Post #1129285

2026-04-12 10:10 UTC

I had managed to miss this magnificent essay from @pluralistic . His main point: what&#39;s obnoxious about #AI is not the technology, but the economics. For example, I can easily imagine a world in which LLMs are deployed benevolently by not-for-profit actors of the social and solidarity economy. But AI plus capitalism... ugh. &quot;AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage&quot; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur #economics

Replies (5)

@esskah@hessen.social 2026-04-12 12:38

@alberto_cottica@mastodon.green @pluralistic@mamot.fr I think it’s not possible to disentangle a product more addictive than algorithmic social media feeds and less accurate at math problems than a middle schooler from the business model of post colonial hyperscale wealth extraction. LLMs & pattern recognition have been in use for a long time, but many projects with real societal benefits have struggled to survive in the AI goldrush. What’s left will be mass surveillance tools and war machines.

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@yacc143@mastodon.social 2026-04-12 13:00

@alberto_cottica@mastodon.green @pluralistic@mamot.fr But then, X plus capitalism… ugh works for surprising many X that are benign in other contexts. Optimizing the hell out of anything for just one or a few variables tends to break most anything.

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@gavin57@toot.wales 2026-04-12 13:31

@alberto_cottica@mastodon.green @pluralistic@mamot.fr If LLMs were always accurate, there could be a case for salvaging the technology from the wreckage, but they are as effective as an SQL database with 60% dummy data. If you can never trust the output from a system, why would you use it?

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@jpkolsen@social.data.coop 2026-04-12 13:55

@alberto_cottica@mastodon.green @pluralistic@mamot.fr also, the environmental impact is mostly a problem because we allow the mega-corps to dump the price of externalities on the rest of society. If emissions and water cost the equivalent of the impact caused, running these models would be much more expensive, and they would only be used in cases where their utility could justify the cost

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@spherulitic@tech.lgbt 2026-04-14 22:33

@alberto_cottica@mastodon.green @pluralistic@mamot.fr the internet changed the world. Pets dot com did not. This feels like that sort of moment.

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