Mastodawn

TBH the 'revolution risk' he talks about sounds pretty good around about now. Bring it on I reckon.

It is good to hear this from a well studied and celebrated economist.

It reminds us that what you are doing when you are letting 'agenticAI' etc into your workplace, community spaces, culture at large, is helping extend (US) corporate power (and in so doing, the US gov).

While you have been engineered by the market to believe otherwise, you are not necessarily better off using these tools. You have instead been tooled, and you're not getting paid for it.

Big AI is first and foremost a trojan

Sure there's a lot of healthy skepticism around productivity & AI, but what of reputational damage from using it?

It's surely a thing in the arts, where the ballooning distaste around genAI is making it a risk to use in your practice (bit like NFT's, who remembers).

In my own arcane tech circles I'm starting to see murmurs of the same, where to do vibe coding is to mark yourself, tainting trust of peers.

I'll guess we'll see what the 'costs' are of the broader cultural fallout.

Yes Fortune magazine is a generally conservative publication, just as this economist is a neoliberal centrist.

I agree with some of what he says, & disagree with some too.

But that's not the point. Zoom out a bit and you'll see that having a celebrated neoliberal economist dissing the AI productivity myth is a weather report, one that investors will be listening to.

His views are a sign of a bubble approaching maximum waistline, if ever there was one.

GhostOnTheHalfShell 1d ago

When you have top executive at Nvidia saying that workers are less expensive than AI or similar comments from I think the CEO of Uber, the con is finally being shown to be what it is.

And Zitron has been doing amazing legwork detailing that their math does not math. There is no pathway to profitability. Not with the way numbers are now and not the trends which show increasing cost with scale and the gigantic debt load they are carrying.

contrasocial 1d ago

Revolution is already under way. Liberals only are able to acknowledge reality in retrospect though, so give them another 50 years to catch up.

derptron 1d ago

@JulianOliver "The gap between what LLMs do well in demos and what they do reliably in complex, high-stakes professional environments remains, in his view, far wider than the industry’s marketing suggests."

I concur :p

nanowiz 1d ago

ai and citizen united -- just one hell courtesy of the roberts court

Molly in Missouri 1d ago

@JulianOliver @tante listening to politicians insist that data centers are inevitable reminds me-- we need to end capitalism before it ends us.

Arjen P. de Vries Timmers 🕊️1d ago

@JulianOliver
qouting the article:

The intellectual failure, in his view, runs deeper than policy. It’s a failure of imagination — an inability to articulate what a genuinely human-centered AI future would look like, and the political will to demand it.

“We’re all so blindly taken in by what OpenAI, Anthropic, and a few other hyperscalers are offering,” he said, “because we haven’t articulated a reasonable alternative.”

EZA 1d ago

@JulianOliver The most interesting question isn't whether AI is overhyped or underhyped—it's who captures the gains if the productivity gains actually arrive.

canleaf08✅ 加拿大葉子 🏳️‍🌈⚧️🇪🇺🍁1d ago

@JulianOliver When do people finally realize: Intelligence means "data collection" not being smart.

You are feeding a void called llm your data.

konstruct 1d ago

@JulianOliver I feel this in my bones, as soon as I told myself to never use AI again, it was similar to someone quitting smoking, I could taste and smell much more, but with intelligence and consciousness instead of food

Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC 22h ago

@JulianOliver Fuck being competitive. Why are we forced to compete against each other all the time? We should cooperate instead!

GeofCox 22h ago