There are plenty of reasons why I hate "A.I.". The primary reason being that it's painfully obvious to me who stand to profit from it. It's not us, but we are conditioned to believe so.

As with most takes, there are nuances. "A.I." has been put to good, for example to advance medical research. But it has been put to awful use by many bad actors, as I will be discussing in a later blog post. And I firmly believe that there is no such things as "neutral technology"¹ - design is always deliberate, and thus embed social norms. In a capitalist society, that would be norms such as "efficiency" (time management), or "profitability" (the potential for monetary extraction). Cloud-hosted, generative "A.I", i.e. what most people refer to as "A.I." nowadays, are already displacing a sizeable chunk of workers in the name of "increased productivity" and "cost-savings". And yet, most of us are conditioned to deploy these tools in our everyday work. They nestle their way into government bodies and private companies alike, solidifying themselves as core infrastructure of society even if they turn out to be useless in a large number of cases. But limiting the discourse to case studies is naive at best and predatory at worst. It's a lost cause riddled with counter-examples from both sides, and it inevitably leads to reactionary thinking as opposed to dialectical analysis. The point is to make you relient on the technology, not because you need it but because it is soon part of the norm for what makes a productive citizen. As soon as you let it shape the way you think, it becomes an extension of yourself. Let a machine do the thinking but operate it, shifting the worker's power into the hands of the owners one prompt at a time. It does not have a purpose but you will give it one, fulfilling the prophecy of the Techno-Optimist manifesto. The medium is the message.

And the free market we find ourselves in is bizare. These companies keep burning money while wasting a fuckton of energy & water. And somehow, the LLM owners still struggle achieve their entire raison d'être: to turn a profit for their shareholders. But due to investor's hype, NVidia's evaluation would currently make it the 3rd largest economy in the world (looking at nominal GDP).

https://www.binance.com/en-AE/square/post/31847511347481

There is no way that NVidia alone is more productive than the entire German economy. NVidia can not sustain the entire German population (84 000 000 people), but "we" pretend it can. But capitalism does not care, because Q4 results were great and Q1 is just getting started.

And the rest of us who do care are in for the ride anyway. For reference one of Sweden's largest pension funds, AP7, has a 70% exposure towards the US stock market. And that's just the stock market. In the event of an actual crash, many countries will head straight towards a recession due to the global reach of the US economy. When the "A.I." bubble finally bursts, it will be the second global economic crisis that I've witnessed in my lifetime so far. And I'm not even 30 years old. Yet "we" tell ourselves that this is the most effective economic system for managing resources.

As two wise men once said:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.