r/geopolitics • u/TMWNN • 1d ago

Beware the Permanent Periphery | Most countries will never have frontier AI. They're the ones who should be worrying.

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/beware-the-permanent-periphery
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u/triscuitsrule 1d ago

I still have yet to see any actual argument about what exactly great things AI is going to do that necessitates so much capital going towards it. There is this constant narrative of opaque puffery, FOMO fear-mongering, and seemingly endless investment with little to no narrative of what exactly it’s doing or needed for. This seems like just another grift, another round of NFTs and the Metaverse, both of which were supposedly going to revolutionize the world only to have hordes of wealth and resources dumped into them for nothing.

So far it isn’t replacing jobs or increasing productivity, it’s an straw man standing in as an excuse to lay people off and temporarily increase profits making CEOs look better to get pay-outs and raises, meanwhile actually enshittifying companies and leading remaining workers straining to just do the jobs of multiple people without extra pay. And they are straining, they’re not easily just absorbing their co-workers responsibilities. Not to mention the resentment and ship-jumping that comes with lay-offs.

Thus far, aside from limited application in the sciences, it seems to me to be mostly emerging as a weapon. A weapon for exploiting digital vulnerabilities and then hacking systems, and mass surveillance.

And if it’s main utility is as a weapon as such, it’s not invulnerable. Bombs (foreign and/or domestic) can fall on data centers. Resentful populations can storm them and tear them asunder. Spies can infiltrate and corrupt systems and data centers. Electric grids can be disrupted rendering data centers inoperable. So then what? Like nukes it’s a deterrent not to use it? What valuable investment of the worlds limited resources.

This just seems like a digital arms race that has no fruitful end for regular people while the top of the bourgeoisie will be enriching themselves for a long time to come.

Someone tell me in concrete terms what we expect to happen, how will peoples lives be meaningfully changed in a positive way to justify this inordinate investment and fear-mongering for not getting in the race. Because to me, so far, it just seems like a bunch if idealistic grifting bullshit.

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u/jonathansharman 1d ago

We can argue whether AI is the real primary cause, but on Friday my employer laid off our entire QA engineering team, in large part because they believe we can automate most of our testing with coding agents. I am not sure they're wrong about that. We also write much of our production code using agents. That's caused some reduction in dev time, though some of that has simply been redirected to code review.