A big bet, with none of the mandatory electricity infrastructure figured out. Maybe better to call it a pipedream.
America is now one big bet on AI
171–180 of 193 posts
Re: America is now one big bet on AI
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
The incremental revenues to software and hardware vendors and energy providers is also used to hire new people, build new infrastructure (manufacturing plants, energy production systems, etc.), with second-order economic effects too. There are higher-order effects too, also more diffuse.
Again I'm not denying second order effects exist. Just saying it's not 150% of the direct effects.
Ah, got it. I'd say it's possible but no one knows for sure. There's too much related spending that's hard to measure, including, for example, organizations spending to try out newfangled AI services. I don't think that kind of spending is counted in the investment figure, because it's not capex.
Re: America is now one big bet on AI
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
There aren't enough jobs because we are stuck in a money-printing loop thanks to the baby boomers. The dynamics and debasement floor prevent new entrants from entering the market while regulation cripples those trying to keep things going. Concentrating and sieving the money-supply into non-productive companies on a moonshot bet to eliminate capital formation and one party that forms the basis for the economic cycle.…
> intolerable and torturous acts which have become so commonplace today What are you referring to?
The vast generalized systemic malaise of corruption that afflicts America both in business, and politics.
It is most commonly expressed in process which is designed to isolate, strip of agency, impose cognitive dissonance (through deception and lies), create trauma loops (structured circularly with push-pull dynamics), and utilize sophisticated psychological blindspots that every person has; primarily to induce inconsistent internal states of confusion beneath cognition, which creates psychological stress beyond the point of coping for physiological effect.
Define intolerable and torturous acts rationally by functional element from case studies, you will find the elements in aggregate nearly everywhere you look. That wasn't always the case.
Its under different names, and called different things but the elements are all there. Education, Business, Politics, the sheer number of places is endless. The work of a generation.
For example, Master Data Management is all about creating dossiers of customers for targeting your most profitable customers with extras; while simultaneously reducing finite resources required by basic services that are given to your baseline customer (beyond the point of service failure, just shy of the point of fraud).
Ever wonder about that systemic issue where a ticket you opened, described it properly, and it has a straightforward resolution, but its automatically closed as resolved 20-30 days later with no action taken and no reprimand or escalation path that's effective and it can't be reopened. Or that CSR doom loop where they transfer you so many times taking advantage of the trunk line timeout after a signaling change where the phone disconnects (x minutes after the first signaled transfer), or the lies about higher than normal call volume which aren't actually based on averages and always apply... The loss of some needed benefit because someone decided in error that requirements weren't met for that benefit, depriving you immediately, with no recourse. Like paypall freezing your connected bank account because of a chargeback that was illegitimate on the sellers side.
People blind themselves because this is everywhere, and it shouldn't be, but there is no one capable of stopping it that isn't also more incentivized to continue it for profit.
Who benefits, what recourse, what's required for a rule of law, and what happened in the two decades leading up to 1776 that showed what happens when a rule of law no longer functions.
Coercion is the purposeful application of psychological stress beyond the point of coping to induce outcomes.
While a little funny, if it weren't so close to the truth Agents of Shield got this mostly right except that its everywhere: "Take a deep breath, calm your mind, compliance will be rewarded. Are you willing to comply?"
Re: America is now one big bet on AI
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
A hell of a lot of absolute slop as well… it’s really not at all obvious that it’s a net win in any way at this stage. Actual real life case studies that people can point to where they deployed it and it all went great are actually very hard to come by. It was only the other week that there was that study that said the number was as low as I think they said like 5% or something. No shortage of excitement though, but…
I feel like I am living in another reality when I hear about all these "studies" confirming LLMs have no value and how no one uses them. I am using LLMs all day. I have more ideas about how to use them than I have time to build out.
> I have more ideas about how to use them than I have time to build out.
Can’t you just use your AI-supercharged productivity to build them? What’s the bottleneck here?
Re: America is now one big bet on AI
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the tragic part. This administration ran on a platform of bringing back the real economy and manufacturing. Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles. The GDP increases are fake. Mining Bitcoin produces nothing, in fact the money supply should not be increased to match the fake GDP increase. The same is true for "AI".
>Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles. The current boom has basically had nothing to do with any government efforts. It is booming in spite of the current administration. This is all private industry.
> The current boom has basically had nothing to do with any government efforts.
You must have missed the federal governments 500B “stargate” project
Re: America is now one big bet on AI
#176We're in this weird situation where: 1) the average American is heavily dependent on equities in their 401k for retirement, 2) so the stock market has to go up, 3) but the stock market is already at record valuations and it's difficult to see how forecasted growth levels justify the current valuation let alone an increased valuation, 4) without revenue growth, the only way for companies to sustain EPS growth is massi…
> 1) the average American is heavily dependent on equities in their 401k for retirement, > 2) so the stock market has to go up This is why I've come to despise 401k's replacing old-school pensions. Yes, pensions had their problems but with 401k's workers must fleece themselves to have any sort of retirement opportunity. Want a shot at retirement? Now we all have to run ourselves into the ground to make number go up.…
Where do you think pensions were storing the money?
These are two sides of the same coin.
Re: America is now one big bet on AI
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then we might have to solve our education problems after all.
Ha! I wouldn’t count on it.
Why not?
If you're trying to compete with some country who can do things that you can't and there's nobody to be found who knows how to do the thing, isn't teaching your people the obvious thing to do?
The cost of not doing so will be cumulative, so sooner or later the ROI will be there. It's just a matter of how bad things need to get first. That is, unless there's something else we've got going for us that we can fall back on, but I'm not sure what that thing might be--we've been busy dismantling contenders for the job lately.
Re: America is now one big bet on AI
#178There is other emerging tech we could be investing in that other economies are doubling-down on. But the Administration has made green energy harder for American companies. And a lot of health tech too is tougher under the current administration. Tarrifs, affordability, etc also hit hard on small businesses, making growth there tough.
That is the tragic part. This administration ran on a platform of bringing back the real economy and manufacturing. Now they fuel the Bitcoin and "AI" bubbles, which are nonessential and non-tangibles. The GDP increases are fake. Mining Bitcoin produces nothing, in fact the money supply should not be increased to match the fake GDP increase. The same is true for "AI".
The Bitcoin and AI people grease the palms of the super PACs while the manufacturing and real economy people provide the votes. Win-win.
Re: America is now one big bet on AI
#179Key quote: > The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year. In other words, investment in AI is a massive private-sector stimulus program, powering economic growth. Questions for which no one knows the answer include: * Will these AI investments earn a positive rate of return in the aggregate? * Without these investments o…
The 40% investment could presumably go into jobs and infrastructure that might be more durable.
LLMs are infrastructure.
Re: America is now one big bet on AI
#180Its not a bubble because the economy isnt actually about trade any more, its about power. The people in power now know that control over technology is the name of the game. It doesnt have to have a return on investment, it has to enable control of public opinion and eventually, robots.
In the 1900s we called "control over technology" something else, I believe it was "seizing the means of production".
There is a big difference between nationalizing industry and regulating it.