The last big fall in the price of bitcoin, in December '22 was caused by a shift in the dynamics of mining where it became more expensive to mine new btc than what the coin was actually worth. Not only did this plunge the price of crypto it also demolished demand for expensive graphics chips which are repurposed to run the process-heavy complex math used in mining. Cheaper chips, cascading demand and server space that was dedicated to mining related activities threatened to wipe out profit margins in multiple tech sectors.
6 months later, Chat GPT is tolled out by Open AI. The previous limitations on processing capabilities were gone, server space was cheap and the tech was abundant. So all these tech sectors at risk of losing their ass in an overproduction driven recession, now had a way to pump the price of their services and this was to pump AI.
Additionally around this time the world was recovering from covid lockdowns. Increased demand for online services was dwindling (exacerbating the other crisis outlined above) as people were returning to work and spending more time being social IRL rather than using services. Companies had hired lots of new workers: programmers, tech infrastructure workers, etc., yo meet the exploding demand during covid. Now they had too many workers and their profits were being threatened.
The Federal reserve had raised interest rates to stifle continued hiring of new employees. The solution that the fed had come up with in order to stifle inflation was to encourage laying off workers end masse – what Marxists might call restoring the reserve army of labor, or relative surplus population – which was substantially depleted during the pandemic. But business owners were reluctant to do this, the tight labor market of the last few years had made business owners and managers skittish about letting people go.
A basic principle at play here, is that new technology is introduced for two reasons only: to sell as a new commodity and (what we are principally concerned with) replacing workers with machines. Another basic principle is that the capitalist system has to have a certain percentage of its population unemployed and hyper exploited in order to keep wages low.
So there was a confluence of incentives here. 1. Inexpensive server space and chips which producers were eager to restore to profitability (or else face drastic consequences) 2. A need to lay off workers in order to stop inflation 3. Incentives for businesses to do so.
Laying off relatively highly paid technical/intellectual labor is a low hanging fruit in this whole equation, and the roll out of AI did just that. Hundreds of thousands of highly paid workers were laid off across a variety of sectors, assured that AI would create so much more efficiency and cut out the need for so many of these workers. So they rolled out this garbage tech that doesn’t work, but everyone in the industry, the media, the government needs it to work, or else they face a massive economic crisis, which had already started with inflation.
At the end of the day its just a massive grift, pushed out to compensate for excessive overproduction driven by another massive grift (cryptocurrency) combined with economic troubles that arose from an insufficient government response to a pandemic that killed millions of people; and rather than take other measures to stifle inflation our leaders in global finance decided to shunt the consequences onto workers, as always. The excuse given was AI, which is nothing more than a predictive text algorithm attached to a massive database created by exploited workers overseas and stolen IPs, and a fuck load of processing power.
I hope someday we can come up with an economic system that is not based purely on profit and the exploitation of human beings. But I don’t know that I’ll live long enough to see it.
Well remember that the shifts that can happen in material conditions and consciousness can happen very quickly. We can’t decide when that is, but we can prepare and build trust until it does occur. Hard to imagine what it would take in the west to see an overthrow of capitalism, all we can do is throw our weight behind where it will have the most effect, hopefully where our talents reside also! Stay optimistic, despite even evidence to the contrary. For the capitalists, its better to believe that the end of the world is coming than to believe a new world is possible. So if nothing else lets give em hell
That is a very pessimistic and causal explanation, but you’ve got the push right. It’s marketing that pushes I though, not necessarily tech. AI, as we currently see it in use, is a very neat technological development. Even more so it is a scientific development, because it isn’t just some software, it is a intricate mathematical model. It is such a complex model, that we actually have study it how it even works,because we don’t now the finer details.
It is not a replacement for office workers, it is not the robot revolution and it is not godlike. It is just a mathematical model on a previously unimaginable scale.
“Pessimistic and casual”? You’re gonna make me self conscious.
I’m an AI skeptic. Its too energy hungry and its not doing anything except scraping massive amounts of consumer data. No its not going to replace workers, but then again countless workers were already laid off so it already served its purpose there. Doesn’t have to replace them, just has to purge them but in a systematic way, such that the Fed called for when they started raising interest rates.
Are you an AI Scientist/engineer? If so I’d love to hear more about your work. I’m in tech myself but def not on the bleeding edge of AI.
I remember learning about Turing tests to determine whether speech was coming from a machine. Its ironic that in practice its much more common for people to not be able to recognize even a real person.
I appreciate the candid analysis, but perhaps “nothing to see here” (my paraphrase) is only one part of the story. The other part is that there is genuine innovation and new things within reach that were not possible before. For example, personalized learning–the dream of giving a tutor to each child, so we can overcome Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem–is far more likely with LLMs in the picture than before. It isn’t a panacea, but it is certainly more useful than cryptocurrency kept promising to be IMO.
Again, I am highly skeptical that this technology (or any other) can be deployed for such a worthy social mission. I have a cousin who works for a company that produces educational materials for people who need a lot of accommodation, so I know that there are definitely good people in those fields who have the ability, and probably desire, to deploy this tech responsibly and progressively in a manner that helps fulfill that and similar missions, but when I look at things systemically I just don’t see the incentive structures to do so. I won’t deny being a skeptic of AI, especially since my personal and professional experience with it has been like dramatically underwhelming. I’d love to believe things work better than they do, that they even could but with ai I see a lot of promises and nothing in the way of results, outside of modestly entertaining tricks. Although I gotta admit, stable diffusion is really cool. Commercially I think its dogshit but the way it creates the images is fascinating.
No actually I’m mostly self educated. I’m just a tech worker who studies history, social theory and economics, but also does some political organizing. So take it with a grain of salt if you must.
Glad you got something from it, I appreciate the compliment!
From now on, we at /c/vegan will promote a strictly banana-based diet in humans. Fruitarians will be tolerated, but only to the extent that they take steps toward removing other fruits from their diet and becoming bananatarian. /s
I use Wasabi too, I was thinking about having another option with data spread across different devices, with extra devices for safety (like SIA). Thanks for your point of view and for the suggestions!
Multiple backups are good (really 2 is the minimum anyone should have). It’s just the added complexity and overhead and distributed systems doesn’t seem worth it to me, I have a local backup on a disk mirror in my NAS, and an online backup to B2 and that feels like good enough so far.
I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus on sale last year and ended up liking it so much that I wish I'd bought a more expensive model with analog sticks. Meanwhile my Steam Deck gathers dust because it's just way too bulky, I grew up on a Game Boy Color and want something that fits in my pocket.
The ultimate dream for me would be if/when someone gets SteamOS running on something this size.
I know what you mean, I bought a PSP and PSVita after my Steam Deck and currently I’m using the Vita as my goto emulator, the PSP is great for when I’m out and about and want something smaller.
It’s crazy how the first time I read the comic I was fine understanding it but you hacked my brain and now I cannot read that character as a C anymore.
I visited Panama for an agricultural trip about a decade ago where we focused on coffee agriculture and production. Coincidentally, there are some coffees that blend in beans or peanuts to mellow the flavor. This is usually done for cheaper coffees that use robusto beans instead of arabica. It’s also to relieve some of the acrid taste that can develop during the drying out process if the beans are dried around animal droppings.
If you’re interested in what a mellowed coffee would taste like, I think chock full of nuts is a brand you can try in the states.
Edit: ok so I did some more research and it appears that chock full o nuts likely no longer does this, they just have typical coffee nowadays. I’ll leave it to you other internet sleuths to find a brand that does.
kbin.life
Oldest