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The last big fall in the price of bitcoin, in December '22 was caused by a shift in the dynamics of mining where it became more expensive to mine new btc than what the coin was actually worth. Not only did this plunge the price of crypto it also demolished demand for expensive graphics chips which are repurposed to run the process-heavy complex math used in mining. Cheaper chips, cascading demand and server space that was dedicated to mining related activities threatened to wipe out profit margins in multiple tech sectors.
6 months later, Chat GPT is tolled out by Open AI. The previous limitations on processing capabilities were gone, server space was cheap and the tech was abundant. So all these tech sectors at risk of losing their ass in an overproduction driven recession, now had a way to pump the price of their services and this was to pump AI.
Additionally around this time the world was recovering from covid lockdowns. Increased demand for online services was dwindling (exacerbating the other crisis outlined above) as people were returning to work and spending more time being social IRL rather than using services. Companies had hired lots of new workers: programmers, tech infrastructure workers, etc., yo meet the exploding demand during covid. Now they had too many workers and their profits were being threatened.
The Federal reserve had raised interest rates to stifle continued hiring of new employees. The solution that the fed had come up with in order to stifle inflation was to encourage laying off workers end masse -- what Marxists might call restoring the reserve army of labor, or relative surplus population -- which was substantially depleted during the pandemic. But business owners were reluctant to do this, the tight labor market of the last few years had made business owners and managers skittish about letting people go.
A basic principle at play here, is that new technology is introduced for two reasons only: to sell as a new commodity and (what we are principally concerned with) replacing workers with machines. Another basic principle is that the capitalist system has to have a certain percentage of its population unemployed and hyper exploited in order to keep wages low.
So there was a confluence of incentives here. 1. Inexpensive server space and chips which producers were eager to restore to profitability (or else face drastic consequences) 2. A need to lay off workers in order to stop inflation 3. Incentives for businesses to do so.
Laying off relatively highly paid technical/intellectual labor is a low hanging fruit in this whole equation, and the roll out of AI did just that. Hundreds of thousands of highly paid workers were laid off across a variety of sectors, assured that AI would create so much more efficiency and cut out the need for so many of these workers. So they rolled out this garbage tech that doesn't work, but everyone in the industry, the media, the government needs it to work, or else they face a massive economic crisis, which had already started with inflation.
At the end of the day its just a massive grift, pushed out to compensate for excessive overproduction driven by another massive grift (cryptocurrency) combined with economic troubles that arose from an insufficient government response to a pandemic that killed millions of people; and rather than take other measures to stifle inflation our leaders in global finance decided to shunt the consequences onto workers, as always. The excuse given was AI, which is nothing more than a predictive text algorithm attached to a massive database created by exploited workers overseas and stolen IPs, and a fuck load of processing power.
I hope someday we can come up with an economic system that is not based purely on profit and the exploitation of human beings. But I don't know that I'll live long enough to see it.
Well remember that the shifts that can happen in material conditions and consciousness can happen very quickly. We can't decide when that is, but we can prepare and build trust until it does occur. Hard to imagine what it would take in the west to see an overthrow of capitalism, all we can do is throw our weight behind where it will have the most effect, hopefully where our talents reside also! Stay optimistic, despite even evidence to the contrary. For the capitalists, its better to believe that the end of the world is coming than to believe a new world is possible. So if nothing else lets give em hell
I can't tell you how many times I've had this exact thought. 😕
Are you an economist or business professor IRL? Because that was an amazing answer!
No actually I'm mostly self educated. I'm just a tech worker who studies history, social theory and economics, but also does some political organizing. So take it with a grain of salt if you must.
Glad you got something from it, I appreciate the compliment!
Very nice writeup. My only critique is the need to "lay off workers to stop inflation." I have no doubt that some (many?) managers etc... believed that to be the case, but there's rampant evidence that the spike of inflation we've seen over this period was largely due to corporate greed hiking prices, not due to increased costs from hiring too many workers.
Exactly! the two things are the same phenomenon expressing in two different ways! This is exactly why this is such a mindfuck.
Follow my logic: in the usa by 2022, covid19 had killed over a million people. When you compare this to the total unemployed in the US, that's not just the governments padded numbers but adding together all the people in prisons, people who stopped looking for work, etc., those covid deaths were about 12% of that unemployed "surplus" population. Again, the system needs a certain number of people to be unemployed, over a million people died, which means over a million "jobs" (this includes employed and unemployed positions within the entire workforce.) At the time the media was calling it "the great resignation," where employees were just going out and getting better jobs. But where did these jobs come from? Can you really just go out and get a better job any time you want? Of course not. Try searching for a job now, good fucking luck.
Seriously, google "reserve army of labor" if you haven't already, it explains everything. So as the labor market tightens, consumption increases. People got a better job and can fix their credit up in a few months and get a loan on a car maybe for the first time. People are walking out of the grocery store with more food, or going out to eat more. Retailers notice this and raise prices in response to increased spending. this is a phenomena that Marx wrote about in value price and profit, which I might mention again.
