> What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism.
I see a lot of people want to blame capitalism, but look at any other system, and ultimately they all fail due to human greed. The only way to make capitalism work correctly is with regulation, because once monopolies and collusions are reached, the natural incentives disappear (i.e. the lowest cost service that delivers what the consumer values).
> Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.
Agreed. You will earn less money (relative to cost of living), tax will increase, but yet people will still pretend your quality of life has increased - but they haven't. Many services you now can't reach a human - at all. Emails have disappeared, phone lines have disappeared - I now have to waste 5 minutes speaking to a chat bot that I know cannot solve my issue for it to maybe allow me to type text to what it claims to be a human.
> LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you.
In a sense, most neural networks can be modelled as some form of Markov Model. What's becoming more obvious is that the structures of these models is super important, and there is still a lot to be learned.
> Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains.
Cars are a decentralised transport (as much as a transport system can be), whereas a train is a centralised transport system. The internet is also a transport system, but with packets instead of people, and this has had great success with a mixture of centralised and decentralised transport mechanisms.
The biggest problem with trains is that you create a single point of failure and an unnatural monopoly. Your bandwidth is also heavily reduced due to safety considerations (you want to travel fast over long distances, but need to increase the safety margin to do so). Unlike cars or internet packets, you can't divert a train. One can imagine a new protest group "just stop energy" (instead of "just stop oil") quite trivially bringing an entire Country to a halt by placing cars on all of the tracks.
> AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models.
Interesting to see that none of the climate activists so far have gone for clear winners like crypto mining, or AI training. Instead they would rather keep making the life of the every-day person miserable, as if it isn't miserable enough already.
> You will never trust another product review.
You find that people pay for reviews anyway. Somebody I know gets sent Amazon products to review, and they get to keep the products. The more positive reviews you give, the more you get selected for future reviews. The only way around this is reputation - I find somebody you trust who has reviewed a product. It's why Linus Tech Tips (LTT) and the recent review scandal was important - they have a reputation and it does inform consumers about expensive computing equipment investments.