Another brilliant piece by @pluralistic

« The AI sector is utterly dependent on criti-hype. They are burning tens of billions of dollars on engineering salaries, custom chip fabs, human data annotation, data-center rents, racks and racks of GPUs and ASICs, whole gridsworth of electricity and entire aquifers’ worth of fresh water for cooling.

They are hemorrhaging a river of cash, but that river’s source is an ocean-sized reservoir of even more cash.

To keep that reservoir full, the AI industry needs to convince fresh rounds of “investors” to give them hundreds of billions of dollars on the promise of a multi-trillion-dollar payoff.

That’s where the “AI Safety” story comes in. You know, the tech bros who run around with flashlights under their chins, intoning “ayyyyyy eyeeeee,” and warning us that their plausible sentence generators are only days away from becoming conscious and converting us all into paperclips. »

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship-236575979d5c