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"AI" is basically mass theft of culture, knowledge, and agency from the entirety of human record. It's no surprise that the robber barons are willing to pay people extremely well to expand its scope and efficiency.

Well... yeah, those were both public sector enterprises.

Why do I live in a country where one guy makes the same as 6274 other people? 😩

Without doing the research, I’m guessing the same could be said about Web 2.0 and top comp sci grads being scooped up left and right to build empty promises as well. History is cyclical. Just as some companies survived that bubble and how said companies can profit was learned at that point, the same will likely happen with current AI models and corporations.

They’ll fall short of all the promises being made, except: that they help software companies code faster, are excellent data collection tools acting as chatbots to laypeople, and can generate small bits of media on the fly (at a pretty insane power requirement to train and use) so they’ll be used to generate art and sounds and the like.

Every other magical promise is the same from Web 2.0. People are being laid off in droves as productivity and profits soar, the global population has more access to information than ever before, but most of us are becoming dumber because of the social media algorithms designed to keep them addicted. We can see impending social and ecological doom in fascism and climate change, but the “quarterly growth” of capitalism is all that seems to matter.

The only reason we even ever made it to the moon is because we had two countries with nukes pointed at each other and we got real lucky.

And still people would say “America made it to the moon” instead of “Humanity made it to the moon”

We are children in a vast enveloping cosmic dark.