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.

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.

Better take than their last one on AI

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.

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

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.

Nobody has provided ‘AI’, at least if those characters are intended to be an initialisation of Artificial Intelligence.

Whenever anyone is impressed by the function or output of a LLM to the level they’re convinced it’s a representation of intelligence, their input and opinion of the targeted subject should be summarily dismissed, and if they persist, ridiculed.

Nobody asked for any of the tech we have. That’s kinda the point. It didn’t exist

I really wanna punch this asshole. Just once.

I remember after the rise of social media, the world was always going towards decentralized finance, blockchain and many other things. Hell even Meta burnt massive cash in metaverse which supported cryptos. But after Covid, the whole AI episode started playing out of nowhere, and even now, the whole push around it just feels unnatural, almost as if staged. Today's so called AI success is 30% based purely on merit and 70% based on coordinated media management and unsoliciated offerings of desperate investment.

The innovations in AI/ML were always part of the modular infrastructure, specific to the enterprise level products and not su much for the retail users.

In order for AI to have a market there would need to be a large scale demonstration of the uses and benefits of AI in many various industries, most of which do not involve image generation or writing a single line of computer code.

I'm so sick of asking people for demonstrations of AI use and it being 100% programmers going "oh it's really good at writing functions", now I have no idea if it is, or isn't, any good at writing functions, but since I don't write functions, that example is of no use to me.

I want to know how good it is at writing technical documentation for proprietary hardware solutions that the AI will have no experience of in its training set, because I suspect it sucks at it. How good is it at taking poorly written guides in Chinese, translated into English via Klingon and ancient Babylonian, how does it handle it if it comes across the sentence "absolutely do not ever warning" with no additional information as to what I absolutely should never not do. Because that's when thinking is involved, and AI doesn't think.

I did not read the full article since it is paywalled.

But well, nobody asked for the internet either.

"Nobody Asked for AI" is a pretty stupid argumentative approach.

• It's obviously wrong because a lot of people ask for AI which actually works. And I myself use AI daily because it does work for some things better (and yes, sometimes that just means faster and/or cheaper) than the alternatives right now.
• If actually nobody had asked for AI, that would still be a null-argument because AI is pretty damn useful regardless. There was a massive resistance against locomotives, cars, power looms... technology in general. Some new technology was outright wrong. But after all, people do live longer and less children die per capita now than before the industrialization. Not knowing that it will be useful doesn't imply it isn't useful. You are using technology which simply didn't exist a hundred years ago right now. Technological advancement is actually a proven-good thing.
• Arguing against AI in general completely misses the point. What people actually hate is US AI companies. And rightfully so. The self-licking ice cone of circular funding brought us the RAM shortage, massive power grid destabilization, local environmental problems because of reckless construction and operation of data centers (on paper, data centers are the absolute cleanest thing you can build; but they use dirty gas turbines because the grid can't sustain them; and somehow they also manage to waste massive amounts of water - no idea, how though, as all professional cooling tech uses closed loops).

But... But... Will nobody think of the stakeholders?

nobody asked for automobiles