I don’t think you understand the reality of our future. “Oh no! Stocks!” While literally everything is burning around us. Yes. Take it out. End the stock market and end the capitalist structure that’s causing it. This is going to happen regardless. Might as well make it happen faster so it’s more manageable than if we keep trying to prop it up.
AKA Americans over 55, mostly. Because that’s the group that owns 73% of the country’s wealth while billionaires own about 5%.
Basically do away with all retirement funds that have stock indexes in them and you’ll be good. 401ks and the like.
But that’s what I’ve been saying from the get go. The entire predatory economy is built to sustain people being able to retire off the backs of increasingly few workers. Retirement age needs to go up as the median age goes up
Same. As a millennial, it’s just been catastrophe after catastrophe my whole life. Burn it down, hopefully something worthwhile rises from the ashes for the children.
Gen X here - it’s been the same for my life, too (Recently watched a video that recounted all the trauma Gen X went through, and it’s a lot) . I bet boomers could say the same.
But still, I don’t want to burn it all down. That’s not gonna be good for anyone.
What part of our economic systems are worth saving? The pain will be worth our children not being ground down to a pulp and squeezed for every extra bit of their labor just to maybe survive.
I understand the reaction though. I am prescribing moderate to long term pain for long term gain, not a medicine people want to take willingly.
You aren’t exactly painting yourself as an oracle here. Spouting doom will always leave you correct eventually, but being wrong for decades beforehand doesn’t become insight just because something finally breaks.
Why are you so confident that deliberately accelerating a collapse makes it “more manageable”? If the dot-com boom had lasted long enough for actual revenues to catch up with valuations, the eventual correction could’ve been far less severe. Buying time can give the underlying technology a chance to deliver. It’s getting more efficient per token at an incredible rate, and there’s enormous pressure to improve hardware efficiency too. At some point, falling costs and growing paid usage could make the economics sustainable, though neither of us knows when, or whether, that’ll happen. You’re assuming that time can only make things worse, then treating that assumption as a reason to burn it all down.
Also worth noting the increase in power generation has pushed us to add 50% to our total global solar capacity in the last two years. That’s fucking awesome and unlikely to stop increasing suddenly.
I’m not saying nothing’s wrong, or that all these companies are good guys, fuck no. But confidently predicting doom now is no more convincing than all the previous prophecies that predicted doom.
I guess I interpreted it as a full collapse because they’re implying that AI as a technology would disappear entirely, which at this point would require all computers to disappear or regress to a primitive state.
If the dot com boom… So we’re just using hypotheticals to boost positivity?
Often speeding up something, gives you more control. Think of riding a bike. Going long stretches and remaining upright is easy. But when your kid is in front and breaks unexpectedly, you have to slow and do that back and forth thing with the handle bars to remain upright. Now imagine letting the AI bubble pop now. Better for it to pop while there’s still functioning governments, than when those governments are at the edge of breaking.
Yeah solar is great, I agree. But we’re still building fossil fuel power plants and solar has done nothing so far to stop that. It simply slows it. If the fall happens right now, everything collapses. We’ve stopped the acceleration of the climate crisis, and humanity has a chance to survive at 1.5C+. Humanity can rebuild. If we collapse at 3 or 4° C, we won’t have any ability to rebuild, as there’s a much larger collapse happening.
The point is that society is going to collapse regardless. It’s better for it to happen now because it gives humanity the best chance to survive. If we shut down civilization now, everything can come back. The earth can heal and we can survive. If it collapses in 2120, the earth is a much more formidable environment to try to nurture small cultures of people.
And as of right now? AI is the #1 enemy to the environment. And for what? Fake videos? So if we can end AI right fucking now, it sets a much more livable future for human beings. And honestly, a much more humane one. So if capitalism has to go down with AI, and society has to go down with capitalism, it’s the most humane option. At least people will have a chance. If we continue down the path we’re on, there’s really no hope for a future.
“So we’re just using hypotheticals” meanwhile your entire argument depends on civilisation definitely collapsing, doing so later definitely being worse, and doing so now leaving humanity able to rebuild.
