Mastodawn

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

I talked about linguistic #productivity a bit yesterday. But I'd like to say something about "productivity" in the #tech grifter sense, the #programming nerd sense. This questionable sense of "productivity" is central to the marketing campaign by which Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and all the other boosters of "generative #AI" (i.e. unintelligent AI) are hoping to convince the world—or at least, a sufficient number of gullible investors—that the future of computing and technology and indeed the entire future of human civilization lies with "generative AI".

It's so...productive, they say! Gosh it's like a "cognitive multiplier", they say! It's like having a whole roomful of Ph.D. geniuses on tap, ready to do all sorts of "agentic" busywork and thereby double and treble your "productivity" just like that! (fingersnap)

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

There's a precious fallacy at work here, a straightforward one that's extremely typical of elite #computing culture: the self-important computer geek already imagines themselves to be self-evidently "productive" (i.e. they've achieved a comfortable position in the #technology sector, they've got loads of "passive income" flowing in through their tech investments, etc.) and therefore they tell themselves: "If I am doing twice as much of the usual crap I do every day, then I MUST be twice as 'productive'."

What are they "producing" exactly? Well...money and status for themselves, except these are not genuine products. The generation of #money is in fact a destructive process: the Earth's resources and human labor are being consumed in ever-increasing quantities in order to generate exponentially increasing hoards of money. Every unit of "wealth" that's being "grown" in someone's portfolio of investments represents the seizure and consumption of resources (including the lives of human laborers) which might have benefited humanity generally, but which instead have gone towards enriching one person in particular.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

Indeed I'm going so far as to suggest that the #software "industry", which I'm not sure should be called a true industry because it's a fundamentally non-productive one, comes pretty close to being something that #capitalism quietly regards as ideal, although of course you'll find no capitalist who will actually admit this: the corporate software biz is almost the ideal anti-industry. It consumes extraordinary and ever-increasing quantities of resources and produces absolutely nothing of lasting value to anyone...but it causes heaps of #money to accumulate, and that is accounted as "productivity" by people in the #tech sector.

Nothing has made that fundamentally destructive quality of corporate software more obvious, in recent years, than the two most recent "innovations" of the tech sector: #cryptocurrency and "generative #AI" (i.e. "AI" devoid of intelligence.) As it happens, both of these things are very low-effort in terms of technological innovation, relying chiefly upon bulk to achieve results.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

There's nothing brilliant about #blockchain gambling schemes; "the blockchain" itself is merely a sort of electronic ledger, and the virtues of the "blockchain economy" are merely copied off the existing ways in which people can gamble and speculate upon worthless investment opportunities. The only thing that's truly novel about #crypto is that, merely by copying what other blockchain gamblers have already done and spicing it up with some novel marketing gimmicks, there can now be a hundred thousand mini-economies instead of a limited handful.

There's practically zero actual #innovation going on, beyond fostering a whole new ecosystem of gamblers and grifters who are pulling much the same sort of scams that an earlier generation of scam artists have pulled off. The "wealth" being "created" by this crypto speculation is of a wholly destructive sort: the crypto gamblers are invited to believe that hunks of cryptographic hash (i.e. hunks of #entropy, in physical truth) are somehow equivalent to hunks of gold, merely because the hunks of cryptographic hash are technically all different from one another. One might as well gamble on thermal noise.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

Is gambling "wealth" actually producing anything? Is anything being created merely because gamblers bid up the market value of some entity on which they're speculating? I would say that the answer to these questions is clearly NO. If two poker players, both with garbage hands, both refuse to budge and keep doubling down on their bets until the stakes are in the stratosphere, they have created nothing: at the end of the day, they're still just a couple of gamblers with the same old cards in their hands. They haven't "created wealth"; they've only created a vast quantity of debt, which one player now owes the other. And debt is simply a hole which may or may not eventually be filled with money.

That's what #crypto speculation, and indeed all #market speculation, are really accomplishing. They are not creating anything other than ever-increasing piles of debt. A crypto grifter borrows and begs a big pile of startup funding from somewhere (funding that itself comes almost wholly from people who are themselves borrowing and begging in order to sustain their own grifts): if the grifter succeeds, they now owe a lot of people a lot of money.

Luckily, the canny grifter knows how to slip away from actually making good on such obligations.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

And meanwhile, buildings packed full of #GPU hardware being diverted away from their intended purpose (i.e. rendering graphics) are being run to exhaustion, eating up precious electricity and burning through expensive semiconductors, for no better purpose than to keep alive a huge number of speculative mini-economies, sustaining a massive population of gambling addicts. There's nothing the least bit "productive" about any of this #cryptocurrency nonsense. It's a wholly destructive "industry", but one which can be sold to dull-witted tech geeks as "productive" merely because it generates splashy headlines about large quantities of money—ever-growing "wealth" which is merely ever-accumulating debt.

But #capitalism quietly regards debt as a source of guaranteed income. The holder of debt hopes to bleed that debt into perpetuity, always collecting interest on it. Why do you think right-wing politicians get so furious at the idea of debt forgiveness, e.g. on college loans? It's because, to their corporate allies, debt is the ideal asset, a generator of infinite "wealth" without the expenditure of a single lick of effort on the part of the creditor.

That is to say, holding onto debt in perpetuo is "productive", according to the accepted standard of "productivity".

