"AI" / LLMs take the late great David Grabers concept of Bullshit Jobs to new heights.
Bullshit Jobs are when people are paid to do useless things in order to keep them busy. They shuffle information around and do generally useless work instead of doing something useful like... working in care, education, community organizing, art, craft, music, saving the planet and tens of thousands of other genuinely useful things that pay peanuts.
Perhaps people are "encouraged" to work in Bullshit Jobs (the alternative is being penniless after all) to **stop** them working in genuinely useful jobs like care, saving the planet etc.
The other reason for the existence of Bullshit Jobs is that people working in Bullshit Jobs are paid well enough to become consumers themselves. They become Bullshit Consumers who can afford to buy Bullshit Products. These are the sort of products neo-liberal capitalism adores.
Robot vacuum cleaners that stop working when the company that sells them goes broke. Light bulbs that require an internet connection to turn on an off (and for AWS to not have an outage) Cars where the heated seats are a subscription service. All subscription services in general. Built in obsolescence. Shoddy products that start to fall as soon as you start to use them. Fast fashion. E-readers that are a poor replacement for a physical book. Operating systems that force advertisements onto users computers. Advertisements in general. The list goes on and on...
All of this creates Bullshit Economics. People doing useless, worthless work in order to consume useless, worthless products. All because capitalism demands continual growth. We are told "there is no alternative"
Now the oligarchs running the world(s economy) think that they can use AI to automate Bullshit Jobs in order to avoid paying humans to do the work. The LLMs are designed and coded to be plausible not to be correct so in many ways they are nothing but Bullshit Generators. The oligarchs hope to replace billions of people doing Bullshit Jobs with vast data centers churning out Bullshit
Data centers cost billions and become wholly obsolete in every 5 years so in many ways they are Bullshit Products themselves. I don't think building a data center the size of a small country which requires the power and water resource of several small countries to operate will replace billions of Bullshit Consumers buying Bullshit Products. Even if you need a new one in 5 years time.
Newly redundant Bullshit Consumers wont be able to buy anything at all if they don't have a Bullshit Job or they are forced to become climate refugees. The Bullshit Economy **has** to collapse sooner or later. Infinite growth on a finite planet is literally insane. So is the fantasy of founding a fascist colony on Mars.
According to neo-liberal capitalist economics the world will be a better place once the Bullshit Generators do all the Bullshit Jobs in the Bullshit Economy as the oligarchs will be even more incredibly wealthy. Which is nice...
What are billionaires saving up for anyway, Hell?
#AI #LLMs #BullshitJobs #DataCenters #NeoLiberalEconomics #Oligarchy #BullshitProducts #DavidGraber #BullshitEconomics
robcornelius
me·ta·phil, der