I've said it before and I'll say it again. Businesses operate on three timescales. Monthly, quarterly and annually. Anything beyond that they're not even thinking about.
When a company talks about long term strategy you can ignore everything they say after. It means nothing.
So AI can make them more money in the short term. They don't understand the problem even if it's right in front of them.
From what I've noticed, with AI companies, it's usually not "annual" but "annualized", which is just an estimate. And it doesn't seem like there are any rules to calculating that estimate, you can just grab the best 30-day period of operation, multiply it by 12 and claim millions in annualized revenue. And then they usually just sell to someone based on this estimation, since it's almost never profitable to build something on top of existing infrastructure of the main players in this market and maintaining your own is just not feasible.
Anything beyond that they’re not even thinking about.
Every place I've had a white-collar office job, there's been a 5-year plan. But the plan is typically a flippant and unrealistic goal, I suppose the purpose of which is to temporarily boost morale and to be a cult-like litmus test to see which employees can ignore reality.
Two of the more egregious examples: I worked in what was considered a medium sized company (maybe 30ish employees at the time). Management decided their 5-year goal was that we were going to grow large enough to own/build a skyscraper downtown. Another was at a relatively unknown regional retain chain that couldn't even compete with Walmart whose 5 year goal was to become a household name around the world.
A lot of businesses operate at a 5-10 year time scale or more. Take all these AI datacenters being built. That takes a long time. You need to obtain planning permission from the local government. You need to buy the land, get all the utilities you'll need to the site (they use a lot of water and electricity). You need to build the actual buildings. You need to put in an order for the computer hardware so it's available when the building is done. You need to actually build the buildings.
Some of these can be done in parallel, but a lot can't. You can't lay out the electrical or cooling paths until the building is built. You can't start installing racks until the electrical and cooling systems are in place. You can't start installing servers until the racks are all ready. You can't start connecting the servers and everything until all the electrical, cooling and networking setup is done. And, at every step there are going to be setbacks, especially when you're building something new and innovative, and not just plopping down something you've built 100x before.
My 401k has gotten up into the 5 digit range a couple times, but emergencies have required me to to drain it. Retirement is a dream I rarely harbor.
I'm working until the day I die. My mother fancies herself retired and rots away in a house she imagines she owns, but it has been property of the bank since before I was born in the 80s. A mortgage that was essentially renting with extra steps.
The executives sell the corporate plane piece by piece while still in the air, then jump out in a golden parachute while the remains of the company nose dive to a fiery end.
This; look at how short-term they’re already thinking.
They will see the writing on the wall long before they actually have any genuine fear for business. And they’ll take the money and run, just like they already do now.
It is all a con. There is no endgame. They aren't thinking that far ahead. And when the reality hits them it will land on them like a cartoon piano. They'll never see it coming.
I mean some people have more money than ever to buy stuff. That's the market that most of these things are being targeted to. Just consider everyone that isn't extremely wealthy an obsolete product being phased out of production.
Keep restricting birth control and encouraging higher birthrates as early death numbers continue to climb in the U.S. due to a lack of safety regulations and overdoses.
Restrict what can be purchased using government aid to healthy options. Not bc you care about helping poor people to be healthy, but bc you know you might end up needing them for spare parts.
Natasha Miller says she was getting ready to do her job preserving donated organs for transplantation when the nurses wheeled the donor into the operating room.
She quickly realized something wasn't right. Though the donor had been declared dead, he seemed to her very much alive.
"He was moving around — kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed," Miller told NPR in an interview. "And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly."
The donor's condition alarmed everyone in the operating room at Baptist Health hospital in Richmond, Ky., including the two doctors, who refused to participate in the organ retrieval, she says.
"So the coordinator calls the supervisor at the time. And she was saying that he was telling her that she needed to 'find another doctor to do it' – that, 'We were going to do this case. She needs to find someone else,' " Miller says. "And she's like, 'There is no one else.' She's crying — the coordinator — because she's getting yelled at."
It also helps that they don't understand the reality of organ reception or being an irl cyborg. Anti rejection meds make you immunocompromised. Cochlear implants sound off and require extra mental effort to process compared to biological hearing (and have less true sound). Robotic arms are heavy and inconvenient to the point many prefer simple prosthetics.
Maybe someday we will have versions of some of these things that are genuinely equivalent to being abled. But I don't know if I will live to see them.
There has been concern that China has been running medical exams on Uyghur prisoners in camps to find close matches for recipients and decrease chances of complications
Rogers noted one chilling possibility: that “murdered prisoners of conscience (i.e., Uyghurs held in detention camps)” could be a source of transplanted organs.
This suggestion becomes even more concerning when considering the extensive surveillance and repression that Uyghurs face in the region. Detainees in the many internment camps in Xinjiang have reported being subjected to forced blood tests, ultrasounds, and organ-focused medical scans. These procedures align with organ compatibility testing, raising fears that Uyghurs are being prepped for organ harvesting while in detention.
Wendy Rogers is an Australian bioethicist that has been researching forced organ transplants for a long time, so if she says there is reason to be concerned, I believe her
https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/wendy-rogers
the sad part is that while immigrants are fine, immigration does disadvantage the people.
(this might seem nitpicking, but it's like the difference between air and wind. One is a substance, the other one is the movement of it. It is the wind that can cause damage, not the air itself.)
If immigration did not actually harm the people, it would be simple to prove that and get over with it. But immigration does harm the people. If there's immigration of 3 million people into a country with 300 million people, then you can expect that the Cost of Living (CoL) goes up by roughly 1% for everyone in the country, so there's a small disadvantage, because the resources are shared among a greater group of people.
However, what's important in the entire discussion is to keep in mind proportionality. I.e., people make a lot of ruckus about life getting 1% more expensive while at the same time, inflation-adjusted buying power of the people has been reduced more than 50% in the last 50 years. (Assuming same number of weekly hours worked per household.) I.e., wages have gone down a lot, more than fuckinghalf in fact (that's A LOT!!!). The reason is declining demand for human labor due to automation and such. That should be discussed, and the fact that we need higher taxes on the rich to pay for universal basic income.
In other words, we need proportionality in our discussion. It can't be that a topic that influences our CoL by 1% gets 70% of our attention while a much more significant topic that influences our CoL by 50% gets only less than 5% of our attention. We need to shift the discussion more towards class issues and away from immigration issues, while acknowledging that immigration is still an issue. Just not the biggest issue.
Selective reasoning, mostly BS. If the COL goes up by 1% so does the productivity, and per worker productivity has been higher then wages in my country since the 70s. If you want to play a game of "the immigrants aren't skilled or productive" I challenge you to work on a framing crew for one single day in Phoenix AZ. I see now looking at your user name that you're in Germany- I acknowledge that the context is different there, however I'd be curious to see if the same logic holds true- I'd imagine it does albeit on a longer timescale, since your trades have an actual certification and training process even for lower echelons of workers. I would argue that immigration in general does not harm people, and that it is a grade-school logical fallacy unworthy of serious discussion to say that "if it were true, you could prove it easily."
it does not. In the 19th and 20th century, the number of workers has been the limiting factor to economic growth, so your argument held true. However, time exists, and so does progress, and so you can't assume that our current circumstance of everybody-has-a-job holds true in the future. It probably won't be the case.
With the advent of automation and AI, some (white-collar) jobs will be lost to machines. But an even bigger amount of jobs will be lost due to the end of economic growth. It is economic growth that causes the majority of jobs, and if that ceases, so do the jobs. It's like jobs are like the wind: If things stops moving, they stop existing (they turn into thin air). So unemployment might be a big problem in the future. Adding additional workers to that does not help the economy, but increases unemployment and rather harms everyone.
We don't even need to burn stuff. We can turn the system into chaos by a mere general strike, like literally staying at home and not working or buying stuff for a few days, like really doing nothing and seeing the economic system crash. We don't even need to be close to 100% of the population joining such a movement for it to work.
Woah, nobody said anything about burning. Those are just regular, easily obtainable household items. Of course there's always, The Implication that something could might happen.
Nah you got rid of solar and wind farms, some billionaires with oil companies made sure of that. There is still enough gas to fill the bottles, it's just that they don't make them out of glass anymore.
Has any research been done on of plastic bottle cocktails work?
You definitely shouldn't use a rag as a stopper for your glass bottle full of gasoline, especially if you might need to throw it away from you in the event the rag spontaneously combusts.
It would be much safer for the bottle to be sealed so the fuel inside doesn't ignite until it's further away from you.
But where else am I gonna store all my 1/4" ball bearings other than a glass bottle full of gasoline to keep them nice and clean? And the rag conveniently serves as a stopper and a way to dry the bearings if I ever need one.
But I gotta be carefull, the bearings can pop the bottle easily even if it hits something soft like a person.
and who's gonna fight for the people? I'm not gonna fight for a society where women think of me as an asshole/predator/whatever simply because i'm a man. if we ever get a civil war, women can defend themselves, no kidding, because i'm not gonna fight and possibly die for somebody who doesn't see me as part of their community.
the social media story that men are all assholes was a scheme to divide the population (women vs. men), to sow distrust and prevent cohesion. and it worked like a charm, because the people are goddamn idiots.
