I feel like this shouldn’t even be necessary to say, but it seems we’ve gotten to that part: Scams are not legitimate economic activity. I have probably lambasted this previously, but I am seeing a lot of it currently. Indeed, I think _a lot_ of people have decided scams are a noble pursuit, that scams and lies are useful, as measured by how lucrative they can be. Not only is that illegitimate business, but that’s a very sad commentary on how business-people see the role of business nowadays.
I just read an article about an AI company’s finances, and it’s clear these companies are nowhere near generating profit. They are redirecting investor money to NVIDIA and execs, premised on the notion that they can essentially replace every business via machine learning algorithms. It’s a scam. Don’t let hype substitute for reason.
Let’s check the ballistics here: what is an economy? An economy is the sum of all productivity in a given area. Why do we even have them? We have economies so that we have a means by which to allocate goods and services. If we distill goods and services down to their essence, what is at the core? At the most rudimentary level, humans need energy to survive. This essentially means calories. Ergo, when you strip away all the optional facets, you have food. Robots do not need food. However, they still need energy. Moreover, they need energy that is produced by complex processes with many moving parts, and they operate using chips that are produced with very precise processes in sophisticated industrial machinery.
The implicit idea behind all the so-called AI spending is that the wellbeing of a few companies is more valuable than millions of actual humans. Beyond being a Faustian bargain, I happen to think that is stupid on its face. To me, this is the modern equivalent of thinking calculators “know” math. These machines are very capable in a specific area because they only do one thing. In the case of so-called “AI,” we are really describing machine learning. The popular AI companies illegally copied essentially everything on the www and then ran the data through a machine learning algorithm. So (so-called) “AI” can return relevant output (most of the time), but the way ML works is essentially by omitting outliers. What this means is that you end up getting more sameness. I can scarcely imagine something more un-American than that.
And this scam has grown so popular and so large that people seem to have forgotten it’s a scam. Personally, I think there’s a lot of merit to using ML algorithms. However, I think a lot of folks have lost the plot entirely.