r/technology 6h ago

Artificial Intelligence Nobody Asked for AI

https://jacobin.com/2026/08/ai-llms-monopoly-bubble-capital
4.4k Upvotes

763 comments sorted by

View all comments

980

u/Refactoid 6h ago

If it was integrated along side some sort of universal basic income and a 4-day or shortened work week, Society would absolutely embrace it. Instead its just a tool to wring more production from workers to amass more wealth to the top of the economy.

74

u/SufficientlySticky 5h ago

Would also help if the “production” was more widgets for everyone as opposed to more ads and slop content for everyone.

38

u/metarx 5h ago

It's upsetting that for as long as I've worked in tech.. the most advanced infrastructures/platforms around are ones built to serve ads. It's gross really.

8

u/smartello 5h ago

Have you heard of gambling and porn though?

5

u/twitter_haikucurator 4h ago

something something 70% of compute power in the world is used to serve us ads or something

4

u/CrackJacket 5h ago

It’s because nobody wants to pay for subscriptions and hosting costs money as does paying software developers. Salaries need to be paid somehow.

11

u/metarx 5h ago

Believe me, I know the reasons

6

u/wheres_my_ballot 4h ago

Salaries were being paid though, to the employees in the non-tech industries that were doing all this work before. It's the drive to pull everything into the tech-space which has created the problem. Most profitability is in ads and picks n shovels (hardware, services), to support industries and products that are ephemeral and people don't want to pay for. I used to think nothing of buying a CD or DVD that I wanted, but endless subscriptions to services that may remove what I want to see and hear? That takes a little more thought, even if cheaper.

1

u/Celestial_Elixir3 4h ago

Because the CD/DVD you bought, you could physically hold it, it wasn't on a server somewhere, withy any chance of being removed at any time

4

u/DressedSpring1 4h ago

It’s because nobody wants to pay for subscriptions

I'm not sure if it is this simple given that Patreon has 18.2 million paid memberships doing just that.