AI is Stupid

From The Baffler:

As of 2025, 95 percent of companies that invested in [generative] AI did not profit at all from the investment […] As the tech journalist Edward Zitron estimated in his guide to the racket, by “the end of 2025, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Tesla will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years, all to make around $35 billion.” That’s like spending $100 to make $6.25—and then doing it again and again, five billion times.

Upper-echelon tech bros are idiots.

If you’re bored by the ceaseless “AI”-related witterings of a media in thrall to these idiots, especially in light of the revelation above, read New Escapologist instead.

The Baffler, incidentally, is one of America’s few left-wing media outlets with any clout, yet it wrings its hands over the same topics as any business dad of the conservative press. “Is AI really coming for entry-level jobs first, and the rest of the workforce next?” it asks. Yawn.

The article doesn’t mention UBI once, the only seriously proposal for replacing Wage Slavery as a way to feed people. Their use of “bullshit” in the headline — a word generally reserved in work-related conversation for thankless drudgery since our David’s Bullshit Jobs in 2013 — is little better than clickbait. Neither the word nor the sentiment appears in the article.

I don’t think we mention AI once in the current edition of New Escapologist, and we’ll probably maintain our aloof and studious silence until someone convinces us that AI will help real people to escape their day jobs with an income intact.

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