The "AI Industry" (to the degree that it exists) has burned billions of dollars with no real hope of recuperating that. Models offered by services, charging huge amounts for inference, don't really offer much, if anything, above open source models run locally. Many of the claims made by these companies, and their supporters, have turned out to be lies. It seems as though the whole thing is a huge grift.
Investments will likely never be recovered. We've already seen a bail out in the form of military contracts. We will see much more public money dumped in to these technologies. In fact, threatening workers and suppressing labor strength is so strategically valuable that I expect LLMs to just be publicly funded (by being folded into the military industrial complex).
On these grounds, it can be easy to reject the technology outright. After all, how can anything useful not be profitable?
Even for radicals, capitalism can cloud our lens. The fact is, the dominant technologies of our age tend to not be profitable. Or rather, they are "publicly funded, privately profitable" (/hums in propagandhi/). Just like oil.
Outside of Saudi Arabia, oil is mostly not profitable to get out of the ground. Even there, it had only historically been profitable because of massive global military investments. The oil-centric world we have today is largely built on, and kept in place by, massive government subsidies. Roads, street parking, and direct subsidies to oil companies are all massive investments that tie populations to the resource at the heart of the military industrial complex: oil.
Oil was strategically important, because you can't run a modern military without it. The fossil fuel economy doesn't exist because fossil fuels are so cheap, but because modern militaries are only really possible by militarizing the population.
Unprofitable things *are made profitable* to serve the strategic interests of authoritarian systems. Though we have better alternatives to most oil-based products, it would be hard to argue that oil is not a useful resource. We can acknowledge it's strategic importance while also recognizing that the elimination of oil is essential to the survival of humanity.
Returning to "AI," we're seeing the same type of thing but it's more obvious. After the crypto grift, this seems to just be another way to transfer money into the pockets of the rich.
But crypto wasn't exactly a grift. It had a strategic function to power. It wasn't what we were told it was. It didn't free us from central banks. It wasn't a new way to invest. It wasn't anonymous. But it did create a new way to bribe politicians. It did make it easier to funnel public money into the pockets of the far right.
"AI" can similarly be mostly a grift. It can fail to do most, or all, of the things it claims, and it can still fulfill strategic functions. If we dismiss it as "just another grift," I think we miss a lot. "Just a grift" isn't something sustainable. It is something that will die out. It's something we don't need to resist because it is self limiting. But a strategy is something different. A strategy is more complex. A strategy will be sustained, at any cost. A strategy must be actively resisted.
@cdarwin@c.im
![screenshot of a post by Oz Katerji @OzKaterji
I also think it was obvious, basically everyone with sense said that Iran could win the war simply by outlasting US resolve, and they did precisely that. Trump basically thought the Iranians would fold like the Venezuelans did after Maduro, he was wrong.
[quote post]
Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom
Unless you're an brain-wormed partisan,
"Iran is an evil regime," "this preventive war was stupid and should never have been launched," and "this peace …](https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/116/784/600/296/658/717/original/849edf4a8fcf95df.png)
![screenshot of a post by Michael McFaul
@McFaul
This agreement is far worse than I expected.
To reopen the strait— a strait that was open before the war- we and our partners are transferring billions to the autocrats. We get nothing else— no elimination of enriched uranium, missiles, or terrorist support. And to add one final gift, we agree to not help the Iranian people pursue their democratic aspirations. Just incredible.
[quote post]
Farnaz Fassihi @farnazfassihi
The full text of the …](https://files.mastodon.online/media_attachments/files/116/784/600/795/576/923/original/ca1e80b92c0ee1ea.jpeg)