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

The hitch in the #crypto schemes is that, outside the get-rich-quick culture of capitalism and #entrepreneurlife, nobody wants worthless fake money backed by nothing but speculation on blocks of procedurally-generated noise. The ordinary person wants #currency to be, well, boring. They want something that merely holds its value and doesn't go away. They don't actually want "currency" that fluctuates unpredictably and whose value can be "bricked" at any time by a rug-pull scam—although capitalists and corporate bosses are still daydreaming about forcing crypto on the masses, with the help of fascıst governments to hurry the process along, because they would LOVE to be able to pay the working class with literally worthless and brickable money.

In a previous era of U.S. history, this was called "company scrip". Instead of paying wages in standardized currency, corporations tried to pay their workers in paper whose value they could destroy at any time, merely by refusing to honor the paper. Today, there's many an #entrepreneur who hopes to achieve the same thing by forcing the general population to accept crypto in place of sound money.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

And thus the #technology sector got itself into the following bind: they'd committed themselves to blockchain gambling and #cryptocurrency in a big way, they could almost taste the myriad opportunities for "wealth creation" inherent in the chaotic and intrinsically untrustworthy nature of crypto, Jensen Huang of #Nvidia was no doubt salivating over this brand-new pretext for selling gigantic quantities of GPUs to blockchain grifters...but the public outcry against this latest manifestation of predatory capitalism was so great that crypto was forced into a penumbral state.

It's still a huge business; fascıst GOP politicians (and some traitorous Democrats) are still banking upon enriching themselves through facilitating #crypto fraud through various political favors. There's still no shortage of entrepreneurs and "venture capitalists" hoping to profit through exploitation of blockchain scams. But they have been compelled to dial back on the usual hyperbolic tech-sector promises of a glittery future and universal happiness "on the blockchain".

But what about all those speculators hoping to get rich by doing nothing but filling a building with GPUs?

Enter the #LLM. Make way for "generative #AI".

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

The current-day craze for "generative #AI", i.e. non-intelligent #artificial_intelligence, must surely be a direct outgrowth of the foiling of the earlier #tech sector obsession with "the blockchain". Both #crypto scams and #LLM scams require much the same thing from the entrepreneurs hoping to cash in: they want to bum or steal enough money to buy or rent some property, stuff it full of computer hardware being run to exhaustion, and collect vast quantities of profit thereby.

What's more, the ill-gotten gains of cryptocurrency gambling and scamming could now be laundered into another, far more exciting-seeming "innovation". Blockchain speculation was now in a bad public odor, but the "wealth creation" via blockchain speculation could now be funnelled into something far more readily hyped and sold to the public as a miracle of high technology. Jensen Huang could breathe a sigh of relief, now that there was another and shinier reason for tech grifters to buy up vast quantities of #Nvidia hardware.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

Again it must be stressed: the "generative #AI" business is a wholly destructive one. Enormous quantities of computer hardware and electricity and other resources are consumed, gigantic volumes of human communication and human creativity are devoured, and the only products are (a) #money and (b) stochastically generated garbage which happens to bear a superficial resemblance to genuinely intelligent human communication.

The #LLM is not meant to be intelligent; it is meant to fake or mimic the products of intelligence, but to do so in an automated, predictable, high-volume manner. And that's just what intelligent and creative work is not: it's not automatic, it's not predictable, and it's not cranked out in quantity. In fact that's precisely why entrepreneurs and business executives absolutely despise dealing with human beings who possess actual intellect and creative ability: such persons refuse simply to produce garbage on demand. Creative persons tend to have extreme independence of personality; they don't merely excrete stuff by rote, because some boss demands it.

But that's what "generative AI" is meant to do. It's MEANT to be stupid.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

#LLMs emit garbage, but they at least emit a LOT of garbage, and the garbage can be roughly constrained to a certain shape by altering the training materials from which the stochastic LLM parrot is copying in order to generate the garbage. In a #software "industry" whose products are already 99.9% garbage—but lucrative garbage and therefore "productive" garbage, in the geeklord sense of "productivity"—it would seem that "generative AI" is seen as a godsend. It's an "industry" where most high-paying jobs are undoubtedly pure busywork, of no clear use to anyone on Earth, but now thanks to "generative AI" it's possible to do all that busywork "agentically"!

Which means, of course, that there's now an incentive for useless busywork to multiply and proliferate in the #technology sector and in #business. Now that such busywork can be done automagically, with LLM gibberish-generators, there's bound to be perceived value in creating even more worthless high-tech non-work, e.g. cranking out vastly increased quantities of rubbishy e-mails or reports or white papers...it's all grist for the same mill, now. "Generative AI" can generate the ever-increasing volumes of trash, AND it can purport to process and summarize and analyze the mountains of trash, generating yet MORE trash, ad infinitum.

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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen Mar 29

And guess what! This death-spiral of procedurally generated garbage, mountains of it growing ever higher, will be accounted all the while as ever-increasing #productivity. Why? Because there's so MUCH of it! More of it, all the time! And the #LLM gibberish-generators will always be getting bigger and hungrier in order to meet the demand! And that means money! profits! PRODUCTIVITY!

Never mind that not a single useful thing is anywhere produced; never mind that the Earth's resources are vanishing down this sinkhole, merely to enrich a few elite techies. The elite techies feel "productive", the more LLM trash is generated. They've got all their "agentic AI" thingummies running around doing useless techie busywork, more of it all the time, and that feels oh so productive to the geeklords.

And isn't that what really matters in the end? Is anything on Earth more important than geeklords' feelings?

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brib

Mar 29

@mxchara I remember reading Adam Smith's treatise on productivity and was like "no wonder people valorise it so much now... and no wonder it's destroying the Earth".

IMO the notion of productivity is way overrated. (they say, while expecting infinite productivity from themself, because they too have capitalist hellscape brainworms)