alt Hacker News> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.
If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.
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> If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man.
This hype scenario would be the biggest bust of all for Ai. Without jobs or money then there is nobody to pay Ai to do all the things that it can do, it the power and compute it needs to function will be worth $0.
Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't even play a decent arcade game. Fiber is not universal so that all of this to be transferred to the cloud. We tend to forget that computing is universal and it's not just PCs.
and if you're unlucky to live close to a datacenter, this could include energy and water? I sure hope regulators are waking up as free markets don't really seem equipped to deal with this kind of concentration of power.
Nothing ever lives up to the hype, that's why it's called hype.
> rise to unaffordability
Or require non-price mechanisms of payment and social contract.
AI probably will end up living up to the hype. It won't be on the generation of hardware they are now mass deploying. We need another tock before we can even start to talk about AGI.
I think living up to the hype needs to be defined.
A lot of AI 'influencers' love wild speculation, but lets ignore the most fantastical claims of techno-singularity, and let's focus on what I would consider a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two.
Even in this scenario, the capital gains on the lump sump invested in AI far outpaces the money that would be spent on the salaries of these workers, and if we look at the scenario with investor goggles, due to the exponential nature of investment gains, the gap will only grow wider.
Additionally, AI does not seem to be a monopoly, either wrt companies, or geopolitics, so monopoly logic does not apply.