This is bad news for everyone (well, except the high priests of the LLMs / nascent Cthulhoid godlings), but it certainly makes the communities who've successfully opposed data centers seem ever more justified in retrospect.
It also sustains the bubble for a bit longer. I'm genuinely curious/anxious to see when and how the bubble bursts. It could end up being something seemingly trivial or random and completely illogical that finally topples the jenga tower.
They're good analogies. It's possible to keep a Jenga tower going forever, just extremely difficult once it reaches the point of being all middle pieces.
It's certainly not possible to keep a Jenga Tower growing forever. For each floor you add you need to leave at least one piece in a lower floor. Eventually you run out of pieces. It's possible to "complete" a Jenga Tower, but at that point it has to stop growing.
The dot com boom was a bubble. Doesn't mean that the underlying web technology that powered it was bad or worthless. But the valuations definitely were. AI, in its current form, will be around for a long time, maybe even as ubiquitous as the internet is today, a few decades from now. But the situation right now can definitely be classified as a bubble.
If the need is driven by a bubble economy, when the bubble pops the demand disappears too. This can even lead to a separate bubble popping (see: the dotcom and telecom bubbles).
Yes, datacentres can be reused for other purposes but dark fibre didn't save the telecom bubble and the utility of train tracks didn't save the railway bubble.
The economics work out just fine. Their actual target business model is replace every knowledge worker. Their thought process is "look at all these people making 150k+, we can do their jobs for 10% of that, think how much money that would be if we had all of it"
Sure, the next step is complete regression to feudalism, but they aren't thinking that far ahead, they just want to take every job in existence that isn't physically turning a proverbial wrench.
the moment AI is capable enough to replace every knowledge worker and all knowledge workers are fired and/or dead the AI companies will just hike up the price for access to their bots until every company is paying at least as much if not more than what they were on human workers.
It doesn't work out for the owners of the capital. Their wealth is entirely based on their claims on future production that is consumed by people with money.
Then it's on to centralization of the "human" components of the workforce into company towns, robot armies and competition for natural resources that will be processed from raw.
It’s wild to me that anyone can have that thought and yet not think about what happens to everyone whose job you took. Especially in a country with citizens known for owning guns.
Especially after seeing what the “learn to code” movement has brought people into, I can’t imagine those people will just roll over and peacefully enter homeless encampments..
> Especially in a country with citizens known for owning guns.
This has always been a story Americans tell themselves to sleep better at night that has zero relation to reality.
The US is a country that has seen many injustices perpetrated by the government. From concentration camps for people of a certain descent to legal racial discrimination (and slavery before that) to wanton violence by security forces against innocent people (pick your favourite police/ICE/etc murder here).
When have armed Americans ever risen up against a government injustice? Best I can think of is the Oklahoma city bombing and I'm pretty sure that's not what you're all refering to.
Your list is embarrassing. Since 1973 (I'm not going further back because the recent examples are too bad to bother), there have been:
* 2 land disputes between federal land management and individuals that thought they deserve more rights over federal land. Hardly fighting against an injustice here, were they
* The BLM protests/unrest started by the murder of George Floyd. I don't recall Americans taking up arms against murderous cops, or anyone, really. The closest to arms taking I can remember is an underage guy going to a protest to "protect" against rioters, getting attacked and killing people in response. Hardly anyone fighting against government instilled injustice with their right to bear arms, is it?
* January 6, where a bunch of mentally challenged individuals tried to overturn the election results at the request of the loser of that election. There was no injustice done against the people in question, and they didn't use their arms against it, they just stormed a barely defended building. One of the shittiest coup attempts of all time, and if anything, for furthering injustice and government overreach than anything else.
Hunger and desperation are really powerful motivators. And violence and rioting are basically socially transmitted diseases.
You don't need everyone to wake up someday and think "Hey, I think those Jacobins in France had a good point" to have a revolution. You only need a few detonators.
If the societal conditions are ready, nobody can really stop the masses once they are ignited.
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