There will be no Machine Gods
2026-Oct-27, Tuesday 13:55![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
There's not enough money in the world to pay for the AI boom. Archive link here.
See also the classic website Is AI Profitable Yet? (answer: absolutely not).
I don't think AI is useless--the math proofs coming out show it's not, and Claude is genuinely very good at doing things that every programmer hates like checking for bugs (slightly less good at fixing them) and writing unit tests, much less the pattern-matching in medicine like early detection of cancer. But it doesn't matter how useful it is because there is not enough money, computing power, or energy in the world to turn everything over to the soulless machines. The physics just doesn't work out.
These people think if they just build one more data center they'll create the Machine Gods who will solve all our problems and they won't. It's not going to happen.
See also the classic website Is AI Profitable Yet? (answer: absolutely not).
I don't think AI is useless--the math proofs coming out show it's not, and Claude is genuinely very good at doing things that every programmer hates like checking for bugs (slightly less good at fixing them) and writing unit tests, much less the pattern-matching in medicine like early detection of cancer. But it doesn't matter how useful it is because there is not enough money, computing power, or energy in the world to turn everything over to the soulless machines. The physics just doesn't work out.
These people think if they just build one more data center they'll create the Machine Gods who will solve all our problems and they won't. It's not going to happen.
"Human beings may not be perfect, but a computer program with language synthesis is hardly the answer to the world's problems."
-JC Denton, Deus Ex
no subject
Date: 2026-Oct-28, Wednesday 11:17 (UTC)As the money dries up, I wonder if we're going to see the more frivolous use cases (use Copilot to write your emails!) get throttled, priced out, or discontinued in favor of a focus on more significant industrial, military, and enterprise uses. It seems like SOMETHING has to give, and a lot of consumer-grade use cases wouldn't be sustainable.