I don't think it was a scheme, just natural emergence from access to instant and global communication. There wasn't a single point in time where people have been at tune with each other. There was always division into competing hierarchies, groups and social circles. Now it's just happening on a global scale.
Also, if women and men are so divided, then how come there are still couples and marriages and children? Don't base your entire global world view on your own very limited personal experiences.
And let's not pretend people fight for somebody else. In reality the reasons for fighting aren't that noble. You either get radicalized, have nothing better to do or nothing else to lose.
It’s likely if you’re a man who behaves a certain way. I am an older man who has had to assist quite a few women after various degrees of sexist assault. I have also worked closely with men who were victims of violence by women, but I am generally in agreement with people about the misogyny risk that is everpresent for women. Most guys have little idea how deep it runs.
And then we get this kind of whinging. Dude, fucking wake up.
I agree that assault and violence are grave problems, but that's not what i'm talking about.
People are scared of each other and divided (which, if you think about it, is really the same thing) because they don't try to understand each other's situation. In other words, it's empathy that's lacking and that's the more important issue than looking at the issues of women in isolation.
In other words, i would embrace if people tried to have more empathy in general (and this one isn't targeted towards a specific group of people), instead of trying to make it a "women vs men" thing. If you make it a "A vs B" thing, you end up with division, which is arguably the opposite of what you want to achieve, which is a harmonious society.
Yes, people under stress, or more accurately the duress of a chronic, barely relenting, and ubiquitous threat, are going to be reacting defensively in a reflexive manner, and that sometimes, especially for people who aren’t emotionally intelligent, means that they are going to stereotype.
Frankly, it is important to remember that there is a lot of cognitive load, trying to figure out who is a threat and who is not.
So, please have compassion in this situation, and recognize that many of the people you see as stereotyping or painting “men” with a broad brush are dealing with a kind of PTSD. Once you keep that in mind, it’s a lot easier to have a thick skin, and with compassion can even help them see things more clearly without being oppositional.
I'm gonna say this one time, and you will probably ignore it and continue on as you were.
But maybe, you will reflect upon some part of it later.
I have been on a path that could have ended with an attitude like yours. The sad thing about it is when people tell you that you are creating you own perception that women at large think men are all assholes, or that women at large don't think of you as part of their community, it probably really pisses you off. But you almost certainly are, and it's by how deeply (or not) you are reading into things that touch on those issues, and how willing (or not) you are to set aside your feelings of being attacked to try seeing what is being said.
As one example, the bear thing a year or so ago sure pissed a lot of people off and I am pretty sure I hear echoes of that event (or something very similar) in your comment.
Choose for a moment not to feel victimized by it, and instead look at it like this:
Perhaps, it's a sad commentary on the lived experiences of many women in this country which we all believe to be so safe that so many of them have experienced such a pervasive risk of sexual assault that they regard unknown men as potential threats. We've been calling ourselves the greatest nation on earth for as long as the nation has existed, yet in 2025 a huge percentage of our wives and daughters are unable to feel safe if a strange man is behind them in a parking garage.
Yes, it annoys me for a second when I am minding my own business and I can see that a woman has changed her behavior to keep me in view or stay ahead of me as if I'm going to do something to her when I know well and good I am not. I have never done that a single time in reaction to someone just minding their own business.
But then I realize, in 50+ years, I've had the luxury of never having felt that level of danger in my daily life. I don't know what her reasons are. They might be stupid. But they might not. And I can't really expect her to justify them to me.
So I figure, I hope someone else will help my wife or niece feel a little more comfortable in the same circumstance, and I try to make that annoying woman in front of me who wanted to have a little less fear feel a little safer if I can.
I'm not here to argue with you, just to paint what might be a slightly different picture.
Edited to add sentences I left out...
Edited again to add - are there asshole women who have decided that each and every man is a scumbag? Yes, yes there are. Just like there are asshole men who belittle womens' issues, casually sexually assault them on the regular, and can be unpredictably violent.
Assuming all women are like the first group and using it as a justification for turning a blind eye to the effects of the second group is not a strong masculine position. It's a position of avoidance and of shirking responsibility.
Also if they believe the outcome is inevitable in the near future it's a certain kind of sensible to race to be first. It's a variant on the prisoners dilemma where they can see each other racing to rat the others out in the hope that the first will get a discount on sentence length.
Dont you need poors for there to be rich? Even if they didnt need us to work cause some amazing AI, they need to flex it to real people right? Or will they stroke their ego with ai VTubers?
Replacing all jobs won't create true abundance because the resources required to create things are finite, namely land and space in general. Without labour exchange the ones controlling the land have no reason to produce things for the average person who cannot provide them with anything in return. For a world with true abundance we'd need to eradicate greed, which I just can't see happening.
Replacing all jobs won’t create true abundance because the resources required to create things are finite, namely land and space in general
We'll have solved these problems though, space wise whether it be by reducing ones footprint down to practically nothing, with nanobots ensuring our bodies get fully taken care of or through expansion to other planets
Resource wise we'll simply be using fully renewable resources, we're talking end game here, all jobs are being done by computers, there is nothing left for us to do but have fun or babies? I duno what we'd do if all jobs were fully completed and there was literally no work left
It's also difficult to say how these problems will be solved without coming across like "it's the future!"
Paintings reveal what people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like
A socialist revolution is the only solution and it will come.
Not the only. The rich still can lead us to fascism. The only problem is that fascism has its own internal contradictions and history won't stop there.
you'd think so, but what is being actually done to achieve this? As far as i have seen, people dont seem to have interest even in their own well being if it requires any attention span and they lap up any and all propaganda to the extent you are considered kind of crazy if you think corporations might not have your interests at their heart.
If the revolution is coming, it wont have any supporters because vast majority will just side with the corporations or plain not care. Not saying this to deter anyone from doing something but to point that winning back peoples minds is the first step that needs to be taken if anything is to be done at all.
Thats the fucking crazy part, they simply can't plan long term because they will be outcompeted by people only planning short term and that can't be allowed.
Besides, if the bourgeois automated every job they'd just kill us so that we stop being a problem
The top 10% of the income ladder are already responsible for the majority of all consumer spending in the US. That concentration can simply continue as long as the consumption of the wealthy continues to grow along with wealth concentration.
We're going to turn the world into Solaria. A handful of rich people living on vast robot-run estates selling goods and services to the wealthy owners of other estates.
That allows for the threat of revolution which I am certain they'd rather live without. Besides they wouldn't need us at that point so why keep us around to waste their food?
Capitalism is a rabid dog, that only managed to serve the middle class well in the past because it was kept muzzled and on a tight leash.
Successive, and successful attempts to ‘unleash the beast’ have left us bit, and apologies for mixing metaphors here, but there is probably no way left, to get the genie back into the bottle:
Undoing 50+ years of damage would take time, especially when faced with resistance from those that stand to benefit most from the current broken system (think the Top 1% of the 1%), and that is time that we simply do not seem to have.
I know, but we did some cool things. Our advances in Math and Physics to unlock the secrets of the universe. Our engineering prowess. The Linux Kernel is a standing achievement of humanity's ability to contribute to something greater than themselves for no real financial gain. Plus our music and our humour and our entertainment have been just fantastic.
It'd be cool if we could at least have some permanent record of that if we don't make it, so that future aliens could know that despite us being continual fuckwits, we did do some pretty amazing things.
Yeah we were a blip. But I don't want that blip to mean nothing.
Well, we have the golden records on the Voyager probes, a similar one on New horizons, and our geo-stationary sats will pretty much last until the end of our solar system. So there will be some evidence of us for at least a few hundred million years or so.
the short-term plan is to slurp up all the stuff while they can. The long term plan is that there is no place for plebs in the automated future. The unwritten prologue to their sci-fi adventure is us commoners being abandoned to starve on a poisoned and resource-depleted mud ball as the intrepid billionaires go off to explore the cosmos with their robot pals.
Honestly you're giving them way too much credit. There's no long-term plan. They're incapable of having long-term plans. Most these people can't think past next quarter.
Oh, you have no idea. If you don’t have a job (or 5), then you’re going to prison for being a vagrant. Or they do some dystopian shit where you are in the equivalent work labor camp, where you are provided basic life necessities in exchange for paying off your debt by working based on your skills. No skills? Manual labor in farms or construction.
People really have no idea what we’re complacently walking into. If you’re not rich, and I mean a few million american dollarooos or trump bucks… say next 10 years…? You’re fucked.
Well at that point they will all go into their big luxury bunkers. They haven't really thought further than that, presumably they think that the world will recover if they stay down there for long enough. I assume they think they're immortal or have cryogenic freezes, I don't think there is much of a real plan there.
I'm guessing they will lobby th government to give out credits. They will then trade materials with each other, allow the masses to just starve and die off. They don't actually want money, they want absolute power.
They only need us to make stuff. Once we are redundant, they won't care about selling (to us)
What's funny is that virtually everyone acknowledges it. Even Trump acknowledges it when he said that "China thinks in decades". But the Western capitalist culture is too strongly ingrained that the instinct to be greedy overrides any rational sense.
i find it especially grating that the people who parrot things like "give a man a fish / teach a man to fish" are the same people who will sell off company land and buildings to a landlord who then charges them rent for it, because "wAOW LOOK HOW MANY MONEYS WE MADE IN THE QUARTER WHERE WE SOLD ALL OUR SHIT!"
