The wealthy with all that money from the stock market are definitely making a lot of money, which most of us don't have the disposable income to have dropped $100,000 into NVIDIA four years ago to have really profited from it. Wall Street only cares about corporate profits, and those corporations will still make a lot of money from senseless wars, even if we go into a full scale depression. That's the nature of the modern economic climate, those with a lot of money get rich while the rest of humanity starves.
That's the pick and shovel vendors. Selling AI is profitable, gambling on AI is profitable, but are AI investments profitable? If you use LLMs in your business, how much are you saving? Yes, nVidia shareholders are making a fuckton. AI can help professionals be more productive. It may pay for itself, but providing enough productivity to tangibly reduce headcount?...that's science fiction...I can imagine MANY ways of doing so with science fiction AI...just not with real world LLMs.
Why give pesky humans a paycheck and benefits to dig a ditch when an AI-enabled machine can do it without needing a lunchbreak or bathroom break or needing a holiday off?
Sure, right now, it's only running on a computer in the server closet, spending each and every day filling in spreadsheets... but you know, sure as hell is hot, that they're already working on stuffing it into construction equipment and farm equipment and factories and working on replacing teachers and professors with AI humanoids... don't worry, soon the only people who will be able to find a job will be people with 20+ years of experience in a 5+ year old "industry".
You could automate ditch digging with 80s technology. Take a (digital) picture, draw the ditch, let the robot do it's work...or simply drill some beacons in the soil at the 4 corners. It's not the AI stopping automated ditch digging..it's ALL the other stuff. A robotic excavator would be very expensive. It doesn't take a lot of labor to dig a ditch...one skilled operator and maybe a day's worth of labor, tops. So that tops out around $400 today. Even if you're charging consulting company rates, that's $2000 per ditch...There's no way to automate that excavator to recoup costs. And in your example the human being is there to deal with emergencies or contingencies, such as ground shift.
Using your imagination, any job can be automated...but as a thought exercise, do it....create the robot to replace a McDonald's worker...there's no way you can ever do it cheaper. I can imagine many ways to automate away my job. I can't imagine Claude doing that in the next 5 years. It makes too many mistakes for tasks a tiny fraction of what I do. With AI, errors multiply exponentially based on complexity.
IF your job could be automated....it would be. Someone would have automated your job somewhere. For example, truck driver...IF...it could be automated, it would be....maybe not for commercial, but for combat. The US Army would pay top dollar to transport a tanker truck of fuel through a warzone...risk not having your soldiers killed. They may not do it for all payloads, but they would be trying it out right now and making the news doing so.
THAT is the reality, not that AI is making things better for normal people, because again, those who are more productive are not seeing wages increase accordingly. Only the wealthy are seeing a true benefit.
I question that the wealthy ARE receiving benefits, beyond the pick and shovel vendors. I don't think the modern LLM AIs are useful enough to really make a tangible dent in your labor needs. Most talk about actual benefits are based on theoretical science fiction AI...not today's version of Claude/OpenAI/Gemini. IF AI worked as promised, absolutely...but first, it has to work as promised. It falls short in real-world usage. If ChatGPT can do your job, it was probably automated a few years ago by simpler technology.
So we're all in this uneasy transition. Today's AI doesn't work very well and shows no sign of working as promised in the short term. However, it's equally foolish to assume it never will work.
The wealthy WILL absolutely benefit from science fiction AI. However Claude/Gemini/OpenAI/CoPilot all fail on the basics today. They provide SOME value, but not enough to tangibly cut headcount.
Edge networks/CDN/firewall providers seem to be companies where they have dozens of engineers on call 24/7 to put out fires and apply fixes for tickets created by hundreds of thousands of clients. Automating some of that or all of that means less engineers are needed to manage resources, firewall rules etc. I don't know if they have a core dev team working on traffic pattern analysis/bot detection/network and infra tools, but I'm guessing all those engineers are safe.
You're incorrect on that part. All those tools? They don't require AI. They can be done algorithmically. If it can be automated, it has been before LLMs were publicly available. I have worked for teams automating these precise operations. There's too much money on the line to take a human out of the loop. There are various ML automations...perhaps some LLM ones...but LLMs are slow and these 24/7 techs are there to react in seconds, not minutes. However, the state of the art is that these automations are nowhere near advanced enough to tangibly replace humans. Even the older, much more reliable, algorithmic/ML ones?...they were never good enough to replace a human being, just increase their chance of finding attacks/anomalies/downtimes.
The instant you automate that engineer's job?...you give him something new to do. They are highly skilled professionals with valuable domain experience. There's always more for them to do and many ways to bill customers and make more revenue.
Also, if you COULD reliably automate the ops portions?...it would be news on
I am very confident there is no technological basis for this layoff....just routine business ones. I don't know why shareholders don't file a class action lawsuit for this type of bullshit. If a CEO says they have AI that can replace labor, they should have to prepare evidence that such tools actually exist.
I always liked Sony more than M$. It's been nice watching them out-innovate and out-maneuver Microshaft over the years. Now if we could just get them to rage quit from making desktop operating systems, that'd be great mmm'kay?
So life will be better if Sony and Nintendo are the only viable consoles? They don't directly compete with one another and MS has been very good about supporting their gaming hardware on PCs, including Linux ones. Also, MS really trailblazed the the games pass, something I am confident Sony would have NEVER done had MS not forced them.
