“OK,” the young man said, “but what can we do about the crash?” He was clearly very worried.
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that. I think it’s already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they’d fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of
it, but I don’t think Trump’ll do that, so –”
“But what can we do?“
We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving
using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and
the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.
I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming.
…
I’m not sure I entirely agree with Doctorow on this one. I’ll probably read his upcoming book on the subject, though.
I agree that, based on the ways in which AI is being used, financed, and marketed… we’re absolutely in an unsustainable bubble. There’s a lot of fishy
accounting, dubious business models, and overpromised marketing. I’m not saying AI’s useless: it’s not! But it’s yet proven
itself to be revolutionary, nor even on the path to being so, and it’s so expensive that it seems unlikely that the current “first dose is free” business model is
almost-certainly unsustainable.
But I’m not convinced that a resulting catastrophic economic collapse is inevitable. Maybe I’m over-optimistic, but I like to imagine that the bubble can
fizzle-out gradually and the actually-valuable uses of AI can continue to be used in a sustainable way. (I’m less-optimistic that we’ll find a happy-solution to prevent AI from being
used to rip off artists, but that’s another story.)
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
It’s a little wet and miserable this Twenty-Eighth of Bleptember, but what really perturbed this bleppy doggo was somebody she didn’t recognise moving a wheelie-bin outside their house.
What could they want? Can they be trusted? Might they have ham? 🐶
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Just a mini-blep this Twenty-Sixth of Bleptember, from a certain attention-seeking doggo who insisted on a cuddle from me while I sat in a Zoom meeting.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been away for a couple of days and she’s missed me… but this bleppy dog wanted lots of cuddles and reassurance as we prepared for the school run, this
Twenty-Fifth of Bleptember.
After standing completely stationary on the M25 for over an hour and a half and with no end in sight, I’m getting increasingly confident that I’m not going to catch my flight from
Gatwick whose gate closes… in half an hour. 😢
Developers just love to take what the Web gives them for free, throw it away, and replace it with something worse.
Today’s example, from Open Collective, is a dropdown box: standard functionality provided by the <select> element. Except
they’ve replaced it with a JS component that, at some screen resolutions, “goes off the top” of the page… while simultaneously disabling the scrollbars so that you can’t reach it. 🤦♂️