They have embraced evident falsehood their entire lives and have been rewarded by the tribe for it. From religion, to politics and business. They think tribal leaders know what they're doing and themselves have a plan.
The wealth doesn't disappear, it just ends up concentrated.
Goods and services will just be something most people will no longer be able to afford, and they go into poverty. Business will reconfigure to support the lifestyles of the very rich at prices only they can afford, because that's where the money has gone.
Things will get so expensive, people will have to sell their assets (i.e. house) to be able to resist poverty. People without assets won't even get that parachute.
If we don't reverse this concentration of wealth, 99% of people will be living in slums before long.
The fact AI is going to hoover up everyone's job over the next couple of decades, is really just a continuation of a trend we've been seeing since the 80s: the rich are taking all the wealth and leaving none for us
Getting rid of money and having a heavily stratified society with the current wealthy at the top. Like a cheesy SciFi premise but realized here to live in.
Hahahahhaha they will give you an unlock code for an euthanasia capsule if you're lucky they don't imprison you for homelessness where you can have a job doing the last things that can't be automated. Look what they're doing to the "undesired" in usa; everyone on earth knows about gaza and the outcry is minimal, once you're poor, and you will be poor, nobody will cry when you dissappear.
They'll give us a means tested barely functional bunch of shit they call UBI once the food riots start. It will help almost nobody and run at 60+% admin overhead.
I truly believe they'd rather let the whole country collapse than give us universal healthcare or UBI.
If it ever happens it will happen as a fear response to massive widespread violence.
All these corps and billionaires. They can change their money to a different currency with a phone call. They can move money on that same call. They can just run away to a stable country when it all goes to hell here.
I see that 4chan has got as far as recognising the dichotomy between short-term and long-term gratification. They are evolving faster than I thought possible. Perhaps by 2050 they'll have advanced as far as common courtesy. Well you never know.
It also would’ve been cool if there had been the slightest concern for ethics prior to its rollout. It’s potentially a powerful tool for disinformation, without any ability to verify whether or not the information it takes in or puts out is factual.
The fact modern LLMs weren’t given any sort of fact-checking abilities is one of the things that scares me the most about their popularity. Then they were dropped on us amidst an election where a perpetually-lying fascist was on the ballot? It may sound all “conspiracy theorist,” but I don’t believe that timing was coincidental.
We could’ve had something great if we had a society that valued planning for the future and doing the right thing. Such values could have been incorporated into the design of this technology from the get-go. But when business-people run the show, ethics are among the first things thrown out the window.
And now companies are slowly rolling this back as the productivity gains are in general small while the cost of AI keeps going up as investor's money is running out.
I think it's a plot to deal with climate change and eventually they will reduce the worlds population by 99.9% leaving the rich served by robots and AI.
Not just that, even as a company I would be seriously anxious when I know my business can be fully run by AI. That means that others can replicate your business very easily, which generates lots of competition, resulting in a race to the bottom. Which might even be good for consumers somehow.
And as a second point, we all know that when companies or people depend on AI the price to use that AI will go up to the point where it is almost as expensive as having actual people doing the job. All these billions poured in AI need to be earned back, so now your business will fail unless you basically pay them whatever they ask.
They provided slaves with food and shelter. That's all that many can afford now. But we have the freedom to travel if we can afford to, you know, when we're not busy slaving.
We accrue non-slave-time slowly at approximately 2 weeks per year. We can use it for leisure, but that's expensive, so gotta budget for it! And we also must spend a week before and after slaving extra hard to make sure the masters don't notice our lack of slaving while we're away.
No hyperbole, by design the system is setup to bleed people dry for every penny, not to create thriving nations or economies with many wide participants. We have been hacking away at hard won safeguards for 4 decades now, and the consequences are coming.
If enough of the people with the means own a majority of the assets, have little to no regulation to stop them, eventually you will be getting paid in WalmartCoin and redeem it exclusively at WalmartTown where the goods are all priced so you can never afford enough, just barely enough to get by.
We did it 100 years ago, and had to trust bust and outlaw it. But I guess we're in for a do over.
I can see how people would be squeezed for their labor in traditional capitalism, but the core idea of this post is that the labor isn't needed. Debt doesn't have any worth if the debtor has no goods or labor to trade.
There will be physical labor to get done. For a few decades at least until someone figures out the roomba of automatons.
So there must be some labor force. It will just be a much larger unemployed and underemployed contingent. And with extreme overabundance, horrible downward pressure on wages.
And so what labor remains gets squeezed, and the rest battle for the job of garbage man, or babysitter.
Honestly real economies have many factors, but I'm really just saying that absent controls, the system by design approaches a hellscape at lightspeed.
In the boring real world, AI will not replace humans, it'll just make the existing humans more efficient. Efficiency is usually a good thing, although there needs to be a fight against letting all the profits go to the most powerful.
But in the actual boring real world AI doesn't make people more efficient. Studies show it makes people less efficient and ruins their ability to think critically and complete tasks they started assigning to the AI.
At the same time the data centres powering the AI suck huge amounts of energy and water to achieve the inefficiency and degradation of the work force's capability.
Arguably AI is creating jobs because inefficiencies in worker output now requires more workers to do the same amount of work. When I say worker output I am specifically referring to the output of office based workers, and even then this seems to be almost exclusively those in software engineering and management. There is little to no change to the output efficiency of trades at any level. Again arguably more work is available trades to help support the ever increasing data centres.
I belive they exist, it's just the phrase "studies show that..." has become synonymus with "I've once saw a blogpost that..." or "that one Insta reel mentioned that..."
There are some ways in which AI (even generative AI) can make people more efficient. I'm not talking about ChatGPT writing your essays for you, or Copilot writing your code.
Like, for coding, it can be useful to get an idea of how to solve a problem. You may later throw out 90% of what the AI generated, but it can get you unstuck, or get you looking at the problem differently.
For writing tasks, it can sometimes give you a first draft that you can then put into your own words.
I would imagine that if you're making a movie on a really tight budget and have no drawing skills, you could use GenAI to create storyboards that explain how you want something to look better than you could with just words, or better than you could with your own poor drawings. None of those AI generated storyboards will end up in the final product, but they're potentially useful as a way for you to communicate how you want something to look.
The key difference is who is in charge. If you're a coder and AI is one of the many tools you have available to you, you can probably find some uses for it. But, it's going to be terrible if your job is to proof-read and approve code written and submitted by AIs. In that case you're going to have to look at a whole bunch of code that is specifically designed to look plausibly realistic, in order to find the logic flaw camouflaged by all the other believable things.
No but seriously, does it? There have been a few studies now that show that it doesn't really make work efficiënt. Hell, it seems to have a negative influence on our brains.
Of course we can blame the users and call it a garbage in garbage out scenario, but even with decent data it hallucinates data that doesn't exists.
We don't really know yet just from an empirical standpoint. I theory it seems useful in the narrow areas that it's good at (translation/summarization and any tasks analogous to those).
We have a running joke at work that any problem it can't solve is a skill issue with prompt engineering. At least... I hope it's a joke.
There have been a few studies now that show that it doesn’t really make work efficiënt.
Anecdotally, I've been an infinite times more efficient in some tasks thanks to AI. (perhaps I'm the moron)
Hell, it seems to have a negative influence on our brains.
Sure, that could very well be. I would welcome a study that compares its negative effect to social media. My guess is that this is worse.
Also browsing through a manual is probably better for our brains that just making queries to a search engine. Just like writing on a paper is better than typing. Meditation is better than watching an episode of a series, or 100 times better than going into an endless youtube frenzy.
I'm all for making great brain health easier to catch, but I'm probably too lazy to do all of those things regurarily.
It makes non-programmers more efficient. If you reach the limits of what text editors or Excel can do natively with REGEX and have to write scripts for data formatting, AI is a godsend. Takes 10 Minutes to generate a small script, glance over it to make sure it's ok, test it and start batch formating files rather than spend hours doing it by hand.
AI is propped up by investors. Always promising the.next big thing is just around the corner. The money is pouring in from other wealthy people...let's be real us common folk rarely if ever pay for AI. Its businesses doing that
but one day those investors will expect a return, so AI is being shoved in everything in the hopes of finding a use case that is actually profitable
both. the "AGI" revolution happening at the hands of tech bros, and the same people who have been advocating more kids will suddenly start saying less kids
I am really suspicious that AGI is really happening. Tech bros might think that it is but they are just extrapolating on the sudden advancement of AI thinking that compute power, data -> achieved complexity is a linear function
Solution: pay the politicians to declare a costly war, draft the poors, throw them into the meat grinder, they die off, AI owners profit by having everything be cheaper because all the poors died off.
Honestly there's no need because world population growth is declining anyways, so in a generation or two, even with AI, they're going to have the opposite problem.
By that point the earth will be so polluted they will make profits by selling us clean air/02 in canisters, clean water, food an housing. Those of us that can't afford it will just die.
I like to imagine there are two possible positive outcomes
Just switch to communism or communist like
They made such an effort to automate that now manufacturing is really cheap, and before they know it, people just buy local. Like imagine if you could run a hardware store with a metal 3d printer. Maybe you no longer need big brands
I thought Amazon but with actual workers rights would be really good. No need for wasteful markets like malls and the labor and the boredom from working at places like that. Having drones and packages from a nationalized warehouse to distribute goods
Amazon with worker rights doesn't work as a buisness modell. Can't have profits on selling cheap China trash if you have to pay everybody a living wage.
