Conversation

The failures of tech and finance journalists to adequately question the narratives coming out of the supposed #AI alarmist machine are breathtaking. The people who should be objectively reporting on how inane and pathetic the claims are instead have joined the VC funders in an intentional mass delusional event where they convince one another that some junior engineer's ravings are proof that the machines are about to unleash the poisonous gases.

Relax. The actual clear and present danger from LLMs is not that they're on the threshold of self awareness. It's the unprecedented misallocation of capital, starving actual useful entrepreneurs of funding.

It's the horrific and indefensible overconsumption of energy and water, causing actual material hardship for communities that have the misfortune of hosting data centres.

It's the circular Ponzi schemes that obscure the financial shenanigans that absolutely will come unstuck and bring down a fair chunk of the global productive economy when they do.

It's the promotion of chatbots as digital surrogates for actual social contact and the psychological damage to vulnerable users.

And it's the uncritical grovelling worship of tech billionaires and a whole class of feudal overlords who fully intend to use this technology as a shortcut to a surveillance state where ethics and governance are outsourced to fragile, unreliable, and resource squandering sausage machines with training biases that guarantee that the outputs will assuredly not promote egalitarian and biosphere-preserving outcomes.