Tax harvesting and the AI Backlash, pt. 2
I mentioned in a recent blog post on AI that humans would never be allowed to go free range. I mentioned the tax harvesting that the state requires in order to function and the problems with people abandoning downtowns and local businesses to stay at home and work. One of the fringe benefits of the remote office is you can eat a can of soup in 15 minutes while standing over the kitchen sink before getting back to work. You don't have to go out and get food, or gas up, or pick up dry cleaning, etc.
Prior to the Covid-era spending and massive inflation, restaurants were the core of the American economy. Low wage prole jobs in the "food sector" were the backbone of economic "growth", the bulk of jobs report data. "350,000 (low wage, dead end) food service jobs were created last quarter..." Those of us who follow the economic news headlines were treated to this for decades.
Post-Covid, food scarcity is a much bigger deal now and eating out is a luxury. I seldom go to a restaurant now and much prefer eating a bowl of rice and beans with a scrambled egg.
The cost savings from food, gas, mileage, wear and tear on a vehicle ends up being a pay raise for a lot of remote workers. I wear sweat pants, shorts and other prole-level clothing and haven't paid for dry cleaning in over ten years. My closet sports a large collection of button down shirts that haven't been worn since 2014. I periodically scoop some up and drop them off at Good Will. I was a clothes horse at one point, not proud or anything. The weird thing about the last twenty years is that the garments from this period are still in style. Fashion stopped "evolving" after about 2002 and a button down business shirt with a collar is still the same. More stylish clothing is dicier, but still likely to work now. Take that anicca!
ZeroHedge today has an article outlining California's possible plan to introduce a "mileage tax" to replace revenue lost from gasoline taxes. As commuters switch to electric, the tax harvesters have to find new ways to cover the decline in revenue. California has traditionally had a high tax on gasoline, hitting the working class especially hard since many of them have to commute long distances for work, child care, etc. This is the same state with out-of-control homelessness. I spoke with a relative who lives there last night and we discussed the plight of many Americans in his home state, how it was something that could be solved if only there was a will to turn away from war and the enrichment of our oligarchy.
I know many people still want to believe that AI will change everything for the better. There is no AI, just LLMs/chat bots, generative art and so on. These are useful tools which have come under increasing criticism from different camps. The investor community understands that the companies pushing AI are grossly overvalued and over-leveraged and the cracks in their business models grow larger every moment. Oracle is mulling firing 20,000 employees to fund its AI initiatives; it faces insolvency by 2027 based on its declining revenues and skyrocketing debt obligations.
Among technical workers, we hear complaints of AI slop showing up in code bases. Among social media users, there is proliferation of AI-generated images and text. AI produces content for what is now mostly bot traffic on the Internet. In other words, we pay a high price in water, electricity and environmental degradation so that machine generated artifacts can be consumed by automated, non-sentient bots.
School children are becoming even less capable at problem solving and college students flood their professors with AI composed essays on various topics. Lawyers have been caught submitting legal briefs with bogus citations.
I am the last holdout, the true devotee of AI. I get it. It's a tool, much like the search engine. When search engines began emerging in the 1990s, they were a rabbit hole into all sorts of bad ideas, conflicting and illogical viewpoints and so on. They were a mess and boy, were the 90s and early aughts fun!! I miss the old days.
"Oh, I guess you found that on the Internet..."
This kind of sneer was common at first and then faded. Saying it now makes you sound like a GenXer. You date yourself by uttering these words since yes, we all get our information from the Internet now. That's life. The technology blended into our daily lives and became useful, at least for a few years. Search engines eventually became just The Search Engine, Google. It in turn became the world's portal into the sum of all human knowledge, but its quality began to suffer as its original philosophy was completely supplanted by the needs to make even more money and to shape public opinion. Don't be evil! became, "Let us help you decide what is/is not evil!"
AI is not the same as the early search engine, but it shares many of the same qualities. Unlike its forebear, it's expensive, has no economic future as a business model with the current crop of companies. Many of these will be destroyed by greed and stupidity as economic reality catches up with the balance sheets. But as in the dot bomb era, e-commerce didn't die with the demise of Pets.com and the hundreds of other companies like it that went tits up. It emerged on the other end as Amazon and Wal-Mart.com. In other words, e-commerce became a pillar of consumer activity, but in the hands of yet another capitalistic cartel. We think nothing now of buying groceries, clothing, cars, houses, saxophones and so on from a website.
Capitalism's proponents always point to the benefits of competition, as a way of providing consumer choice even when the cartels produce the same cars at the same price point and so on. Do you know who also hates competition? Capitalists.
Hence, the cartel is created as a compromise. We will agree tacitly to create the same generic objects overseas in exchange for a kind of tranquil equilibrium where a few of us can prosper, grow the K-shaped economy. We keep up the image of competition and the consumer self-deludes into believing that he has choice.
