If you understand it as they want to put up roadblocks for any competition, what they say all fits into place.
it’s all about self-interest. the chairs are disappearing and they need the music to keep playing.
the sad thing is so many talking idiot heads believe their talk about ‘guardrails’, and endlessly yap on about the AI blowing up the world in 2030. almost nobody in the media has any tech or business knowledge, it’s all ignorant and paranoid speculation and people eat it up. a couple of podcasts/shows I like are full of paranoid idiot nonsense and anytime someone tries to talk sense to the hosts, they go ‘BUT THE TECH GUYS SAY IT’S GONNA KILL US ALL!!!’
but if you listen to legit tech and economic people they are very open about how AI is a giant shell game that can’t ever possible deliver on it’s supposed benefits or horrors, but they look at the actual numbers and don’t listen to CEO bullshit.
Also ignore the tech workers raising alarm bells constantly, going to anyone who will listen to talk about how these systems are breaking containment, obfuscating their actions, and going against their directives.
Ignore those guys.
The CEOs are absolutely lying about what the systems can do, they’re sales people and they’re fighting to be the Last Purchase.
That does not mean the systems aren’t powerful. It just means they don’t do what they’re advertised as being capable of.
The “braking containment” shit is marketing hype. Notice how after one of them made such an announcement, magically within a week or two all the other AIs were suddenly doing the same thing? And you just take that at face value? When you look into each claim, it’s just the standard “LLM slop can’t properly follow instructions” with a bunch of hype sprinkled on top.
my favorite was the ‘the AI tried to seduce me’ stories.
the reporters who wrote this crap… just come across a dumb as the AI itself, if you don’t buy her into their ‘AI is trying to bang you and thinks you’re really hot’ bullshit…
but lots and lots of folks very much would like an AI to try and bang them.
and nobody remembers how people went on about block chain and crpyto for years… and now it’s just a nothing burger. just another speculative asset that’s mostly used for illegal activities, it didn’t topple governments and destroy national banks and non nerdy people have no idea what it is still.
I’m just sad I dismissed it as a nothing burger in 08 and deleted my wallet with a few btc in it.
Nobody wrote a book called “if anyone builds it everyone dies” about crypto. At worst they thought it might destabilize national currencies but, importantly, no economists thought that. No one in finance thought that. No one who knew how financial systems worked thought crypto was anything to worry about.
Tech workers, people without financial ties to Al one way or another, people who do understand these systems are sounding alarms. No one is listening.
not literally, but plenty of people were talking about how it work destroy and topple governments and usher in a new world order and/or lead to liberate from the oppression of the state and some new utopia. and those were the evangelists trying to sell it to you… just like these AI workers are.
and it works. drama sells. people love it. reason why most popular posts on reddit are all relationship drama.
Stop listening to dumb podcasters
what about people who make dumb comments on lemmy?
We should be executed.
Slowing the pace of AI development is not pausing capitalism.
Competition is a core part of capitalist theory, that’s true. In practice, however capitalists have always sought to limit, neutralize or eliminate competition. In fact, capitalism has a strong tendency toward market concentration, not in spite of competition but because of it. Competition does not result in all competitors sharing the prize equally. Competition is inherently zero sum.
Think of sports competitions: do all teams take equal share of the trophy at the end of the season? No, one team, the team that outcompetes all the others, wins 100% of the trophy at the end. Market competition is no different. Winning companies take all the market share and losing companies go out of business or get taken over. Companies have always known this and that’s why they have always tried to rig the competition in their favor whenever possible.
The fact is, the only entity capable of keeping competition fair is the state, but the state is so easily captured by capital. But even when the state is able to maintain open competition, oligopolies, duopolies and monopolies still form, because, again, that’s just the nature of competition. Competition is inherently zero sum, winner-take-all. That’s why the state has always had to come in and break up monopolies periodically. But if the monopoly powers are able to capture state power, they can prevent that. It’s like the championship winning team taking over the league.
It’s true that these AI companies are starting to worry about losing. I think OpenAI especially is concerned because they are currently struggling against both Anthropic and some other emerging companies, including some Chinese companies. But I think even Anthropic is worried because while they might be winning, they’re winning a race to the bottom. These companies are not profitable, and there’s no path to profitability for them in the foreseeable future. So not only can OpenAI not compete, they can’t compete in an industry with no clear path to profitability. So, yeah, they’re all colluding to stop the game because right now, no one’s winning. But that kind of collusion does not exist outside the bounds of normal capitalist operations, it’s always been a feature of it.
Yes good points. There are of course also plenty of other examples of capitalists asking the state to protect them from competitive pressures, for example with tariffs.
Whether capitalism without competition is still capitalism is a matter of decades of debate.
Some scholars have felt the need to add an adjective, like monopoly capitalism. Others, like Varoufakis, are exploring other terms, like technofeudalism.
Whether capitalism without competition is still capitalism is a matter of decades of debate.
because the word “capitalism” just doesn’t have a coherent definition
Free trading of goods and services on markets has been a thing for pretty much the entire existence of human civilization; so have property rights. If those are the things that define “capitalism”, it’s extremely difficult to imagine a world without it; if they aren’t, then which are?
@schnurrito I made an attempt recently: https://mishathings.org/posts/what-is-capitalism/
OK, that’s an interesting analysis and certainly one possible way to think about historical developments; the parts that are unclear are (1) whether this is trying to argue that the transition from feudalism to capitalism might be a bad thing (not something I’ve seen argued a lot) and (2) what, then, is socialism/communism?
That’s literally neither what those AI dicks say nor what they aim for.
It kind of is. Just in the sense they want to go back to feudalism instead.
Mel: “So, anyway, things started bad when I got up and stubbed my toe. Hurt like a bitch, y’know? And that pain stayed with me all day! Ever stub your toe, Lord? Nothing worse, I’m tellin’ ya”.
more like
Mel: fuck the Jews!
