I’d respect the VC grift of “rich people give us way too much money and we do nothing with it and become moderately well off” if it didn’t cause so much damage.
Like, its basically the idea of paying people to do stuff that might not be “productive” but gets them to try things out. But there is no oversight, no regulation, no incentive to care what happens as a result in 3 years time, let alone 50. We should be doing it, but with like restaurants and FOSS programmers and engineers. Move landscapers to public lands to clear out invasives. Move the spacex dorks to nasa and work on an actual 50 year plan to get men on mars in an actually smart way. Have the ‘AI’ dorks actually work to resolve problems that COULD be solved with neural nets/LLMs. Pay them to just do something weird and unique that might not be the “best” but employs them and offers something unique to the community.
Instead, its ultimately grift, useless movement of capital and resources to appear as growth, fumbling about blindly hoping to hit the next dotcom bubble. Real “Useless jobs” when actually productive meaningful work exists, with the same skills that these people have, but isn’t “good” enough for the demons of capitalism to invest in.
Its gonna hurt a lot of people directly related to the “computing industry” (haha i’m in danger) but I don’t see it effecting the average person.
My company has its fingers in a lot of pies overall. The most we’re doing “ai” is basically advanced parsing of data. The type of stuff that the average joe would never see ultimately. If the llm beasts decided to die tomorrow, then we’d have to reassign like 3 people. In an organization with at least 10 teams of 4+ people. In a company with thousands and thousands of employees. And specifically, we’re the type of company that IF it were to collapse, average joe would 100% hear about it and be effected in a somewhat meaningful way.