The last phase of the "AI" scam?
All the talk about how "AI" could "wipe out humanity", which the tech billionaire CEOs are suddenly astroturfing, is just the final stage of the scam. By now, even they know that they and the venture capitalists they've been duping are never going to get back all the hundreds of billions of dollars they've sunk into this. "AI" doesn't work. It will never work. It can never work -- not reliably enough to be trusted with anything important, and even the things it can do (crappy fake pictures and wrong answers to questions), users aren't willing to pay for, not at the prices needed to cover the costs. The bubble is going to collapse, meaning a stock market crash that might be as deep as 1929. Rather than admit that they caused this by massively overhyping a fake and unworkable technology, the tech bros are pivoting to claim they had to stop developing it (or be regulated into doing so) because it was too powerful and dangerous. At this point what they're really concerned about is warding off the potential lynch mobs after the entire economy gets laid in ruins by their arrogance and stupidity.
If the war in the Middle East really blows up and causes massive fuel shortages here, that could well trigger the collapse, but it's only the fact that this huge "AI" bubble exists in the first place that will make the results so disastrous across the whole economy.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:28 AM
6 Comments:
This is a tough read in the morning. AI has certainly become an obsession.
Ugh! All I can think about are all the poor people stuck in communities next to these data centers.
Framing AI as "an existential danger to humanity" really is the ultimate tech-bro exit strategy. It sounds a lot more heroic to say you're pausing development to save the human race than to admit you burned hundreds of billions on a glorified autocomplete that nobody wants to pay real money for. When the unit economics crash against reality, the spin machine is going to be dizzying.
Anvil. Too much of an obsession, for some. Time to break the habit.
Bijoux: It's awful, but they will probably shut down after the bubble collapses. And local resistance has stopped many data centers.
Mr Shife: I wonder how many people will be fooled. Certainly the many journalists who went along with the hype won't want to admit they were wrong either.
The pivot from "it'll transform everything" to "it's too dangerous, we must pause" is a genuinely convenient story if the real problem is those return-on-investment numbers just not adding up. The bit about journalists being reluctant to admit they got swept up in the hype is a good point too, that kind of institutional face-saving could drag the reckoning out longer than it should.
It's hardly surprising that the tech CEOs and their toadies have put some thought into how they can weasel their way out of this. Nearly everybody is going to get hurt, and a lot of wealthy and powerful people are going to lose big.
I hope the reckoning is not dragged out much longer. The consensus among economists seems to be that the longer the collapse is delayed, the worse it will be.
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