1. AI is sold to enterprise as a way to replace human labor with accurate robots. Middle management spooges all over every conference room. No more wages, no more dental plans, no more HR. They go all in, and a bubble is formed.
2. the bubble hype builds momentum, snowballing this effect. Investors are frothing for a piece. Money starts flowing in, the next big gold rush is here.
3. investment allows huge data centers to be built. Regulations are skirted, money is thrown around like crazy.
4. computing commodities are captured. The world’s supply of RAM, SSDs, GPUs, and hard drives are gobbled up. Consumer prices shoot through the roof, brands that have sold to consumers and enterprises alike for 30 years pack it up instantly. all anyone can afford are little dumb tablets with no ram that are basically only good for being displays for cloud apps <— you are here, this is about 20% complete
5. All communication starts to be done on cloud apps, all document saved to cloud drives, and all content created by humanity scanned for pattern-matcheing by AI. The aforementioned data centers, which we were told were simply for making Agi possible, support all this activity. I’m not talking about out the mechanical Turk LLMs they trotted out to fool all the middle managers, I’m talking about purpose built models looking for context and meaning in written words (like a specialized LLM to detect biases), patterns in financial documents, engineering designs for things that haven’t been announced yet.
6. we now rent this privilege from the corporations and if they dislike what we are doing they cut us off, essentially making us digitally homeless. The owning class are paid by us to be one step ahead of all markets, always winning and overvalued, and with the power to crush dissent like Spez deleting comments from the reddit database. Peter Thiel can end your whole fucking life just because you have immigrant parents. Marco Rubio can make one phone call and send a drone after your family if you’ve ever donated to a Palestine cause. It’s prison planet theory, but actually being done. Somewhere, Steve Bannon is smoking a cigar on a beach, thinking that if he was going to have to go through life without a functioning dick, At least he had this.

You best start believing in techno-fascist dystopias; you’re in one

I understand exactly why they keep adding it. They have put all of their eggs in the AI basket. Have seen that it is not profitable and the only way they can hope to make it look profitable and keep the bubble afloat is by forcing it on users to inflate usage metrics