The anti-human ideology cannot die soon enough
I've been resisting the 'AI' thing, the best I can, as a matter of principle. Maybe I've already shared my very strong opinions on LLM-generated slopware here before, but this post is about how the pseudo-religious belief in 'AI' is changing society for the worse, and what I'd imagine would come of it. How that became such a problem is a confluence of things.
The Tech Bros are psychopaths. More specifically, if you took their own words at face value, the Tech Bros are Epstein-class psychopaths, openly committed to an anti-human ideology, who boast, on stage, about how they spend obscene amounts of money on something they believe might destroy humanity. They really couldn't be more brazen about it. This is essentially what every bootlicking 'AI' evangelist and consultant is proselytising.
And there is the more nuanced explanation of the 'AI' psychosis: CEOs and LinkedIn 'thought leaders' (who were grifting as blockchain experts three years ago, and as quantumn computing experts before that) have been huffing the 'AI' fumes simply because everyone else is doing it, and nobody wants to risk their careers by admitting they potentially blew company money on something that provides little to no benefit.
On top of that, we have the 'growth at all costs' thing that defies the common sense of those who believed investors would be satisfied with having shares in a business that has a healthy and sustainable income. The VC investors are demanding exponential growth, rather than profit, even when it means running businesses, and whatever services they provide, into the ground. That's why we're reading about mass layoffs in several corporations making record profits, as CEOs attempt to replace people with LLMs and automation. Who is likely getting laid off at Microslop right now? Well, it's largely the people who made a career in developing Co-Pilot in the first place, and in training it to replace people.
My prediction is that the 'AI' bubble will burst by the end of 2028, and very likely within the next 12 months. Some believe it's beginning to happen already. Investors, who are always demanding exponential growth, had pissed close to a $Trillion on something that could never become profitable in its current form, and investors will start to realise this. A considerable amount of that investment went in data centres that aren't being constructed, and likely wouldn't be because local communities are pushing back. Chatbots are being forced on everyone and everything, but most of us percieve them as irritating and intrusive. The currently subsidised subscriptions/tokens to LLMs, and everything downstream of 'hyperscalers' will become more expensive, likely to the point it would be cheaper to re-hire developers. SaaS vendors are definitely going to hike their subscription tier prices when that happens.
When the 'AI' bubble does burst, the effects of that on the wider economy won't be good, but every company and organisation that replaced people with automation and 'AI' is in decline anyway. Automation might reduce costs and increase profits in the short-term, but decline inexorably follows. Employees who become replaceable cogs in a machine stop caring about the machine, and so do the customers. The company loses the essence of what made it successful in the first place.
What would happen, in the very unlikely event the bubble didn't burst, though? I think a new renaissance of art and culture would happen. I'm going to riff about it here, since I have only a vague conception of the forms it might take.
We're currently staring down the barrel of increasingly bland uniformity of design and fashion generated by algorithms recursively ingesting their own slop. Ever wondered why 80% of vehicles and corporate pub looks the damn same, and how everything is sanitised and monocultured? Every new building is minimalist in design, and that's not a result of artistic choice. Everything on the corpo Web is corporate marketing, and says nothing of value. One thing 'AI' cannot do is produce anything original or inspiring. It will generate something derivative of this blandness.
I think it would lead to something that might be termed 'Gen Punk'. The need for creativity, meaning and expression are basic human needs. People will always seek meaning in being able to do things for themselves, and in exercising their capacity to create something expressive. There will also be people who seek beauty in things different to the slop around them, and adopt a style.
This thing I call 'Gen Punk' would be a subculture of human creativity, beauty and individual expression. These things could never be entirely suppressed by a mainstream culture that accepts corpo slop as the default.