Post · A small Bonfire corner on the internet

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic sums up the AI bubble:

"This isn't like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. [...] AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit-economics." Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money. [...]

Bain & Co says that the only way to make today's AI investments profitable is for the sector to bring in $2 trillion by 2030 (the Journal notes that this is more than the combined revenue of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple Nvidia and Meta). [...]

Today's AI bubble has absorbed more of the country's wealth and represents more of its economic activity than historic nation-shattering bubbles, like the 19th century UK rail bubble [...]

The most important thing is the investor story and the ensuing mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people. AI isn't going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips – but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

#AI

https://pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh (27 Sep 2025)

2qx

@2qx@mastodon.social replied · last week

@fcr @pluralistic

In a petrofascist economy, things that allow fossil fuel reserves to be monetized have value.

There are wells producing America's largest export that would be underwater financially without AI and BTC mining.

So things that use energy (giant pickups, giant homes, AI, BTC) are compulsory, not because they're efficient, but because they're inefficient. Because without gratuitous waste, the entire petro-dollar system would collapse.

Urzl

@gooba42@mastodon.social replied · last week

@fcr @pluralistic The Paperclip Maximizer already exists but because it's making money instead of paperclips, we don't recognize it.

The Corporation is already the out of control competing intelligence killing humanity. It's not an autonomous collection of robots that will do us in, it will be humans supporting the will of The Almighty Employer.

We're actively converting everything inherently valuable in the world into money which has zero inherent value.

Yrrsinn

@yrrsinn@chaos.social replied · last week

@gooba42 that's the point of @cstross Talk at #34c3 https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future @fcr @pluralistic

Poul-Henning Kamp

@bsdphk@fosstodon.org replied · last week

@gooba42 @fcr @pluralistic

This was forcefully brought home to me when IBM launched a thousand employees at WDC to win support for legislation which removed employee protections.