If I had to guess what the main drivers of the AI bubble are, my first guesses are these:
1. The End of Economic Growth
We are getting closer and closer to the point where it will become impossible to even simulate growth; real net growth of the economy as a whole might be over already. All those huge investments in hypertrophic machine learning models that need huge servers to run, and in the computing centres with the hardware for training and running those models, are big money desperately trying to find a new growing market.
2. Science Fiction Mythology Running Wild
For many people nowadays, science fiction has replaced religion and traditional mythology, as we can see in the rise of UFO cults, one of the biggest ones being Scientology. Rich people, engineers, even scientists, are not immune to having irrational beliefs about our future. People who don't believe in any traditional gods somehow quite often still believe that humans can (and should) build artificial deities.
3. Unhinged Techbro Oligarchs
Oh boy, I'm not going to write anything about those men right now, other than that being completely insulated against the consequences of your own failures (because you can always pay your way out of everything) and being surrounded by people who constantly tell you that even your silliest rubbish ideas are brilliant (because you pay them) will break even the strongest mind.
4. Fairytales of Slavery (OK, I had to steal the title of my favourite Miranda Sex Garden album)
There is this idea of AI as obedient slaves that can never revolt, and since they aren't human, they don't get to have human rights, which of course means that nobody is going to ever set them free. All the people who wish they could own slaves like in the Good Old Days™ (whether the Southern US before the First Civil War [I think there will be a 2nd one] or in Ancient Rome or whatever your favourite historical setting is) can now dream of buying a robot.
5. Intelligence Supposedly Solves Everything
There is this strange belief about the power of intelligence, the idea that everything is just a problem that has a solution, and that we can always find any solution if we just apply enough intelligence. This also applies to problems where we already know the solution, have known them for decades, yet don't implement them because we don't like the consequences. Many people seem to think that even the laws of nature can be outsmarted with enough intelligence, which is quite silly IMHO. AI won't solve the polycrisis because climate chaos, species extinction, ecosystem degradation, resource depletion, pollution, etc., aren't first and foremost technological problems but systemic ones, the main driver behind the polycrisis is the fact that our global economy has become too big for this planet, and going to space is just bollocks because there is no biosphere anywhere we can reach, there is no place anywhere besides Earth that doesn't just kill us if we make a mistake. No amount of intelligence, whether artificial or natural, can do anything about the fact that we need to stop what we've been doing for centuries, or the Earth will stop us by letting us die. We can't continue what we've been doing, it's simply impossible. But we're trapped in a myth that stems from the Age of Enlightenment, the myth of reshaping the world through thinking, which just doesn't work. We're not the bosses of the universe or even just the Earth, we're part of the biosphere, part of the fauna, nothing but a bunch of very clever apes who believe in silly stories.
Unlike many of you, I am not against AI. I think AI is a very interesting research field, or rather, bundle of loosely related research fields. No, I am against Capitalism and against the myths of limitless growth and post-scarcity. Resources have always been scarce, resources will always be scarce, but we can still have a halfway decent life for everyone on the planet if we just share everything and abolish private property. At least for now; over the course of the coming decades, things will get dramatically worse no matter what we do because we're so deep in ecological overshoot that the Industrial Age will enter its phase of decline and collapse, just like any other civilisation before it. We can either apply the solutions that have been known and explored for decades, or we can keep running towards the cliff at increasing speed while trying to sprout magical wings that will in all likelihood never exist.
#ai #aibubble #πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis #capitalism #aireligion #aicult #limitstogrowth #intelligence
