A.I.: Low Quality, High Cost
The A.I. investment surge is the latest stupid thing that stupid people in positions of undeserved power will force down our throats. People who actually know how to make things are being laid off. Consumers are dealing with increasingly shitty products and services every day.
Unlike cryptocurrency and the Metaverse, which we could effectively ignore and hope it goes away, A.I. is entirely a top-down choice. And because our businesses are almost entirely monopolistic/monopsonic we likely won’t have alternatives for them to compete against.
Prediction: A decade or two after the A.I. boom new “disruptors” will show up in some industries and make “artisanal” products like the ones we’ve been making before 2021-ish. They’ll hire a bunch of humans (likely fewer than we currently use for the same jobs and at lower wages) to create those products and services. They will have marginally higher quality than the garbage A.I.-centric businesses shovel out and will cost more.
We’ll waste immeasurable human capital, have a world polluted with more minimally usable things, take yet another hit to wage growth, and have even more wealth syphoned from working people into capitalist wallets. And we probably still won’t have UBI or even universal healthcare.
Which sucks for billions of people, but is awesome for like twenty people…
So of course we’re gonna do it. 👍