Comment on Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron
SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Capitalism working as intended
Comment on Five tech giants are hiding $1.65tn in AI debt, using the trick that toppled Enron
SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Capitalism working as intended
DdCno1@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Given your username and where it’s registered, you will not like the answer, but: Socialists were also notorious for cooking the books to hide their failures, even more so than dirty capitalist pigs. It’s one of the reasons why the system failed.
This doesn’t make the AI bubble okay, of course. I’m only writing this, because your smug comment combined with your user name are particularly ironic.
Another thing: Had LLMs like we have them now been available in the '70s and '80s, the likes of East Germany and the Soviet Union would have been all over them in a desperate bid to save their economic system, just like they tried to with computerized planning and automation back then, wasting ridiculous and economically ruinous amounts of resources on extremely inefficient chip production before they collapsed. In a way, current-day tech giants and the corporate world in general are repeating this mistake in a desperate bid to tasks part in the “next big thing” to get out of the stagnation they found themselves in.
Call it history repeating itself or rhyming - either way, I’m noticing some patterns here.
tracyspcy@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I’m struggling to get the point of your comment. Let me try to squeeze some ideas from your post:
PS If you feel painful to read this, so did others who read your post.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
I have a hunch you took this personally. Nah, I must be hallucinating.
Their historic record is considerably worse. I don’t even need to bring up gulags, mass starvation and the abysmal living and human rights conditions of every Socialist regime throughout history to support this point (but it doesn’t hurt).
This does not mean that pure capitalism is fine either (I used to consider myself a smug and enlightened centrist - can you tell?), but it tends to work the best with a fair bit of socialism injected in key areas (social safety net, high taxes on wealth, strong regulations and institutions, robust democratic decision making, lots of economic freedom and high social mobility), as in the Nordic model, which is arguably the best thing humans have come up with so far.
I didn’t say that, but it was definitely a strongly contributing factor. I mentioned East Germany in particular, since it spent a fortune on setting up a competitive chip industry to achieve parity with Western and Japanese companies, but failed. The debacle that was their infamous 1 MBit chip, which cost 1 Billion Ostmark to develop (at a time when the country was struggling with high debts it owed to West Germany), but never achieved more than 20% yields in pre-production and was never production-ready illustrates just how hopeless the endeavor was. By the time the chip was in said pre-production state, Japan was already producing 4 MBit chips en masse, at economic yields, of course. I can’t find the numbers on how much of the state budget went into this, but it was a considerable portion, at the cost of everything else. Literally their hail Mary.
Ironically, these investments did pay off in the long run, just not for them: The area where the East German government concentrated its chip production is now known as the German silicon valley. Investments into education and research in particular laid the groundwork for the current and very competitive market-driven chip industry and other IT companies that have settled there.
No. Current-day tech giants are in search of something that promises them more perpetual growth in a finite world, where almost all viable technological niches are already saturated. Smartphones are a solved issue: Everyone has settled on glass rectangles with high-res touchscreens, the hardware and software for them is so mature that even ten year old devices are still sufficient today. Gimmicks like foldables are expected to remain fringe. Same with conventional PCs and laptops: Times when a device was obsolete after four years or sooner are long over. Cloud services and virtualization have similarly reached their peak, to the point that there’s a counter movement back towards local IT.
All of this means that easy avenues for more growth are already clogged up, so after some brief excursions into crypto and NFT, earlier and much smaller bubbles, it’s AI with its promise to replace costly human white collar labor with cheaper software that doesn’t talk back, doesn’t form unions or have uppity ideas about redistributing wealth or getting rid of greedy CEOs. Digital slaves, if you will, ideally as intelligent or more intelligent than humans, but without any ability to shape its own destiny. It’s not happening, of course, just as delusional as trying to automate yourself out of the inherent issues of centrally planned economies, but everyone needs to pretend that it might one day, because their livelihoods depend on it. They have invested too much, are in too deep to pull out, are afraid that if one of them does, the house of cards comes crashing down.
I will not pretend that any of this is particularly insightful, but since you appeared to have struggled with the historic parallels, I thought I’d elaborate on each point a little. I hope this doesn’t cause you any additional pain, but if it does, you should be able to deal with it as a strong, rugged Socialist individual used to hardships in service of a better future. No pain, no glorious workers’ and peasants’ revolution, am I right?
tracyspcy@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Oh boi. Save some words for yourself, stop wasting them on me. Don’t have time to read it rn, maybe later
deft@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
Most countries should be all over LLMs
Whether people want to admit it or not. AI will be the thing that takes the next step in most areas of influence. It’s literally the next industrial or atomic revolution. Just because there is an AI bubble and the companies around it are doing all they can to bail out the water of a sinking ship doesn’t make the actual tech itself bad or stupid.
That said all systems are corrupt. This whole capitalism vs socialism shit just exposes anyone who thinks that way as an idiot. It’s not red vs blue , it’s not an is or isn’t sort of thing.
XLE@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
/s?
deft@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
Imagine thinking a breakthrough in protein folding is a joke.
Do you understand how computers work or why they were ever useful? Or just make pretty color box light change?
SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Aw, beehaw. As expected. Corruption is a cog in the machine. You pigs call it lobbying sometimes. You’re almost there but still unable to grasp that embezzlements are bound to happen in every market economy, planned or not that happens in capitalist systems, what those economies really were although severely restricted by NATO.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
How does a defensive alliance restrict economic systems?