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Big tech has spent $155 billion on AI this year. It’s about to spend hundreds of billions more
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Not these kind of figures. Only a quarter of countries have annual GDPs larger than what's been spent so far this year. This is on a scale not seen before.
What makes it worse is that it's being spent on something which consumes huge resources and has no purpose except giving a few people more power as they would control what these systems would say is true.
That just shows that some parts of the economy have far too much money. And it's all going to nvidia
Transatlantic telegraph, I think, was very expensive, or Panama channel projects. Before they were finished to any useful degree.
In this particular case - I don't think it's more expensive than Soviet attempts at turning Kazakh steppe into agricultural land, let alone all the space and defense projects.
It's an ideology-driven effort all right - an idea that you can create an inherently totalitarian technology. Probably caused by the popular (in the 90s and early 00s) belief that the Internet is inherently anti-totalitarian, so there's a need to compensate. Both are wrong.
I think there was an inherent demand behind those examples though. Just the number of lives lost looking for the northwest passage showed how useful the Panama canal would be.
You're also comparing government spending in a lot of those cases Vs private capital. That fact shows how much power has shifted in the world already.