this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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I wonder if this will be one of the things pointed at after the AI bubble bursts. Yes, AI will be sticking around, but the hype over it now is ridiculous.
The way how every single digital product suddenly has AI shoved in it is really reminiscing of the Web bubble before it popped.
But just think about all the time AI could save you at work by performing simple tasks. It really suits my need very well, have you tried it? NAH JK FUCK AI. OpenAI is a shitshow and their fans are morons.
There are two possibilities: railway/dotcom bubble or monorail/bitcoin bubble ...and I'm not sure which one it is going to be yet. In the first case, a lot of people lose their investment, because they got too greedy and believed in huge returns...but the infrastructure remains and there is a net good to society and time spent specializing in it is worth it afterwards. The second, not so much, it is just a hype cycle with almost nothing of use left once it is gone and a lot of wasted time. I'm leaning towards the first, but if they don't find a way to bring energy costs down, it might end up in the monorail/bitcoin scenario...maybe 10% chance.
If AI hits a dead end, it'll still be trotted out as an excuse to keep wages low, as in "if you peasants keep complaining, you can just be replaced with AI!" just like the articles about burger-making robots over a decade ago when people were protesting for a $15/hr minimum wage back then (and still no burger-making robots mass deployed today). Trash still has its uses, just like how bitcoin hasn't become the "become your own bank" system it was promised to be and is instead used to hide financial fuckery.
That reminds me of a funny story from Encyclopedia Geopolitica where an expert in money laundering describes bitcoin around 2016 as being an el-dorado for financial forensics. It was so good at tracking funds that there was a bitcoin wallet address on a terrorism website on the deep web and they could see the donations arrive in real time and catch a pile of 'em. Maybe now they are more cautious and use more mixing layers, but it is still a terrible use case for that if you don't control transaction entry and exit nodes: the ledger is public and every transaction is traceable.
It's been letting people be their own bank for 15 years. You can send transactions across the globe for pennies in fees which confirm instantly using Bitcoin lightning. The supply has remained capped at 21 million. It's doing exactly what it said it would do without a single hack or hour of downtime 24/7, 365.
The lightning network is more centralized. Congrats, you just exchanged the banks for a different set of banks.
Except it's not. Lightning is incredibly decentralized, you can run a full lightning node on a raspberry pi. I have one running on my phone. Look up a graph of lightning network, looks just like any other decentralized system. Nodes you route through never have custody of your funds, unlike a bank.
Yeah, I'm sure your dinky raspberry pi is processing a meaningful number of transactions.
It can. Lightning transactions are as easy and lightweight to process as e-mail. They measure in the bytes or kb in size, no mining is required.
It will collapse when the product sales don't match the AI spend. I'd say it's only being propped up by hype money even now.
If you read the article, it mentions that they're generating $2b/yr in revenue already. It's not trillions, but damn if that isn't impressive for a startup.