So why were prices going up? Larry Summers gets in front of Jon Stewart and says that increase in spending equals increase in demand, when demand challenges supply then prices go up! Which is what we are generally taught. Except Marx proved that this was not the case, that inflation really was just retailers raising prices due to increase in consumer spending. Its a bit of economic slight of hand that I could explain if you want but for now I'm already long.
The federal reserve says that inflation (which is like you said, mostly driven by companies raising prices to squeeze consumers, and this is proven by the way the fed responds) is out of control, so therefore they are raising interest rates. The way this will control inflation is by making it harder and more expensive for companies to get money for large capital investments. This is all to squeeze the companies to stop hiring (since their p&l is negatively affected) and eliminate excess staff. But the companies are reluctant to let people go/stop hiring because of what they just experienced with a "tight" labor market. They have the incentives or pressures, but they need an excuse, they need a justification. Enter automation with ai. Finally the automation revolution that the media has been threatening workers with for decades is here and sorry can't halt progress you see (Ned Ludd did nothing wrong.)
Except it isnt all that. In the mean time the economy has adjusted to the depleted reserve population, the corpos were given everything they wanted or needed in order to continue to profit after the death of millions, and a new grift industry has grown up and attracted all this funding and following and clout. Didn't even have to lose that many jobs, just a bunch of high paid ones. Except interest rates are still elevated so the fed is continuing to keep that pressure on the labor market. Anyway, there's all of these cascading effects, from systems interacting with each other; therefore its more useful to understand the relation between phenomenon than it often is to try and understand that phenomena on its own.
So you're right, it was corporate policy, but it isn't greed necessarily. Definitely greed adjacent though, its like systematic greed. There are incentives and disincentives present within the system. Karl Marx was able to write about the causes of inflation 150 years ago, and they were using the same faulty excuses then. That's also why the fed decided to raise interest rates, they understood what the problem was, and the fix is and always has been to throw people into unemployment. The system is predictable, but it isn't rational.
That is a very pessimistic and causal explanation, but you've got the push right. It's marketing that pushes I though, not necessarily tech. AI, as we currently see it in use, is a very neat technological development. Even more so it is a scientific development, because it isn't just some software, it is a intricate mathematical model. It is such a complex model, that we actually have study it how it even works,because we don't now the finer details.
It is not a replacement for office workers, it is not the robot revolution and it is not godlike. It is just a mathematical model on a previously unimaginable scale.
"Pessimistic and casual"? You're gonna make me self conscious.
I'm an AI skeptic. Its too energy hungry and its not doing anything except scraping massive amounts of consumer data. No its not going to replace workers (because it doesn't work), but then again countless workers were already laid off so it already served its purpose there. Doesn't have to replace them, just has to purge them but in a systematic way, such that the Fed called for when they started raising interest rates.
Are you an AI Scientist/engineer? If so I'd love to hear more about your work. I'm in tech myself but def not on the bleeding edge of AI.
Machine learning has many valid applications, and there are some fields genuinely utilizing ML tools to make leaps and bounds in advancements.
LLMs, aka bullshit generators, which is where a huge majority of corporate AI investment has gone in this latest craze, is one of the poorest. Not to mention the steaming pile of ethical issues with training data.
I appreciate the candid analysis, but perhaps "nothing to see here" (my paraphrase) is only one part of the story. The other part is that there is genuine innovation and new things within reach that were not possible before. For example, personalized learning--the dream of giving a tutor to each child, so we can overcome Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem--is far more likely with LLMs in the picture than before. It isn't a panacea, but it is certainly more useful than cryptocurrency kept promising to be IMO.
Again, I am highly skeptical that this technology (or any other) can be deployed for such a worthy social mission. I have a cousin who works for a company that produces educational materials for people who need a lot of accommodation, so I know that there are definitely good people in those fields who have the ability, and probably desire, to deploy this tech responsibly and progressively in a manner that helps fulfill that and similar missions, but when I look at things systemically I just don't see the incentive structures to do so. I won't deny being a skeptic of AI, especially since my personal and professional experience with it has been like dramatically underwhelming. I'd love to believe things work better than they do, that they even could but with ai I see a lot of promises and nothing in the way of results, outside of modestly entertaining tricks. Although I gotta admit, stable diffusion is really cool. Commercially I think its dogshit but the way it creates the images is fascinating.
What would a good incentive structure look like? For example, would working with public school districts and being paid by them to ensure safe learning experiences count? Or are you thinking of something else?
It wouldn't look like the profit motive, and it wouldn't look like a half baked grift.
We've already established that language models just make shit up. There is no need to demonstrate. Bad bot!
Excuse me? Are you calling me a bot?
I remember learning about Turing tests to determine whether speech was coming from a machine. Its ironic that in practice its much more common for people to not be able to recognize even a real person.
It's just that I rarely see a real person be so confidently wrong.
Care to elaborate?