the writer Nina Illingworth, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration, posted this excellent analysis of the reality of the AI bubble on Mastodon (featuring a shout-out to the recent articles on the subject from Amy Castor and @dgerard@awful.systems):
Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don’t care if AI doesn’t work.
They really don’t. They’re pot-committed; these dudes aren’t tech pioneers, they’re money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it’s literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it’s not real and they don’t care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made.
The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don’t know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it’s total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised.
Particularly in the media, it’s all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all.
the linked mastodon thread also has a very interesting post from an AI skeptic who used to work at Microsoft and seems to have gotten laid off for their skepticism
what i’m trying to understand is the bridge between the quite damning works like Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Myth by John Kelly, R. Scha elsewhere, G. Ryle at advent of the Cognitive Revolution, deriving many of the same points as L. Wittgenstein, and then there’s PMS Hacker, a daunting read, indeed, that bridge between these counter-“a.i.” authors, and the easy think substance that seems to re-emerge every other decade? how is it that there are so many resolutely powerful indictments, and they are all being lost to what seems like a digital dark age? is it that the kool-aid is too good, that the sauce is too powerful, that the propaganda is too well funded? or is this all merely par for the course in the development of a planet that becomes conscious of all its “hyperobjects”?