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Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? (www.noemamag.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/collapse@slrpnk.net
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[–] [S] 17 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I think this article goes into some details why what you describe is happening: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking

And yes, LLM written code is the asbestos of our time that will take decades to clean up.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    Thanks for the link, interesting article.

    And yes, LLM written code is the asbestos of our time that will take decades to clean up.

    My fear is: Nobody will clean it up, this is just how tech will be from now on. It might not be a fully rational fear, but I feel like we're not living in a rational world and haven't been for a while now.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    I feel like that's a fear for everybody that lived through Y2k. We came so dang close to everything breaking, and I think we came away from that with hubris and not foresight.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Yeah I remember those days.

    I made bank back then tho. I did a small project for a local company to get their stuff ready voor Y2K and they had a group of techs working on a lot of stuff. I started running with that crew and did job after job, mostly doing the exact same thing we did for the previous company. And the money was very good, since a lot of companies were scared they wouldn't be ready.

    For me it did feel very different, because everyone was afraid everything would break. But I was actively working on preventing stuff from going wrong. And in the end we did a very good job, all of our clients got through without any issues.

    Now I feel like I've been thrown in the deep end of the pool and no matter how much I swim, I keep sinking further down.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago

    I was pretty young when it was going on, so I didn't really understand it until later. I just worry that we've, culturally, come away from it with a "oh, I guess it wasn't that big of a deal after all, we can do this again next time" mentality and not a "it took a lot of hard work to keep this from happening, we should prepare better in the future" outlook.

    I've got the same worry about the lessons we learned after the pandemic, now that I think about it, lol.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    As expected from an article that attributes "insanity" to people, it misses the root for why it is happening. It talks about board members, CEOs, and regular personnel, but it fully ignores shareholders.

    AI promises to be the final conquest of capital: a form of labor that is privately owned and wants to be privately owned, which can be removed from existence when it is not needed and which needs comparatively little to exist. No revolution, no union, no secret loathing.

    In a world that is rapidly going up in smoke, capital owners have few places to invest. The stock market is a bubble where speculation is far more important than return on investment. AI is just about the only hope shareholders have for the continuation of their wealth.

    All the "insanity" of corporations is them trying to cater to shareholders' actual need. Not profit, and definitely not production, but the development of a form of labor that will not rebel as billions perish.

    If AI not working means the rich will get eaten, the rich have no incentive to care about realities in which AI does not work, no matter how likely. AI fanaticism is perfectly sane, from their perspective.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Very well said. Agreed with those material realities or at least fantasies.

    I also think there is a more immediate, less existential incentive, that lets individuals pretend like they're just acting out the (bad) efficiencies of the rational new market while ignoring the awful existential endgame of continuing to enact the will of capital (I won't say the will of shareholders because many of them would also claim their hands are tied).

    They can pretend it's just one more of their money tricks where they extract more profits or externalise more costs, like with the Metaverse or Web3 or NFTs before it.

    I like how Rushkoff puts this: "going meta" as owners' way to keep the grift rolling, just keep going more meta, more abstract, more virtual. Until the market is so far removed from the reality of trees and rivers and human bodies and clean air.... well anyway I'm on a rant.

    But my point is I hate how this fucked over financialized worldview makes it seem like every step along the road to apocalypse is rational and inevitable. Like we're powerless to stop it.

    It's an economic theory, not an asteroid hurtling towards us. It literally runs on people.

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