The death of the empire won’t be a loud bang but a boring ever after. Nothing to do, nothing to distract you from all these memories of what you have done. The worst thing for a worker to happen is nothing at all. If nothing happens at all, nobody needs you, nobody employs you, how do you spend your time? How do you justify your own existence?
To a worker, the worst that could happen is literally nothing at all. As long as anything happens, and i mean anything, there’s business to be made and work to be done. As some poet put it: “Do not go easy into this silent night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go easy into this silent night.”
And that is why Trump starts this war; Because if all was perfect, and everybody had everything they need, the economy would come to a screeching halt. To ensure that things continue to be done, and business to be made, windows must be broken repeatedly (planned obsolescence), and buildings need to be smashed, so they can continue to be rebuilt, in a never-ending cycle.
And $1000 electric bills.
Why not both?
Friendly reminder that the AI is built and controlled by billionaires who are the ones using it to kill us.
Mostly the AIs are built and controlled by public companies. Anthropic’s ownership is secret, but about 10% is owned by Google, and about 10% by Amazon. For OpenAI, 1/4 is owned by Microsoft, 1/4 is owned by their non-profit arm in some bullshit scheme, 1/4 is the employees (presumably including CEO, etc), and the remaining bits are early investors. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, nVidia, Oracle, and other public companies are owned by regular investors, pension funds, investment banks, etc.
Billionaires are part of the problem, but so are pension funds, investment banks, and regular investors who own a bit of stock in their 401(k)s.
This isn’t billionaires using their private money on private projects to fuck up the world like some kind of mad Bond villain. They’re not breaking any laws. They’re not doing anything in secret. They’re not doing it in order to kill people, or to try to take over the world.
This is the whole system where these companies are following the laws and trying to generate profits for their investors. Killing all the billionaires would be easy and satisfying, but it wouldn’t fix the problem, because the problem is a systemic one.
If it were Doctor Evil hiding in a cave, working on a doomsday machine, you’d need to send in Austin Powers to stop him. When it’s regular public companies doing it, you can stop it by just changing a law. The US system is so fucked up that it may be impossible to do that. But, in say France it’s probably much more likely that someone can just pass a simple law saying “you can’t do that”.
Thanks for tempering my cynicism with facts and logic, but I’m still angry for some reason.
You should be. The system sucks. Even though it’s not Doctor Evil in a cave, it sucks that American oligarchs have the power they do. Even before Trump they were using their money to get people elected and lobby them to bend the laws in their favour. And now, with Trump, they’re just outright flattering and bribing him and getting what they want without even needing to hide them. But, they’re also symptoms of a problem. The values of the US are fucked up and this is really just a reflection of those values.
On the flip side, you have absolute maniacs like Peter Thiel and half of the US government, trying manicly to usher in the actual End of Days.
this is the fucking root of every fucking “will technology kill us?!” statement.
The tech won’t do shit, the goddamn assholes owning it will.
I thought AI would eventually make every profession based on thinking and creativity redundant or obsolete, so if you ask me we’ll die of depression caused by AI. But maybe you are right and we die of dehydration first.
You might have to learn from the republicans then, how to life without thinking.
isn’t that bottom frame AI?
or we could just use closed loop cooling
I’m still gonna die guns a-blazing in a shootout with the clankers in the human-AI resource wars of the 2040s.
AI isn’t killing us. Half a dozen billionaires are.
Actually scratch that, we’re killing ourselves.
Cause half a dozen people could be “convinced” to stop very easily, if everyone stopped supporting and protecting them.Its not gonna steal our water until we die. AI is still just a tool. Billionaires are gonna use it to poison our minds so that we’ll fight amongst ourselves until the last of us is dead.
Why not both?
That’s true, but this misunderstanding may be due to the fact that what is sold as AI today is by no means what movies like Terminator are about.
