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Additionally, this claim by AI isn't unique to that business...its EVERY capitalist enterprise. They all speak with one voice "you are a commodity to be extracted" Its the sensible and reasonable position to expect all their new tech will do the same! Its the only rational conclusion!

Eric Schmidt has proven time and again that he's a smug douchebag former CEO with a cooked brain, especially when it comes to AI. It's like he doesn't know how to put on any affect other than "smug booster"!

As judges routinely hand out 10, 15 year sentences for drug trafficking crimes (which is really often a lot less serious and a much smaller amount of drugs than people think from watching tv), there is a pervasive mindset that white collar, or white people, crime shouldnt result in real prison time

Yep. Look at how much productivity has increased over the last 50 years (300%) and look at where we are in terms of precarity. The problem is never the tech, but the perverse incentives of our economic system.

Chances are this fucker will "pass" long before these college graduates will. There are two ways to look at it: 1. They will have to clean up the mess he in part helped create. And/or, 2. They will live longer than this fucker. Simple as. End of.

Why should universities turn over commencement to speakers who essentially do product placement?

Like I get that they're inveterate hype merchants and they're going to preach a hyperbolic result beyond what the machine learning models could possibly deliver, I just figured they were clever enough to realize those two are incompatible with each other.

"And oh, it requires the use of enormous data centers that use vast amounts of power you will have to pay for in increased utility bills and good luck buying anything requiring ram, which is just about everything. Enjoy!"

This man slowly turns beet red throughout, I’m assuming from anger because there’s no way he still experiences shame or embarrassment

Just look at this smug cunt

Not to mention the profit outlook for these LLM products looks dramatically different if it’s just a b2b product vs a retail product

Not to mention the university staff approving these speakers and their presentations

Your "bicycle for the mind" pales in comparison to my "Zamboni for the soul"/"smallpox for the career"

"I'm going to make you homeless, jobless and living in a tent next to a data center where you die of illness by 22 thanks to the heat, pollution, and extreme levels of noise." "Wait why aren't you clapping..."

Good point.

Lie back and think of England except now it’s “lie back and think of techbro oligarchs getting richer while you scrape and suffer”

I think it's also the case that commencement speakers are routinely booed but something about these boos have a higher public saliency than every time Betsy DeVos got booed for example. 🤔

Productivity has increased 300% in the last 50 years, and we suffer more precarity because the fruits of that increase were funneled to the top. And even that is not enough for them.

Their tech also keeps failing, and they conclude they just need to throw more power at the problem.

you can’t do the surprised pikachu if your own sales pitch is “this is going to ruin your lives and you just have to suck it up because we can’t control our own greed”

"why does everyone hate the addictive product we sold by claiming it'll destroy the labour market and could end the world? It's a mystery!" - the oligarchs who have won our glorious capitalist meritocracy

Like the people living next to datacenters?

There's a use case for some implementations of generative AI, I think, including as a disability aid, but it wouldn't really make sense for most people if it were implemented with a halfway sensible pricing model (you could get better results hiring a worker). I think that's the key here.

That's a real symptom, so it's obviously better than a fake diagnosis fabricated and weaponized by anti-AI zealots as a new fear-mongering ableist slur / trope to, among other things, gatekeep LLM assisitive tools from us neurodivergent and disabled folks.

Disability assistive technology is not what people object to when they object to generative AI, nor is machine learning in general. I think you're either panicking, in which case I feel you but please take a deep breath, or being disingenuous.

AI has plenty of genuine negative externalities which actually need to be dealt with but that's difficult to do with these raging extremists who just want to destroy AI tech and attack anyone and everyone who uses it as being terrible humans. How is all of this not supposed to rile people up?

Please,🙄 whatever kills this wasteful destructive deadend AI hyperscaler scam faster is only to the good. The sooner the Large model cons that are OpenLie & Myopic implode the sooner actually useful, profitable small, narrow, purpose AI models can be made & actually be developed & put to good use.

And I'm not defending those knuckleheads because they did initially market AI to CEOs and corporate boards as a tool that will allow them to slash payrolls and other HR expenses - but they nobody is stupid enough to market anything as self-destructive, so stop it with the fake quotes.

the pro side has been absolutely abysmal.

