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Timothy Burke's avatar

Here's what I'm afraid of: I think some large-scale businesses are increasingly invulnerable to whether something "works" or not. Amazon doesn't really care if their algorithmized customer service doesn't work any more--they are passing beyond it. It's not just that they are now 'too big to fail' in terms of providing satisfaction to customers but that the profits, such as they are, come from operations that aren't about whether customers get what they want or can find what they want. Moreover, the larger financialized ownership in the current global economy doesn't depend on whether the assets they own produce annualized revenues that makes them worth owning--they are rentiers who are bringing in so much capital that they have run out of places to park it. (No wonder some firms were parking tens or hundreds of millions in SVB: the world is running out of investments.)

In that environment, the security that AI *doesn't work* isn't much security, because the logic of thing is to use it anyway both to produce a kind of "innovation halo" but also to fire more people. I think this is feeling more like Terry Gillam's Brazil than anything else: a dystopia that doesn't have to work even in suppressing people, maximizing profit, etc.; so the cartoonishly stupid factual content of some AI will be beside the point. The people pushing it scarcely care: it is not about the problems it solves, it is about the rate of its adoption.

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Dave Algoso's avatar

I was just reminded of your Amazon example above, with a less personal but no less silly experience. The diapers that we usually have shipped monthly via "subscribe and save" are out of stock. I clicked on "see backup products" expecting to see other diaper brands listed. Instead Amazon is suggesting diaper wipes, as a replacement for diapers.

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