I heard recently this summary:
The US economy depends on two things:
They don't have a plan. It's pigs at the trough.
Yup. The people pushing AI are not concerned with the social or economic reprocussions of pushing AI. They just want line go up.
The "Don't Look Up" greed + willful ignorance will crush us all.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Businesses operate on three timescales. Monthly, quarterly and annually. Anything beyond that they're not even thinking about.
When a company talks about long term strategy you can ignore everything they say after. It means nothing.
So AI can make them more money in the short term. They don't understand the problem even if it's right in front of them.
I feel this is always true for public companies, while there are some exceptions in private ones.
From what I've noticed, with AI companies, it's usually not "annual" but "annualized", which is just an estimate. And it doesn't seem like there are any rules to calculating that estimate, you can just grab the best 30-day period of operation, multiply it by 12 and claim millions in annualized revenue. And then they usually just sell to someone based on this estimation, since it's almost never profitable to build something on top of existing infrastructure of the main players in this market and maintaining your own is just not feasible.
Anything beyond that they’re not even thinking about.
Every place I've had a white-collar office job, there's been a 5-year plan. But the plan is typically a flippant and unrealistic goal, I suppose the purpose of which is to temporarily boost morale and to be a cult-like litmus test to see which employees can ignore reality.
Two of the more egregious examples: I worked in what was considered a medium sized company (maybe 30ish employees at the time). Management decided their 5-year goal was that we were going to grow large enough to own/build a skyscraper downtown. Another was at a relatively unknown regional retain chain that couldn't even compete with Walmart whose 5 year goal was to become a household name around the world.
Have you ever met Capitalism™ ? The guy doesn't really do long term plans
Answer. They don't fucking have a plan. At all.
And they don't care. They care about profits now, not profits 5 years from now. That is a problem for future CEOs to solve.
Yep, need line to go up this quarter and the few following, no further planning needed.
You pay me $10 to punch you in the face. I pay you $10 to kick me in the balls. We just increased our country's GDP by $20.
My 401k has gotten up into the 5 digit range a couple times, but emergencies have required me to to drain it. Retirement is a dream I rarely harbor.
I'm working until the day I die. My mother fancies herself retired and rots away in a house she imagines she owns, but it has been property of the bank since before I was born in the 80s. A mortgage that was essentially renting with extra steps.
I'm just whining now, so I'll stop.
It's topical whining though, so it's allowed
Sell to other billionaires ad nauseum. Let the rest of humanity starve. The usual kings and peasants model
The executives sell the corporate plane piece by piece while still in the air, then jump out in a golden parachute while the remains of the company nose dive to a fiery end.
This; look at how short-term they’re already thinking.
They will see the writing on the wall long before they actually have any genuine fear for business. And they’ll take the money and run, just like they already do now.
It is all a con. There is no endgame. They aren't thinking that far ahead. And when the reality hits them it will land on them like a cartoon piano. They'll never see it coming.
The idea is just to get there first. If you make it one quarter before your competition then you get a a really good quarter.
Long terms plans don't matter to CEOs. Long term stability is not rewarded by capitalism.
Kill off all of the poors they no longer need and live in a utopia being served by robots.
Thats the fucking crazy part, they simply can't plan long term because they will be outcompeted by people only planning short term and that can't be allowed.
Besides, if the bourgeois automated every job they'd just kill us so that we stop being a problem
Oh, you have no idea. If you don’t have a job (or 5), then you’re going to prison for being a vagrant. Or they do some dystopian shit where you are in the equivalent work labor camp, where you are provided basic life necessities in exchange for paying off your debt by working based on your skills. No skills? Manual labor in farms or construction.
People really have no idea what we’re complacently walking into. If you’re not rich, and I mean a few million american dollarooos or trump bucks… say next 10 years…? You’re fucked.
