This chart offers a reminder of how dependent the U.S. economy's growth is on the data-center buildout. Rising borrowing costs threaten those investments.

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-09-02-2026/card/one-great-chart-the-u-s-economy-ai-jSUnMuhe71BUTSgVJmVt

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[–] BoxedFenders@hexbear.net 19 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What baffles my mind is how the entire LLM/Transformer architecture only began in 2017 (with the "Attention Is All You Need" paper), and less than 10 years later, the entire global economy decides to dedicate all of its efforts to creating tokens for these models. The money dedicated to this is bigger than the railroad, highway, and electrification buildouts COMBINED, in both dollars and percentage of GDP. Humanity is sacrificing its energy, capital, and natural resources to feed the AI machine. In a way, it has already enslaved us. And it hasn't even been 10 years!

[–] DoofusAscendant@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago

AI ain't the one doing the enslaving, though, it all comes down to the fact that the only way anyone's ever made money in tech is by commandeering attention. This has been a really efficient method for concentrating wealth and now the only thing anyone who controls that wealth can think to do with it is finding increasingly elaborate ways to colonize the human mind.