Greentext

The people have changed for sure. Originally it was a lot of techies and nerds, either by circumstance or due to the efforts needed to make the internet operate

I agree, you had a lot of tech folks. But I think this undersells how many tech-proficient artists you had. Lots of people who knew just enough to get a website off the ground (or just knew who to ask for the answers) and then spent the balance of their time doing music or webcomics or long form prose.

I think the thing that's strangling the web now more than every isn't even "AI" or "bots" or "evil foreigners" so much as "sales and marketing people". They're fucking everywhere. Filling up my inbox. Spamming my invites list in every form of social media. Blowing up my phone. Grabbing every spare inch of screen space on every commercialized website.

If AI really was just a tool for artists and developers, I am convinced it would be an enjoyable addition to the Internet ecosystem. If the only bots were written by Slashdot and Stack Exchange forum flunkies, we'd have a plethora of useful little scripts and automated tools.

But because everything has to be marketing, and the shit that's being marketed has to be as high margin as possible in order to capitalize on economies of scale, we are in an endless blizzard of shit I would never want and certainly never asked for.

Just a maelstrom of trash bombarding everyone who isn't in a cubby hole like Lemmy.

it will maintain a steady state until the vast majority is living on unemployment benefits, at which point the unemployment system will collapse because the money will run out for it, and either we’ll go into a massive depression, which will set us back 50 years or more, or the entire system will collapse and either we will die off from all the pollution and destruction to the planet,

That last bit feels more likely than not, given the degree to which we're churning up every acre of undeveloped real estate. We're arguably already past the point of collapse.

But the idea that this will cause unemployment really hinges on the theory that AI can be cheaper and more ubiquitous than human labor. I've seen no evidence to support this.

On the contrary, AI is phenomenally expensive and inefficient. It's a luxury (of sorts) that we're subsidizing with longer working hours and a lower standard of living.

Modern AI is just another form of massive waste creation. When the bottom falls out of the market, it's going to have to be one of the first things on the chopping block precisely because it is so resource intensive despite yielding so little

I suspect we'll create a bunch of revisionist fantasies about how great 21st century AI was, a century from now when we've forgotten what it looks like. But in the meantime it's not going to render us unemployed. It is going to bloat the economy with busy work jobs. Both on the front end fixing all the fuck ups that unmanaged automation creates and on the back end, as we scramble to clean up the mess it leaves behind.