[csoups14]

"Insanely useful" doesn't mean hundreds of billions of dollars of upfront investment from our largest corporations is prudent especially when proponents of AI don't seem to approach the risk honestly. The argument isn't just that AI is going to take over the world, it's that the consequences of massively over-investing in it could lead to a broader economic collapse more like the Great Depression than the Dot Com bubble. I'm not going to predict what might happen, but I don't think the Dot Com bubble is necessarily predictive of any outcome here, either.

[llbbdd]

This is not money that would otherwise be going to agriculture or energy; one of the few salient points that Ed makes is that a lot of these deals are circular and based on invented money. I think the comparison to the dot com bubble is sound purely because basically every DC investment that exploded would have been legacy-defining investments if they'd been able to stay solvent until like 2010. Some companies and some people are going to lose, but they're not going to have been wrong, just badly timed.

[csoups14]

Tech companies sitting on godlike amounts of money and being able to invest such huge sums in AI at a nascent stage is worrisome. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that this is anything close to an optimal distribution of investment in the economy. It's not a plus that some of these companies are playing an investment shell game. They don't hand out awards for badly timed investments, they hand out bankruptcy rulings. It's fine and good if a few speculative companies go bust. Nobody will think it's fine when companies ingrained into the fabric of the economy do. At the end of the day it's clear we've learned very little from previous crashes and I think it's a false assumption to think we'll suffer equivalently for it.