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Fabio Manganiello /
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2024-07-04 01:50:02

Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: The #AI bubble is already starting to deflate. Like with all other tech bubbles, it ...

The #AI bubble is already starting to deflate.

Like with all other tech bubbles, it doesn’t mean that the technology itself is pointless. AI assistants are now widely used to get coding suggestions/completions, search complex codebases, control home devices through simple voice commands, generate stock cover images for blogs, add effects to Instagram posts, help analysts detect potential cases of fraud, perform sentiment analysis of text content, recognize dogs in pictures, etc.

But these are all tools that augment existing activities - they won’t revolutionize them, let alone replace existing workers in whole industries, any time soon.

I agree 100% with The Economist’s analysis, but I’m also baffled: this is the same newspaper that just two years ago wrote that 80% of the workforce was at risk of being replaced by AI - contributing to fuel one of the most inhumane and dumb seasons of layoffs that mankind has memory of.

As I predicted a while ago, the same employers that until recently fired large chunks of their workforce will soon have to come back to the market to hire them back at a higher price, after harming their own reputation - and the ones who actually benefited from this hype are the employers who didn’t buy into the hype, who held on their workforce, and who hired laid off top-notch Twitter/Google/Microsoft/Amazon talent at a discounted price.

I wish that progress didn’t have to always work this way. I wish that innovation could be gradual, and new technologies adopted responsibly once their benefits and limitations were understood. I wish that people who ask “but does your product have AI?” before deciding whether to buy it/fund it were pushed outside of my industry - those are clueless sociopaths who belong to gambling dens, not to technology.

Unfortunately, behind the invisible hand of the market there are many stupid, irrational, cynical, selfish and despicable human beings who are just waiting for smart people to build the silver bullet that makes them disgustingly rich, keeps printing money for them without any external intervention required, and makes everyone else unemployed and miserable in the process. And those are ready to bet absurd amounts of money on whatever unproven bullshit gives them the illusion of getting one step closer to this repugnant scenario.

So what’s supposed to be gradual progress that benefits humanity as a whole ends up being a continuous sequence of gold rushes and hype bubbles that do more harm than good, fueled by sociopath venture capitalists. And these are folks with a goldfish memory who apparently never learn from their past mistakes.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/02/what-happened-to-the-artificial-intelligence-revolution from The Economist
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