Thought - Post-Bubble Accounting

I do think the AI financial bubble will ultimately burst but it's an increasingly hard one to have great faith in as a motive force for change around the technologies involved. Seems like so many of our governments have so completely committed themselves to the ethical abyss of miraculous AI growth that even when it proves to be a false hope they'll be completely unable to reflect on what they either ignored, allowed or encouraged as part of it. Deepfakes, faux-social LLMs, abandonment of education, erosion of privacy, consent, labour rights etc. It'll be a world of Tony Blairs in the aftermath, leaders reviled for their bad choices but so fortified in the reactive defences to their failure that they'll do nothing, change nothing and reflect on nothing.

What reaction to that might work? Not sure. Certainly though a ground up and unyielding assertion of the harms done and the choices made around them would be something. Start with the training data, the indifference to consent, legality, ownership etc. Don't let the narrative, however companies like OpenAI end up, drift into one of accidental and unforeseen errors - neither the platforms nor the nonsense economics surrounding them exist by mistake. They and all their harms are the product of active choices desperately reinforced by financial and political pressures. Every case of AI Psychosis, deepfake porn, scams, political harms, addictive behaviours, lay-offs - these weren't incidental and unfortunate missteps on the path of something better, they were the acceptable intents of an industry propped up by its own cruelty and governments paralysed by awe at wealth and cowardice in the face of money.

- Dylan