AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots
I’m not a Leninist by any means. But on a mass scale, the need to grow for a Capitalist economy? Manifests itself in ways Lenin described as “Capitalist Imperialism”. If you only reach one chapter, the author says that’s Ch7, which becomes a short essay.
Lenin Argues against Carl Kautsky’s assertion that such a prospect looks like grabbing Land. Lenin argues that Capitalism needs no such political arm directly, only ownership of the economy by a foreign body. Eventually investment capital runs out of fertile ground at home and must find new markets to control.
As Russia’s economy stagnated, and the room for investment dried up, much of Putin’s moves were to open other countries to Russian Finance Capital. When that failed, taking new land became the fallback for having new oil and shipping investments. Not just land, but resources as Kautsky discussed.
And here Doctorow breaks down how that looks for single firms in monopoly or oligopoly, specifically in the tech sector, and its drive to constantly " invent new markets". A perfect compliment.
That’s what these data centers are - Empire. They will swallow your ability to compute. Moderate it. Control it. Direct it towards only their ends. Because at the end game, the most value extraction comes from not simply selling you a product, but selling you as a product to other businesses. Enshittification will continue until you can out-bid the corpos for your data sovereignty. Reverse Centaurs are easy to train, replace, and shift. Centaurs? Require actual investment, giving the worker some power.
The need for control? Emerges organically from the consequences of noncompliance. In both the puppet-state in response to its international industrial overlords, or its alternative in direct management by a foreign state. The money must flow, the growth must happen, or the party is over for much broader than their own dinner table.
The growth must happen, or the very laws of a market crush the entire society down to well below this peak. No more growth stocks in growth industries, just cutthroat competition from the same corpos that keep out upstarts… Until some shock ruins somebody’s bag, and we get a chance at something interesting like the tech sector used to be.
Great to see Lenin’s analyses being applied more often. His concept of imperialism is the single greatest contribution to capitalist analysis after Marx.
I wanted C3PO from the AI boon. Instead, I lost my job and was replaced by AI.
-Sci-fi nerds who were hopeful of the future and AI
Hopefully some cheap hardware.
Hopefully dirt cheap gpus and ram when the bubble bursts
Unfortunately most of the GPUs aren’t usable by gamers. We aren’t talking mining booms where miners buy up gaming GPU stock, then sell cheap when the bubble bursts.
We’re talking companies buying huge GPUs that don’t have video outputs and have an altered software stack to what’s used for gaming, missing all kinds of features and game specific patches.
Granted, many 4090/5090s were also used, and those will be usable by gamers, but even with a significant price drop on those, only richer gamers will find that to be viable.
Somewhat similar story for memory - a lot of it is tied up in HBM, or as GDDR on enterprise graphics cards.
And their energy usage must be outrageous
don’t have video outputs and have an altered software stack to what’s used for gaming, missing all kinds of features and game specific patches.
True about those without video outputs. But in Linux, game specific patches are in Mesa and not in the graphics drivers for example.
Additionally, in windows (linux too?) one could use Moonlight / Sunshine to compute on the GPU and stream to secondary device (either directly, like say to a Chromecast, or via the iGPU to their monitor). Latency is quite small in most circumstances, and allows for some interesting tricks (eg: server GPUs allow you to split GPU into multiple “mini-gpus” - essentially, with the right card, you could host two+ entirely different, concurrent instances of GTA V on one machine, via one physical GPU).
A bit hacky, but it works.
Source: I bought a Tesla P4 for $100 and stuck it in a 1L case.
GPU goes brrr
I would pickup an inference GPU to run models locally. I can see a benefit in that especially if they’re on the cheap
I certainly wouldn’t let something like a cheap RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server with 96GB of VRAM go to waste. I’d put it to good use with Blender rendering, running models I actually care about, and maybe some Games on Whales.
AI is in the hype section of the emerging technology curve. A lot of good will come out of AI once we calm down and stop losing our damn minds.
It won’t be just cheap GPUs either. It will be things like more accurate cancer diagnoses, as Cory says near the top.
What we need is for regulation to catch up and start incentivizing the right things…that is, the things that will benefit society as a whole, not just the oligarchs.
