48 percent of people are still that gullible?
While taking the poll to see how folks feel several humanoid robots were beating people to death in the background.
Right now AI is looking a lot like a bubble. Wealthy people keep investing in it, but all the AI companies are losing money way faster than their profits. They’re selling compute at a vast loss, and if they charged full price, no-one would buy it.
With tin-foil hat firmly in place, this is what the owner class hopes to get out of AI:
1. Automate everything. As Corey Doctorow surmises, they want to automate as much as possible, until the working class just isn’t needed anymore, so they can build their Ayn Rand private city utopias (Peter Thiel has plans) and let the rest of us starve somewhere, displaced by the quarries, data centers and automated factories.
2. Create armies of swarming killer drones that are commanded by AI, as Randall Munroe predicted, not only to annex any territory that they can’t buy, but to garrison all the working class they’ve confined to reservations to die of thirst and hunger. And…
3. In the meantime, process all the mass surveillance information in order to predict who is a dissident or a troublemaker or is capable of organizing resistance, so that they can be dispatched early. Also to micromanage their dwindling workforce and make sure women can’t go to an abortion provider.
One thing that gives me hope is that my local college made an announcement on Facebook about an AI product they bought for athletics.
Every single comment on both it and the news story was negative.
Turns out telling an entire generation that AI will replace half their jobs, flood the internet with slop and make billionaires richer didn’t produce boundless techno optimism. Who could have predicted that? The AI industry may have a capability problem, but it definitely has a messaging problem.
The AI industry is actively telling companies that they can become ‘more efficient’ (i.e. fire workers) with AI; that’s more than a mere ‘messaging problem’.
It has a financial interest in companies firing their workers and raising prices to make room for it.
Honestly, I hope AI continues to improve and does actually wipe out large swaths of the job market. Maybe then countries will finally have to come to terms with the idea that capitalism is absolute fucking shit and finally consider some sort of UBI or other way to move away from the existing garbage of a global economic system.
What I don’t look forward to is the significant months/years these fucks take to make those decisions, and the pain and suffering it will cause to billions of people. Why do these assholes always have to be dragged into the future kicking and screaming?
Wouldn’t having so many unemployed people work in their favor? Lots more scabs for one.
I’m not even concerned about it replacing jobs, it has proven to be shit at replacing real intelligence, and making the LLM bigger is not a path to AGI. Also my job requires hands, which copilot doesn’t have, so maybe I’m biased.
But I’m concerned about AI being used to spread disinformation and control narratives in favour of the ruling class. I’m concerned about AI datacenters exacerbating climate change. I’m concerned about even further erosion of privacy and mass surveillance. I’m concerned about the inevitable economic crash that will come when they eventually accept that this mess has no path to profitability. I’m concerned about AI psychosis and the way chatbots can seriously mess up a vulnerable mind. I’m concerned about the effects AI will have on children who grow up using it. Probably a few other things too that I’m forgetting about right now.
I’m also concerned about the powers that be trying to force AI to do things it can’t actually accomplish in spite of the fact that human labour is objectively the only real option. It doesn’t matter that it can’t actually do the job, it matters that they spent money on it and will keep hammering at it until reality catches up with them and hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people get hurt when the world burns because they won’t stop chasing sunk costs. The hubris at the top of a lot of companies is thick enough to cause real suffering for a lot of people.
They just gotta use it to know it won’t be taking jobs.
Seriously. Use it for something you consider yourself an expert at. Based on what happens, remember it’s like that for any topic. Yes, even the ones you know little about but it seems to. That’s the state of generative “AI”.
Tell this to the people who have the power to take away jobs. They don’t care if it works correctly or not.
Whenever a chat bot is aggressively presented on a website, I like to ask it how to disable all AI features. Often it will tell me to click on menu options that don’t exist.
Young adults have to become experts at something to realize that - a prospect that AI makes harder every day.
Let me elieviate your fears. Human capital is listed as a liability, technology investment is CAPEX.
But so many prerequisites for effective AI implementations are relying on improving quality of inputs / training materials and that is an OPEX siphon.
