Technology

While everyone was jerking themselves raw about this stuff a year ago, Tycho at Penny Arcade (yeah, remember them?) nailed it and it's been sitting in my head ever since:

Ultimately, the technology is not my concern. It is that there's another Industrial Revolution happening, right now, you can play with it like a toy, and it will be very surprising to me if it results in a greater bargaining position for the worker. That's just not how it goes.

Some portion of the conversation always has the sting of betrayal in it. But you like computer stuff! Yeah, I like computer stuff. Except we aren't talking about computer stuff. We're talking about people stuff. People are messy. I work with a lot of creative people, and I have also had the pleasure - firmly installed in quotes - of working with the kind of people who call those people "creatives." We were at a meeting once where the person who will be advocating and using these technologies in your organization told us they hated creatives to our face. These technologies will displace workers and slash pay. That's… I mean, that's it.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/12/26/sockrates

From the start of this AI boom, I've been saying, again and again, that regardless of the technology itself, the truly despicable thing about this are the people. Take all your idealistic futurist nonsense and "passion" for pushing the limits of technology and blow it out your ass, because this technology has one primary use case that was obvious from the word go, and every single one of these fuckers knew what that was when they started making it. For years they have worked to make a tool for corporations to steal the work from the working class, weaponize it against them, and enrich themselves in the process. They can all get fucked.