Companies are racing to incentivize employees to use AI. But as some companies are finding, the more employees that use the technology, the heavier the bill.
Even if AI someday does become profitable short term, total profits will still go down long-term, because all profit comes from human labor (or exploiting nature). All any technology ever does in capitalism is to replace human labor, thereby putting more pressure on the empirically proven tendency of profits to fall. Profit gains from technology can only ever be short term and relative to competition who hasn’t yet adapted the technology. Once everyone has, prices drop, adjusting to lower socially necessary labor time.
The only way for the billionaire class to keep profits flowing a bit longer at this point is to do what we already see them doing now: get rid of the free market by enforcing monopolies with captive markets, bonded labor and merging big capital with an increasingly violent and warring state apparatus: capitalism inevitably leads to fascism-imperialism every time.
AI lends itself to this because of the centralized nature of data centers, the already monopoly based business model of tech companies and the political power and influence those monopolies hold. On the other hand, there is some potential, if not revolutionary at least disruptive potential, in small scale, specialized, open source models that can be trained with fewer resources.
The only alternative road to fascism, of course, leads to communism.
Even if AI someday does become profitable short term, total profits will still go down long-term, because all profit comes from human labor (or exploiting nature). All any technology ever does in capitalism is to replace human labor, thereby putting more pressure on the empirically proven tendency of profits to fall. Profit gains from technology can only ever be short term and relative to competition who hasn’t yet adapted the technology. Once everyone has, prices drop, adjusting to lower socially necessary labor time.
The only way for the billionaire class to keep profits flowing a bit longer at this point is to do what we already see them doing now: get rid of the free market by enforcing monopolies with captive markets, bonded labor and merging big capital with an increasingly violent and warring state apparatus: capitalism inevitably leads to fascism-imperialism every time.
AI lends itself to this because of the centralized nature of data centers, the already monopoly based business model of tech companies and the political power and influence those monopolies hold. On the other hand, there is some potential, if not revolutionary at least disruptive potential, in small scale, specialized, open source models that can be trained with fewer resources.
The only alternative road to fascism, of course, leads to communism.
Even if you take worst case costs Anthropic’s “Profitability” Swindle https://share.google/UV5HNgJyMzfcknekF it’s already approaching profitable.
If you slow down the model update cycle it’s looking like at least anthropic can be profitable 🤷♂️. That argument is loosing it’s weight quickly.