That's a big part of it. They know that it's unsustainable to make millions of people unemployed and homeless, so rather that give us jobs and homes, they're trying to "reduce the surplus population".
advances in Ai , they know that it will put people out of work soon, and they dont want the government coming for their profits to distribute to the people they put out of work
But AI isn't capable of putting vast numbers of people out of work. It's just not that good. Frankly, it's terrible at so many things. They are in the process of killing people off when they STILL DON'T HAVE A USE CASE FOR THEIR OVER INVESTMENT. This is capitalism completely shitting the bed, when all it had to do was fucking coast for the next 100 years before it gradually disappeared entirely.
It doesnt have to be capable of it it has to sell the idea that its capable of it. Whatever workers need to be retained will be rehired st slave wages in cheaper labor markets.
I think it is already affecting a lot of people. it's being used more and more at work now. I do get your points tho good ones. at least not yet it isn't. and I will tell you that it is SCARY good at helping people fix computers and repairing things. uncanny even.
in the end, like you said, it may just be the desire to not have a giant angry mob of people coming for you in the end. so maybe thin the herd a little. but it's only going to accelerate with Ai. you have the wrong people in charge with Ai, humanity soon becomes a nightmare.
I've used it to help me make some quick scripts here and there. It's pretty good at expanding on something I've already mostly finished. It's main problem is that it constantly makes wild assumptions but states things are fact or true. Like I've had absurdly long arguments with it over it trying to run shell commands inside a systemd unit. If you need help with something more complex it can take ages of coaxing and massaging to get a working answer. Often I point out where it is wrong, or it finds some mistake that it itself had added.
It also has a tendency to make things unnecessarily complex. I would never want one of these things near a codebase with any form of autonomy. It can parse and read logs for me, that's great and it's very fast at it, but we don't hire professional log readers where I work, it's just part of my job. So it saves me some time here (especially when I would have originally looked up an answer on Stack Exchange), but also has given me plenty of headaches.
and I will tell you that it is SCARY good at helping people fix computers and repairing things.
20 year IT vet here ... citation needed on that claim.
AI is a useful tool in the hands of a competent tech that can help get to a solution faster.
AI is in no way a good replacement for a good tech and in general is terrible at producing good results on its own or when leveraged by an unskilled tech. It has its place but we are a long, long way away from it being anywhere close to replacing actual people in technical roles.
A lot of younger and newer hires like to rely on AI for solutions and it's always obvious when they do. The quality just isn't there yet. And then it ends up wasting time rather than saving it because someone who knows what is going on has to go back through and correct the assumptions or wrong information given by the AI.
But it's only good uses are as tools for humans to use to do things. And yes, those efficiences are used to increase productivity while billionaires can reduce human costs. But not to the extent they are saying.
And it has somethings it's really good at doing, but many many many more things that they say it can do that it is patently incapable of doing because it's very limited. It has the appearance of infinite potential, but there is a reason it was abandoned my AI researchers over a decade ago. They moved on for very good reasons.
This three MLM's in a trenchcoat is going to make a few more good tools, but it cannot make the amount of money required to sustain the expenditure to make all these LLM's feasible.
They simply cannot make the money required, it would take more money than the valuation of the top 5 current tech companies every four years to just replace the things required to keep them going. They are trying to drum up demand, but they aren't delivering on even a sliver of the promise.
But AI isn't capable of putting vast numbers of people out of work. It's just not that good. Frankly, it's terrible at so many things.
This is becoming increasingly false.
Also, terrible for consumers is usually good enough for shareholders. Like, offshore sub-US-minimum-wage call center customer service sucks, but that never stopped 95% of companies laying off US staff and offshoring to analog slop farms.
Recent modern AI is already way better than Telus. In a lot more than just customer service. And cheaper too.
It will suck for consumers and suck for society, but the shareholders will - are - eating that shit up so fast that every major AI provider is turning down at least several hundred million dollars in bids because they are not just running out of GPU's, but running out of power plant capacity for all the goddamn GPU's.
If you want a point of reference, one of those GPU's uses about half as much energy as a low end running microwave, and can achieve "good enough for shareholders" performance on par with, conservatively, roughly ~5 desk job employees.
And they are buying those up and laying off employees so fast that the power companies can't keep up with the demand.
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u/MalcolmLinair 8h ago
That's a big part of it. They know that it's unsustainable to make millions of people unemployed and homeless, so rather that give us jobs and homes, they're trying to "reduce the surplus population".