#SiliconValley#BigTech#VCs#SocialMedia#Web#AI#Capitalism: "I believe we're at the end of the Rot-Com boom — the tech industry's hyper-growth cycle where there were so many lands to conquer, so many new ways to pile money into so many new, innovative ideas that it felt like every tech company could experience perpetual growth simply by throwing money at the problem.
It explains why so many tech products — YouTube, Google Search, Facebook, and so on — feel like they’ve got tangibly worse. There’s no incentive to improve the things you’ve already built when you’re perpetually working on the next big thing.
This belief — that exponential growth is not just a reasonable expectation, but a requirement — is central to the core rot in the tech industry, and as these rapacious demands run into reality, the Rot-Com bubble has begun to deflate. As we speak, the tech industry is grappling with a mid-life crisis where it desperately searches for the next hyper-growth market, eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt technology that nobody asked for in the hopes that they can keep the Rot Economy alive."
"Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition whose members include Amazon, Apple and Meta, is launching a campaign to defend the legality of using copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence systems."
-That won’t stop bosses from trying to use AI to replace certain jobs, keep pay lower, and demand you and your coworkers produce more work
-Your bosses’ measuring stick for AI output isn’t whether it’s so good it can replace you wholesale, but if it’s “good enough” to justify the savings on labor costs
-Certain industries are uniquely vulnerable to generative AI output, and are more threatened than others
-After workplaces are disrupted by generative AI, employees not laid off or reassigned will have to pick up the pieces, often with more work than before
-Whether or not your boss adopts generative AI directly or your industry is threatened, the technology can be used as leverage against you and your colleagues
-Generative AI may or may not be a flash in the pan, but it can be a wrecking ball to your job regardless, especially if your boss is looking for an excuse to cut costs or to appear innovative — and you should be ready
There will almost certainly be no AI jobs apocalypse. That doesn’t mean your boss isn’t going to use AI to replace jobs, or, more likely, going to use the specter of AI to keep pay down and demand higher productivity"
#Capitalism#PoliticalEconomy#Competition#Neoliberalism#Antitrust: "40 years later, nearly every industry is dominated by a handful of companies, and these companies price-gouge us with abandon. Worse, they use their gigantic ripoff winnings to fill war-chests that fund the corruption of democracy, capturing regulators so that they can rip us off even more, while ignoring labor, privacy and environmental law and ducking taxes.
It turns out that keeping gigantic, opaque, complex corporations honest is really hard. They have so many ways to shuffle money around that it's nearly impossible to figure out what they're doing. Digitalization makes things a million times worse, because computers allow businesses to alter their processes so they operate differently for every customer, and even for every interaction.
This is Dieselgate times a billion: VW rigged its cars to detect when they were undergoing emissions testing and switch to a less polluting, more compliant mode. But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands. Computers don't make corporate leaders more evil, but they let evil corporate leaders execute far more complex and nefarious plans. Digitalization is a corporate moral hazard, making it just too easy and tempting to rig the game."