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cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:
I had an idle thought a while back that things like block chain and generative "AI" could be partly explained by having too much compute available with not enough demand. In other words, "We have all these computers, but they're sitting mostly idle. What can we do with them?" I think I had cause and effect reversed (well, it's a cycle so it's hard to tell).
Since we live in this capitalist system, the makers of the chips must show growth. The market for computer chips was at risk for reaching maturity, where any growth would track population, more or less. So, cleverly, you exceed that by coming up with "applications" whose demand for computer chips is umoored from humanity. The motivations of these applications are circular and decoupled from any external motivations. They exist for their own purpose (growth at all costs). As such, the demand could be unbounded!
Paperclip maximizers indeed.