You can love or hate MS. I have a slight preference for XBox over PS, but I am glad Sony is around keeping MS from getting complacent. I am personally intrigued by the SteamDeck, but only time will tell if it's a console experience...smooth, simple, seamless, and reliable like XBox/PS5....or a science experiment like the ASUS Ally...where with enough tinkering and sacrifice and working around it's idiosyncrasies , it MIGHT work.
But regardless of your preferences, competition is good.
Serious question: Do we actually prefer current screen writing to be something worth protecting? It's really not that dissimilar to much of software, where the entire production process has been so corporatized and dumbed/mellowed down that you might replace any individual contributor with AI without anyone noticing. Or all of them for what I care.
You're not making a serious and sincere question. You're stating you opinion and your agenda. If you think screenwriting is terrible today, you're forgetting how badly it sucked before. Aliens may be my favorite movie, definitely a great movie, few would disagree, but remember how many shitty movies were released in 1986? Howard the Duck and Cobra were no masterpieces. 2026 is an intellectual utopia compared to 1986.
Now you're the one being not so serious and sincere here. 1986 also gave us Platoon and Top Gun. Literal movies still being shown in theatres today. Not to mention a guy named Ferris taking the most infamous Day Off from school ever.
Let me know how many shitty sequels and thrice re-treaded storylines from the modern era will get re-released 30+ years from now, still putting butts in movie seats. Because that is what Holly-over-wood has reduced itself to.
No. On average, they didn't suck worse. Today's average release puts the bar on the floor and still trips and flops over it.
Most of the beloved hits of the 80s were retreads of older stories you and I never saw. Also, wasn't Top Gun a retread of An Officer and a Gentleman? I remember people complaining about that when I was a tiny movie-loving kid in the 80s. Trust me, people have been saying this shit since you and I were in diapers. It's hard to write an ORIGINAL story. Many are going to be "inspired" by famous stories of the past. Star Wars was inspired by a mashup of Flash Gordon and Samurai movies. However, it was new to me...but rather than shit on the 80s, consider what we have.
I consider modern TV on the same level as a movie and so do most directors. OK. Recent movies may not have been as exciting, but TV fills that gap. Alien Romulus...while a mashup of older Aliens movies was pretty good...forgettable, admittedly, but I had a great time while watching it. However, Alien Earth? I still think about that one. I still think about Kirsch and wonder what he's doing...almost a year later...which is my gold standard of entertainment. If you haunt me, you get a gold star...Aliens still haunts me to this day.
The world has changed. You want to tell a story? Well...in the mid-80s, movies were the only option. TV sucked...and even if you made a good TV show, no one would see it after it aired....so why bother polishing cannonballs? Once box sets of shows because cheap and easy in the DVD-era + streaming made it easy to re-watch...now you start seeing Game of Thrones, Dexter, Carnivale, the Sopranos, Alien Earth, Stranger Things, etc.
Why tell your story in 90 minutes when you can tell a really grand one over many hours, if not years? Some stories in video games are downright amazing...maybe that's your jam. However, if you want to compare eras, you need to compare the entire entertainment landscape.
Movies in theaters? Yeah, a slight downgrade....but considering movies on streaming and prestige TV alone?...massive upgrade....before you consider gaming and new media.
If everything AI produces is crap or slop content, why would you need to ban it from receiving awards?
We always judge real accomplishments with more reverence than fake ones. A real car chase is a much more impressive accomplishment than CGI. Should there be another category? I am fine with that. I don't know who to credit an AI script with. Should a prompt monkey get an award? Claude? The Oscars committee decided to ensure we're celebrating humans, not AIs. I think that's wise, but regardless, this is their industry. When it doubt, I'll let people in the industry decide what's best...just as I don't want Disney telling my industry how to run itself.
Serious question: Do we actually prefer current screen writing to be something worth protecting? It's really not that dissimilar to much of software, where the entire production process has been so corporatized and dumbed/mellowed down that you might replace any individual contributor with AI without anyone noticing. Or all of them for what I care.
You're not making a serious and sincere question. You're stating you opinion and your agenda. If you think screenwriting is terrible today, you're forgetting how badly it sucked before. Aliens may be my favorite movie, definitely a great movie, few would disagree, but remember how many shitty movies were released in 1986? Howard the Duck and Cobra were no masterpieces. 2026 is an intellectual utopia compared to 1986. Regarding corporatization? I assume you're talking about Marvel? Well, Top Gun is a literal ad for the US Navy...massive hit in 1984 as well as 2022. I found it entertaining, but it was a fucking ad. Most children's programs were toy ads. The Super Mario Brothers movie from 2023 was FAAAR superior to the one from 1993. I am pretty confident the Street Fighter movie coming out this year will be superior to the one from the 90s. Mortal Kombat?...OK, that was a downgrade...because the original was stupid, shitty, silly fun....and the newest one tried to be high quality...a mistake from not understanding your audience. However, it's fair to say they're closer to commercials than
Regarding AI. If you think that will make no difference?...no, you don't understand AI. It's a pattern matching tool. All movies will look the same, dialog will be awful unless heavily doctored. AI can write a decent short story, but will fall down writing a large piece. There will be TONS of errors and bad and confusing sentences and weird hallucinations. The best case scenario for LLM-based AIs is just averaging a bunch of screenplays....it will be noticeably more uniform and corporate and stale and tame....lacking in originality or creativity.
I think the Oscars committee made the right call. It has always been a celebration of human accomplishment. I don't think AI accomplishments belong in the same awards criteria.
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