Those companies are not trying to make a profit they are trying to make a cheap workforce for the rich that wont unionise or expect basic human rights.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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I'm a little more cynical. I think the AI companies are making a fortune selling the fiction that human workers can be replaced.
Megacorps invest for the short-term gains (wage suppression via layoffs that are spun to be a positive thing) and avoids short-term losses (holdouts may lose investors because AI is hip).
To my mind that is not more cynical, it is just a layer of grift on top, like scum. The real cynicism is the misanthropy of betting against humanity.
It does have a demotivational effect as a threat.
FINALLY someone gets it without me having to explain it.
There is also a growing cadre of these people who, I think, truly and deeply believe Peter Thiel's hype about making a godlike super AI. Silicon Valley has been due for a religious awakening for years, and a techno-god that you can, theoretically, entreat with personally from the safety of your browser window? It's tailor-made. At the very least, I feel like a lot of them have fallen into Pascal's Wager about the whole thing, and that's enough for them to devote time and energy and the limitless money they can beg or borrow to this.
I feel like a lot of them have fallen into Pascal's Wager about the whole thing
Funnily enough, you just described the Zizians. There's a really good 4-part series of Behind the Bastards on them if you're interested
I'm familiar, but I think there's a lot of less extreme thought along the same lines throughout especially the C-levels and presidential classes. It's gone beyond being a selling point and started into being a full-on belief because they've been selling the lie so long.
And its clearly not working
My concern is a mass depopulation when there are sufficient robo-slaves to take up the slack of maintaining society and producing technological progress. Although it'll likely be temporary. I'm fairly sure humans when digitized will grow in number or similarly when we start space exploration and colonization in earnest. Without FTL some faction could always just go somewhere else if they want to do society another way.
Okay, I'm a big fan of the torment nexus myself and I'm looking forward to it being unleashed. But while we wait, can we work on paying nurses a living wage or shit like that?
Where are you? Nurses make like $150K+ here.
Feel free to replace with any socio-economic problem where you live.
I can add a few to the stack. Teachers, daycare workers, and EMT.
Tbh, we're already looking at mass depopulation by 2100. Not a lot of people are having kids nowadays
Imo it's all for the government surveillance state. They already have terabytes upon terabytes of data, they just can't really use it. But an AI that could sift through all that shit in 5 minutes? Sounds great.
But I suppose both paths lead to AI companies getting bailed out.
They are so fixated on this that they are totally blind to that even if this were so it would remove the whole foundation of business: having customers able to pay, at all.
I'm convinced these richoids are actually stuck in this investment cuz they know as soon as one of them runs, the whole investment start falling apart, and given we know how far some of the bugmen will go for money, I wouldn't be supprsised if their lives are being threatened behind the scenes over it.
This 100% tracks.
It makes the big tech CEOs sound like the idiots on /r/wallstreetbets or /r/superstonk except luckier. I can far too easily imagine them calling each other "paper hands" behind the scenes.
Their lives are threatened. The instant that the line goes down they know they're all fucked. They also know that we're all just about at the top of the hill and they can see the other side so they're all digging up.
Well yah there's that, no I more-so mean they will actually kill them for 'causing' the collapse. Bowing, epstine, and a few other "suspicious circumstances" over the years, I'm would not be suprised in the least if it were true.
Just waiting for that sweet, sweet bailout.
They're not done digging their financial holes so they'd just spend a bailout right away and keep on digging. It's not that they got into a debt that's hard to keep up with. It's that the entire industry has no working model that covers the cost of doing business. Ed Zitron has laid this out in multiple articles and interviews (and probably on his podcast).
All of the investors and C-suite execs are chronic gambling addicts by this point
C-suite hopefully got a taste of reality when OpenAI and Anthropic tried to charge token-based rates that covered their actual costs. Suddenly nobody was willing to pay and rates had to be slashed again! (I think this was all in the last month or two.) More and more enterprises will probably be downloading one of the free open-weight models and developing their own in-house setup (which would at least be more resource efficient).
“There are no product cycles, and, aside from the still-baking superintelligent foundation model, there doesn’t seem to be any product at all,” Brandom writes. “With this pitch, [Sutskever] raised $3 billion!”
I seriously need to get in on this and grift some rich investors, I'm broke as shit dude.
Yeah, it's a scam to suck up VC money.
I think it's far worse than this.
All the AIbros have come from the direction of LessWrong, either directly or indirectly. They're literally AI cultists working to make the future godlike AI that's going to rule the universe.
I'm not making this up; I'm not exaggerating.
The principals in the AI space don't care about such paltry issues as "ROI" or "human beings" or any other such trivialities. They're all focused on making The AI™.
Zitron and others like him are focusing on the investors because he knows the principals are literally insane religious cultists.
Yep, fucking rationalists. Insane cultists of pseudointillectualism…
Organized crime frequently would use a business to mask or funnel money through, distract from other activities, or for blackmail and extortion sources.
Wait, what were we talking about again?
I don't think Futurism is even pretending to give a shit anymore either with their rage bait headlines about AI.
OpenAI managed to go from Non Profit to Anti Profit.
They put the ole' flaming national money pit to shame.
Because they're washing corporate money from tax heavens.
I already know where this gonna end which is another bubble 🙃