AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

  • ATS1312@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    I’m not a Leninist by any means. But on a mass scale, the need to grow for a Capitalist economy? Manifests itself in ways Lenin described as “Capitalist Imperialism”. If you only reach one chapter, the author says that’s Ch7, which becomes a short essay.

    Lenin Argues against Carl Kautsky’s assertion that such a prospect looks like grabbing Land. Lenin argues that Capitalism needs no such political arm directly, only ownership of the economy by a foreign body. Eventually investment capital runs out of fertile ground at home and must find new markets to control.

    As Russia’s economy stagnated, and the room for investment dried up, much of Putin’s moves were to open other countries to Russian Finance Capital. When that failed, taking new land became the fallback for having new oil and shipping investments. Not just land, but resources as Kautsky discussed.

    And here Doctorow breaks down how that looks for single firms in monopoly or oligopoly, specifically in the tech sector, and its drive to constantly " invent new markets". A perfect compliment.

    That’s what these data centers are - Empire. They will swallow your ability to compute. Moderate it. Control it. Direct it towards only their ends. Because at the end game, the most value extraction comes from not simply selling you a product, but selling you as a product to other businesses. Enshittification will continue until you can out-bid the corpos for your data sovereignty. Reverse Centaurs are easy to train, replace, and shift. Centaurs? Require actual investment, giving the worker some power.

    The need for control? Emerges organically from the consequences of noncompliance. In both the puppet-state in response to its international industrial overlords, or its alternative in direct management by a foreign state. The money must flow, the growth must happen, or the party is over for much broader than their own dinner table.

    The growth must happen, or the very laws of a market crush the entire society down to well below this peak. No more growth stocks in growth industries, just cutthroat competition from the same corpos that keep out upstarts… Until some shock ruins somebody’s bag, and we get a chance at something interesting like the tech sector used to be.

  • termaxima@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    “Reverse centaur” is a super clunky term, I think we should say “Minotaur” instead.

    A Centaur has the head of a person and the body of a beast, a Minotaur is the opposite.

  • wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io
    1·
    3 days ago

    AI is in the hype section of the emerging technology curve. A lot of good will come out of AI once we calm down and stop losing our damn minds.

    It won’t be just cheap GPUs either. It will be things like more accurate cancer diagnoses, as Cory says near the top.

    What we need is for regulation to catch up and start incentivizing the right things…that is, the things that will benefit society as a whole, not just the oligarchs.

    • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Most of the hype isn’t about machine learning stuff for cancer diagnoses though. When the average C-level guy talks about AI they mean almost exclusively LLMs. Fancy autocomplete is their solution to everything, from summarizing an email to agentic OSes. And that’s just not going to happen.

    • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      That won’t happen until the brick wall is not only hit, but completely demolished. While Democrats are significantly more rational than Republicans, they are still almost as much in the oligarchs’ collective pockets. Only the Progressives give me any hope, but there aren’t nearly enough of them in Congress yet to make shit happen.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        It is already happening.

        The distractions is that you only see the AI companies which have been blitz scaling, dumping unlimited amounts of money into orders and plans without any revenue plans for the other side. This move only pays off if they can essentially buy the entire market and lock out any competition (and then the rent-seeking enshittification will being). The long-term prospects of these companies is shaky at best, but that doesn’t matter to the people currently dumping funding into them… they’re going to sell everything at the IPO and leave some other suckers with the bag.

        Because of this, there are many many times the amount of advertising and promotional hype than is justified by the actual progress in the field.

        Everyone is familiar with this. If someone says AI, do you think of ChatGPT or an LLM? That’s because you’ve been affected by this hype wave that is being intentionally propagated in order to drive valuations for AI companies who are looking to hit an IPO so all of the early investors can get out quick before the bubble bursts (It’s like a crypto rugpull, except it is using the stock market instead of a meme coin).

        ‘Actual’ AI. By which I mean machine learning, including neural networks, has made huge progress in a lot of fields following the discovery of the Transformer model (the T in GPT). The, very real and impressive, improvements that have been gained are not flashy, they do not make for immediate next-quarter profits and are mostly public discoveries coming out of academia so they benefit everyone which makes them worthless to the people trying to horde emerging technology in order to push this bubble/rugpull.

        Your life will be WAY more affected by the slow and incremental work being done in the field of robotics than having a slightly more personable chatbot. Your life or the lives of people you love will be saved by the advances in protein folding which allow rapid development of new treatments which can be customized to the individual. Cancer therapies that are optimized for the exact mutations in the patient’s cancer cells or customized medicine aimed at reducing side effects or harmful interactions.

        • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          I was already aware of much of what you said, although I probably hadn’t gazed down the road quite as far.

          However, what I was referring to was the regulation the commenter I replied to was calling for. What I meant was that proper legislation wouldn’t happen until the “rugpull” you described actually happens, and the economy finally goes into the recession it would otherwise already be deep into at this point. Being delayed so long may make it especially ugly, I fear - or it may just bridge us into the next thing that keeps the economy propped up, such as the robotics you mentioned.

          May you live in interesting times, indeed.

          • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 days ago

            I’m cynical to think that proper legislation won’t happen even after the crash. There’s simply too much money available to buy bribes/motorcoaches for Supreme Court Justices (Clarence Thomas) and other cheaper politicians.

            May you live in interesting times, indeed.

            I invite you to shelter against the storm: https://lemmy.world/c/dull_mens_club

            • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.worldEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              I actually feel the same, but I was trying to not be too much of a downer.

              Thanks for the recommendation, but I’m already subscribed. If you read the post a couple months ago from someone who just got a tiny phone, I made a longish comment on it with my own mini-review of it.

              • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                18 hours ago

                I actually feel the same, but I was trying to not be too much of a downer.

                Yeah, it can wear on you.

                I keep my subscribed feed clear of politics because the political content that spreads on social media is evolved/selected to be compulsive/clickbaity so I don’t even want it touching my eyes.

                Dull Men’s Club is a great community because everything that makes for compulsive content isn’t ‘dull’ and I suspect it’s a lot more of a bipartisan community than most places given the types of expertise that some of the user’s display.

  • Zephorah@discuss.onlineEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Wow. I feel like I just entered a Time Machine back to the 90s and 00s. I didn’t realize Corey Doctorow was still writing blog stuff on other venues.