Timeshares. Duh.
Capitalism is a rabid dog, that only managed to serve the middle class well in the past because it was kept muzzled and on a tight leash.
Successive, and successful attempts to ‘unleash the beast’ have left us bit, and apologies for mixing metaphors here, but there is probably no way left, to get the genie back into the bottle:
Undoing 50+ years of damage would take time, especially when faced with resistance from those that stand to benefit most from the current broken system (think the Top 1% of the 1%), and that is time that we simply do not seem to have.
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For what it’s worth; the world will survive and adapt. Whether that means the extinction of humanity, is a whole separate matter altogether.
Our species entire existence is a mere blip compared to dinosaurs for an example.
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I know, but we did some cool things. Our advances in Math and Physics to unlock the secrets of the universe. Our engineering prowess. The Linux Kernel is a standing achievement of humanity’s ability to contribute to something greater than themselves for no real financial gain. Plus our music and our humour and our entertainment have been just fantastic.
It’d be cool if we could at least have some permanent record of that if we don’t make it, so that future aliens could know that despite us being continual fuckwits, we did do some pretty amazing things.
Yeah we were a blip. But I don’t want that blip to mean nothing.
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Well, we have the golden records on the Voyager probes, a similar one on New horizons, and our geo-stationary sats will pretty much last until the end of our solar system. So there will be some evidence of us for at least a few hundred million years or so.
The plan is billionaires sell to each other
They didn’t think that far. They just fired everyone and replaced them with Ai.
And now companies are slowly rolling this back as the productivity gains are in general small while the cost of AI keeps going up as investor’s money is running out.
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I think it’s a plot to deal with climate change and eventually they will reduce the worlds population by 99.9% leaving the rich served by robots and AI.
“Plot” is a little too high an observation of any real power, intelligence and magick.
There are adjacent and other dimensions right and here now that no one talks about it. They never spoke the language we’re talking now because they were psychic. Vampires are real, but not what’s been said. Ditto on rich because money is not real either.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Businesses operate on three timescales. Monthly, quarterly and annually. Anything beyond that they’re not even thinking about.
When a company talks about long term strategy you can ignore everything they say after. It means nothing.
So AI can make them more money in the short term. They don’t understand the problem even if it’s right in front of them.
Anything beyond that they’re not even thinking about.
Every place I’ve had a white-collar office job, there’s been a 5-year plan. But the plan is typically a flippant and unrealistic goal, I suppose the purpose of which is to temporarily boost morale and to be a cult-like litmus test to see which employees can ignore reality.
Two of the more egregious examples: I worked in what was considered a medium sized company (maybe 30ish employees at the time). Management decided their 5-year goal was that we were going to grow large enough to own/build a skyscraper downtown. Another was at a relatively unknown regional retain chain that couldn’t even compete with Walmart whose 5 year goal was to become a household name around the world.
A lot of businesses operate at a 5-10 year time scale or more. Take all these AI datacenters being built. That takes a long time. You need to obtain planning permission from the local government. You need to buy the land, get all the utilities you’ll need to the site (they use a lot of water and electricity). You need to build the actual buildings. You need to put in an order for the computer hardware so it’s available when the building is done. You need to actually build the buildings.
Some of these can be done in parallel, but a lot can’t. You can’t lay out the electrical or cooling paths until the building is built. You can’t start installing racks until the electrical and cooling systems are in place. You can’t start installing servers until the racks are all ready. You can’t start connecting the servers and everything until all the electrical, cooling and networking setup is done. And, at every step there are going to be setbacks, especially when you’re building something new and innovative, and not just plopping down something you’ve built 100x before.
I feel this is always true for public companies, while there are some exceptions in private ones.
Yeah, I usually say “large organisations”. So it’s a good point.
Part of it is that corporations have decentralized and siloed ethical responsibility. It’s a lot of greased cogs.
You are so correct. They will, in very short time now be more or less doing exactly what I suggested!
From what I’ve noticed, with AI companies, it’s usually not “annual” but “annualized”, which is just an estimate. And it doesn’t seem like there are any rules to calculating that estimate, you can just grab the best 30-day period of operation, multiply it by 12 and claim millions in annualized revenue. And then they usually just sell to someone based on this estimation, since it’s almost never profitable to build something on top of existing infrastructure of the main players in this market and maintaining your own is just not feasible.
You pay me $10 to punch you in the face. I pay you $10 to kick me in the balls. We just increased our country’s GDP by $20.
I’d pay $5 to watch that. Hey, I think we have something going here.
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Soylent Green.
My 401k has gotten up into the 5 digit range a couple times, but emergencies have required me to to drain it. Retirement is a dream I rarely harbor.
I’m working until the day I die. My mother fancies herself retired and rots away in a house she imagines she owns, but it has been property of the bank since before I was born in the 80s. A mortgage that was essentially renting with extra steps.
I’m just whining now, so I’ll stop.
It’s topical whining though, so it’s allowed
Manual labour is a place where people have an edge on machines because it’s cheaper to replace a person than a machine.
Medical experiments also benefit from having people to test on more than machines.
isnt that the plot of wall-e
Corporate welfare of course
You’ll just have to sell your organs and work double shifts in the mines in order to pay for all the times the AI screws up your food order.
Anon learns about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