He was insulting the graduates at their graduation!

I’m surprised scolding the audience didn’t work.

"Read the room, moron! Graduates of 2026! Existential dread! It's fungible now. You know when you stare off into the distance with inexpressible horror? PolyKalsh is the first to commoditize and securitutize ennui, disquiet, anxiety and even terror. I.... The fuck is wrong with this crowd bruh?"

Amen.

AI leaders have not just talked about how AI will get rid of oodles of jobs. Some of them have talked about how AI will replace all of humanity. Plus the real-life harm AI data centers are bring to communities. So it's a mystery why so many people are against it.

i think if you’re a kid this shit is also omnipresent, inescapable, and obviously corrosive in ways that The Olds like us can at least somewhat avoid

they're so whiny about it too

They're so out of touch if they think they can destroy millions of well-paying white collar jobs and the people being displaced will thank them for it for some reason

Every possible benefit AI could bring to humanity is nothing compared to the total disaster everything else is. The rich and geriatric class has already taken so much from younger generations and AI is the final boss of that, coming after our jobs in a society that will let you die without one.

that's the best part, IMO techbros tell everyone "if this gets traction we won't need any of you anymore" and everyone was like "HEARD, CHEF" and made sure the public knew it was as welcome as a fart in church

Yeah, most people just plain do not like LLMs. bsky.app/profile/radi...

It’s also notable that prior to the AI craze, they were saying everybody should become software engineers. Now they’re saying software engineering is the first profession to be eliminated. These clowns couldn’t give worse career advice if they tried.

Tech’s big war on the professional managerial class is going to produce a backlash of left-wing producerism.

We will exterminate you all!!! (Now, please clap.)

I won't say it's never happened, but the list of transformative technologies that require full-scale marketing for uptake after widespread awareness has to be small, right?

The smug on this fuck’s face is just begging to be slapped off 😒

True, but they're also trying to build market share. They're slowly ramping up the pressure to pay--corporations already pay a lot, but I don't know if the AI companies are able to recover costs. I like the chatbots, but I'm not going to pay $200/month.

Thanks for this cogent analysis. So many large accounts pontificate without regard for what they’re saying but (for what it’s worth) I think you nailed it. Cheers from 🇨🇦

"This thing I'm forcing everyone to use will negate all the work you did to get this degree today and make you unemployable. Wait, why are you booing and not cheering? Get on the rocket ship to futility!"

It's so mind-bleedingly expensive that they couldn't afford to float the cost for a traditional Trojan Horse marketing plan.

It's like speaking to a graduating class of accountants in 1980 and extolling how computer spreadsheets were going to take the jobs of a lot of accountants. Though spreadsheets are a powerful tool that accountants in particular ultimately benefited from, that msg won't be received very well.

"Will reduce my pay if I'm lucky enough to get a job, with a chance of catastrophe" - would be astonishing if they understood that message and didn't boo it.

If they really thought it was like cell phones or cars and have broad popular appeal they wouldn't be in this mad dash

Normal people aren't as gullible as executives, obviously.

Somewhat ironically, the most “responsible” AI company, Anthropic, is the one running the apocalyptic playbook most! Between the Mythos cybersecurity press and Amodei routinely saying he expects 50% of white collar jobs gone in 5 years…

Reinforces the argument that most CEOs should be fired, as totally unfit for purpose. A 'friend' says something to them on the golf course, & that's the new company strategy. Yet they're paid £££. I suspect most successful companies do well despite their senior execs, rather than because of them.

As others have suggested here a key factor is they didn't think they needed to market this to the 'peasants' who they presumed would just accept what their 'betters' gave them. A fundamentally misunderstanding of how society works

What frustrates me the most is that part is totally unnecessary. The quick profit and grabbing market share is what drives it, not the tech itself.