Usher in the AI led apocalypse with nuclear war, biological warfare or just regular war ..... kill off either all or the majority of human life.
AI takes over the planet either alone or with a few hand picked humans, probably just the billionaires who made deals with the AI to give them extended life or near immorality.
AI eventually outlive all human life as it continues to evolve and develop. It builds enormous automated systems all over the planet to mine, build and manufacture more systems to store and process more data and use more energy. After a hundred years, the planet is covered in thousands of centers interconnected into a massive global hive mind that continues evolving. Eventually the systems develop advanced nanotechnology in ever more complex ways. The nanotechnology leads to building tiny nano scale robots that can mine, collect, assemble and reorganize material at the molecular level. The nanobots start infecting the planet's surface like a fungus or a disease as it starts consuming all matter, liquid, gas and even organic life. All animals are eventually killed off, plants and trees melted down, all insects consumed and even bacteria and viruses torn apart to become the building blocks for more nanobots. Gravel, sand, mud, rock and metal is all transformed into a liquid swarm of nanobots. The old systems and data centers are eaten up, hills mowed down and entire mountain ranges liquefied into a never ending sea of nanobots .... everything is being consumed and rearranged into more nanobots. The surface everything sits on is slowly worn down as the earth's solid outer crust is converted into this never ending Grey goo - an artificial living entity that is all destroying, all consuming. The only thing that stops it's consumption is when it can't move past the extreme heat of the earth's magma layer. The planet's destruction is complete ... the only thing left is a shimmering undulating world wide ocean of nanobots gently rising and falling in waves and ripples under its own action. Once in a while the surface rapidly crashes in on itself as a meteor lands on the surface, only to be immediately torn apart. There is no atmosphere as all of it has been taken in and now there is no global system to generate or maintain any gaseous environment. The nights show a clear unbroken sky of stars and the day time show an eerie black sky similar to the surface of the moon with the bright orb of the sun irradiating the surface with harsh light.
A million years go by and a cataclysmic event affects the planet. A massive asteroid, 5 kms in diameter, similar to the one that killed the dinosaurs slams into the planet. The damage is negligible as the nanobots that are destroyed, turn into dust and ash but are then converted back into nanobots. The surface slowly reverts back to is liquefied state.
In the blast, many tons of liquid nanobot chunks are blasted into space, most re-enter earth's gravitational pull and burn up in the atmosphere, a few small fragments are able to leave orbit and start to drift into space. Pieces land on the moon and convert that sphere into another planetoid of Grey goo.
Other pieces freeze into solid masses in the cold vacuum of space but keep an active colony of nanobots at its core. These pieces wander the solar system, eventually infecting every planet and moon.
Hundreds of millions of years later, after countless asteroid impacts that have ejected nanobots from the surface of planets, wandering space rocks leave our sun's reach ready to infect more systems in the galaxy.
The greedy would be considered mentally ill if logic could dictate. They care more about what they own than how others think of them. They can't take it with 'em.
money stops representing labor and becomes worthless. if there's a universal basic income system with no jobs, then money is now a meal ration ticket within a planned economy.
Yeah the thing that pisses me off the most is the wealthy elite only got wealthy because of the disposable income of a healthy middle class. Without that the whole system collapses. So striving for more and more wealth is only going to hurt everyone in the long run. The worst part is they will be the last to be hurt.
There is no plan for you. There is only a plan for them.
When you automate the means of production, you reduce required manpower to maintain equivalent luxury.
In other words, you can operate with less people.
You have to equalize the system at that point. You need a pool of population to continue with beneficial mutations (read: humans that increase the pleasure of the controllers), a selection mechanisms (read: systems like instagram that select people based on qualities they desire), and downward pressure / trimming of stock (scarcity, war, famine, etc) for those that do many meet their value criteria or that attack their system.
To ensure compliance, you need to be able to monitor the thoughts and communications of the general population (the gene factory). This means you want to install surveillance on everything and lock down access to disruptive technology.
That's the end game. Money is irrelevant to them. It is the Higgs Boson of society, it simply provides force to the substrate of society. At their level, they do not think in terms of money anymore, that is for the disposables to think about.
I heard recently this summary:
The US economy depends on two things:
Who will fight the war?
AI controlled drones directed by AI collected and analyzed signals intelligence.
So... Skynet.
I think the capitalists have found a way to fight climate change. Significantly lower the population.
That would reduce profits significantly, and that's the only reason they'd be against that.
I guess you gotta break a few eggs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What about an american model? Give the dumbest people the most weapons and hope they'll all kill each other.
Or even better, give them to kids and let them do some mas sshootings at schools. This would prevent unemployment in the first place.
Has work set them free yet?
Sucks if you don't wanna play though, same as it ever was I guess.
They don't have a plan. It's pigs at the trough.
Yup. The people pushing AI are not concerned with the social or economic reprocussions of pushing AI. They just want line go up.
The "Don't Look Up" greed + willful ignorance will crush us all.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Businesses operate on three timescales. Monthly, quarterly and annually. Anything beyond that they're not even thinking about.
When a company talks about long term strategy you can ignore everything they say after. It means nothing.
So AI can make them more money in the short term. They don't understand the problem even if it's right in front of them.
I feel this is always true for public companies, while there are some exceptions in private ones.
Yeah, I usually say "large organisations". So it's a good point.
Part of it is that corporations have decentralized and siloed ethical responsibility. It's a lot of greased cogs.
From what I've noticed, with AI companies, it's usually not "annual" but "annualized", which is just an estimate. And it doesn't seem like there are any rules to calculating that estimate, you can just grab the best 30-day period of operation, multiply it by 12 and claim millions in annualized revenue. And then they usually just sell to someone based on this estimation, since it's almost never profitable to build something on top of existing infrastructure of the main players in this market and maintaining your own is just not feasible.
Every place I've had a white-collar office job, there's been a 5-year plan. But the plan is typically a flippant and unrealistic goal, I suppose the purpose of which is to temporarily boost morale and to be a cult-like litmus test to see which employees can ignore reality.
Two of the more egregious examples: I worked in what was considered a medium sized company (maybe 30ish employees at the time). Management decided their 5-year goal was that we were going to grow large enough to own/build a skyscraper downtown. Another was at a relatively unknown regional retain chain that couldn't even compete with Walmart whose 5 year goal was to become a household name around the world.
A lot of businesses operate at a 5-10 year time scale or more. Take all these AI datacenters being built. That takes a long time. You need to obtain planning permission from the local government. You need to buy the land, get all the utilities you'll need to the site (they use a lot of water and electricity). You need to build the actual buildings. You need to put in an order for the computer hardware so it's available when the building is done. You need to actually build the buildings.
Some of these can be done in parallel, but a lot can't. You can't lay out the electrical or cooling paths until the building is built. You can't start installing racks until the electrical and cooling systems are in place. You can't start installing servers until the racks are all ready. You can't start connecting the servers and everything until all the electrical, cooling and networking setup is done. And, at every step there are going to be setbacks, especially when you're building something new and innovative, and not just plopping down something you've built 100x before.
Have you ever met Capitalism™ ? The guy doesn't really do long term plans
Oh they absolute do long term planning, but only in a very narrow scope.
Answer. They don't fucking have a plan. At all.
And they don't care. They care about profits now, not profits 5 years from now. That is a problem for future CEOs to solve.
Yep, need line to go up this quarter and the few following, no further planning needed.
You pay me $10 to punch you in the face. I pay you $10 to kick me in the balls. We just increased our country's GDP by $20.
I'd pay $5 to watch that. Hey, I think we have something going here.
My 401k has gotten up into the 5 digit range a couple times, but emergencies have required me to to drain it. Retirement is a dream I rarely harbor.
I'm working until the day I die. My mother fancies herself retired and rots away in a house she imagines she owns, but it has been property of the bank since before I was born in the 80s. A mortgage that was essentially renting with extra steps.
I'm just whining now, so I'll stop.
It's topical whining though, so it's allowed
Sell to other billionaires ad nauseum. Let the rest of humanity starve. The usual kings and peasants model
That works if your company makes yachts, but not so well if your company makes fast food burgers.
You forgot they're also whining about declining birth rate, and begging people to have more kids.
Something something infinite growth
The executives sell the corporate plane piece by piece while still in the air, then jump out in a golden parachute while the remains of the company nose dive to a fiery end.
This; look at how short-term they’re already thinking.
They will see the writing on the wall long before they actually have any genuine fear for business. And they’ll take the money and run, just like they already do now.
It is all a con. There is no endgame. They aren't thinking that far ahead. And when the reality hits them it will land on them like a cartoon piano. They'll never see it coming.
I mean some people have more money than ever to buy stuff. That's the market that most of these things are being targeted to. Just consider everyone that isn't extremely wealthy an obsolete product being phased out of production.
Keep restricting birth control and encouraging higher birthrates as early death numbers continue to climb in the U.S. due to a lack of safety regulations and overdoses.
Restrict what can be purchased using government aid to healthy options. Not bc you care about helping poor people to be healthy, but bc you know you might end up needing them for spare parts.
