'RUsVille
From Cory Doctorow's latest on the AI business:
...This isn't like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent "unit economics" – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit-economics." Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money...
Doctorow goes on to make a convincing case that the already massive AI bubble is expanding so fast that the best thing we can hope for is that it bursts as soon as possible.
In other words, if folks like Mess'rs Doctorow and Zitron are right, the crash is coming and the only thing still up for debate is how bad it's going to be.
And then there is the matter of how fast the libertarian tech lords who now rule us will start screaming about the need for a bailout bigger than Jupiter and all of its moons.
Or some such Mars means nothing to us now-type thing.
______
6 comments:
AI bubble crashing? Surely you jest. Why, the President of the whole United States says this:
“The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence. Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set the global standards and reap broad economic and security benefits. Under President Trump, our Nation will win, ushering in a new Golden Age of innovation, human flourishing, and technological achievement for the American people.”
https://www.ai.gov
He’s never been wrong before. He even sits in the Oval Office and hands out red ball caps emblazoned with the caption “Trump Was Right About Everything” on the front. So how could he be wrong about AI?
Well, maybe when he says this:
“While the Federal Government should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace, in the context of Federal procurement, it has the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas. Building on Executive Order 13960 of December 3, 2020 (Promoting the Use of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in the Federal Government), this order helps fulfill that obligation in the context of large language models.”
And then does this:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/28/politics/trump-ai-medbed-conspiracy-theory
Or when he stands in front of the whole wide world at the UN and says climate change is a hoax and the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, thereby sacrificing truthfulness and accuracy to his own ideological agenda. And then AI calls him a liar:
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/ai-boom-will-boost-us-renewables-despite-trump-fortescue-says
But you can bet the farm on the fact that if (when) the AI bubble crashes, Trump and his Tech cronies will be the ones who “reap broad economic and security benefits”. It certainly won’t be the average citizen. Even the ones who buy his red caps at $50 per head.
At the moment the AI gurus are competing to dominate the world.
They dont give a fuck about the world being better.
When it comes down to the basics AI is like all that preceded it.
Garbage in Garbage out.
Newspeak is just around the corner!!!
TB
Lew--
At least those that buy a hat actually get something for their money unlike those that ponied up for a piece of so many of the other grifts.
.
TB--
I fear that we, ourselves, have already gone 'round.
That corner, I mean.
.
What, Me, Worry?
Even the Douche Bank is running with this now!
Post a Comment