David Gerard on the "AI doomers"/"rationalists" and their beliefs.
In the end they are a bunch of eugenicist, racist losers afraid of death.
(Original title: AI doomsday and AI heaven: live forever in AI God)
Maybe the last few days have made more people realize that GitHub is not your friend and not there to facilitate Open Source but to accumulate power for Microsoft. Anything GitHub says or does needs to be understood in that light.
There used to be this deal between Google (and other search engines) and the Web: You get to index our stuff, show ads next to them but you link our work. AI Overview and Perplexity and all these systems cancel that deal.
And maybe - for a while - search will also need to die a bit? Make the whole web uncrawlable. Refuse any bots. As an act of resistance to the tech sector as a whole.
One thing that the current exorbitant investments in "AI" show is that the investor class and big tech corporations do not pay enough taxes: If you have billions to set on fire for spicy autocomplete we should take some or all of those to do something useful with.
I wrote about frictionlessness and "AI". The essay is admittedly a bit of a weird ride trying to connect a few very distinct thoughts. I hope it's still worth reading.
