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Think critically about AI
Great article from Cory Doctorow (Enshittification author) explaining why AI is being overhyped and will likely turn out to be a bubble. This 'reverse centaur' is also a very handy concept:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur
Comments
I'm only about 1/3 through the article, but thanks already for posting that. It's a fantastic read so far!
(Not to be understood as me saying I agree or disagree with it in substance. It's just ... a super well written and thought provoking article.)
... and I'm getting a t-shirt that says T.I.N.A. on it for sure.
He's a really great writer (and speaker, lots of interviews etc on YouTube), I agree!
A good read but it is very USA-centric. And he doesn't mention Ai development in other countries (especially our enemies) or the use of Ai in the military. These are issues as worrying as the Ai investment bubble.
But thanks for posting the link!
while I do think AI, specifically LLMs since I am required to use them in my workplace, are impressive compared to where AI was before, and also that it is having an impact on roles, I feel like working with them has also revealed that a lot of the promises and expectations have been greatly overblown. This will likely create not only a bubble but another AI Winter.
I have looked at some of the online debates between some of the researchers involved (some of which can be off putting due to the high school level of ego based attacks) and the main criticism appears to be that either we have reached or are close to reaching a plateau with the current paradigms of machine learning.
A lot of the bullish views on the idea that AI will keep improving ‘exponentially’ are assuming that just dumping more CPU will keep that exponential growth (or more deluded, imo, will get us tomAGI). Others act as if AI will just improve its own code base, which I have only seen techoptimists bring up and not real researchers.
Throwing more CPU at something strikes me as something like saying we can make animals as intelligent as homo sapiens by just increasing the number of neurons. I’m not a neuroscientist but I have read enough cognitive psychology to know that it’s not just the neurons I put the architecture of our brain that makes us what we are.
so, analogous to that, if the cipurrent architecture of LLMs is reaching a plateau (and the underwhelming releases of the latest GPT seem like a supporting data point), more CPU is very unlikely to make major improvements, let alone get us to AGI.
He's saying some of the players in the A.I. space will fail. OK... but that's true of any business. Remember the "dot-com bubble"? Back then businesses misallocated their investments while chasing wild claims and failing to do their homework. I don't find his comments particularly illuminating, quite honestly. Businesses are now using tools which are available and the services are being adopted in all business sectors.
Is there a lot of hype surrounding these services? Sure. There are also a lot of unknowns. But one person will be able to do the work of dozens, or hundreds or thousands of people by leveraging what's available right now. That's good for productivity. And that's good for individual empowerment. If you run your own business, you may already have seen and used the tools to great advantage.
This has been the advantage of technology through the entire history of humankind. Steve Jobs called the personal computer a "bicycle for the mind" (highlighting another piece of technology which gave people an "advantage" over pedestrians).
If one person’s work displaced the work of dozens, hundreds or thousands of people at scale in today’s world, it would be a human catastrophe.
“Good for productivity” is not necessarily good for humanity.
One person does more work and that means all people working at a company can do more work. That means a competitive advantage. Company makes more money. Company can hire more people who are capable of doing the work of thousands. And the top performers at these businesses get the idea they could start their own businesses and compete.
Businesses must compete or they fail. This is not new. Competition and capitalism works. Extraordinarily well.
Do the math on what happens when that many people lose their jobs.
The goal of the billionaires foisting widespread AI use is in large part to allow them to pay fewer people. They are quite open about it. They want to replace skilled workers — who will then have few opportunities for employment.
Not everything that is good for corporations in the short-term is good for humanity in the long-term.
https://mlkglobal.org/2017/11/23/martin-luther-king-on-capitalism-in-his-own-words/
I really don't even see the point engaging with NeuM about any of this stuff. He's drunk the Kool Aid so bad that he seems incapable of grasping arguments which don't fit his worldview as a true believer in the death cult of neoliberal capitalism. Sad, but that's how it is.
Why do you continue to assume people are or will lose their jobs as a result? There will be more work than ever to perform and knowledgeable people will be able to run multiple businesses and leverage both A.I. and robots to maintain their businesses.
It would be great if folks here (even in the "Other" section) would stay on topic and make the personal decision to not turn challenging discussions into their chance to throw pointless insults at the other person just because they disagree. General piece of advice: Don't be a bomb thrower. Be a contributor.
Industry faced similar challenges when the Internet replaced dozens of retail style jobs like Travel Agents, Mom and Pop bookstores…
Similar to the invention of the Big Box Stores (Walmart, CostCo, Guitar Center) making small local retail a loss generating business.
