paradise, real "peak of human civilization that will never be reached again" type stuff. (I've talked to both Gen X'ers and boomers who have similar nostalgia for the 90s, so it's not purely me being nostalgic for my childhood.)
I could see people killing themselves after the ASI singularity. When you've become such a god that the only challenge you have left to surmount is your own self-destruction. But we're not nearly there yet.
I'm approaching this as someone who is trying to build a mental model of a phenomenon that is deeply foreign to me. I am fantastically in love with life and fantastically afraid of losing it, so I think my threshold for when I would consider suicide is simply higher than many other individuals. Even many types of emotional and existential "pain" serve only to sweeten life (Nietzsche correctly identified that melancholy is a positive emotion). I will again reiterate that an "increase in suicides" by itself doesn't mean much without knowing what the base rate of suicide is in a wider range of cross-cultural contexts. (We also have to define what a "suicide" is. Is a Hamas suicide bombing a "suicide"? Is it a "suicide" if a young Russian man signs up for the front lines because he doesn't care much either way if he lives or dies? There are certain death-inducing phenomena that are present in other cultures but not our own, and that should probably factor into the conversation at some point.)
That's fascinating to me. Perhaps I need to get checked for depression, but aside from dangerous situations where instinct takes over (say, car swerved a bit in bad weather), I have no interest in life outside of what it means I can provide for my wife and family (both materially and emotionally), and can't actually remember the last time that was different.
Maybe, but, I'm deeply skeptical of the over-medicalization of normal psychological variance. Honestly I think you're closer to the population norm than I am. Everyone's always talking about how depressed they are and how meaningless everything seems. I feel like the odd one out in that I've never struggled with any of that. But on the flip side, I do struggle mightily with anxiety issues, and a few other types of mental health issues besides, so it's not like I got off free or anything.
You perform a vital evolutionary function. If your barometer for responding to external stimuli was too sensitive and hyperactive, it would only get in the way of the fulfillment of your duties. I'm deeply appreciative of people like you who are capable of performing the vital functions that I myself would only be able to perform with great difficulty. (My own designated functions, should I have any, are not nearly so vital.)
If we think of human civilization as a single living organism, then the various personality types and psychological dispositions that we find among individuals define the cell types; different individuals are specialized for different functions. Diversity (and experimentation, and mutation, and tragic ends) is necessary for the organism as a whole to function.
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I'm no social scientist but I'd point out that this was the era of so-called latchkey kids which is a phenomenon that has largely disappeared since then but used to be the norm among GenX teenagers. This surely appears to contradict the thesis of some researchers that "the steady historical contraction of children's and teenagers' freedom to roam, play, and explore independently without adult supervision contributed to rising alienation and mental health strain" (according to Google AI). Admittedly I'm at a bit of a loss regarding this but I also assume that the environment where latchkey kids were forced to learn autonomy was also a stressful one.
I'm also guessing that lead poisoning and illegal drug proliferation also played a role.
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I don't know what the data shows, but if Kerouac's On the Road is an accurate picture of what the 1940s/50s were like, it was a time when a young man could arrive in any big city with a thriving social scene, like New York, San Francisco, or Denver, spend a few days job hunting and find a random manual labor job like parking lot attendant or railroad worker, grab a shitty but private apartment (no roommates) somewhere, and spend his free time having fun and/or making art.
So part of me wants to say that a lot of the problem is that housing in dense, fun parts of the country is fucked. And the entry level job market is fucked.
I myself remember seeing my own city, in the last 20 years or so, go from a place where it's hard but reasonable for a person who doesn't have a solid career to pay the rent with random jobs to a place where it's very difficult to do it.
At the same time, modern media (both mainstream and non-mainstream) is constantly exposing people to pictures of stunning material success. Politicians, socialites, celebrities ranging from YouTubers to Hollywood actors. There's kind of a sense in the gestalt that either you hustle your way to being some kind of at least mini-celebrity with a personal brand, smart your way to being a tech/entrepreneur genius, or you're fucked, condemned to the permanent underclass.
