The AI Hoax is Destroying America with Ed Zitron

I think this is a perfect illustration of how technology ends up being applied under different social and economic systems. The reason AI is problematic in the west is due to the fact that it's applied towards finding ways to increase the wealth of the oligarchs. On the other hand, China is using AI for stuff like industry automation, optimizing government workflow, and so on. AI is just a tool for automating work, there's nothing inherently bad about it. The question is how this tool is applied and to what purposes.

To clarify when u say "AI" do u mean llms and diffusion models cuz if u mean ai as a whole then u are simply wrong ai is hugely useful, has been around for decades, and is widely used in basically everything u can imagine. If by ai u specifically mean llms and diffusion models, then let me clarify that yes these models do in fact exists and let me further clarify that "AI" is just a term these models are in no way "intelligent" just in case thats what u mean by "exists", and yeah many of their purported uses are scams tho some are not, the REAL use of llms and diffusion models from the perspective of capitalist is to fire a bunch of people because "ai can do their jobs now" and then hire them right back at a much lower salary to do the same job but as prompt engineers, just like they did with translators back when google translate became viable(which is also ai btw).

It's not true that all current AI is a scam.

Western AI is a detestable scam that everyone hate because they use it for stupid things that no one asked for but everyone hate, like replacing artists with AI or generating endless slop to pollute the internet with, and because the capitalist insist on using it as a way to completely replace workers instead of using it as a tool to make work easier as it should be.

If instead of being stupid bazinga hyped techbros about it we treat it as the mere tool that it is, it can be genuinely useful in some very niche applications.

AI is just another tool, like email. The biggest problem with AI is the people using it, whether it's burning tons of greenhouse gases for huge datacentres or relying on them for important tasks that should be left to humans. Deepseek sort of combats the first issue, and one would hope China is smart enough to use it to serve the people and not profit. I really like Ed Zitron and his podcast and have been listening for awhile, his criticism of OpenAI and other Web3 nonsense has been ahead of the curve.

As you can see from people commenting in this thread and discussions elsewhere, someone with positive or negative opinions of AI will lump or leave out different technologies to determine whether AI is good or bad. So being pro and anti AI doesn’t refer to the same thing for everyone.

That said, the current ‘pro-AI’ push in global markets is a naked attempt to develop technologies with the intention of maximizing the required amount of expensive computing power needed to accomplish a goal. After crypto mining fell through a bit and stopped filling the role of computation blackhole, something new was needed.

It's an intersection of immature tech and desperate capital.

Look at some of the rubbish that was tossed around when personal computers were new. The classic one is "you'll have one in the kitchen to store recipes" but they didn't foresee livestreaming or Microsoft Excel. Or look at some of the railway routes proposed in the mid-1800s. Fair enough, people will speculate and make dubious guesses about the future of new tech. I expect we'll find useful cases for generative AI, but many of the "now with extra fingers" products will wither when they prove to offer unacceptable cost once unsubsidized, or simply prove to be too much hassle to get correct output from. When a support LLM regularly gives technically incorrect answers, nobody will want it no matter how clean its grammar and florid its language is.

But fir now, it's fuel for late-stage capitalism that has to jump from bubble to bubble to keep delivering infinite growth. They'll wager on any and all of it, even the stupid and ultimately useless stuff, in case it delivers the moonshot return they're after. It's institutional FOMO that they might miss buying into day-1 Apple, or that they might strangle their big win by not cramming it down everyone's throat hard enough.

Some may remember the dotcom days, where everyone was trying to latch internet onto something. You ended up with online pet food and hosiery. When it crashed, it took out a whole swath of companies and a lot of people who had come out to Silicon Valley for the gold rush.

A few years later, it was mobile + X. Just add mobile to coupons, or wine, or car shopping. Then in 2008, we had the housing crash and it took out most of the mobile companies on shaky ground.

The common thread was that a lot of questionable companies dropped out, and many bathrooms were lined with worthless stock options. But we also ended up with companies that had a sustainable business model and survived and became large.

