Isn't all the infrastructure and hardware. That stuff's going to get used because the goal of AI is to replace white collar workers and that tech does work. Not perfectly but it's improving every day and it already does quite a bit.

The problem is that the nature of llms means that when things shake out we're going to be left with just a couple of big players. That's because the only people who are going to be able to stay in the game are the ones who have access to training data from real human beings and that's basically going to be people that own a platform. Basically Microsoft Google Apple and Facebook.

The real problem though is banks are loaning out money to anyone who so much as sneezes making a noise that sounds vaguely like AI.

A lot of those loans are going to be bad, they're going to collapse and the banks are going to go with them.

When that happens we have basically two options.

First we can nationalize the banks to prevent a global economic collapse. Let's not get ourselves we're not going to do that. We have been programmed that is socialism and socialism bad, m'kay.

The other option is a massive 2008 style bailout followed by mass layoffs as companies boost their stock.

There isn't a single economist who doesn't know this is coming and I'm guessing most of the people here even know it's coming but we can't do anything to stop it because our thinking is too constrained to come up with any other solutions besides letting the corporations fire 25% of us, praying that we're not in that 25%, coping with the very real possibility we will be in that 25% by convincing ourselves we are the ultimate badasses that the company couldn't possibly live without...

I'm open to other solutions but I literally do not know of any. Voters around the globe simply will not accept the correct and well understood solutions of regulation and short-term government control. And if there's a third solution nobody has come up with it

I'm asking out of ignorance I really don't know how well it works but you really need to be able to easily control access to logins and such.

Like with my company I've got single sign on for tons of apps and they seamlessly integrate with multifactor authentication apps.

That's all just kind of built into active directory and it's all plug and play and just kind of works (as much as anything works with modern computing).

As much as Windows 11 sucks because it's so incredibly user hostile you still need the administrators to be able to cheaply and easily set up all the permissions and logins and all that. Otherwise it's a cost of administering the devices goes up it defeats the purpose of saving money by buying non Microsoft software and hardware.

Because decades of market consolidation means your options are very limited.

Yeah but are they web scale?

I would love for you to tell me what of my post represents a thought terminating cliche and for you to actually debunk anything in my post.

And I would love even better for you to explain a path forward for humanity that doesn't involve guys like you getting the shit all over people beneath you on the social ladder. I'm not going to bother pointing out again that you will be at the bottom because there is no way in hell your mental facilities could imagine or envision that happening. You are simply too amazing and too glorious to end up as one of the many billions stuck on the reservations occasionally being fire bombed by drones...

Say hi to the world leaders at G5 this year for me.

And it's actually even worse then you think it is. Foreign students can and do get the same loans or sometimes better loans and better government assistance then locals. There are entire programs at major colleges that exist to bring people in from overseas who are basically already trained and ready to go, give them a little bit of specific skills that corporations want and then hand them over to the corporation to make money for that corporation.

If the corporation decides they want to keep the H1B then yeah the loans do get paid off by them or the corporation.

But if they don't keep them here which is not uncommon then the taxpayer just eats it

Meanwhile as an American you simply cannot apply for these programs. I mean technically you can but they're not there for you. I have had H1B coworkers ask me why us Americans aren't taking advantage of these programs only to have to explain that we can't because they're not for us.

You're also missing the point. These programs don't exist to educate those people it's just job training. The actual expensive education is done in their native country. That's typically where they get their bachelors and or masters degrees. That is billions of dollars worth of education spending that happens overseas where American billionaires don't have to pay for it.

That's the real cost savings. They can completely do away with 90% of education funding in America and get other countries to pay for it.

Which is a great deal for the billionaires getting tax cuts but for anyone who has kids and now has to come up with an additional 40 or $50,000 to pay for tuition because your kid is competing with somebody from India or even China good luck with that.

And if you bring this up the left wing will scream at you for being racist and the right wing will try to bury you in the algorithm and the centrists will tell you that it's fine because GDP go up and so line go up and line go up is always good.

So they end up living in slums. Cities have slums we just don't like to think about them. Occasionally right wing media will talk about them because there's a lot of Filth and crime like you would expect when everybody is dirt poor and being abused. Although honestly they don't even really bother with that anymore because they found they can just make shit up about actual nice cities and right-wing idiots will believe literally anything.

I mean they had a guy on Fox News pretending to be antifa who literally is the same guy who was pretending to be a violent black lives matter protester a few years ago. That is the level we are at people.

The hilarious thing is that the suburbs aren't sustainable. Even though people in the inner city make very little money and get treated like shit there's a lot of them because of how well, population density works and so the poor people in the inner cities subsidize the well-to-do people in the suburbs. Without the subsidies the suburbs can't pay for their roads in schools and cops.

It's basically an elaborate way to keep some form of slavery going even though we're not technically allowed to do that anymore. But again it's not sustainable because we are gradually breaking down the economy so much that there just isn't enough money to go around anymore. Capitalism is being dismantled in favor of a weird feudal system that benefits the very very top 10,000 or so people on the planet

It's no coincidence that we began the slash funding to higher education and actively attack higher education as soon as widespread Visa programs existed to bring in trained workers. Why would you as a billionaire want to pay the taxes for local citizens to be educated in college when you can just have another country pay that and pull those people over?