On the sexual front, the blackpill has really risen in popularity compared to 20 years ago. 20 years ago a young man who typed "how to get laid" into Google would have found the pick-up artist community, which would tell him that by doing fun adventurous things like approaching women he could gain social skills and have a lot of sex. This was true, by the way. And it still is, despite dating apps. But now with the rise of the blackpill, it's more common for the young man to get sucked into some community that tells him that he is fucked if he doesn't looksmax his way to being a 6'2" male model with a square jaw. The dating advice for men has also become more political. 20 years ago it had more a libertarian, fun, adventurous attitude. Now it's gotten sucked more into the miserable culture war, with both male and female influencers spreading misogyny and misandry, the kind of energy that if one buys into it, makes one wonder why there's even any point in interacting with the opposite sex. Meanwhile women are comparing themselves more than ever to hot female influencers on social media.
The vibes in the country are bad. There's a sense that something big has to change, soon. The overall feel is of living in a declining empire rather than in an ascending one. Overall social optimism is scarce despite some good things happening (for example, homicides are way down compared to say the 1980s though part of this might be that medicine lets more people survive getting shot than in the past). And now with the AI revolution, things appear even scarier. It's nice if hypothetically AI increases social productivity, cures disease, and so on at some point in the future, but that's hard to enjoy if there is fear of becoming unemployed in the near future. There's a general precarious sense that seeking a stable career is a fool's errand and one has to constantly be on one's toes, ready to pivot one's life in an instant, if one wants to be able to adapt.
Third places have gotten scarcer and also people spend more time sitting at home online. Many young people complain about having zero friends. The Internet makes it easier for people to get sucked into a lifestyle where one doesn't meet people in physical reality, to spend many years in that lifestyle and then realize that one is 30 and has no social skills and no off-line social connections.
I think tech also may be starting to reach the natural biological limits of the human organism when it comes to being a cyborg, a tool-user. Beyond a certain level, constant engagement with technology might become corrosive to certain needs that the human organism comes hard-wired with. The typical human organism needs a certain dose of touching grass and socializing off-line in order to stay healthy. The modern software-enabled lifestyle also has a certain constant annoyance factor. One has the sense of living in a dystopian cyberpunk world of giant corporations that are constantly pursuing you with advertisements and pestering you with notifications.
Now, does all this explain the change in suicide rates? I really don't know. That would require some deep analysis to determine. But it's what first comes to mind.
For what it's worth you can still do this in Europe. I did it 3 years ago and went to France and became a chef, it's not always easy but I can usually get jobs for friends who want to do the same (as I did for an ex-programmer friend who lost his job).
It took me a few weeks of sending emails, Instagram messages and one flight to get the first job, and another two weeks of staying over with friends and in hostels to find a place. I did share with housemates but later realised that cheap apartments were available if you searched. I had zero grasp of the language but a couple of thousand in savings from working at a factory to get me started.
I know French bartenders and waitresses who just decide to show up in Paris or Marseille and try and make it there, I know a 20 year old Irish busker who travels across Europe surviving on the money he makes playing guitar on the street, and another Ukrainian guy who escaped the war at 17 and hopped around Europe before making it to France. It seems fairly doable if you're actually willing to be poor for a while.
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I think there is plenty of ground yet to be taken on AI greatly encomplexing one's life. For example, if you're not inclined to "plug in" all aspects of your life into a corporate AI (does corporate software such as dating apps currently inspire your trust???), you must go local model. Keeping up with the rest of the world on local models sounds like it will be as complex as a mom and pop store keeping up with Amazon.
Many people's job before hinged on being of slightly higher than average intelligence and having a lot of domain knowledge and legacy knowledge. Now an AI can simply figure out what they get paid to know and they'll have only their raw personal qualities to leverage once the market adjusts. Worst case scenario, you won't be able to make a living in IT unless you can be your own project lead and product manager. That makes life more complex.
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