I believe @tfwright was referring to the current situation of booming stock market and contracting job market.
There is nothing incompatible between your views. We all agree that the future capability of AI has been hyped up and it will likely land at something more modest than the “dream”. And the hype is driven by economics/political reasons.
I like this approach very much. I too believe there’s a future beyond this crap and that we can maintain and evolve out humanity and craft.
I’ve come across the work of the work of Nik Suresh via a interview in Pivot to AI youtube channel. Basically, he’s very critic of AI and found a very successfully consultancy company fixing things the AI bros broke.
Here’s how the present himself in his blog:
I am now the CEO at a very special data consultancy, Hermit Tech. If you are in management but have retained your soul, value the humanities, enjoy reading and so on, check us out! I’m as surprised as you are that this is a viable business model.
If you want to dig deeper, he elaborates more in this post: The Worlds Left To Conquer — Ludicity
IDK, reading his text and watching his interview was a nice boost of optimism for me, so I guess some of you would like it as well.
I saw a guy on TikTok complaining about Portugal and how it’s hard to do business there, that when the business fails, it’s his responsibility to deal with employees, debts and everything. According to him, it’s much better in the USA, because when the business fails there, you just throw away the keys and let everyone else deal with it. :-))
Playing with the idea myself.. I’m tired to be listened to. After the LG tv fiasco and many, many instances of my phone listening to my conversations with random people to suddenly show me ads about it, I had enough.
And btw. after I found out Chromium was build specifically for Google to be able to measure clicks more effectively, that really pissed me off. What pretenders they are.
What I’m trying to say is that the hunt for super optimized companies with no employees, dark factories, AI factories and whatever, is a devil’s trick..
In one of the videos about this, there was a mention about a small business in 80’s that had a note on invoices that went something like that “Pay me, so your customers can order your services”. Economy must be circular, we can clearly see what dark factories do to Chinese cities. You cannot just produce stuff for “free” and hope people will buy your products, they simply have no money, and there is no multiplication effect.
And here I talk only about the economy. If we talk also about the knowledge, who will improve those dark factories in 5 years? People on top cannot improve everything, you have to get dirty, that’s why Toyota values opinions of people doing the actual work, because they can see what can be done better. It’s like an engineer who has never dug coal tells miners how to do it.
I support and encourage it! Not being tracked is a big part of it for me. Although the flip phone I have does have GPS though so I can’t be 100% Sunbeam isn’t collecting data, but they claim they don’t and are a fully independent company (for now) so I’m no worrying about it too much because GPS was the whole reason I wanted a smartphone originally (I’m quite directionally challenged). It means I’m not using iPhone Messages as much either which I’ve seen evidence of doing a lot of tracking. Even almost 10 years ago, it seems they were doing photo analyzing. So I was going camping with my friend. I enjoy it, but I’m not obsessed with it and never search anything on camping online. He and I were texting about our trip and he sent me a photo of his daughter sitting this portable chair he had just bought. He didn’t mention it by name, just the photo. The next day I was getting for the exact same chair. I hate that ****.
I agree about dark factories etc and it seems the only people talking about it are people who generally opposed AI. Obviously my newsfeed is a bit skewed, but if anyone has anything from and more pro-stance that is more than just “we’re not worried about it right now” I’d be interested to read it, because I’m not sure how that is supposed to work.
Also, I was watching this guy on YouTube today and a Twitter (I think) quote popped and the avatar looked familiar and I realized it was YOU! Were you aware of this? It’s at 4:31.
So apparently the situation with Jev is even worse than I thought.. The model was trained for $45M, has been almost immediately diluted by it’s open source alternatives.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53wDOI_7x8I
To invest in AI seems like pure altruism at this point. 
