You can't put the genie back in the bottle 馃ぁ
Meanwhile, the genie is only kept out of the bottle by the force of literally the entirety of the world's available investment capital
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@jenniferplusplus
"You can't put the genie back in the bottle" - spoiler alert: it wasn't Jeannie anyway, but her evil sister!
@jenniferplusplus i love it when people use the genie expression. it's like "ah good, so you are familiar with the mythology of genies and what they do"
Obviously, the models are going to continue to exist. Probably. So will the data sets, the libraries, and the generalized knowledge of how to build them and what that gets you, in a technical sense.
And if you think that's what AI is?
馃ぁ
For the record, AI is a technocratic political project for the purpose of industrializing knowledge work.
That industrialization of knowledge work has 2 parts. First, is mechanization. Making knowledge work dependent on some particular machine. This is already the case, with computers generally. Knowledge work is thoroughly computerized. But, those computers are small, cheap, universally available commodities. That doesn't serve the second part, so they're forcing in new layers of mechanization, and removing access to the old machines.
Second, they ensure those machines can only be obtained through large investments of capital. Thus, all knowledge work can be done only at the pleasure of the capitalists who own the machines. Personal computers don't help them, there. But a black box hosted service that consumes the entire web to build and a whole country's worth of electricity to operate sure as hell does.
"AI" is merely the banner under which they are organizing and justifying this project. The implementation details are just the implementation details.
@jenniferplusplus For a while, I specialized in the finance sector, and had a few of boutique investment banks as clients. At that time, the hip phrase for them was "The scarce resource." They used it the way we use "moat" today, but it came down to the same thing:
They would only invest in things where their money bought the scarce resource. As mining gajillionairre Peter Munk said when asked why he liked mining in the age of computation, "Two guys can't invent competition in their garage."
@jenniferplusplus
Thanks for this, it's a very clear explanation.
@jenniferplusplus I wonder whether it will actually lead to us getting more analog in the end. Basically reverting to what it鈥檚 been like before computers became mainstream. Cause if you piss off your consumer base little too much they can decide to ditch your whole set of artificial limits all together. I see many people doing just that with social media now, we cut heavily on our use, select things like Mastodon instead of the Meta, resorting to books for entertainment etc.
@jenniferplusplus I was thinking about this today. It's like they watched Star Trek or other sci-fi, saw the "black box" devices that relied on a central service to run, and said "I want some of that".
They want us all to have dumb devices we pay them for that use their services, that we pay even more for.
The saddest part is every single company seems to be onboard with this, despite them suffering greatly now because of it
Where it gets interesting I think is to consider the flip side of the coin. So big tech and the corporate world is all-in on AI technologies that serve to further erode social fabric of society, towards dystopic future if they have their way. A risk clearly perceived by many people who have a longing and human needs for real connection and social cohesion.
Big tech AI does not deliver there. It does not address people's needs in these regards.
Another way of formulating is saying that Big Tech is retracting from the 'market of real human connection'. In other words it leaves market space, places for people and small initiatives to most excellently fill these gaps. At the smaller scales, inter-community, across institutions and non-profits, small sustainable businesses, paying real attention to people and their needs instead of placing an artificial entity in front of them that separates them from others, becomes the true unique selling point for a commons.
@jenniferplusplus Recently called it "a social weapon masquerading as a technology" because of ALL of this and more.
So you can see how that genie is extremely prone to returning to it's bottle.
It only stays out as long as they can keep shoveling an ever increasing amount of real resources into it. And it turns out the resources available are finite
@jenniferplusplus I wouldn't compare AI with a genie rather than with Pandora's box because you won't get AI back into anything.
Not that AI is good or bad but too many companies and investors have pumped so much money into AI that it's about time to think of ROI.
AI is no charity even though one of the leading companies has Open in its name.
So, imo AI stays as long as the investors don't have their money back and it can take a long time until that happens. And then the earning starts.
