You’re missing out on the MLM. Don’t you like money?

The article Citing Charity Majors by Simon Willison writes,

“[…] this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust settles.”

This time is different. The cult I’ve joined is the real cult.

If you’ve done the reading, then you’ll eventually see that this is, as are all socioeconomic problems, a class issue. The rich are plundering the poor, again.

I’m reminded of MLMs. I’m reminded of the time, very long ago when they would still call, when a lady from the German Lottery called to make me an offer. I politely told her that I wasn’t interested. She responded in an astonished voice, “You’re not interested in money?”

This is like that in such a boring way. We don’t have any new ideas.

Attorney-at-law Frito Lay likes money

“[…] you are making withdrawals from a trust account that took years to build.”

Those who can will cash those checks because they will never have to pay it back. They don’t understand how precious those savings are, because they didn’t pay into them in the first place. It’s all just free resources to them, just like all the other free, public resources they’ve plundered in the past. They claim that these resources are infinite to fool others into letting them take them, but they know that there’s really only enough for their own short-term gains, and they don’t care.

“[…] on-call rotations that grind people up and spit them out”

These are the people who will pay for this plundering, as usual. Support. And customers.

Cashing checks against the future is the natural mode of the form of capitalism I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying my whole life. It occurs whenever someone sells you something that doesn’t do what it says on the tin, when they get you to pay more for their services than they are actually worth, when they get you to pay for the risks they’re making you assume.

The sales job of AI is that the upsides massively outweigh the downsides. This is not obviously true, as even many proponents will admit. Those who think it’s true just mean that they personally won’t suffer the ill effects of any of the downsides.

Or, hey, maybe I’m not a Marxist, but a fascist, as Anti-AI nostalgia and the cult of the past by Sean Goedecke argues.