Most of the hype isn’t about machine learning stuff for cancer diagnoses though. When the average C-level guy talks about AI they mean almost exclusively LLMs. Fancy autocomplete is their solution to everything, from summarizing an email to agentic OSes. And that’s just not going to happen.
That won’t happen until the brick wall is not only hit, but completely demolished. While Democrats are significantly more rational than Republicans, they are still almost as much in the oligarchs’ collective pockets. Only the Progressives give me any hope, but there aren’t nearly enough of them in Congress yet to make shit happen.
It is already happening.
The distractions is that you only see the AI companies which have been blitz scaling, dumping unlimited amounts of money into orders and plans without any revenue plans for the other side. This move only pays off if they can essentially buy the entire market and lock out any competition (and then the rent-seeking enshittification will being). The long-term prospects of these companies is shaky at best, but that doesn’t matter to the people currently dumping funding into them… they’re going to sell everything at the IPO and leave some other suckers with the bag.
Because of this, there are many many times the amount of advertising and promotional hype than is justified by the actual progress in the field.
Everyone is familiar with this. If someone says AI, do you think of ChatGPT or an LLM? That’s because you’ve been affected by this hype wave that is being intentionally propagated in order to drive valuations for AI companies who are looking to hit an IPO so all of the early investors can get out quick before the bubble bursts (It’s like a crypto rugpull, except it is using the stock market instead of a meme coin).
‘Actual’ AI. By which I mean machine learning, including neural networks, has made huge progress in a lot of fields following the discovery of the Transformer model (the T in GPT). The, very real and impressive, improvements that have been gained are not flashy, they do not make for immediate next-quarter profits and are mostly public discoveries coming out of academia so they benefit everyone which makes them worthless to the people trying to horde emerging technology in order to push this bubble/rugpull.
Your life will be WAY more affected by the slow and incremental work being done in the field of robotics than having a slightly more personable chatbot. Your life or the lives of people you love will be saved by the advances in protein folding which allow rapid development of new treatments which can be customized to the individual. Cancer therapies that are optimized for the exact mutations in the patient’s cancer cells or customized medicine aimed at reducing side effects or harmful interactions.
I was already aware of much of what you said, although I probably hadn’t gazed down the road quite as far.
However, what I was referring to was the regulation the commenter I replied to was calling for. What I meant was that proper legislation wouldn’t happen until the “rugpull” you described actually happens, and the economy finally goes into the recession it would otherwise already be deep into at this point. Being delayed so long may make it especially ugly, I fear - or it may just bridge us into the next thing that keeps the economy propped up, such as the robotics you mentioned.
May you live in interesting times, indeed.
I’m cynical to think that proper legislation won’t happen even after the crash. There’s simply too much money available to buy bribes/motorcoaches for Supreme Court Justices (Clarence Thomas) and other cheaper politicians.
May you live in interesting times, indeed.
I invite you to shelter against the storm: https://lemmy.world/c/dull_mens_club
I actually feel the same, but I was trying to not be too much of a downer.
Thanks for the recommendation, but I’m already subscribed. If you read the post a couple months ago from someone who just got a tiny phone, I made a longish comment on it with my own mini-review of it.
not “our” minds. theirs.
techbros are the ones causing it to the detriment of everyone else.
Wow. I feel like I just entered a Time Machine back to the 90s and 00s. I didn’t realize Corey Doctorow was still writing blog stuff on other venues.
He’s been writing a lot lately … ever since enshittification hit the fans
His blog: https://pluralistic.net/
Back in them boingboing days.
I miss boibgboing. Never been able to get into it since they paywalled commenting.
Not to mention all the adverts after all the stories … including anti-capitalism stories
The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free!
Since the beginning of human history …
PC parts
“Reverse centaur” is a super clunky term, I think we should say “Minotaur” instead.
A Centaur has the head of a person and the body of a beast, a Minotaur is the opposite.
Pretty sure a superb writer like Cory chose reverse centaur for a reason - to make it clearer that a human is becoming the servant of a machine.
The term isn’t just about which half is human though, it’s about the dynamic flip in humans relationship with tooling.
The “tool” part of the centaur is the horse body. All of the hard to duplicate bits of a human (reasoning, processing, fine motor skills) with the strength and speed of a horse. A reverse centaur is when a complex system is designed that needs a “dumb human” to do the complex bits while the system uses humans as an appendage.
