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posted by hubie on Thursday March 16 2023, @04:36AM   Printer-friendly

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble (09 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow:

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea – known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water – changed its name to "Long Blockchain Corp." Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

[...] The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn't the peak of the blockchain bubble – rather, it was the start of blockchain's final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022's blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

[...] They were amateurs. Their attempt to "make fetch happen" only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

[...] Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were "investing" in a vast enterprise – but the only real money ("fiat" in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble's energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We've stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money – and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest – are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They're not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

[...] Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify's "AI DJ" will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn't put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn't add up to what Bank Of America analysts called "a defining moment — like the internet in the '90s." For one thing, the most exciting part of the "internet in the '90s" was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn't dominated by large companies – indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to "This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves." Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn't "artificial" and it's not "intelligent." "Machine learning" doesn't learn. On this week's Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete – not our new robot overlord.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 18 2023, @08:42PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday March 18 2023, @08:42PM (#1296948)

    I feel (not know) that most living things are sentient in varying degrees, and the ability to recognize that sentience in others is a measure of the level of sentience in the one doing the recognition.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday March 20 2023, @05:55PM (1 child)

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Monday March 20 2023, @05:55PM (#1297213) Homepage Journal

    I have to agree. Remember, even though the idea was from fiction, a biochemist wrote it. Thought itself is a chemical process.

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 20 2023, @06:28PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday March 20 2023, @06:28PM (#1297238)

      Agreed: thought is clearly a chemical process. Now, whether or not that chemical process has significant quantum effects (like photosynthesis does), we may not have a handle on yet - certainly quantum mechanics is involved but I am confident (without basis) that whatever role quantum processes may play in thought, there are other processes that could replicate those functions, whether basic chemistry, electrical, digital, or whatever else.

      As for thought itself, there are various dimensions of complexity / sophistication of thought, and levels within those dimensions, one of which might be "self awareness" and another might be called "sentience" both of which independently may or may not be present in a given "thought system" under evaluation.

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