I offered a possibility. You’ve built a whole prescription for humanity around your predictions.
And your bike analogy involves slowing down and steering to avoid a crash. You’re advocating deliberately crashing because you’ve decided a worse accident is inevitable further down the road.
There’s a lot wrapped up in that certainty, and its a sentiment that does personally annoy me for several reasons: You’re assuming the problems you see won’t be meaningfully understood or addressed by anyone else, and that because you can’t see a workable solution, there isnt one. You’re treating the limits of your own foresight as the limits of what’s possible. Stop and consider whether you really consider yourself an unparalleled engineer and problem solver of the modern era. Dont tell me the answer, just ponder it.
Then, when it comes to your preferred scenario, suddenly humanity can cooperate, adapt and rebuild after civilisation collapses. Why does human ingenuity get to do so much heavy lifting after the catastrophe, but count for so little in preventing it? There’s a huge juxtaposition in that reasoning.
You’ve scrutinised the future you dislike for everything that could go wrong, and waved through the future you prefer on everything that could go right. That’s a very shaky basis for deciding everyone else would be better off enduring a collapse now.
And “if we shut down civilisation now, everything can come back” is doing an extraordinary amount of work there. How are you keeping people fed, water clean, medicines available and nuclear facilities maintained? Who’s coordinating any of that through the collapse you’re welcoming? Those are fairly significant details to skip on the way to “the earth can heal”.
You don’t get to dismiss uncertainty in my argument while treating the most optimistic version of your own catastrophe scenario as a certainty, that’s fucking nonsense.
I get that you’re concerned but this is irrational and you probably need to talk to someone serious if this is actually weighing heavily on you. If its just an idle rant, less so.
AI isnt going to end, the big dog companies might go down, but you can run very good ones on your computer these days. Helps to look into stuff, the unknown is always scarier than the known.
Companies having done that doesn’t make it fundamental to the technology. That’s just something a lot of people who base their worldview on article headlines parrot.
Don’t get me wrong, those practices are bad. But they come from the incentives and behaviour of the companies involved. The technology doesn’t require them. That’s a failure of a system that rewards companies for taking whatever they can get away with.
All of this is a capitalism problem, focusing on the technology is a distraction that will never achieve anything.
My view:
The problem with neither .com nor AI was that the technologies are useless. The problem with the bubble is that many of the companies involved are promising far more than the technology can realistically deliver. Against this backdrop, it doesn’t matter how long you let the bubble run, because meeting those exaggerated expectations is simply impossible in reality.
AI has its uses, particularly as specialised tools for specific fields, but – largely due to the hype – it is currently causing enormous damage on various levels.
Against this backdrop, I believe that the bursting of the bubble will lead to a faster shift away from exaggerated, inefficient and wasteful technological promises towards efficient tools and solutions… and is therefore to be welcomed.
Yeah agreed, but marketing and hyping is how you get people excited and how you get funding. I struggle to imagine how you’d ever remove that from the economic equation. It definitely can have its drawbacks.
Yeah I think your conclusion is pretty likely. Most tools started off inefficient and got more so, because a more efficient tool is more desirable. Broadly speaking.
I dont think its completely impossible that they (the big companies) eek out their existence long enough that their income overcomes their initial outlay. As I say, they arent static, they are still progressing both the software and the hardware. Ramp up their green energy investment, continue progressing the energy efficiency increases per token, consistent supply lines and competition in components and raw materials push prices down. All feasible. None guaranteed, but all feasible.
I don’t think you understand the reality of our future. “Oh no! Stocks!” While literally everything is burning around us. Yes. Take it out. End the stock market and end the capitalist structure that’s causing it. This is going to happen regardless. Might as well make it happen faster so it’s more manageable than if we keep trying to prop it up.
I would love to live in a world where I don’t have to hear the words “NASDAQ” and “Dow Jones” ever again.
Yes! End the shareholders, start giving ownership back to the direct stakeholders!
