AI as Capital Class Weapon #
I am firmly in "team normal tech" where it concerns AI and its role within software development, business, and society. It's clearly a very useful tool. As Ryan Dahl was once fond of saying, "every program is a proxy". I'd extend that to say that, as proxies, a good chunk of those programs are parsers or encoders.
So, having a giant statistical model that moves tokens around and can transmute one sort of tokens into another on demand, is pretty dang handy. I don't think it's The Singularity come to save and/or damn us all, and I find it absurd in the extreme that people seem to think AI is going to provide a path to Dyson Spheres or an end of the drudgery of manual (or intellectual) labor.
There are three clear reasons why the capital class is so smitten with AI, which have little to do with its technical merits, and explain the reason for corporations pushing so hard on the AI bubble in defiance of any financial indicators that may suggest it's unwise.
AI Accelerates the Post-Modern Crisis of Legitimacy #
AI Reduces Labor Security #
AI is sychophantic #
Analysis of Power #
These reasons become obvious when we recognize that:
- The capital class is made up of people who, by and large, cling to a self-image as anything other than a mere beneficiary of the labor of others, but rather must see themselves as a creative force.
- The interests of the capital class are aligned against the interests of labor. They are served more