Mastodawn

I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes "capital allocators" spend *$1.4T* on the money-losingest technology in human history, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs

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Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)15h ago

@pluralistic I hear what you're saying and it's broadly right, but I want to push back a little bit. I think you're looking at a symptom and not the disease. If AI undeniably made the life of the masses better, we wouldn't object to it. But that's not what's happening, so what are we objecting to? It's extraction: when the wealthy use their power to acquire wealth instead of generating it.[1]

1. https://fosstodon.org/@ovid/116334866923361500
2. https://curtispoe.org/projects/extraction/

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Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)

@pluralistic
I've built The Extraction Index to help us track this worldwide. ([2] in previous post). This behavior has been documented to occur for thousands of years across many civilizations and economic systems. Over the millennia, extractive behavior has become less severe individually (e.g., we outlaw slavery), but it becomes far more widespread.

If we keep treating the symptoms instead of the disease, we're playing whack-a-mole: the wealthy will always find a way to abuse power.