Now, we're in the mid-stage of the same trajectory. AI + whatever. There will be the inevitable shakeout, lots of companies will go out of business. But we'll end up with a few strong ones that will solve real problems.

Not sure which ones, but if history is a guide, it will be those that solve sticky, real problems that people are willing to pay for long term.

An LLM, just like any technology, is in itself neutral. What's important is who controls the application of said technology.

When the people own a technology, both directly and via the means of production applying and producing it, it will be used to improve the lives of the people.

When the capitalists own a technology, it will be used to improve the lives of capitalists.

The claim that AI is a scam is a ridiculous and can only be stated by someone who doesn't understand the technology. Are we genuinely supposed to believe that capitalists hate profits and capital accumulation and are just wasting their money on something worthless? It's absurd. AI is already making huge breakthroughs in many fields, such as medicine with protein folding. I would recommend watching this video on that subject in particular. China has also been rapidly improving the speed of construction projects by coordinate them with AI.

To put it in laymen's terms, traditional computation is like Vulcans: extremely logical and have to go compute everything logically step-by-step. This is very good if you want precise calculations, but very bad for many other kinds of tasks. Here's an example: you're hungry, you decide to go eat a pizza, you walk to the fridge and open it, take out the slice, put it in the microwave to heat it up, then eat it. Now, imagine if I gave you just the sensory data, such as, information about what a person is seeing and feeling (hunger), and then asked you to write a full-proof sequence of logical statements that, when evaluated alongside the sensory data, would give you the exact muscle contractions needed to cause the person to carry out this task.

You'll never achieve it. Indeed, even very simple tasks humans do every day, like translating spoken words into written words, is something that nobody has ever achieved a set of logical if/else statements to replicate. Even something seemingly simple like this is far too complicated with far too many variables for someone to ever program, because everyone's voice is a bit different, every audio recording is going to have slightly different background noise, etc, and to account for all of it with a giant logical proof would be practically impossible.

The preciseness of traditional computation is also its drawback: you simply cannot write a program to do very basic human tasks we do every day. You need a different form of computation that is more similar to how human brains process information, something that processes information in a massively parallel fashion through tweaking billions of parameters (strengths in neural connections) to produce approximate and not exact outputs that can effectively train itself ("learn") without a human having to adjust those billions of parameters manually.

If you have ever used any device with speech recognition, such as writing a text message with spoken voice, you have used AI, since this is one of the earliest examples of AI algorithms actually being used in consumer devices. USPS heavily integrates AI to do optical-character recognition, to automatically read the addresses written on letters to get them to the right place, Tom Scott has a great video on this here on the marvel of engineering that is the United States Postal Service and how it is capable of processing the majority of mail entirely automatically thanks to AI. There have also been breakthroughs in nuclear fusion by stabilizing the plasma with AI because it is too chaotic and therefore too complex to manually write an algorithm to stabilize it. Many companies use it in the assembly line for object detection which is used to automatically sort things, and many security systems use it to detect things like people or cars to know when to record footage efficiently to save space.

Being anti-AI is just being a Luddite, it is oppose technological development. Of course, not all AI is particularly useful, some companies shove it into their products for marketing purposes and it doesn't help much and may even make the experience worse. But to oppose the technology in general makes zero sense. It's just a form of computation.

If we were to oppose AI then Ludwig von Mises wins and socialism is impossible. Mises believed that socialism is impossible because no human could compute the vastness of the economy by hand. Of course, we later invented computers and this accelerated the scale in which we can plan the economy, but traditional computation models still require you to manually write out the algorithm in a sequence of logical if/else statements, which has started to become too cumbersome as well. AI allows us to break free of this limitation with what are effectively self-writing programs as you just feed them massive amounts of data and they form the answer on their own, without the programmer even knowing how it solves the problem, it acts as kind of a black-box that produces the right output from a given input without having to know how it internally works, and in fact with the billions of parameter models, they are too complicated to even understand how they work internally.

(Note: I am using the term "AI" interchangeably with technology based on artificial neural networks.)