So when I was a kid the government paid 80% of tuition and now they pay about 30%.

Again, this is not a coincidence.

This of course creates enormous amounts of social instability from vast swaths of people who are cut off from middle class living and higher education. So yeah let China have that social instability.

The trade off is that America doesn't get those patents but I don't get anything out of those patents they are owned by billionaires. I can pretend that the companies owning those patents will somehow pump up my 401k but thanks to you multiple economic crashes and a handful of layoffs following those crashes I don't have much in the way of savings and I sure as shit don't have the money to go out buying stocks or the ability to risk buying into a startup that might go tits up.

Now would I like to live in a country where immigration increasing the GDP directly improves my quality of life instead of cutting me off from middle class employment? Yeah I would love to live in that world. I don't. I live in a hyper-competitive world where your entire quality of life is based on the job you get.

If somebody wants to suggest a viable way of changing that I'm all ears but every time I seriously bring it up I get modded down into pulp by people furious at the prospect of paying somebody to not work. Or I get a handful of libertarians talking about Ubi replacing all the other government programs and need to stop and explain, uselessly, why that is not going to work and solves nothing.

So if you don't have a third way I don't want to hear it.

There will be winners and losers but a lot of people are anticipating that when the winners come out on top there's going to be a huge amount of infrastructure that we get to take and use for things like heating and cooling our houses.

But those winners didn't go away and they are still going to be using those data centers to replace White collar jobs which is the entire point of this exercise.

That means we're not going to get all that free cheap electricity capacity. All we're going to get out of this is a massive Wall Street crash where they start firing Us in Mass to boost their stock prices.

We need to do something about that but we're paralyzed by stupidity, bigotry and an overwhelming urge to prevent anyone from having a happy life without being miserable a minimum of 40 hours a week.

I'm open the solutions but when I've asked the solutions people just bring up Ubi which is a pipe dream. You don't have the political power to push it through and if by some miracle you did the payouts would just be absorbed by monopolies jacking up prices.

Ubi is a classic example of a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. And I have not seen a single other solution proposed.

I do still see a lot of thought terminating cliches though. Although I think everyone is given up on yelling buggy whip at me.

If we spend $5 trillion dollars on new cities and houses and roads instead of replacing as many white collar workers as possible?

Remember folks the product here is not funny little videos. The product is replacing trillions of dollars worth of wages. The funny little videos are just there to get you to interact while they train up the AIs.

We are literally going to shift our entire civilization to one where a small group of people have their every need and want satisfied to the limits of human capacity while everyone else lives in abject poverty commonly associated with the worst of the American Indian reservations or parts of Africa.

That is at least the current plan. A return to feudalism. And I really don't see anything that stops it.

This isn't like when you lost your job at the buggy whip factory and went to work at the car factory. There is no car factory. It's entirely run by robots.

And as a added reminder 25% unemployment was enough to trigger two world wars. Yeah we don't have the same colonial militaries anymore like we did back then but we have a lot of economic colonialism that's going to break down. As it does countries will switch back to military imperialism to get what they want. Only this time we have nuclear weapons.

It's nonsense to get us talking about Apple and it worked because here we are talking about apple. It's a silly marketing campaign.

This is what's called outrage farming. And it's a huge part of why our civilization is collapsing.

Outrage farming should be an occasional bit of funny nonsense which to be fair this is but it's not just an occasional bit of funny nonsense anymore it's a multi-billion dollar industry.

Remember all those videos of people getting into altercations on airplanes? Several of them were staged. I don't mean staged in the airplane I mean literally on a set.

We really need to start teaching critical thinking in schools directly but we're not going to do that because critical thinking skills get used against elites and actual elites not the imaginary ones you hear about that run the women studies departments in community colleges. Like billionaires and wealthy bishops and those kind of assholes. Those guys are not going to let you teach kids how to think critically.

And it can be taught and learned. You don't have to just blunder into it by sheer luck.

Seriously if you don't connect your TV to the internet all of this AI smart bullshit is irrelevant.

Honestly I have an old Vizio because I have old game consoles hooked up to it and they work surprisingly well because lots of people were still hooking up old game consoles to flat panels back in the day. I'm not trying to recreate moment 37 of evo or 1ccing Mushihime-sama so a frame or two of lag isn't noticeable to me.

Woke is just DEI which is just SJW which is just political correctness which is just desegregation.

The governor of California said it best, anti woke is just anti-black.

When you strip everything away it's just the same mistake we made back in the 1800s when we didn't finish reconstruction in the south. What historians here call the original sin of America.

To be honest it's not a uniquely American problem. The same trick for dividing people into easily manageable groups is done all across the globe. Japan has the burakumin, China has the uyghur, India has its caste systems etc etc.

Jesus sees you.

You don't just take away privacy or decent wages or job security or healthcare all at once. You got to boil that frog.

Here in America it took us 65 years. This whole mess we're in started when Barry Goldwater lost. The corporate wing of the Republican party formed in alliance with the racists and the religious extremists. We were explicitly warned about it but we ignored the warnings.