I think VR is a reasonable analogy.
The tech works. It’s just super niche applications. It would have been incredibly stupid for a business to presume that it’ll be huuuuge market based on hype, and invest billions in say, a virtual reality universe… Presuming they’ll recoup costs once the public all have their own VR gear due to its obvious ‘really cool tech’ factor.
AI is the same. Yeah, the tech works… In a less precise, less predictable, but still sometimes useful way. Again, very niche applications. Will fucking everyone on earth want to spend $5/month to use it? I really doubt it and I have no idea why they would presume that, except because such presumptions when stated to their shareholders make line go up.
We’ll see who ends up writing off their own personal Metaverse-like AI pipedream disasters, when the finally figure out the money’s just not coming - but the writeoffs will be 100 times larger, and I think some big name businesses might not be able to survive it.
supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
There is no reason a major percentage of people couldn’t one day find usefulness or enjoyment out of VR, the devices are simply an order of magnitude too expensive right now and inherently it isn’t an experience you can share easily.
AI on the otherhand is a cancerous process of stealing (legally or not) well curated large datasets, throwing them into a woodchipper, creating an extremely lossy compression of all that data that is fed to people through a device that constantly hallucinates and then using all of that to rationalize austerity for the humans and institutions that created the datasets and true value in the first place.
VR is an exciting new technology, AI is a process of self immolation of knowledge and the practices and values that safeguard and maintain it for the public benefit.