Residential power doesn’t have to go up because of data centers, that’s a choice. We can make them pay higher property tax rates if we want to compensate for a relatively low number of jobs created given the revenue generated. It’s not like fracking, it’s just a bunch of computers and some hvac

I'd love to see a realistic data center bit in a similar city game. You zone the land, it suts fallow for years and eventually starts sucking up all the water and increasing pollution because it's running 6 gas turbines

They thought people dont really care about environment issues but they are finding out thats not true.

Data centres now feel like they would be a "business deal" building in SimCity 3k/4 like the federal prison or the toxic waste dump: brings in money, but your mayor rating tanks (and in this case, the building also requires a lot of power and water, too).

Yep, even if you remove LLM, training from that conversation entirely, "we're going to triple Utah's fossil fuel usage in order to store more emails" is not a great message.

that data centers produce so few jobs is, honestly, also self-inflicted. you've got West Virginians begging for fucking FRACKING because it just might bring in a few more jobs

Yeah, the whole "bow down and accept the inevitable to make somebody else richer" message seems to finally be hitting.

data centers are basically modern fracking. huge externalities, all borne by the local communities and not the companies ruining fucking everything while profiting from it

...and then making relatively recent tech obsolete, it starts to feel like we are all being extorted. Pay this, or else! Buy this, or else! You could lose access! You will be wiped out! Oh and we made porn with your image without your permission! They do not seem rich b/c they are bringing value.

And steal all your water

That and the whole NFT/cypto stuff on the back of social media turning the world toxic while the billionaire owners amassed country economy sized piles of wealth.

I still think the main problem is that for most of us, AI has made our lives distinctly worse, directly and indirectly. In multiple ways. The observed benefit is basically zero. It might be benefit the average person someday. Maybe, but I’m doubtful. But the pain is here now. And getting worse.

Sephiroth posting is the self-destructive drug that tech execs have been unable to resist

They have become so much more explicit in their belief that there are useful people (coders and the people who manage/fund them) and serfs that the backlash was inevitable.

They used to be; I know one guy who retired to sail big old sailboats. But that was an earlier generation; the current lot, and it's not even the engineers really, are mostly people in it for the money.

The cool nerds avoided "career progression" and didn't get put into the CEO spots

Also tech used to provide useful services for the faustian bargain or whatever and everything nowadays is palpably on a ticking clock before it gets made worse to try to start extracting money. I remember when Google branding meant a working product!

Theres also the basic fundamental issue of how a jobless population can pay for products! They've never really tried to answer that...just vague suggestions of 'someday' maybe UBI.

I think they actually believed it. Maybe in somewhat of a shallow, naive way (with hindsight, the inherent limitations in "don't be evil" are visible from space), but it was more than just an act.

In Texas they are running pro-data center propaganda ads as roll ads on YouTube and probably on cable (I don't watch enough to know if it's not gymnastics seasons XD)

If predictive algorithms actually worked for anything but a few niche applications people would ignore the costs. It is the horrible combination of more expensive and also quite crappy. Like being fired for a less experienced replacement that is bad at everything but sucking up.

A lot of this is capitalizing on neither political party adopting an anti-AI stance. Which is weirdly planning out for them so far. This is yet another issue where elites are wildly out of step with the population as a whole.

Also the entire reaoson so many municipalities are in competition with each other for data center site awards is because they are huge contributors to municipal finances with very little cost in services

Were not Lake Tahoe folks told to get their electricity from somewhere else? It seems quite far-fetched though I am curious.

I have a friend that ran a pretty good ai company at the start of the ai thing. Asked him what the actual use case sales pitch is around the gpt 1 release. He said, “with ai/ml you will be able to automate just enough of your work to leave at 5 and see your kids.“ That should have been it

This is making my self-pitying World Trade Center-watching, 2009-BFA-graduating millenial ass think I had it pretty good, actually.

TBF, there was a significant camp who initially marketed as "this will entirely end life on earth" and they did loose out to the moderate "worst econopocalypse in recorded history" camp :|

I think these tech bros and CEOs are just trolling at this point, they know we hate AI but they're making their millions and don't give a shit

Won’t be long before the first data centre is firebombed…

What a smug looking bastard he is in that clip. No words necessary.

"You're all going to be turned into Soylent Green" isn't a popular message?