alt Hacker NewsIt is honestly offensive to me that this isn't plainly obvious to everyone. AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control. Does anyone think it is coincidence that now local models are more useful the market has suddenly made it massively more expensive to buy your own hardware? Companies are just giving up making consumer hardware because they can can just focus on hyper-scalers. They want to control compute as well, there is no liberating aspect to any of this.
Businesses, especially tech ones, are not altruistic. The idea that tech companies are out to make anyone's life better is a joke and a sentiment that should have died decades ago. The evidence is of predatory business practices and leveraging the worst aspects of our brain chemistry to keep us hooked on apps that make us less happy, keep us stupid and less informed, and buying more.
Even more confusing are the people who are welcoming AI with open arms as just another skill to learn, _surely_ they'll be the ones who come out on top, right? It has all the stink of the countless Americans believing they too will become billionaires and everyone else are just suckers as they are all one healthcare problem away from bankruptcy.
We don't learn.
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> AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human. It has always been, and always will be, about wealth consolidation and control.
I think here it's useful to separate "AI" as sold and marketed today from "AI" as a CS discipline, a field of study, and a category of tools and techniques.
The field of Artificial Intelligence has always been, at least for the majority of people in it, about improving things for real people.
The LLMs that have garnered huge valuations and an outsized share of everyone's attention in recent years started as part of that field, and grew out of its research and technological advances.
But once companies started seeing how they could monetise it, that's when it started being about wealth consolidation and control.
>AI has never, ever, and never will be, about making life better for the average human.
You don't know that. And this same line could be said about any technology that results in accruing of capital, but actually does end up making life better for the average human.
What if AI at AlphaFold finds a cure for Alzheimer's disease? What if it finds a way to actually perfect fusion?
You can't tell me we don't live better lives than people 100 years ago right now, and that is because of technology.