Polite sage for offtopic, maybe there should be a thread specifically for discussing AI and its economic and political implications.
>>658350Mainly because it's being hastily adopted despite poor results and rather than being used to make work easier or to do things we couldn't before, it's being used only for cost-cutting and to lay people off. Although this has already started proving to not be wise and some of the companies that tried replacing workers with AI have realized they actually need people to do the work correctly (but they still use the situation as an excuse to hire people at entry level instead of senior positions).
There's also the part where it's
largely a scam by tech bros that uses very inefficient methods, basically brute-forcing the algorithm. This was demonstrated when Deepseek came out and was able to run much lighter. The reason why they would choose the brute force method basically boils down to making the business more capital-intensive than labor intensive (not just in the sense of using the AI vs workers in companies using AI but in the sense of developing the AI, creating the model, being based on automated processes vs human developers designing it). A more capital intensive venture is desirable for these tech companies because it allows them to demand more money from investors. Rather than the traditional capitalist method of extracting surplus value from the employees' labor, tech companies are operating largely on a rent-seeking method where they try to embed themselves into infrastructure and demand high prices for necessary services. The lack of understanding on the part of people buying the services of these companies, including using or investing in AI company servers, means that it's easier to skim money from that because we are in a speculation boom and there's a lot of deluded money flying around.
Meanwhile, the
social cost of the AI has been shown to be quite high. Most materially, it has a huge draw from the power grid because of how much computation these models involve (compare again to Deepseek). This isn't just bad for global warming and so on, but is creating pressure to divert electricity from regular people under cases of scarcity. I.e. porky tech companies are going to drink your milkshake and pull electricity away from the hospital and neighborhood and grocery store refrigerators to help middle managers more efficiently ignore emails with AI summaries. Probably the most significant social cost that isn't as hard-materialist would be the proliferation of misinformation. Fake AI generated images are both successfully posing as real ones, as well as casting doubt on actual real ones, including encouraging people to declare historical photos (such as those documenting the Holocaust) as AI generated fakes, and there's very little happening to correct this. The same sort of thing is happening with text generated by AI - everyone has seen the screencaps of google's AI misinforming people, but it's more far-reaching than that. The more that people are relying on AI, the more information gets polluted with "hallucinations." This includes programming with a lot of important companies now using AI to code. It's also normalizing the use of AI for making policy, military, and law enforcement decisions, like face recognition software and scraping people's digital profile a la Minority Report to probabilistically predict if someone is likely a criminal, or even a terrorist (Israel in particular has been killing people based on AI identification, in pilot tests of this tech).
tl;dr the canard about petit bourgeois artists not liking it is covering for much much worse problems.