AKA Americans over 55, mostly. Because that’s the group that owns 73% of the country’s wealth while billionaires own about 5%.
Basically do away with all retirement funds that have stock indexes in them and you’ll be good. 401ks and the like.
But that’s what I’ve been saying from the get go. The entire predatory economy is built to sustain people being able to retire off the backs of increasingly few workers. Retirement age needs to go up as the median age goes up
Your solution makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Everybody gets to work til they die. Except the rich.
Because that will never lead to oligarchy or fascism!
Oh wait…
Suuuuure, but if I say this, I get put on some kind of list
Same. As a millennial, it’s just been catastrophe after catastrophe my whole life. Burn it down, hopefully something worthwhile rises from the ashes for the children.
Gen X here - it’s been the same for my life, too (Recently watched a video that recounted all the trauma Gen X went through, and it’s a lot) . I bet boomers could say the same.
But still, I don’t want to burn it all down. That’s not gonna be good for anyone.
What part of our economic systems are worth saving? The pain will be worth our children not being ground down to a pulp and squeezed for every extra bit of their labor just to maybe survive.
I understand the reaction though. I am prescribing moderate to long term pain for long term gain, not a medicine people want to take willingly.
You aren’t exactly painting yourself as an oracle here. Spouting doom will always leave you correct eventually, but being wrong for decades beforehand doesn’t become insight just because something finally breaks.
Why are you so confident that deliberately accelerating a collapse makes it “more manageable”? If the dot-com boom had lasted long enough for actual revenues to catch up with valuations, the eventual correction could’ve been far less severe. Buying time can give the underlying technology a chance to deliver. It’s getting more efficient per token at an incredible rate, and there’s enormous pressure to improve hardware efficiency too. At some point, falling costs and growing paid usage could make the economics sustainable, though neither of us knows when, or whether, that’ll happen. You’re assuming that time can only make things worse, then treating that assumption as a reason to burn it all down.
Also worth noting the increase in power generation has pushed us to add 50% to our total global solar capacity in the last two years. That’s fucking awesome and unlikely to stop increasing suddenly.
I’m not saying nothing’s wrong, or that all these companies are good guys, fuck no. But confidently predicting doom now is no more convincing than all the previous prophecies that predicted doom.
When’s the last time we went decades without a “once in a generation” type economic catastrophe?
The topic here was the collapse of civilisation?
Fair enough. It seemed to be going back and forth but the guy you responded to is arguably talking about society as a whole.
I guess I interpreted it as a full collapse because they’re implying that AI as a technology would disappear entirely, which at this point would require all computers to disappear or regress to a primitive state.
I keep thinking the term “Butlerian Jihad” is going to be entering normie culture at some point soon.
DUNE: A Brief History of The Butlerian Jihad (Encyclopedia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FcBWOvEnEI
If the dot com boom… So we’re just using hypotheticals to boost positivity?
Often speeding up something, gives you more control. Think of riding a bike. Going long stretches and remaining upright is easy. But when your kid is in front and breaks unexpectedly, you have to slow and do that back and forth thing with the handle bars to remain upright. Now imagine letting the AI bubble pop now. Better for it to pop while there’s still functioning governments, than when those governments are at the edge of breaking.
Yeah solar is great, I agree. But we’re still building fossil fuel power plants and solar has done nothing so far to stop that. It simply slows it. If the fall happens right now, everything collapses. We’ve stopped the acceleration of the climate crisis, and humanity has a chance to survive at 1.5C+. Humanity can rebuild. If we collapse at 3 or 4° C, we won’t have any ability to rebuild, as there’s a much larger collapse happening.
The point is that society is going to collapse regardless. It’s better for it to happen now because it gives humanity the best chance to survive. If we shut down civilization now, everything can come back. The earth can heal and we can survive. If it collapses in 2120, the earth is a much more formidable environment to try to nurture small cultures of people.
