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Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

joincolossus.com

321–330 of 377 posts

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop trying to impose your narrow-minded definition of art onto other people. If you disagree, that's fine, but you've lost my respect the moment you tell someone else that their definition of art is wrong.

Art without intention isn't art. The entire point of art is the human intention by it. The pattern on linoleum isn't art. The beautiful wood grain in my table isn't art. And shitty AI images/music aren't art.

The human intention doesn't disappear just because the execution involves algorithms instead of paintbrushes - digital or otherwise.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#322
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point though is AI wont make you rich. It is about value capture. They compare it to shipping containers. I think AI value will mostly be spread. Open AI will be more like Godaddy than Apple. Trying to reduce prices and advertise (with a nice bit of dark patterns). It will make billions, but ultimately by competing its ass off rather than enjoying a moat. The real moats might be in mineral mining, fabrication of…

That's 100% not the case. OpenAI is wedged between the unstoppable juggernaut that is Google at the high end and the state sponsored Chinese labs at the low end, they're going to mostly get squeezed out of the utility inference market. They basically HAVE to pivot to consumer stuff and go head to head with Apple with AI first devices, that's the only way they're going to justify their valuation. This is actually not…

I am being generous to OpenAI in my argument as it makes the point there is no moat better but yeah they could die.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#323
With AI everyone is a net loser.

People using it get dumber.

What is being produced is slop and discardable poc-like trash

The environmental costs of building and training LLMs are huge. That compute and water could have been useful for something.

Even the companies building and peddling AI are losers. They are not profitable, need constant billions of dollars of financial help to even syay afloat and pay their compute depth.

The worst part is that even bigger losers will be the general population. Not only are our kids gonna be dumber than us thanks to never having to think for themselved, but our pensions are tied to the stock market that will inevitably collapse when the realization that the top 30% of companies in terms of value are just dominoes waiting to collapse.

But the biggest loser of all is Elon Musk. Just because of who he is.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#325
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this just a result of technological progress? Technology has displaced entire fields of labor for... well, ever. I'm not unsympathetic to the problems this introduces to those workers, but I'm really not sure how it could be prevented; we can of course mitigate the issues by providing more social support to those affected by such progress. In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more peop…

> In the case of artistic expression becoming more accessible to more people The problem is that folks seem to be confused between artistic expression and actually good art. Let alone companies like Spotify cynically creating “art” so that they can take even more of the pie away from the actual artists.

Well putting aside the simple question of "who are you to say what is 'good' art"... are they really? GP says

> Mind you this is barrier to entry. These are shovelware quality assets and I’m not running a business. But now I’m some guy on the internet who can fulfil a hobby of his and develop a skill. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll hit a goldmine idea and commit some real money to it and get a real artist to help!

So apparently they recognize what's going on. In the same vein as me being able to enjoy silly crude animations on YouTube while also enjoying high-quality animations like Studio Ghibli; we can do both.

As for how companies will use AI to enrich themselves whenever possible; absolutely agree, but that's a separate discussion.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#326
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand how this could materially reduce costs compared to current restaurants where you order on the screen and pick up your tray at the counter when your name/number is called.

They dont. Theyre equivalent to those on screen menus that have been around since ~2015. The point is that the automation of the customer service part of restaurants existed before and disappeared for ~60 years.

That automation was nowhere near equivalent to today’s automation.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no idea what it was selling. A friend of mine liked to point out that if you couldn't remember what the brand was or what was being sold, then it wasn't effective advertising. It failed at the one thing it needed to do/be. And there's a lot of ineffective advertising. Either people don't notice it or they don't remember it. Massive amounts of m…

I think a lot of advertising is extremely effective in that it implants the brand in your subconscious through repetition and familiarity. I would much rather go to a local sandwich shop that a Subway, and I've been to a Subway maybe 10 times in my entire life, not once in over 15 years, and am not especially impressed by what I got for the money, and yet every time I go past a Subway my brain immediately goes "ooh l…

That's an advertisement that's working, and not what I was referring to. There are a lot of ads that don't hammer anything about the brand or product into your head, either because they are not memorable, don't communicate their subject matter well, or are placed/appear where they aren't effective.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not clear that being able to sample from a distribution == stealing.

Given that "AI" training needs millions of books, papers and web pages, it is a derivative work of all those books. Humans cannot even read a fraction of that and still surpass "AI" in any creative and generative domain. "AI" is a smart, camouflaged photocopier.

Photocopiers are legal. And every piece of art that has ever been produced is derivative.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only impossibile until it's not

Chaos theory. Look. It. Up. Avalanche effect COMPLETELY PREVENTS certain things from being predictable.

So, you can yell and scream all you like but everything, and I mean literally everything that we know was once "unknowable" "impossible" "complete chaos" "unpredictable"

There is only one thing that a person can never know, and that is the limit of their ignorance and incompetence.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#330
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI concentrates economic activity and leads to more natural monopolies (extremely likely), yeah, the lower level activity becomes more efficient but the macro economy becomes less efficient due to lower competition. Software has basically done the same thing, where we do things faster and the fastest thing that happens is accumulation of power and a lower overall quality of life for everyone due to that.

How does enabling every person on earth to create Hollywood-quality films (for better or worse) result in more natural monopolies?

The Internet for example is thought to be “democratizing” for society, but in reality some argue we’re now living under a system of “technofeudalism” [1] which is anything but. E.g. just a handful of Internet-enabled companies essentially rule the world. You can sit down and code an Amazon clone with or without AI, and both of them will be highly unlikely to topple the existing monopolies.

[1] https://thebeautifultruth.org/the-basics/what-is-technofeuda...

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