There’s always a ground swell of support for the status quo with each new extinction event for some type of job category.
Seems like welfare systems will be needed to create solutions that keep people solvent in this new world. But oligarchs tend to enforce governments that keep them apart from “entitlement” solutions for the “have nots”. Historically, the leverage of the little guy is Unionization but if they don’t need humans with AI driven robots then the follow on strategy is revolution.
Open Ai going broke?
Remember how for years Amazon just couldn’t turn a profit? But it had the funding to keep scaling larger and larger until the day came when it started to make financial sense and generate massive wealth.
This circle jerk of funding is supporting the scaling of AI compute processing that can at some point be monetized and generate wealth. A lot of “amazons” competing in this case so there are bound to be several loosers and a few winners. It’s a horse race.
Of the biggies I’m hoping:
Google dominates based on how they managed search and kept adding really useful services (YouTube, Mapping, Waymo Taxi’s,…)
OpenAI has no history to study and they will have to be ruthless to dominate
Grok is intended to be an AI that extends the mind of Elon Musk (be afraid, very afraid)
Of course, something like the incursion of TikToq into the mix from a Chinese company is possible if scaling the compute backend is the key to victory… they are killing it on the build out of the essential technologies to drive the west into a distant 2nd place.
"We are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing. This has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now also technology’s. It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves."
What technology takes from us – and how to take it back
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/29/what-technology-takes-from-us-and-how-to-take-it-back
Very good article, sad stories in there for sure but good to have those feelings many of us have articulated.
Yes Chris, truly the tech and industrial overlords are trying to shape the world in ways that benefit their companies, not in ways that are truly good for us as a society or individuals!
Something in the air today…
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/keen-on-america/id1710656849?i=1000747085290
I this Andrew Keen talk way back years ago. He got a lot of flak for being elitist at the time, but he was actually on the money:
He does come across as awfully pretentious tho, I chose not to finish the podcast you shared. Both these guys just come across as hella annoying in that interview. And I say that as someone sympathetic to the cause. They're definitely not gonna convert any edgelords or Maga people with that delivery. 😂
Yeah I don’t think that’s their intention either, I kinda like his snotty delivery, it’s very self aware and I tend to find it funny mostly. Especially when he’s on with his mate Keith from Scarborough who’s now some big shot Silicon Valley investor…
I know what you mean, it is self knowing, I think, and it is funny in parts too, for sure.
Colossus: The Forbin Project.
It’s a good read with lots of suspense, and even a bit of romance.
The movie came out in 1970.
Wikipedia has a good summary.
Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
Seedance 2.0., apparently open source equivalents are in the works...
On Tuesday, Mrinank Sharma, the head of safeguard research at Anthropic (the company that developed Claude AI), resigned, posting a letter on X:
"The world is in peril. Not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.
On Wednesday night Jimmy Ba, one of the co-founders of Elon Musk's xAI, which developed Grok AI, also resigned.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-16/ai-jobs-fake-breakthrough-resignation-chat-gpt-claude/106346440
Yah probably spent too much time using chat bots and got psychosis. Happens to the best of us!
Why does the Cyber Truck make turbo charged engine noises? 😂
cause AI. Also the bridge goes from wood to concrete etc.
Like I've said before, I don't have a problem with AI as a technology. My problem is with the nefarious bastards that are telling people how to train these models and whose end goal is global domination via a police state.
If this stuff isn't gonna be heavily regulated then it needs to be destroyed.
If you think the solution is for politicians to regulate a technology that is so complicated that no one can really understand
How it works… they are usually amazed that is appears to simulate intelligence. Of course, it also generates random hallucinations and with a little nudging if can become (or simulate) the workings of a sociopath.
I think of it as the most current step function in the use of computers similar to:
And now: services that can be prompted by non-programmers to do the users bidding because the services programmers are building can simulate intelligence and optimize its behaviors to improve the results.
Will it write all the software required to replace all programmers? No. It will require more computer specialists that understand layers of this new architecture:
All these computer specialists will be more effective and productive because they can prompt these new AI services to handle a massive amount of what has been primarily done in Software Development Tools that offered compilers, debuggers and hundreds of pre-coded modules. A lot of that drudgery will be replaced by increasing more capable systems that can scale complexity beyond the powers of a single human brain or an army of same.
The best way to totally funk progress up will be to regulate using the understanding of political minds.
For example, consider these “obvious solutions”:
It’s a new world for computer science and it is scary, powerful, mysterious and beyond the understanding due to it’s inherent complexity. But the technology is progressing at a rate no one will be able to manage and no single country can control and dominate.