GoKawiil“AI is the money-losingest thing our species has ever done. We have never lost as much money as we’ve lost on AI.”
The thing that made the web profitable was not that it was unprofitable, it was things like good unit economics, where every time someone started using the web, the web got less unprofitable. Every time a web user used the web again, the total profits generated went up. Every generation of web technology made the web more profitable. That’s the opposite of AI. Every AI customer loses money for the company, every use of AI by that customer loses money for the company, and every generation of AI loses more money than the last one. AI is the money-losingest thing our species has ever done. We have never lost as much money as we’ve lost on AI.
Another giant material difference is the social reception. If you look back to the business press of the aughts and the late ’90s, it’s full of hand-wringing editorials about how bosses will cope with workers who are smuggling in the web. You look at those same press outlets today, and it’s full of people saying, “What are we going to do about the fact that no one in the workplace wants to use AI?”—along with ads for firms that will spy on your workers for you so that you can punish the workers who refuse to use AI.
Ars Technica: AI nonetheless does have thoughtful, sensible defenders.
Cory Doctorow: One of the paradoxes that I try to explore in this book is the workers who are not fools, who are historic good, reliable narrators of their own experience, and who tell you that AI is making their lives better. The foundational idea of science fiction is that what the gadget does is less important than who it does it for and who it does it to. I call those people centaurs. They are workers who are assisted by technology and who decide how that technology is going to assist them. Whereas the workers who hate it are workers who are being asked to produce more with AI at the expense of quality, at a higher speed, at the expense of their own wellbeing, and who understand that they’re being recruited to be what Dan Davies calls accountability sinks—to take the blame when the AI screws up their job.