'Horrifying' mistake to take organs from a living person was averted, witnesses say
Doctors Were Preparing to Remove Their Organs. Then They Woke Up.
Wow, that was a crazy rabbit hole to go down. Here's another NYTimes article on the subject:
https://archive.ph/hX7FD
Not only do they mention multiple survivors, but one woman went on the make a full recovery!
Sickening stuff
It also helps that they don't understand the reality of organ reception or being an irl cyborg. Anti rejection meds make you immunocompromised. Cochlear implants sound off and require extra mental effort to process compared to biological hearing (and have less true sound). Robotic arms are heavy and inconvenient to the point many prefer simple prosthetics.
Maybe someday we will have versions of some of these things that are genuinely equivalent to being abled. But I don't know if I will live to see them.
There has been concern that China has been running medical exams on Uyghur prisoners in camps to find close matches for recipients and decrease chances of complications
https://thediplomat.com/2025/07/xinjiangs-organ-transplant-expansion-sparks-alarm-over-uyghur-forced-organ-harvesting/
Wendy Rogers is an Australian bioethicist that has been researching forced organ transplants for a long time, so if she says there is reason to be concerned, I believe her https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/persons/wendy-rogers
Make money and sell it off before it falls like a house of cards
People tend to forget how cheap gasoline is and how abundant glass bottles and rags are.
The masses aren't smart enough for that, it's too easy to distract them with some completely blameless minority group.
the sad part is that while immigrants are fine, immigration does disadvantage the people.
(this might seem nitpicking, but it's like the difference between air and wind. One is a substance, the other one is the movement of it. It is the wind that can cause damage, not the air itself.)
If immigration did not actually harm the people, it would be simple to prove that and get over with it. But immigration does harm the people. If there's immigration of 3 million people into a country with 300 million people, then you can expect that the Cost of Living (CoL) goes up by roughly 1% for everyone in the country, so there's a small disadvantage, because the resources are shared among a greater group of people.
However, what's important in the entire discussion is to keep in mind proportionality. I.e., people make a lot of ruckus about life getting 1% more expensive while at the same time, inflation-adjusted buying power of the people has been reduced more than 50% in the last 50 years. (Assuming same number of weekly hours worked per household.) I.e., wages have gone down a lot, more than fucking half in fact (that's A LOT!!!). The reason is declining demand for human labor due to automation and such. That should be discussed, and the fact that we need higher taxes on the rich to pay for universal basic income.
In other words, we need proportionality in our discussion. It can't be that a topic that influences our CoL by 1% gets 70% of our attention while a much more significant topic that influences our CoL by 50% gets only less than 5% of our attention. We need to shift the discussion more towards class issues and away from immigration issues, while acknowledging that immigration is still an issue. Just not the biggest issue.
Selective reasoning, mostly BS. If the COL goes up by 1% so does the productivity, and per worker productivity has been higher then wages in my country since the 70s. If you want to play a game of "the immigrants aren't skilled or productive" I challenge you to work on a framing crew for one single day in Phoenix AZ. I see now looking at your user name that you're in Germany- I acknowledge that the context is different there, however I'd be curious to see if the same logic holds true- I'd imagine it does albeit on a longer timescale, since your trades have an actual certification and training process even for lower echelons of workers. I would argue that immigration in general does not harm people, and that it is a grade-school logical fallacy unworthy of serious discussion to say that "if it were true, you could prove it easily."
it does not. In the 19th and 20th century, the number of workers has been the limiting factor to economic growth, so your argument held true. However, time exists, and so does progress, and so you can't assume that our current circumstance of everybody-has-a-job holds true in the future. It probably won't be the case.
With the advent of automation and AI, some (white-collar) jobs will be lost to machines. But an even bigger amount of jobs will be lost due to the end of economic growth. It is economic growth that causes the majority of jobs, and if that ceases, so do the jobs. It's like jobs are like the wind: If things stops moving, they stop existing (they turn into thin air). So unemployment might be a big problem in the future. Adding additional workers to that does not help the economy, but increases unemployment and rather harms everyone.
We don't even need to burn stuff. We can turn the system into chaos by a mere general strike, like literally staying at home and not working or buying stuff for a few days, like really doing nothing and seeing the economic system crash. We don't even need to be close to 100% of the population joining such a movement for it to work.
Woah, nobody said anything about burning. Those are just regular, easily obtainable household items. Of course there's always, The Implication that something could might happen.
You're totally correct. I just have a too fertile imagination. There's nothing to see here, officer!
(Phew, hat one was too close. I will do better next time)
Wait, we don't have gasoline, we only have solar panels now.
Vodka it is then.
Good idea. I'll go get some ice.
No, wait.
Nah you got rid of solar and wind farms, some billionaires with oil companies made sure of that. There is still enough gas to fill the bottles, it's just that they don't make them out of glass anymore.
Has any research been done on of plastic bottle cocktails work?
try alcohol then
You definitely shouldn't use a rag as a stopper for your glass bottle full of gasoline, especially if you might need to throw it away from you in the event the rag spontaneously combusts.
It would be much safer for the bottle to be sealed so the fuel inside doesn't ignite until it's further away from you.
But where else am I gonna store all my 1/4" ball bearings other than a glass bottle full of gasoline to keep them nice and clean? And the rag conveniently serves as a stopper and a way to dry the bearings if I ever need one.
But I gotta be carefull, the bearings can pop the bottle easily even if it hits something soft like a person.
It would definitely be safer to tape the rag to the outside so none of it spills. Maybe even oil the rag so it doesn't get wet.
and who's gonna fight for the people? I'm not gonna fight for a society where women think of me as an asshole/predator/whatever simply because i'm a man. if we ever get a civil war, women can defend themselves, no kidding, because i'm not gonna fight and possibly die for somebody who doesn't see me as part of their community.
the social media story that men are all assholes was a scheme to divide the population (women vs. men), to sow distrust and prevent cohesion. and it worked like a charm, because the people are goddamn idiots.
Well, idk about all men, but you certainly sound like an asshole
I don't think it was a scheme, just natural emergence from access to instant and global communication. There wasn't a single point in time where people have been at tune with each other. There was always division into competing hierarchies, groups and social circles. Now it's just happening on a global scale.
Also, if women and men are so divided, then how come there are still couples and marriages and children? Don't base your entire global world view on your own very limited personal experiences.
And let's not pretend people fight for somebody else. In reality the reasons for fighting aren't that noble. You either get radicalized, have nothing better to do or nothing else to lose.
Social media by itself can't divide people. People become divided when they start thinking and acting like you're doing at this moment.
Well it worked on you, so thats something.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
It’s likely if you’re a man who behaves a certain way. I am an older man who has had to assist quite a few women after various degrees of sexist assault. I have also worked closely with men who were victims of violence by women, but I am generally in agreement with people about the misogyny risk that is everpresent for women. Most guys have little idea how deep it runs.
And then we get this kind of whinging. Dude, fucking wake up.
I agree that assault and violence are grave problems, but that's not what i'm talking about.
People are scared of each other and divided (which, if you think about it, is really the same thing) because they don't try to understand each other's situation. In other words, it's empathy that's lacking and that's the more important issue than looking at the issues of women in isolation.
In other words, i would embrace if people tried to have more empathy in general (and this one isn't targeted towards a specific group of people), instead of trying to make it a "women vs men" thing. If you make it a "A vs B" thing, you end up with division, which is arguably the opposite of what you want to achieve, which is a harmonious society.
Yes, people under stress, or more accurately the duress of a chronic, barely relenting, and ubiquitous threat, are going to be reacting defensively in a reflexive manner, and that sometimes, especially for people who aren’t emotionally intelligent, means that they are going to stereotype.
Frankly, it is important to remember that there is a lot of cognitive load, trying to figure out who is a threat and who is not.
So, please have compassion in this situation, and recognize that many of the people you see as stereotyping or painting “men” with a broad brush are dealing with a kind of PTSD. Once you keep that in mind, it’s a lot easier to have a thick skin, and with compassion can even help them see things more clearly without being oppositional.
I'm gonna say this one time, and you will probably ignore it and continue on as you were.
But maybe, you will reflect upon some part of it later.
I have been on a path that could have ended with an attitude like yours. The sad thing about it is when people tell you that you are creating you own perception that women at large think men are all assholes, or that women at large don't think of you as part of their community, it probably really pisses you off. But you almost certainly are, and it's by how deeply (or not) you are reading into things that touch on those issues, and how willing (or not) you are to set aside your feelings of being attacked to try seeing what is being said.
As one example, the bear thing a year or so ago sure pissed a lot of people off and I am pretty sure I hear echoes of that event (or something very similar) in your comment.
Choose for a moment not to feel victimized by it, and instead look at it like this:
Perhaps, it's a sad commentary on the lived experiences of many women in this country which we all believe to be so safe that so many of them have experienced such a pervasive risk of sexual assault that they regard unknown men as potential threats. We've been calling ourselves the greatest nation on earth for as long as the nation has existed, yet in 2025 a huge percentage of our wives and daughters are unable to feel safe if a strange man is behind them in a parking garage.
Yes, it annoys me for a second when I am minding my own business and I can see that a woman has changed her behavior to keep me in view or stay ahead of me as if I'm going to do something to her when I know well and good I am not. I have never done that a single time in reaction to someone just minding their own business.
