The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Sex, Politics, and Operation Dildo Blitz John Michael Greer I planned on posting an essay on a different subject today. In fact, I had another essay all written and revised, waiting for whatever fame and fortune a weekly blog post by a writer well out on the cultural fringes can expect these days. That essay is going to be cooling its heels for another two weeks before it gets its day in the sun, though. A comment I made during a recent speaking gig, which was duly recorded and posted to the internet, sparked quite a little tempest in a couple of minor online teapots. I don’t follow social media, but I have friends who do, and several of them happened to tell me about certain saliva-flecked rants responding to the comment. It’s a normal experience if you’re a blogger who doesn’t just parrot somebody’s party line. If people want to denounce me, of course, I have no problem with that. I’ve criticized various people fairly harshly over the twenty years I’ve been blogging, and it wou...

  The AI Bubble and the U.S. Economy:  How Long Do “Hallucinations” Last? By  Servaas Storm This paper argues that (i) we have reached “peak GenAI” in terms of current Large Language Models (LLMs); scaling (building more data centers and using more chips) will not take us further to the goal of “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI); returns are diminishing rapidly; (ii) the AI-LLM industry and the larger U.S. economy are experiencing a speculative bubble, which is about to burst. The U.S. is undergoing an extraordinary AI-fueled economic boom: The stock market is soaring thanks to exceptionally high valuations of AI-related tech firms, which are fueling economic growth by the hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars they are spending on data centers and other AI infrastructure. The AI investment boom is based on the belief that AI will make workers and firms significantly more productive, which will in turn boost corporate profits to unprecedented levels. But the summer of ...

  AI as quintessence of our society Symbols and more symbols, and nothing behind them Carlos Ramalhete Of course, I used AI to generate an illustration, and of course, it couldn’t understand the prompt “floating symbols in human shape.” When I see the way people treat “Artificial Intelligence” (henceforth AI, which, as I already wrote, should be “artificial idiocy”), what really scares me is how often people perceive it as if it were a kind of superior intelligence. Just like the  fantasies of hyper-technological aliens , by the way; the only difference is that AI is here, while said aliens are not that much. But I shouldn’t be surprised, for one simple reason: AI is just a reflex of the societal situation in which urban people in rich countries (or in the richest enclaves of not-that-rich countries) spend their lives. That global minority lives in completely artificial environments, whose temperature is controlled, whose food comes in clean boxes, often in ready-to-eat form, ...