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How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

arstechnica.com

21–30 of 58 posts

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#23
post #2

The “reverse centaur” is a natural product of capitalism wanting workers to be as replaceable as possible in order to drive down wages. An ordinary “centaur” is counter to companies’ goals, they don’t want workers empowered.

If that is true, they are incredibly stupid. Empowered workers create better, more effective companies.

But they also create workers that can hop off the ship. If they're on a sinking one, they have no choice but to work hard to get back to shore.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#24
post #16
post #5

Just wait for the economics to catch up and eat the marketing. No effort required.

Though, the larger the bubble becomes the more damaging the pop will be

That's my real fear, that I have massive indirect AI bubble exposure while having zero direct exposure. Similar to how relatively few Americans had liar loans, but we all got burned by the subprime crisis. And then there were those bad actors that made the crisis work for them, and we got burned again during the uneven recovery.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#25

It's kinda too big to fail in US now. If it bursts, US will decline quickly.

It's not, though. The banking system holds onto everyone's money in a fractional reserve system, if you let a run on the banks happen everyone's money is gone. That's "too big to fail".

If anthropic and openAI fail, the top 10% lose half their money in a stock sell-off. That's perfectly tolerable. Maybe congress bails them out anyways but they don't have to.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#26
post #2

The “reverse centaur” is a natural product of capitalism wanting workers to be as replaceable as possible in order to drive down wages. An ordinary “centaur” is counter to companies’ goals, they don’t want workers empowered.

As a business owner I assure you I am not overly obsessed with labor costs. I obsess on all costs, and all revenues. VC funded and public companies may or may not take a similarly holistic view.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#27
post #13

> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI. I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of yo…

Interesting challenge.

1 - I worked abroad and wasn't really familiar with the systems there. Gemini made me aware of a kind of pension account that I could withdraw from when I left the country netting me a few thousand dollars.

2 - Working as a tech contractor, charging by deliverable, Codex/Claude Code speed me up and it doesn't seem to have significantly dropped rates in the market.

3 - Also contractor related: I had Claude do a quick legal sanity check of my contracts, and it warned me of some clauses that I'd be better off removing/changing/refining. I was not aware of these nuances and would not have paid a lawyer for this as the contract was too small, but the changes were accepted by the client and reduced my risk exposure meaningfully.

4 - Learning a foreign language, I use it to check my draft emails and messages. It corrects them but also serves a tutoring role providing feedback, improving both the accuracy of my communication and my rate of language acquisition.

5 - Gemini Deep Research helped me narrow down tent models that met my fairly specific set of requirements. Very happy with the tent I ended up buying, from a brand that was not on my radar before.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is true, they are incredibly stupid. Empowered workers create better, more effective companies.

But they also create workers that can hop off the ship. If they're on a sinking one, they have no choice but to work hard to get back to shore.

> But they also create workers that can hop off the ship.

Sounds to me like a win for the workers, a win for the employer(in that they get better companies) and a win for society at large.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#29
post #2

The “reverse centaur” is a natural product of capitalism wanting workers to be as replaceable as possible in order to drive down wages. An ordinary “centaur” is counter to companies’ goals, they don’t want workers empowered.

If that is true, they are incredibly stupid. Empowered workers create better, more effective companies.

I don't think CEO class want better, more effective companies. They have nothing to gain by that. They want monopoly situation for themselves, locked customers and helpless dependent employees.

Re: How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots

#30
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is true, they are incredibly stupid. Empowered workers create better, more effective companies.

I don't think CEO class want better, more effective companies. They have nothing to gain by that. They want monopoly situation for themselves, locked customers and helpless dependent employees.

It depends but obviously they want both, both control and value.
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