Is Greed Good?

(Hint: No, not just no, but fuck no!)

Currently people are talking about “the” AI bubble (not “an,” but “the”). Corporations are investing billions (possibly trillions) of dollars in companies developing what are called “artificial intelligences,” aka AIs. Since such an “intelligence” is a goal and not yet a reality, some are calling them “pretend intelligences” as they are, so far, only good at regurgitating materials created by actual intelligences.

Setting all of that aside, the focus of many of the postings right now is the “AI Bubble” which is that the AIs currently on offer are not making enough income to justify their investment. In fact they cannot make enough income to justify the investment, hence the “bubble” declaration and the focus on the damage that will be done by that bubble when it bursts, because financial bubbles always burst. (Many think the AI Bubble is the “Mother of All Bubbles” and could wreck the global economy.)

So, seeing these posts, I have to ask, why are these corporations investing so much money in the development of products that cannot produce enough income to justify the investment? The answer is simple: the corporations want to use AIs to replace a sizable fraction of their employees. You have already seen some of this happening if you have called for help to any company and gotten in a conversation with a chatbot, via “chatting” about your issue.

But if we stop to think about the effect of that replacement, we start from the thinking of the corporations. Corporations used to think of their highly trained workforces as an asset. But those days are long gone. Corporations now look at their labor costs as a liability. If only they didn’t have to pay all of those pesky workers … damn! Economics used to have somewhat of a soul, but that soul was sucked out by the likes of Milton Friedman of the Chicago School of Economics. Today economics is solely about profit and loss and has nothing to do with providing good jobs and services for the communities the companies exist in, etc.

So, modern corporations see the turnover from human workers to AIs as a reduction of losses … only. Estimates of as high as 40% of all jobs being replaced by AIs are dancing in their heads. But think about it. The executives of these corporations only see their stock prices soaring because their profitability increased. But looking past that, will stock markets even still exist? If 40% of corporate workers are canned, what happens to the economy when those folks no longer make an income and have no money to spend, or at least far less to spend. The job market cannot absorb all of those laid off workers, so what happens?

Also, a lower demand created by non-workers having less to spend means a lot of the currently marginal companies go belly up, creating more unemployment, creating even more uncertainty. And stock followers like uncertainty like they like the plague, so what happens?

I have to ask: Would the world be better off if there were less greed? We have no real need for billionaires, so why are we encouraging their existence? What if corporations were judged as to how good they are as corporate citizens of their communities? They keep insisting they are people, shouldn’t we expect them to act like good people instead of the psychopaths they currently are?

And how do the values of the products made by AIs hold up? Would you rather have an authentic painting by Picasso or ChatGPT? How good could a recipe be if an AI can’t taste the damned thing? How good can music be if the singer is an AI and the band is artificial. How likely are “they” to get “in the groove” or improvise, one bot riffing off of another?

Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should, especially when the guide star of such efforts is making a profit, just making a fucking profit.