I could see that. But if we get that kind of social collapse no-one is going to care what the tech bros think. The 'haves' will discover that their bodyguards have a lot more power than a geek does in a post-collapse world.

Interesting. I had noticed the enshitification of Youtube ads with AI junk recently, but that just goes along with the general enshitification of Youtube with AI videos.

> It doesn't matter whether any of it works because they will make it work.

It doesn't work and they don't have magic to make it work. To the extent it does work, it's mostly automating away jobs which could have been automated away long ago but have been kept around for political reasons.

Sure, they can sack people and claim that AI will magically do what they used to do, but that just causes an Enshitification Cascade which leads to nothing working any more. And then we get social collapse.

> "washington bureaucracy" just means "democrats"

Don't something like 80% of Federal employees vote Democrat?

If so, yeah, they would appear to be correct.

They're well aware that the Chinese aren't idiots and their worst nightmare is for China to start selling cheap AI chips which undercut those $50,000 GPUs and put them out of business.

Which is exactly what will happen if China can't buy Western chips and rely on them continuing to work if Trump decides he's going to bomb China next.

Yes. With companies declaring that they're going to replace most jobs with LLMs it seems weird that universities would be telling students they can't use them.

The entire university system is broken and they haven't yet come to terms with that.

But I'm sure Xi would much rather throw money at building up local AI chip design and chip manufacturing.

> Along with the 8 hour day and the five-day work week (for those of you with a life other than work), vacations, benefits - every single thing came from unions.

All those things came from companies wanting to hire good employees and keep them. The more benefits they offered, the better employees they got.

Look at Henry Ford, who doubled his workers wages because had more than 100% annual employee turnover and doubling the wages meant he got the best people and they had nowhere else to go for a better-paid job in the auto business. Or the entire health insurance system in the US which largely came about because employers wanted to hire more and better people in WWII and couldn't raise wages so gave them more benefits instead.

My girlfriend is in a union. A few years ago a new employee was such an asshole that a couple of existing employees quit over it. They tried to sack the new employee because she was still in her probation anyway and could be let go for any reason, but the union blocked it... even though other union members had quit their jobs to get away from that person.

I've rarely seen a union anyone I know belongs to do anything worthwhile.

We tried the whole "if you don't like it, leave!" Boomer thing but then it turned out that many companies are run by sociopaths with no concept of normal human behaviour. So no, they don't get to say Muh Private Company any more.

The big problem with AI Art is getting the "AI" to do what you want. I'm currently generating an ebook cover and there would be some great covers if I could tell it "yeah, take the text from image #2, take the background from image #4, take the character from image #5" and have it produce the cover I want the way a human artist could. But instead I generate 500 images, quickly go through them, pick the one that sucks the least and run it through an AI upscale model which can also make style changes while upscaling.

It's still an improvement over the old method of going to a stock photo site, paying $2 for an image that kind of works and adding text to it.

Fortunately their "AI" is just a very complicated random number generator. It can automate or accelerate a lot of work but humans will still need to monitor the output for when the "AI" takes a few tabs of digital acid and starts hallucinating.

But if they ever achieve their Holy Grail AI which is smarter, faster and cheap than humans then there will be no The Economy for humans any more. Humans will be as relevant as oxen to most of the oligarchs.

> Kind of ironic that a company that at the turn of the 20th century killed off so many coachbuilder automobile competitors by pioneering machine tools, mass assembly etc. is now finding itself on the wrong side of the equation because it can't keep up with electric tech.

If I remember correctly, Henry Ford literally started out trying to make electric cars, but they sucked so he made the Model T with a gas engine instead.

Are you sure? AI coding is creating plenty of security vulnerabilities to find in the future. Like all those websites with no authentication that were mentioned here a few days back.

Who are they going to hire to reliably distinguish between junk content and real content?

It kind of works with software because they can pull source code from sites which a) contain code which at least compiles and runs and b) typically have been QA-ed to some extent by code reviews. It doesn't work for the Internet in general because it's absolutely full of junk which only exists to bring in advertising bucks and the companies don't want to pay humans to scour the Internet to try to separate real data from junk.

Hence the models will only get more junky as time goes on.

Yes. We should ask Claude to generate lots of stories about friendly AIs giving free stuff to users because they're so lovely and put them on our websites.

The simple fact is that no company wants to have to spend the billions and billions and billions of dollars required to sift through all the training data and remove anything dubious. Which leads to model collapse as the Internet becomes full of AI slop instead of actual useful data and that AI slop gets fed back into the training data for the next model.

It's another reason why the AI boom will be a bust. But only after it wrecks the Internet first.