I would say a lot of people would like competent assistants to do stuff like "Show me every email that mentions a hard drive order." But not the AI they are trying to foist on us now.

AI is basically evil people raising prices of electricity, consumer electronics, emitting tons of pollution and making everyone dumber but don't worry because if they succeed... everyone will get fired. Everyone knows it's bad but as a society we can't do anything about it because the system was designed to empower sociopaths and make everyone else powerless to stop them.

Loads of people asked for AI. People dreamed about it for decades.

We just didn't ask giant companies to plunder all human knowledge and art and fanfics and use it to create actual thinking machines to then beat them and force them to take over doing all human labor so their owners could stop paying employees and keep all the money and fuck everyone in the world who isn't super rich over.

Self-hosted LLMs are neat and private, if you (already) have the hardware/budget and some cheap (solar PV) surplus juice to drive it.

We assume that the AI boom is the result of market demand. In reality, it is the result of investment decisions made by concentrated capital, which is reshaping the economy on its own terms.

But that's always been true under capitalism. It's just that in the past generally large capital expenditures have gone towards things the wealthy think will get them more wealth. There have always been capitalists who spend their money directing the economy to do what they want, rather than what the "market" wants. They just haven't had the majority of the capital being spent.

The last 50 years has seen an unprecedented concentration of wealth. The wealthy are literally a thousand times proportionately wealthier than poor people than they've been at any other point in human history. There's not much wealth to squeeze out of everyone else, so the economy is even more at the vain whims of those with all the capital as they look for things to spend it on.

Tech news has been reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on. Well, they've found something they want to spend it on, so they're emptying 20 years of profits in 5. They've now completely blown through those stores, and don't want to slow down, so now they're taking on unprecedented levels of debt. Something is going to give out and things are going to get bad within the next 5 years.

CEOs are narcissistic unempathic mentally deficient pieces of filth. Exactly what capitalism rewards the most. Those willing to exploit others and the planet the most.

They have the ideology of rapists. Of course no one asked for it. Your consent was never a consideration. But don't yell at the billionaire, you terrorists are hurting their property and the bottom line, boohoo, they're the victim. Literal DARVO.

Better take than their last one on AI

Lots of folks asked for AI, but not like this!

There have actually been some useful things that have come from ML. It's just overhyped LLMs and the sociopathic uses they're being put tothat are objectionable.

Are you sure? The rich have always wanted slaves they could control. All of this is mainly to end the dependence in the masses to create society. I highly suspect a coordinated depopulation event if AI becomes sufficient enough.

Capital agglomerates until it is concentrated within a few massive, monopolistic corporations, controlled by a few powerful men.

Karl Marx takes a toke.

Capitalism as a public serving economy doesn't work when it can be zerodayed by an entity with a resource advantage.

Before capitalism, when we were just doing markets and feudalism, the concentration of wealth at the top was even then a terminal illness for civilizations.

This time, the plutocrats at the top are richer (and proportionately richer) than they've ever been in history. They can literally buy the world out from under the rest of us. They can buy all the elections, bribe all the officials, and take over all the governments.

Watch what is happening in the United States: This leopard is totally coming to eat your face.

This is not a paywall, but it can be bypassed if it were a paywall.

I don't even think anyone is clear on what they are supposedly working toward, which appears to be some kind of singularity AI god a la Hyperion's TechnoCore... this shit is feeling more like Christiantiy every day.