@cstross

What could possibly go wrong…

@cstross

The fossil fuel industry seems willing to fund AI for as long as it takes.

It's bringing in enormous profits from double digit electricity utility rate increases.

It's re-opening coal & oil fired electricity generators.

Data centers are keeping fossil fuel demand artificially inflated.

AI is intended to interfere with elections, thwart a fossil fuel phase out, & end democracy.

Oil oligarchs everywhere are happy with the results even if AI never turns a profit.

@cstross

📉 Not Stonks.

And let us all not forget, @cstross — that the "dot-com" bubble was caused by overly eager investment in the World Wide Web which was, nevertheless, useful ultimately. It was an object lesson in how dangerous unchecked speculation can be even if the speculation was arguably not that far off the mark. The lesson to be learned from that bubble was about market misbehaviour and not about the technology underlying it.

Two facts are apparent: that the shareholder-types never learned their lesson and, independently, that AI is in no objective sense equivalently transformative when one considers how the 'Web ultimately changed the world.

Today's bubble is repeating the unchecked speculation, reproducing the problematic market concentration and demonstrating the same misbehaviour and rampant, unfounded bullishness but also basing it all on a gimmick that has yet to prove a single valid use-case beyond gimmickry.

And certainly nothing even comparable to the impact of a global, near-instant communication medium.

@cstross @GhostOnTheHalfShell I’m shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

The thing to remember is that savvy investors make money when the market goes down as well as when it goes up. If they have weighty opinions that can move a market a bit, they can capitalize on that power and information. The naive investors are always the ones who end up paying.