And as of right now? AI is the #1 enemy to the environment. And for what? Fake videos? So if we can end AI right fucking now, it sets a much more livable future for human beings. And honestly, a much more humane one. So if capitalism has to go down with AI, and society has to go down with capitalism, it’s the most humane option. At least people will have a chance. If we continue down the path we’re on, there’s really no hope for a future.
“So we’re just using hypotheticals” meanwhile your entire argument depends on civilisation definitely collapsing, doing so later definitely being worse, and doing so now leaving humanity able to rebuild.
I offered a possibility. You’ve built a whole prescription for humanity around your predictions.
And your bike analogy involves slowing down and steering to avoid a crash. You’re advocating deliberately crashing because you’ve decided a worse accident is inevitable further down the road.
There’s a lot wrapped up in that certainty, and its a sentiment that does personally annoy me for several reasons: You’re assuming the problems you see won’t be meaningfully understood or addressed by anyone else, and that because you can’t see a workable solution, there isnt one. You’re treating the limits of your own foresight as the limits of what’s possible. Stop and consider whether you really consider yourself an unparalleled engineer and problem solver of the modern era. Dont tell me the answer, just ponder it.
Then, when it comes to your preferred scenario, suddenly humanity can cooperate, adapt and rebuild after civilisation collapses. Why does human ingenuity get to do so much heavy lifting after the catastrophe, but count for so little in preventing it? There’s a huge juxtaposition in that reasoning.
You’ve scrutinised the future you dislike for everything that could go wrong, and waved through the future you prefer on everything that could go right. That’s a very shaky basis for deciding everyone else would be better off enduring a collapse now.
And “if we shut down civilisation now, everything can come back” is doing an extraordinary amount of work there. How are you keeping people fed, water clean, medicines available and nuclear facilities maintained? Who’s coordinating any of that through the collapse you’re welcoming? Those are fairly significant details to skip on the way to “the earth can heal”.
You don’t get to dismiss uncertainty in my argument while treating the most optimistic version of your own catastrophe scenario as a certainty, that’s fucking nonsense.
I get that you’re concerned but this is irrational and you probably need to talk to someone serious if this is actually weighing heavily on you. If its just an idle rant, less so.
AI isnt going to end, the big dog companies might go down, but you can run very good ones on your computer these days. Helps to look into stuff, the unknown is always scarier than the known.
tl;dr
AI is built from mass theft and anything built with it deserves to be stolen.
Companies having done that doesn’t make it fundamental to the technology. That’s just something a lot of people who base their worldview on article headlines parrot.
Don’t get me wrong, those practices are bad. But they come from the incentives and behaviour of the companies involved. The technology doesn’t require them. That’s a failure of a system that rewards companies for taking whatever they can get away with.
All of this is a capitalism problem, focusing on the technology is a distraction that will never achieve anything.
I’ve had a quick look at your discussion here.
My view: The problem with neither .com nor AI was that the technologies are useless. The problem with the bubble is that many of the companies involved are promising far more than the technology can realistically deliver. Against this backdrop, it doesn’t matter how long you let the bubble run, because meeting those exaggerated expectations is simply impossible in reality.
AI has its uses, particularly as specialised tools for specific fields, but – largely due to the hype – it is currently causing enormous damage on various levels. Against this backdrop, I believe that the bursting of the bubble will lead to a faster shift away from exaggerated, inefficient and wasteful technological promises towards efficient tools and solutions… and is therefore to be welcomed.
Yeah agreed, but marketing and hyping is how you get people excited and how you get funding. I struggle to imagine how you’d ever remove that from the economic equation. It definitely can have its drawbacks.
Yeah I think your conclusion is pretty likely. Most tools started off inefficient and got more so, because a more efficient tool is more desirable. Broadly speaking.
I dont think its completely impossible that they (the big companies) eek out their existence long enough that their income overcomes their initial outlay. As I say, they arent static, they are still progressing both the software and the hardware. Ramp up their green energy investment, continue progressing the energy efficiency increases per token, consistent supply lines and competition in components and raw materials push prices down. All feasible. None guaranteed, but all feasible.
Gonna steal this.
Perfectly sums up most Lemmite’s opinions.