Reverse centaur may sound clunky but is a really elegant one liner for Doctorow’s thesis.
Minotaurs have some potential for badass imagery. Reverse Centaur sounds intentionally clunky.
most of these companies will probably fail. it’s expected. but the AI paradigm is not going anywhere
I’ll salvage me a cheap PC upgrade once this stupid ship finally sinks.
Possibly, but components from AI centers cannot be reused easily (or at all) for consumer machines.
Hopefully we have ways to recycle the old chips. Some of the GPU chips could maybe be put on consumer boards? I’ve already heard of memory chips being recycled, except HBM of course.
Of course a lot of these companies would probably just prefer to put them in a trash compactor lol.
their leaders need to be put into the trash compactor for once, where they belong.
Haven’t read the article yet but hopefully it’s cheap used drives
Why do people keep listening to this guy?
Because he knows his shit.
Sure but nobody important cares and he’s just repeating himself ad nauseum.
and he’s just repeating himself ad nauseum
this is usually how you build mindshare of anything
I’m not sure it’s targeted at anyone “important” (what a classist term!). It is just analyzing the situation and predicting what happens next, for you and I to be prepared. It also hastens the end of the bubble ever so slightly, which is good - the sooner this poison-laced bandaid is ripped off the world’s economy, the faster we can start to rebuild something more meaningful, but now with new productivity tools by our side.
nobody important cares
And you’re sure of that because …
In most fairy tales, it takes more than one blow to kill the dragon…
This man has really built a career and following off saying common sense things…
I don’t know why people keep eating it up or acting like he’s a genius, but at least this time he isn’t coining a new term to “explain” something that leads to everyone using it but not understanding what’s actually happening.
He’s a good writer and leader on the technology front. He gets a bit repetitive but that’s because he is trying to get the word out.
He’s actually built a career on being an author…
I’m also assuming you only read the headline
I don’t think he’s necessarily a genius, but he is a force for good and a great writer. We do need someone to keep stating the truth, keep saying what’s right and what’s wrong, this is literally how we win the information war currently waged against us.
It’s the same with the genocide experts calling out genocide, or the eco-activists calling out climate change. It might be obvious common sense to you, but it might not be to other people, and this is precisely why it needs to be shouted from every rooftop we have available.
Oh, and also, if you actually read his works he clearly does more than just state the obvious and coin new terms (even though both of those are important too). He is deeply and intimately familiar with the technical and social structures of the modern internet, his analysis of various phenomena and trends is usually on-point and has some predictive power (it is more dialectical-materialist than most tech journalism out there). Most importantly he offers solutions to the issues facing us, and practices what he preaches too.
He is deeply and intimately familiar with the technical and social structures of the modern internet, his analysis of various phenomena and trends is usually on-point and has some predictive power
If you think he predicts anything, you’re streets behind
Most importantly he offers solutions to the issues facing us
He repeats what anyone could find in a five minute Google search from articles written by others.
I’ve never seen an original thought, he’s the Carlos Mencia of tech.
What you might think is “common sense” may not be for others. There is value in this being documented, otherwise the person without “common sense” may be influenced by someone with an agenda who does document their thoughts.
Same as when people make fun of “obvious” research, there is value in having it peer reviewed as a reference for future researchers.
There is value in this being documented, otherwise the person without “common sense” may be influenced by someone with an agenda who does document their thoughts.
Oh yeah, because no one has “documented” that AI is bullshit yet…
Only the brave Cory Doctrow could gather and disseminate this to the masses!
/s
The fuck’s with your beef? This is just one article he wrote. The guys written hundreds of pieces, maybe thousands, about all sorts of technology related issues
Timing. Saying common sense stuff before others gives you an edge and being the first to say it with any eloquence, in a way people want to listen and are accepting of what’s being said. A lot of what Cory Doctorow says can be hard to hear or hard to deliver without sounding condescending like NDT. His talent is in the delivery.
He also has a ton of experience in this space, he’s worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for almost 25 years. On top of that, he’s whip-smart and enjoyable to read or listen to
Saying common sense stuff before others
Yeah bro…
No one else has pointed out AI will fail before 1/18/26…
Only the great Cory Doctrow could identify something that no other human has ever even contemplated.
I heard next, he’s going to release a blog post that Nazis might not be nice people
Again, did you even read the oped