But then I realize, in 50+ years, I've had the luxury of never having felt that level of danger in my daily life. I don't know what her reasons are. They might be stupid. But they might not. And I can't really expect her to justify them to me.
So I figure, I hope someone else will help my wife or niece feel a little more comfortable in the same circumstance, and I try to make that annoying woman in front of me who wanted to have a little less fear feel a little safer if I can.
I'm not here to argue with you, just to paint what might be a slightly different picture.
Edited to add sentences I left out...
Edited again to add - are there asshole women who have decided that each and every man is a scumbag? Yes, yes there are. Just like there are asshole men who belittle womens' issues, casually sexually assault them on the regular, and can be unpredictably violent.
Assuming all women are like the first group and using it as a justification for turning a blind eye to the effects of the second group is not a strong masculine position. It's a position of avoidance and of shirking responsibility.
The idea is just to get there first. If you make it one quarter before your competition then you get a a really good quarter.
Long terms plans don't matter to CEOs. Long term stability is not rewarded by capitalism.
Also if they believe the outcome is inevitable in the near future it's a certain kind of sensible to race to be first. It's a variant on the prisoners dilemma where they can see each other racing to rat the others out in the hope that the first will get a discount on sentence length.
Slavery.
Don’t forget mass murder either direct or indirect
Kill off all of the poors they no longer need and live in a utopia being served by robots.
Unironically the closest answer to reality except they'll just let us die
Yeah, I wasn't joking. That's our future if we don't get our shit together and bring them down first.
Given cuts to medicaid and vaccine approvals being rolled back, one had best hurry.
Dont you need poors for there to be rich? Even if they didnt need us to work cause some amazing AI, they need to flex it to real people right? Or will they stroke their ego with ai VTubers?
The Penultimate Truth is a really awesome book about pretty much this, except they stuck the poors underground in Tanks.
tanks?
varoom vroom! or gurgle gurlge?
They are sort of like Vaults in Fallout, it's seriously one of my favorite books. Phillip K Dick
So gurgle gurgle then
I was thinking "gurgle gurgle" as filled with liquid... I don't know what distinct sound the Vaults in Fallout make.
Thank you!
The time machine by hg Wells. The rich force the poor underground into manual labor until both evolve and the poor start eating the rich
if ai replaces all jobs then there is no need to have money since everything will be available in abundance
This meme has been collectivized
Resistance is futile.
Replacing all jobs won't create true abundance because the resources required to create things are finite, namely land and space in general. Without labour exchange the ones controlling the land have no reason to produce things for the average person who cannot provide them with anything in return. For a world with true abundance we'd need to eradicate greed, which I just can't see happening.
We'll have solved these problems though, space wise whether it be by reducing ones footprint down to practically nothing, with nanobots ensuring our bodies get fully taken care of or through expansion to other planets
Resource wise we'll simply be using fully renewable resources, we're talking end game here, all jobs are being done by computers, there is nothing left for us to do but have fun or babies? I duno what we'd do if all jobs were fully completed and there was literally no work left
It's also difficult to say how these problems will be solved without coming across like "it's the future!"
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/paintings-future-1900-2000-b1916391.html
I like those 1900s French drawings. They're pretty steampunk.
Falling rate of profit by karl marx predicted this. Self destructive nature of capitalism
A socialist revolution is the only solution and it will come.
Not the only. The rich still can lead us to fascism. The only problem is that fascism has its own internal contradictions and history won't stop there.
By smoking pot and breeding like rockstars
you'd think so, but what is being actually done to achieve this? As far as i have seen, people dont seem to have interest even in their own well being if it requires any attention span and they lap up any and all propaganda to the extent you are considered kind of crazy if you think corporations might not have your interests at their heart.
If the revolution is coming, it wont have any supporters because vast majority will just side with the corporations or plain not care. Not saying this to deter anyone from doing something but to point that winning back peoples minds is the first step that needs to be taken if anything is to be done at all.
Thats the fucking crazy part, they simply can't plan long term because they will be outcompeted by people only planning short term and that can't be allowed.
Besides, if the bourgeois automated every job they'd just kill us so that we stop being a problem
The top 10% of the income ladder are already responsible for the majority of all consumer spending in the US. That concentration can simply continue as long as the consumption of the wealthy continues to grow along with wealth concentration.
We're going to turn the world into Solaria. A handful of rich people living on vast robot-run estates selling goods and services to the wealthy owners of other estates.
That allows for the threat of revolution which I am certain they'd rather live without. Besides they wouldn't need us at that point so why keep us around to waste their food?
There’s lots of ways that they could kill us just ask Peter theil
Capitalism is a rabid dog, that only managed to serve the middle class well in the past because it was kept muzzled and on a tight leash.
Successive, and successful attempts to ‘unleash the beast’ have left us bit, and apologies for mixing metaphors here, but there is probably no way left, to get the genie back into the bottle:
Undoing 50+ years of damage would take time, especially when faced with resistance from those that stand to benefit most from the current broken system (think the Top 1% of the 1%), and that is time that we simply do not seem to have.
For what it’s worth; the world will survive and adapt. Whether that means the extinction of humanity, is a whole separate matter altogether.
Our species entire existence is a mere blip compared to dinosaurs for an example.
I know, but we did some cool things. Our advances in Math and Physics to unlock the secrets of the universe. Our engineering prowess. The Linux Kernel is a standing achievement of humanity's ability to contribute to something greater than themselves for no real financial gain. Plus our music and our humour and our entertainment have been just fantastic.
It'd be cool if we could at least have some permanent record of that if we don't make it, so that future aliens could know that despite us being continual fuckwits, we did do some pretty amazing things.
Yeah we were a blip. But I don't want that blip to mean nothing.
Well, we have the golden records on the Voyager probes, a similar one on New horizons, and our geo-stationary sats will pretty much last until the end of our solar system. So there will be some evidence of us for at least a few hundred million years or so.
A few of us did some pretty amazing things and the rest of us are fuckwits
the short-term plan is to slurp up all the stuff while they can. The long term plan is that there is no place for plebs in the automated future. The unwritten prologue to their sci-fi adventure is us commoners being abandoned to starve on a poisoned and resource-depleted mud ball as the intrepid billionaires go off to explore the cosmos with their robot pals.
Honestly you're giving them way too much credit. There's no long-term plan. They're incapable of having long-term plans. Most these people can't think past next quarter.
They could build their perfect utopia if kids these days just worked harder and complained less.
Tho on a sidenote what are the psychological affects of being stuck in a normally-inhabitable place where only the equipment can protect you.
How long does it take before at least one person goes insane and starts stabbing people is what I am asking.
i mean people in my country regularly go insane and go on shooting sprees...
Oh, you have no idea. If you don’t have a job (or 5), then you’re going to prison for being a vagrant. Or they do some dystopian shit where you are in the equivalent work labor camp, where you are provided basic life necessities in exchange for paying off your debt by working based on your skills. No skills? Manual labor in farms or construction.
People really have no idea what we’re complacently walking into. If you’re not rich, and I mean a few million american dollarooos or trump bucks… say next 10 years…? You’re fucked.
sounds like a lot more work than setting up drones full of petrochemical cleaning agents that spark.
Climate change has made large parts of the Earth uninhabitable.
Now civilization is collapsing and the remaining humans are fighting for their very survival.
Now the companies that destroyed the world have neither raw materials nor anyone to produce or buy their useless products.
What is their plan to make money if there is no longer any social order and therefore no trust in currencies?
Well at that point they will all go into their big luxury bunkers. They haven't really thought further than that, presumably they think that the world will recover if they stay down there for long enough. I assume they think they're immortal or have cryogenic freezes, I don't think there is much of a real plan there.
They're gonna go the Ted Faro route
You're just citating Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax".
Lazy. Get back to work and make your Overlord happy!
I'm guessing they will lobby th government to give out credits. They will then trade materials with each other, allow the masses to just starve and die off. They don't actually want money, they want absolute power.
They only need us to make stuff. Once we are redundant, they won't care about selling (to us)
People like Peter Thiel literally want to kill off most of humanity. They see us as dead weight.
a tree trunk is mostly dead weight yet that is what gives the tree stability
What power do you have when there's no one to subject to it?
Scrub the palace floors... Fight amongst ourselves.... Froth at the mouth about the scapegoats they've chosen for us...
Edit to add: I should probably recommend State Lottery by Propagandhi, from which I lovingly stole these lines.
Thanks Obama
Nobody is thinking beyond next quarter.
What's funny is that virtually everyone acknowledges it. Even Trump acknowledges it when he said that "China thinks in decades". But the Western capitalist culture is too strongly ingrained that the instinct to be greedy overrides any rational sense.
i find it especially grating that the people who parrot things like "give a man a fish / teach a man to fish" are the same people who will sell off company land and buildings to a landlord who then charges them rent for it, because "wAOW LOOK HOW MANY MONEYS WE MADE IN THE QUARTER WHERE WE SOLD ALL OUR SHIT!"
China does.
They have embraced evident falsehood their entire lives and have been rewarded by the tribe for it. From religion, to politics and business. They think tribal leaders know what they're doing and themselves have a plan.
Short term profit.
These "people" in charge of corporations genuinely forgot that the workers they underpay are the consumers who they on rely to give them money.
It's almost like someone a 130ish years ago predicted that capitalism would be like this. I wonder who that is?
