So the the test of capitalism is whether any of the executives who pushed the AI roll out have gotten fired or had their bonuses slashed… My guess is none of them.
If this were actually about competition, then people would be punished for not paying attention to all of the naysayers who predicted this exact phenomenon. If accountability were a key feature, then corporations would have set up their bonus structure to look for 5-year or 10-year benefits from the AI push because of this exact issue.
Of course we haven’t seen that anywhere because AI was and always is a bubble and everybody knew it and the only goal was short-term profits for whoever can claw them out of the employees or the minor shareholders fingers.
This, plus if we had any kind of political will or intelligence (as a nation; meaning the USA) we’d force AI companies to pay their extenalities: treat and sanitize every drop of water they use, and build the infrastructure to bring it back to communities; pay for their electrical infrastructure in advance and pay their electricity bills to the tune of “nobody else’s bill goes up”; some kind of massive carbon capture tax for their use (this one might not be possible to actually do; it’s too much); and of course paying royalties and copyright violation fines.
As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business. let’s say they didn’t: The cost per token would be quite high, and very few people would use it.
You could argue that this is the very nature of capitalism: theft because it always means owners extracting value from other people’s work, and ultimately planet-scale destruction because it depends on infinite growth while externalizing (not paying for) the true costs of its activity.
In that sense, AI companies are just a faster-growing strain of the global cancer that is capitalism.
Reasonable take, but the last part (“faster-growing”) is huge here. The sheer scale and multipliers on the bad things caused by AI are far beyond most (all?) previous technologies used by capitalists.
As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business.
So the the test of capitalism is whether any of the executives who pushed the AI roll out have gotten fired or had their bonuses slashed… My guess is none of them.
If this were actually about competition, then people would be punished for not paying attention to all of the naysayers who predicted this exact phenomenon. If accountability were a key feature, then corporations would have set up their bonus structure to look for 5-year or 10-year benefits from the AI push because of this exact issue.
Of course we haven’t seen that anywhere because AI was and always is a bubble and everybody knew it and the only goal was short-term profits for whoever can claw them out of the employees or the minor shareholders fingers.
This, plus if we had any kind of political will or intelligence (as a nation; meaning the USA) we’d force AI companies to pay their extenalities: treat and sanitize every drop of water they use, and build the infrastructure to bring it back to communities; pay for their electrical infrastructure in advance and pay their electricity bills to the tune of “nobody else’s bill goes up”; some kind of massive carbon capture tax for their use (this one might not be possible to actually do; it’s too much); and of course paying royalties and copyright violation fines.
As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business. let’s say they didn’t: The cost per token would be quite high, and very few people would use it.
It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.
You could argue that this is the very nature of capitalism: theft because it always means owners extracting value from other people’s work, and ultimately planet-scale destruction because it depends on infinite growth while externalizing (not paying for) the true costs of its activity.
In that sense, AI companies are just a faster-growing strain of the global cancer that is capitalism.
Reasonable take, but the last part (“faster-growing”) is huge here. The sheer scale and multipliers on the bad things caused by AI are far beyond most (all?) previous technologies used by capitalists.
I find those terms acceptable.