The dotcom bubble was the whole investor industry trying to capitalize on the internet, and they just failed because they were investing everything in a new thing people didn’t need yet.
Today we live in an interconnected world, close to what was promised to the investors back then.
In ten, twenty years, once the bubble, OpenAI, Anthropic and all that are long buried, in what form do you think AI will exist? Do you think it will be an improved version of our current-day LLMs, or a different form of AI? Or do you imagine something else altogether?
I completely agree and this I believe is the most important conclusion that can come out of these AI debates. You can not stop AI from existing now that it has been implemented so widely and there are open source/weight models out etc, this technology is going to survive even if the big companies that started it die off.
The big contradiction of our times is yet again, the private ownership of the means of production. Within capitalism, AI can never be a positive thing since at best it’s going to eradicate so many working positions and at worst it can further destroy our planet etc. At the same time, there is nothing you can do to stop it from existing. The only thing that can truly solve the contradiction is socialism, restructuring society in a way that people don’t have to struggle against each other for a job position just because capitalists want to pay the minimum amount on wages, and production will not be done for profit but simply for making life better for everyone. And if there truly is nothing useful left to be done from humans, then they can freely be artists, scientists, athletes or whatever without the system letting them starve for not being a machine cog.
Agreed. The disdain for this technology, for me, is the working conditions, the environmental, the data centers imposed on neighbors, the mass theft of creative pursuits; but much of that could be alleviated if the means of production or the gains of profit were justly distributed. We all know this tech, as it is today, will be wielded by people who seem deeply disconnected from the lived experience of every day people. It’s all the bad things + it’s unfair. Why do they get to steal, on a level of theft we’ve never seen before, and sell it back to us while dotting the world in engines of local decay? I feel like the anger is justified, and the bewilderment of those in power is willful ignorance.
I want to note that, when asked to experts and a range of AI models about how to solve for AGI’s disruption, they point to socialist policies at every angle. See https://institute.deepmind.com/