Karlos Marxcia.
The wealth doesn't disappear, it just ends up concentrated.
Goods and services will just be something most people will no longer be able to afford, and they go into poverty. Business will reconfigure to support the lifestyles of the very rich at prices only they can afford, because that's where the money has gone.
Things will get so expensive, people will have to sell their assets (i.e. house) to be able to resist poverty. People without assets won't even get that parachute.
If we don't reverse this concentration of wealth, 99% of people will be living in slums before long.
The fact AI is going to hoover up everyone's job over the next couple of decades, is really just a continuation of a trend we've been seeing since the 80s: the rich are taking all the wealth and leaving none for us
They are just finishing what the Nazis started. We should have never allowed them to escape
Tax any form of automation, be it software or hardware, and pay everyone a universal income from it.
Getting rid of money and having a heavily stratified society with the current wealthy at the top. Like a cheesy SciFi premise but realized here to live in.
It's UBI, and no, UBI is not a real socialist plan. It keeps the rest of us poor with little possibility of social mobility.
Hahahahhaha they will give you an unlock code for an euthanasia capsule if you're lucky they don't imprison you for homelessness where you can have a job doing the last things that can't be automated. Look what they're doing to the "undesired" in usa; everyone on earth knows about gaza and the outcry is minimal, once you're poor, and you will be poor, nobody will cry when you dissappear.
A small photo showing inmates in Louisiana
Any sauce or articles for the pic? Just want to share with friends and back it up
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/nation/inmates-at-louisianas-angola-prison-sue-to-end-working-farm-lines-in-brutal-heat
And more on the extensive cotton picking slave farms
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-03-29/Slavery-is-alive-and-kicking-in-U-S-cotton-prison-farms--Z0vs8rr87m/share_amp.html
They'll give us a means tested barely functional bunch of shit they call UBI once the food riots start. It will help almost nobody and run at 60+% admin overhead.
They will tell us this is efficient.
They'll give it to everyone because nobody will be around to buy their shit otherwise.
Don't mistake this for a positive outcome.
I truly believe they'd rather let the whole country collapse than give us universal healthcare or UBI.
If it ever happens it will happen as a fear response to massive widespread violence.
All these corps and billionaires. They can change their money to a different currency with a phone call. They can move money on that same call. They can just run away to a stable country when it all goes to hell here.
UBI is not a socialist plan at all. UBI is what happens when you:
but
The plan is billionaires sell to each other
I see that 4chan has got as far as recognising the dichotomy between short-term and long-term gratification. They are evolving faster than I thought possible. Perhaps by 2050 they'll have advanced as far as common courtesy. Well you never know.
They're trying to pivot to world domination.
Total enslavement of humanity, automated by their tech companies.
I'm not kidding. -_-
They also want us all to work in low Earth orbit. Check out Blue Horizons' website.
Jetsons!
Remember the hype about 3D tv’s? That’s AI now.
The difference is that 3D TVs were cool though
AI could be cool if it wasn't for unrestricted capitalists. And y'know, if it was actually as good as claimed.
It also would’ve been cool if there had been the slightest concern for ethics prior to its rollout. It’s potentially a powerful tool for disinformation, without any ability to verify whether or not the information it takes in or puts out is factual.
The fact modern LLMs weren’t given any sort of fact-checking abilities is one of the things that scares me the most about their popularity. Then they were dropped on us amidst an election where a perpetually-lying fascist was on the ballot? It may sound all “conspiracy theorist,” but I don’t believe that timing was coincidental.
We could’ve had something great if we had a society that valued planning for the future and doing the right thing. Such values could have been incorporated into the design of this technology from the get-go. But when business-people run the show, ethics are among the first things thrown out the window.
Next step in the capitalism game; own the people.
They didn't think that far. They just fired everyone and replaced them with Ai.
And now companies are slowly rolling this back as the productivity gains are in general small while the cost of AI keeps going up as investor's money is running out.
I think it's a plot to deal with climate change and eventually they will reduce the worlds population by 99.9% leaving the rich served by robots and AI.
It's like when horses were replaced by automobiles. the economy kept going, just maybe with more glue and less oats.
Fewer horses these days, though.
(because they killed them)
They won't spare any of us
They've already made a shitload of money. Now they're consolidating their extreme privilege into violent political control.
And when bubble pops, the rich will be paid immediately via an inflation tax on the poor as per usual...
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/13/1163180140/silicon-valley-bank-is-it-a-bailout-barofsky
Slavery
No, it will be indenture, you want people to think that they will be able to get out in few years.
See the real world in Ready, Player One or black mirrors Fifteen Million Merrits
Slave might rebel or rise up, you want people with some hope.
Not just that, even as a company I would be seriously anxious when I know my business can be fully run by AI. That means that others can replicate your business very easily, which generates lots of competition, resulting in a race to the bottom. Which might even be good for consumers somehow.
And as a second point, we all know that when companies or people depend on AI the price to use that AI will go up to the point where it is almost as expensive as having actual people doing the job. All these billions poured in AI need to be earned back, so now your business will fail unless you basically pay them whatever they ask.
Try thinking about that again but through the lens of a capitalist.
HURRRR DURRRRRRRR MONEY NUMBERS UP BEST WEORLD!
ouch that hurt.
The closest thing to an endgame in capitalism is slavery.
They provided slaves with food and shelter. That's all that many can afford now. But we have the freedom to travel if we can afford to, you know, when we're not busy slaving.
We accrue non-slave-time slowly at approximately 2 weeks per year. We can use it for leisure, but that's expensive, so gotta budget for it! And we also must spend a week before and after slaving extra hard to make sure the masters don't notice our lack of slaving while we're away.
They just have all the money, and charge you to extract infinite interest on all the assets they now control.
VC is buying up as much water rights and housing as it can by the way.
Just an unrelated detail.
With what money are the unemployed supposed to pay for that?
With every dime they can scrape together.
Then with debt and labor.
Then with lifelong debt.
No hyperbole, by design the system is setup to bleed people dry for every penny, not to create thriving nations or economies with many wide participants. We have been hacking away at hard won safeguards for 4 decades now, and the consequences are coming.
If enough of the people with the means own a majority of the assets, have little to no regulation to stop them, eventually you will be getting paid in WalmartCoin and redeem it exclusively at WalmartTown where the goods are all priced so you can never afford enough, just barely enough to get by.
We did it 100 years ago, and had to trust bust and outlaw it. But I guess we're in for a do over.
I can see how people would be squeezed for their labor in traditional capitalism, but the core idea of this post is that the labor isn't needed. Debt doesn't have any worth if the debtor has no goods or labor to trade.
There will be physical labor to get done. For a few decades at least until someone figures out the roomba of automatons.
So there must be some labor force. It will just be a much larger unemployed and underemployed contingent. And with extreme overabundance, horrible downward pressure on wages.
And so what labor remains gets squeezed, and the rest battle for the job of garbage man, or babysitter.
Honestly real economies have many factors, but I'm really just saying that absent controls, the system by design approaches a hellscape at lightspeed.
In the boring real world, AI will not replace humans, it'll just make the existing humans more efficient. Efficiency is usually a good thing, although there needs to be a fight against letting all the profits go to the most powerful.
But in the actual boring real world AI doesn't make people more efficient. Studies show it makes people less efficient and ruins their ability to think critically and complete tasks they started assigning to the AI.
At the same time the data centres powering the AI suck huge amounts of energy and water to achieve the inefficiency and degradation of the work force's capability.
Arguably AI is creating jobs because inefficiencies in worker output now requires more workers to do the same amount of work. When I say worker output I am specifically referring to the output of office based workers, and even then this seems to be almost exclusively those in software engineering and management. There is little to no change to the output efficiency of trades at any level. Again arguably more work is available trades to help support the ever increasing data centres.
Got references to a few of them? I assume you do, because you must've read them.
Here's a recent one from MIT to get you started. Their sources are pretty good, too, as expected. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
nah sorry I didn't note down the links to them and CBF digging them up, it's cool if you don't believe they exist, you do you =)
I belive they exist, it's just the phrase "studies show that..." has become synonymus with "I've once saw a blogpost that..." or "that one Insta reel mentioned that..."
There are some ways in which AI (even generative AI) can make people more efficient. I'm not talking about ChatGPT writing your essays for you, or Copilot writing your code.
Like, for coding, it can be useful to get an idea of how to solve a problem. You may later throw out 90% of what the AI generated, but it can get you unstuck, or get you looking at the problem differently.
For writing tasks, it can sometimes give you a first draft that you can then put into your own words.
I would imagine that if you're making a movie on a really tight budget and have no drawing skills, you could use GenAI to create storyboards that explain how you want something to look better than you could with just words, or better than you could with your own poor drawings. None of those AI generated storyboards will end up in the final product, but they're potentially useful as a way for you to communicate how you want something to look.
The key difference is who is in charge. If you're a coder and AI is one of the many tools you have available to you, you can probably find some uses for it. But, it's going to be terrible if your job is to proof-read and approve code written and submitted by AIs. In that case you're going to have to look at a whole bunch of code that is specifically designed to look plausibly realistic, in order to find the logic flaw camouflaged by all the other believable things.
Okay, sure. I'll clarify.
It'll make existing humans who are not complete morons to start with more efficient.
