Discussion
All that stuff is terrible and harmful, but it's not driving investment. The total dollar figure represented by these apps doesn't come close to making a dent in the capital expenditures and operating costs of AI. They are peripheral, residual uses: flashy, but unimportant to the bubble.
Get rid of all those uses and you reduce the expected income of AI companies by a sum so small it rounds to zero.
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Same goes for all that "AI Safety" nonsense, that purports to concern itself with preventing an AI from attaining sentience and turning us all into paperclips. First of all, this is facially absurd. Throwing more words and GPUs into the word-guessing program won't make it sentient. That's like saying, "Well, we keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, so it's only a matter of time until one of our mares gives birth to a locomotive."
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A human mind is not a word-guessing program with a lot of extra words.
I'm here for science fiction thought experiments, don't get me wrong. But also, don't mistake sf for prophesy. SF stories about superintelligence are futuristic parables, not business plans, roadmaps, or predictions.
The AI Safety people say they are worried that AI is going to end the world, but AI bosses *love* these weirdos.
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Because on the one hand, if AI is powerful enough to destroy the world, think of how much money it can make! And on the other hand, no AI business plan has a line on its revenue projections spreadsheet labeled "Income from turning the human race into paperclips." So even if we ban AI companies from doing this, we won't cost them a dime in investment capital.
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To pop the bubble, we have to hammer on the forces that created the bubble: the myth that AI can do your job, especially if you get high wages that your boss can claw back; the understanding that growth companies *need* a succession of ever-more-outlandish bubbles to stay alive; the fact that workers and the public they serve are on one side of this fight, and bosses and their investors are on the other side.
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Because the AI bubble really *is* very bad news, it's worth fighting seriously, and a serious fight against AI strikes at its roots: the material factors fuelling the hundreds of billions in wasted capital that are being spent to put us all on the breadline and fill all our walls will high-tech asbestos.
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I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification!
Catch me next in #Madison, CT; #Hamburg; and #Denver!
Full schedule with dates and links at:
https://pluralistic.net/tour
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