Falling rate of profit by karl marx predicted this. Self destructive nature of capitalism
A socialist revolution is the only solution and it will come.
the short-term plan is to slurp up all the stuff while they can. The long term plan is that there is no place for plebs in the automated future. The unwritten prologue to their sci-fi adventure is us commoners being abandoned to starve on a poisoned and resource-depleted mud ball as the intrepid billionaires go off to explore the cosmos with their robot pals.
Honestly you're giving them way too much credit. There's no long-term plan. They're incapable of having long-term plans. Most these people can't think past next quarter.
Capitalism is a rabid dog, that only managed to serve the middle class well in the past because it was kept muzzled and on a tight leash.
Successive, and successful attempts to ‘unleash the beast’ have left us bit, and apologies for mixing metaphors here, but there is probably no way left, to get the genie back into the bottle:
Undoing 50+ years of damage would take time, especially when faced with resistance from those that stand to benefit most from the current broken system (think the Top 1% of the 1%), and that is time that we simply do not seem to have.
Climate change has made large parts of the Earth uninhabitable.
Now civilization is collapsing and the remaining humans are fighting for their very survival.
Now the companies that destroyed the world have neither raw materials nor anyone to produce or buy their useless products.
What is their plan to make money if there is no longer any social order and therefore no trust in currencies?
Well at that point they will all go into their big luxury bunkers. They haven't really thought further than that, presumably they think that the world will recover if they stay down there for long enough. I assume they think they're immortal or have cryogenic freezes, I don't think there is much of a real plan there.
Scrub the palace floors... Fight amongst ourselves.... Froth at the mouth about the scapegoats they've chosen for us...
Edit to add: I should probably recommend State Lottery by Propagandhi, from which I lovingly stole these lines.
I'm guessing they will lobby th government to give out credits. They will then trade materials with each other, allow the masses to just starve and die off. They don't actually want money, they want absolute power.
They only need us to make stuff. Once we are redundant, they won't care about selling (to us)
People like Peter Thiel literally want to kill off most of humanity. They see us as dead weight.
Nobody is thinking beyond next quarter.
What's funny is that virtually everyone acknowledges it. Even Trump acknowledges it when he said that "China thinks in decades". But the Western capitalist culture is too strongly ingrained that the instinct to be greedy overrides any rational sense.
Tax any form of automation, be it software or hardware, and pay everyone a universal income from it.
It's UBI, and no, UBI is not a real socialist plan. It keeps the rest of us poor with little possibility of social mobility.
The plan is billionaires sell to each other
These "people" in charge of corporations genuinely forgot that the workers they underpay are the consumers who they on rely to give them money.
Remember the hype about 3D tv’s? That’s AI now.
Getting rid of money and having a heavily stratified society with the current wealthy at the top. Like a cheesy SciFi premise but realized here to live in.
The wealth doesn't disappear, it just ends up concentrated.
Goods and services will just be something most people will no longer be able to afford, and they go into poverty. Business will reconfigure to support the lifestyles of the very rich at prices only they can afford, because that's where the money has gone.
Things will get so expensive, people will have to sell their assets (i.e. house) to be able to resist poverty. People without assets won't even get that parachute.
If we don't reverse this concentration of wealth, 99% of people will be living in slums before long.
The fact AI is going to hoover up everyone's job over the next couple of decades, is really just a continuation of a trend we've been seeing since the 80s: the rich are taking all the wealth and leaving none for us
I see that 4chan has got as far as recognising the dichotomy between short-term and long-term gratification. They are evolving faster than I thought possible. Perhaps by 2050 they'll have advanced as far as common courtesy. Well you never know.
It's like when horses were replaced by automobiles. the economy kept going, just maybe with more glue and less oats.
They've already made a shitload of money. Now they're consolidating their extreme privilege into violent political control.
And when bubble pops, the rich will be paid immediately via an inflation tax on the poor as per usual...
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/13/1163180140/silicon-valley-bank-is-it-a-bailout-barofsky
They didn't think that far. They just fired everyone and replaced them with Ai.
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