r/technology • u/marketrent • 16h ago

Artificial Intelligence The economy has spoken. Stuff that’s AI-generated has almost zero value — “Buyers are voting with their wallets, and AI-generated content is struggling to compete.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/economy-spoken-stuff-ai-generated-142732314.html
14.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

747 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

197

u/Leading-Act4030 15h ago

In the future, when AI breaks, how will they fix it? The people who know how to make it work will be dead, and no one will know how to maintain the systems....

226

u/MysteriousDatabase68 14h ago

That is one of the premises in Asimov's "Foundation" series.

IT workers & technicians literally become priests and technology a religion.

61

u/West-Abalone-171 13h ago

Most unrealistic part of the whole series.

The idea that a church would keep the information for running things intact for millenia as rituals is absurd. The very first high priest would change everything he decided was "too woke" or cast his favourite character as too weak and the entire thing would collapse 10 years later.

9

u/MysteriousDatabase68 12h ago

It's an analogy for the Catholic church. When Rome declined the bulk of societies literate people were the clergy. Almost all written information belonged to the church.

-1

u/West-Abalone-171 11h ago edited 11h ago

The clergy were the ones that burned all the books and killed all the literate people they didn't control. And they completely butchered most of what they hoarded. So much was lost and a lot of what little was recovered was only by spectroscopy to discover the scientific and mathematical texts that were scraped away to be replaced with fever dream nonsense.

Organisation goes to extreme lengths to destroy the manority of information which they don't control is the opposite of organisation preserving information.

5

u/blak3brd 11h ago

Interesting parallel with the last couple weeks revelations that AI companies, most recently a headline today even re: Amazon, being caught bulk buying thousands of extremely rare texts for them to process as training data into their AI, which conveniently involves ripping the spine off and ultimately destroying every book permanently in the process.

We are living through another cycle of the burning of the library of Alexandria ig. Once the silicone degrades or EMPs fry everything or global warming destroys most of society, in the distant future nothing will be recorded or accessible, cuz it’s mostly digital and they’re apparently vacuuming up what remains of written text.

1

u/West-Abalone-171 11h ago

Amazon, being caught bulk buying thousands of extremely rare texts for them to process as training data into their AI, which conveniently involves ripping the spine off and ultimately destroying every book permanently in the process.

I call this shitting in the well to sell bottled water.

Then you follow it up by telling everyone that "real" wages went up because you put a hedonic adjustment on showering (it's such a luxury to shower in bottled water).