This is not an AI problem, this is a problem caused by extremely large piles of money. In the past two decades we have been concentrating money in the hands of people who did little more than be in the right place at the right time with a good idea and a set of technical skills, and then told them that they were geniuses who could fix human problems with technological solutions. At the same time we made it impossible to invest money safely by making the interest rate almost zero, and then continued to pass more and more tax breaks. What did we expect was going to happen? There are only so many problems that can be solved by technology that we actually need solving, or that create real value or bolster human society. We are spinning wheels just to spin them, and have given the reins to the people with not only the means and the intent to unravel society in all the worst ways, but who are also convinced that they are smarter than everyone else because they figured out how to arbitrage the temporal gap between the emergence of a capability and the realization of the damage it creates.
> This is not an AI problem, this is a problem caused by extremely large piles of money.
Those are two problems in this situation that are both bad for different reasons. It's bad to have all the money concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of losers (and my god are they losers) and AI as a technology is slated to, in the hands of said losers, cause mass unemployment, if they can get it working good enough to pass that very low bar.
Couldn’t agree more. The problem is when the party is over, and another round of centralizing wealth and power is done, we’ll be no wiser and have learnt nothing. Look at the debate today, it’s (1) people who think AI is useful, (2) people who think it’s hype and (3) people who think AI will go rogue. It’s like the bank robbers put on a TV and everyone watches it while the heist is ongoing.
Only a few bystanders seem to notice the IP theft and laundering, the adversarial content barriers to protect from scraping, the centralization of capital within the owners of frontier models, the dial-up of the already insane race to collect personal data, the flooding of every communication channel with AI slop and spam, and the inevitable impending enshittification of massive proportions.
I’ve seen the sausage get made, enough to know the game. They’re establishing new dominance hierarchies, with each iteration being more cynical and predatory, each cycle refined to optimally speedrun the rent seeking value extraction. Yes, there are still important discussions about the tech itself. But it’s the deployment that concerns everyone, not hypothetically, but right now.
Exhibit A: social media. In hindsight, what was more important: the core technologies or the business model and deployment?
