{"id":5049,"date":"2025-06-13T15:57:55","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T20:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/?p=5049"},"modified":"2025-06-17T16:33:44","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T21:33:44","slug":"the-real-danger-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/the-real-danger-of-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Danger of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Last month I wrote several articles about why I don\u2019t think AI art is the threat some people make it out to be. Today I\u2019m going to talk about the thing that I do<\/em> think is scary as hell about AI. Oddly, this doesn\u2019t seem to be something people are too concerned about. I\u2019ve mostly only seen it brought up in sources that focus on AI and the occasional alt news source. Even there, Breaking Points<\/a> is the only place where I\u2019ve seen fairly consistent coverage. Social media seems pretty quiet about it, but since the guys who run social media are lined up to be AI\u2019s biggest beneficiaries, maybe that\u2019s just THE ALGORITHM doing its job well.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a meme that circulates occasionally that says something like \u201cI want AI to answer emails and build spreadsheets so people can make art and write stories.\u201d Like most ideas that assume two diametrically opposed extremes, this is dumb. It\u2019s also inaccurate. I generally assume that it\u2019s posted mostly out of tribal solidarity. If you actually think about the words for 5 minutes before hitting repost, the dumbness is pretty obvious: AI\u2019s capable of doing both. In fact, it\u2019s already doing both, and it\u2019s set to take over our jobs long before it takes over our art.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this isn\u2019t going to lead to the meme\u2019s magical world where everyone is free from their job and can just do art, because we live in late-stage capitalism. If we continue to believe that\u2019s a good place to be, AI is going to cause a lot of people to lose their jobs. Its\u2019 also going to make a lot of people very rich, but those are mostly going to be people who are already very rich. You know the \u201cwealth gap\u201d that people keep talking about? It\u2019s about to get much bigger, probably downright dystopian. And it\u2019s going to happen a lot faster than most people expect.<\/p>\n

How fast? Well, in some sectors it\u2019s already happening. Companies are already laying off (or simply not hiring replacements for) workers in their customer services departments because AI can reliably handle most routine requests for less than it costs to hire a cubicle slave. A few companies jumped the gun a little and fired the whole department, but most of them have since backtracked and realized that they need at least a few humans to act as an escalations department for things the AI can\u2019t figure out. Most of the AI talking heads I\u2019ve seen seem to think this will be the prevailing model in the future: Instead of a department full of people doing a job, the job will be done by AI with a skeleton crew of human \u201cmanagers\u201d who tell the AI what to do and step in to deal with problems the AI isn\u2019t built for.<\/p>\n

When I say \u201cin the future,\u201d I don\u2019t mean that this is something that your kids are going to have to deal with or that will happen when you\u2019re a hovering over your grave. I\u2019m talking within an election cycle or two. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodel got some headlines recently with his comments about how fast AI is improving. Amodel used Moore\u2019s Law, which says that processing power doubles roughly every two years, as a comparison. AI isn\u2019t really limited by processing power, but by (in Amodel\u2019s words) \u201cits ability to maintain coherence across long sequences.\u201d Basically, unlike the self-diagnosed mental case making excuses about failing to deliver on their Kickstarter, AI actually<\/em> suffers from ADHD. The longer it can stay focused without getting confused, the more powerful and useful it is, which is why the power of AI is measured based on how long it would take a human to perform the same task. A few years ago, AI was good for a couple minutes. [Insert your own premature ejaculation joke here]. Right now it can last about an hour. Amodel estimates that AI\u2019s ability to maintain coherence is doubling about every 7 months\u2014more than twice the rate it takes processor speed to double.<\/p>\n

Dario also had a few specific predictions that are great for people like him (Anthropic makes the Claude AI<\/a>), but not so good for those of us who work for a living. There are predictions from other tech oligarchs as well as some current stats that show how fast AI is moving, and none of it\u2019s good for those of us who weren\u2019t born with a trust fund. Here\u2019s a sampling:<\/p>\n