Cogito Ergo Slum

He gives his harness bells a shake.

What will survive of him is love

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

“A.I.” is the largest act of grift I have ever seen.

Lotsa folks on here know that what is currently being touted as “A.I.” is not, in fact, intelligent. Most folks on this backwater of a hellsite know that an LLM is naught but an overcomplicated Autocomplete.

You know who doesn’t know that?

The folks selling it.

One of the key distinctions between the 20th and 21st centuries is that, these days, most of the Leadership of large companies have little-to-no understanding of how their business actually operates. They’re hedge fund managers and financial advisors: Money People, not Engineers.

Elon Musk is a famous example: he has very little formal training in electrical engineering or rocketry or computer science, and largely got to where he is today by being a tech enthusiast who happened to inherit Apartheid Emerald Mine Money. Like the rest of his ilk, he has no need to learn these things; he can just hire the expertise. So the story goes.

But hidden behind the sales pitch for A.I. are certain conversations that you’ll only hear if you listen to boring economic summits intended for people who make more in a day than you do in a year: the Second Industrial Revolution is nigh.

The first time, (the story goes) it was manual labor; the Blue Collar Workers, who were replaced by machines. This time, the machines are going to replace your cognitive labor; you will no longer have to pay for White Collar Work; we have a Machine that does it for you!

For nearly a decade now, very wealthy people who were interested in becoming more wealthy have heard this story, and their ears have perked up, and they have cut very large checks for research and development on this most obvious of investment opportunities.

They did this because the people telling them this story truly and earnestly believed in the story themselves. I know Elon does.

Moneymen do not like cautionary tales. They do not want to hear about Betamax. They are people who have lived statistically improbable lives and have wildly miscalibrated senses of practical ground-level realities. They are that extremely small slice of people who have won everything they have ever tried and have never learned to fear failure.

There’s one major problem with the story: GenAI and LLMs cannot do what they purport to do, and they never will. The Second Industrial Revolution is not particularly nigh.

And now these Tech company’s leaders are on the hook for upwards of a trillion dollars worth of investment capital that, increasingly, is looking like it will never return a fraction of what was invested. A lot of very powerful people are getting increasingly impatient. Something was promised.

So that’s a big part of why it’s getting shoved into everything, everywhere, all at once: the wealthiest people in our society are all grifting each other to the tune of thousands of billions of dollars.

When I was probably too young to use computers, my dad showed me how to use our Windows 95 PC. He opened up Paint, let me doodle for a while, and showed me how to save. He closed the window, pointed to the icon we created on the desktop and said "Click on that twice and you can look at it whenever you want."

I double-clicked, but my masterpiece didn't appear. Nothing but a tiny monochrome hourglass. I was confused, a little frustrated. I said "Where is it?" and my dad pointed at the humming computer tower and said "It's thinking." Not a second later there was my art once again.

I can not overstate the impact of the idea that the computer is often just "thinking" and needs a second. This single-handedly made me so much more patient with technology in general.

I remember having a friend over and showing her Barbie Fashion Designer and whenever there was a loading screen she would furiously mash the left and right mouse buttons until the next thing happened. And this was the first time I experienced empathy for the machine. Like, I knew logically that computers were objects and not people, but seeing the impatient clicking still felt like I was watching someone getting hurt - being abused simply for needing more time to think than a person might.

"What is wrong with you?" is what I wanted to say. But I also figured she was never taught it that way. In a sense, my dad was also teaching me to be patient with people when they don't understand something. So I just said "We don't need to do that, it's just thinking."

She continued to mash the clicker on every loading screen.

As an adult when things go awry on the computer I find myself handling things a bit more thoughtfully, entering problem-solving mode and even asking my PC gentle questions aloud. Going into task manager to see if maybe it just has a lot on its plate, or if some app is bothering it, or if maybe I've given it a big ask just now. I give it room to breathe, I clean it, I shut it down so it can rest.