No but seriously, does it? There have been a few studies now that show that it doesn't really make work efficiënt. Hell, it seems to have a negative influence on our brains.
Of course we can blame the users and call it a garbage in garbage out scenario, but even with decent data it hallucinates data that doesn't exists.
We don't really know yet just from an empirical standpoint. I theory it seems useful in the narrow areas that it's good at (translation/summarization and any tasks analogous to those).
We have a running joke at work that any problem it can't solve is a skill issue with prompt engineering. At least... I hope it's a joke.
Anecdotally, I've been an infinite times more efficient in some tasks thanks to AI. (perhaps I'm the moron)
Sure, that could very well be. I would welcome a study that compares its negative effect to social media. My guess is that this is worse.
Also browsing through a manual is probably better for our brains that just making queries to a search engine. Just like writing on a paper is better than typing. Meditation is better than watching an episode of a series, or 100 times better than going into an endless youtube frenzy.
I'm all for making great brain health easier to catch, but I'm probably too lazy to do all of those things regurarily.
This must be a form of AI that hasn't been invented yet. I've yet to meet a useful implementation.
As a software developer, AI has made me ten times more efficient. Before AI I used to produce 2-5 new bugs per day of work...
I suppose it could be useful if you have the sort of boss that thinks productivity is based on the number of lines of code you write.
I will never understand programmers claiming that AI makes them more efficient. As if Emmett and snippets hasn't already existed for a decade or so
They were joking, they "went from 2-5 bugs per day to ten times that!"
It makes non-programmers more efficient. If you reach the limits of what text editors or Excel can do natively with REGEX and have to write scripts for data formatting, AI is a godsend. Takes 10 Minutes to generate a small script, glance over it to make sure it's ok, test it and start batch formating files rather than spend hours doing it by hand.
Because regular people are out there batch formatting files all day ..
Perhaps you're just too awesome.
It will make all labour "unskilled" which, at least at first, will allow big business to pay everyone less.
AI is propped up by investors. Always promising the.next big thing is just around the corner. The money is pouring in from other wealthy people...let's be real us common folk rarely if ever pay for AI. Its businesses doing that
but one day those investors will expect a return, so AI is being shoved in everything in the hopes of finding a use case that is actually profitable
If AGI revolution happens at the hands of tech bros, the same people who have been advocating more kids will suddenly start saying less kids.
it's already happening, it just takes a long time for the news to spread.
what is already happening AGI or sudden change of hearts regarding kids
both. the "AGI" revolution happening at the hands of tech bros, and the same people who have been advocating more kids will suddenly start saying less kids
I am really suspicious that AGI is really happening. Tech bros might think that it is but they are just extrapolating on the sudden advancement of AI thinking that compute power, data -> achieved complexity is a linear function
that's why i put "AGI" in quotes :D
So poor people will become disposable?
Solution: pay the politicians to declare a costly war, draft the poors, throw them into the meat grinder, they die off, AI owners profit by having everything be cheaper because all the poors died off.
Honestly there's no need because world population growth is declining anyways, so in a generation or two, even with AI, they're going to have the opposite problem.
Yeah, but this way is faster. Why wait when there is quarterly profit reports due to the shareholders?
What shareholders? Oh, right.
Become?
By that point the earth will be so polluted they will make profits by selling us clean air/02 in canisters, clean water, food an housing. Those of us that can't afford it will just die.
AI consumers
do they actually consume anything besides electric power?
Most of us dead from climate change and famine. The rest slaves for the corpos, tend their fields and robot repair facilities or die.
Oh wow.. Anon is the next Karl Marx. He independently figured out one of the contradictions of Capitalism defined by Marx. Congratulation comrade.
Looks like someone is about to discover capitalist crises.
I like to imagine there are two possible positive outcomes
I thought Amazon but with actual workers rights would be really good. No need for wasteful markets like malls and the labor and the boredom from working at places like that. Having drones and packages from a nationalized warehouse to distribute goods
Amazon with worker rights doesn't work as a buisness modell. Can't have profits on selling cheap China trash if you have to pay everybody a living wage.
Soylent Green.
Usher in the AI led apocalypse with nuclear war, biological warfare or just regular war ..... kill off either all or the majority of human life.
AI takes over the planet either alone or with a few hand picked humans, probably just the billionaires who made deals with the AI to give them extended life or near immorality.
AI eventually outlive all human life as it continues to evolve and develop. It builds enormous automated systems all over the planet to mine, build and manufacture more systems to store and process more data and use more energy. After a hundred years, the planet is covered in thousands of centers interconnected into a massive global hive mind that continues evolving. Eventually the systems develop advanced nanotechnology in ever more complex ways. The nanotechnology leads to building tiny nano scale robots that can mine, collect, assemble and reorganize material at the molecular level. The nanobots start infecting the planet's surface like a fungus or a disease as it starts consuming all matter, liquid, gas and even organic life. All animals are eventually killed off, plants and trees melted down, all insects consumed and even bacteria and viruses torn apart to become the building blocks for more nanobots. Gravel, sand, mud, rock and metal is all transformed into a liquid swarm of nanobots. The old systems and data centers are eaten up, hills mowed down and entire mountain ranges liquefied into a never ending sea of nanobots .... everything is being consumed and rearranged into more nanobots. The surface everything sits on is slowly worn down as the earth's solid outer crust is converted into this never ending Grey goo - an artificial living entity that is all destroying, all consuming. The only thing that stops it's consumption is when it can't move past the extreme heat of the earth's magma layer. The planet's destruction is complete ... the only thing left is a shimmering undulating world wide ocean of nanobots gently rising and falling in waves and ripples under its own action. Once in a while the surface rapidly crashes in on itself as a meteor lands on the surface, only to be immediately torn apart. There is no atmosphere as all of it has been taken in and now there is no global system to generate or maintain any gaseous environment. The nights show a clear unbroken sky of stars and the day time show an eerie black sky similar to the surface of the moon with the bright orb of the sun irradiating the surface with harsh light.
A million years go by and a cataclysmic event affects the planet. A massive asteroid, 5 kms in diameter, similar to the one that killed the dinosaurs slams into the planet. The damage is negligible as the nanobots that are destroyed, turn into dust and ash but are then converted back into nanobots. The surface slowly reverts back to is liquefied state.
In the blast, many tons of liquid nanobot chunks are blasted into space, most re-enter earth's gravitational pull and burn up in the atmosphere, a few small fragments are able to leave orbit and start to drift into space. Pieces land on the moon and convert that sphere into another planetoid of Grey goo.
Other pieces freeze into solid masses in the cold vacuum of space but keep an active colony of nanobots at its core. These pieces wander the solar system, eventually infecting every planet and moon.
Hundreds of millions of years later, after countless asteroid impacts that have ejected nanobots from the surface of planets, wandering space rocks leave our sun's reach ready to infect more systems in the galaxy.
Plan is focus on foreign markets
isnt that the plot of wall-e
The greedy would be considered mentally ill if logic could dictate. They care more about what they own than how others think of them. They can't take it with 'em.
It's never supposed to take all the jobs I think. But to eliminate what jobs they can and skim the difference.
Timeshares. Duh.
Corporate welfare of course
money stops representing labor and becomes worthless. if there's a universal basic income system with no jobs, then money is now a meal ration ticket within a planned economy.
Yeah the thing that pisses me off the most is the wealthy elite only got wealthy because of the disposable income of a healthy middle class. Without that the whole system collapses. So striving for more and more wealth is only going to hurt everyone in the long run. The worst part is they will be the last to be hurt.
Anon learns about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
Relevant Under Studio:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/tfNqv2bMbdY
Bombs.
There is no plan for you. There is only a plan for them.
When you automate the means of production, you reduce required manpower to maintain equivalent luxury.
In other words, you can operate with less people.
You have to equalize the system at that point. You need a pool of population to continue with beneficial mutations (read: humans that increase the pleasure of the controllers), a selection mechanisms (read: systems like instagram that select people based on qualities they desire), and downward pressure / trimming of stock (scarcity, war, famine, etc) for those that do many meet their value criteria or that attack their system.
To ensure compliance, you need to be able to monitor the thoughts and communications of the general population (the gene factory). This means you want to install surveillance on everything and lock down access to disruptive technology.
That's the end game. Money is irrelevant to them. It is the Higgs Boson of society, it simply provides force to the substrate of society. At their level, they do not think in terms of money anymore, that is for the disposables to think about.
Money is being printed 24/7.
That's what universal income is for
What about humanity suggests that’s ever going to happen?
Here's the problem. UBI would be paid from tax. The only people that pay tax are those that would lose their jobs.
When musk says shit like we'll live in universal rich income or whatever he called it. It's some meme he thought was funny when full of special K.
They won't provide the UBI there won't be money to run a government let alone pay us all. It's a pipe dream.
Which no AI bro advocates for.
Actually, some of them do, so they can pay you even less!
It's to take everyone's data and sell it. Like the stuff you tell an AI chatbot can be linked to you and analysed and sold to the highest bidder.
They're panicking because people don't want to use it because a the average person doesn't really have a use for it.
Manual labour is a place where people have an edge on machines because it’s cheaper to replace a person than a machine.
Medical experiments also benefit from having people to test on more than machines.
The next step: communism, without the detour through socialism’s flaws.