If there is one certainty of this era, it is that people in America have become or already were — pardon my French — fucking idiots.
I was just watching a video relating “AI” costs to revenues, and they weren’t even close. Companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and collecting a tiny fraction of that in revenue. I am certainly not the smartest person to ever walk the Earth, and I can see that this is all a ….gosh, what do I even call it — is it a lie? A delusion? In any case, the supposed immense productivity gains are not even close to happening. Profits are what’s left after expenses are deducted from revenue — it should be a positive number. Damn, y’all, this isn’t rocket surgery.
I sincerely don’t understand mass delusions. Whether we’re talking Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate or The Emperor’s New Clothes, the story is the same: people are deceived yet play along out of expediency. Then, in the lattermost case, someone who is merely a casual observer observes something that should be obvious, and suddenly all the insiders realize they’ve been acting stupid.
When I think about “AI” in the context of [ersatz] capitalism, it simply doesn’t make sense. As the saying goes, “the math doesn’t math.” Whereas the models made by companies in China are both open source and inexpensive, the models made by US companies are both expensive and proprietary. Not to mention, the companies are seeking to build huge and noisy concrete monstrosities now, as if they want to supplant the tobacco industry as the most loathed.
The term “AI” doesn’t even make sense. Maybe this isn’t something I want to address here, but what even is intelligence? Imho, intelligence is predicated on a baseline that involves both knowledge of like disparate facts and awareness of oneself in an environment. Calling chat bots “AI” is an awfully bold claim. I dare say the big “AI” companies are deliberately seeking to deceive people. Or maybe the big chat bot company execs believe their own bs. Neither would surprise me.
Pardon me, though, I’m starting to digress.
Part of actual intelligence is discernment. In order to know what something is, you gotta distinguish it from what it’s not. I want to say I heard an expression decades ago that was something like, “can’t tell his ass hole from his ear hole” (or something). That expression makes the same point: in order to know what something is, ya gotta know what it’s not. The big “AI” companies seem highly motivated to make this distinction extremely difficult to parse, but that is also not without deleterious consequences. When I think about these chat bot companies being worth trillions of dollars, the conclusion I am left to draw is that America is chock full of gullible rubes, and when I draw that conclusion, it makes me extremely disappointed that the expensive chat bot companies are enthusiastically deceiving people and implying fantasies about what chat bots can do.