AI’s business model is starting to look like a snake eating its own tail: scrape human work, replace the humans who make it, flood the web with synthetic sludge, then wonder why there’s less quality data to train on. Silicon Valley calls it disruption. Everyone else might call it burning the furniture to heat the house.
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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Burning the furniture to heat the house is such a good analogy, wow.
Pretty sure some of that furniture was structural
Load-bearing, some might say
Hey, at least it'll be warm for a hot minute!
Sure we destroyed the planet, but for a while there we provided great shareholder value.
I've heard it as sell the car to buy gasoline
Also very accurate 😄
Shitting the nest is a more abrasive analogy for when you really mean it.
I think "Shitting where you eat" works a little better, given they're shitting all over the internet, which is where their training data comes from
Edit: Spelling
I've heard shitting on your own doorstep. Doesn't fit as nicely as the furniture analogy though IMO 😆
An old one is "eating your seed corn". In other words eating the seeds you need to plant the next crop to survive now guaranteeing you will starve next season.
Wow, also really good 😅
I cant recall the source (I think it was a Telegraph article) but it only took current AIs 7 "rounds" to confuse its data amongst each other and it was 11 or 12 before it becomes completely corrupted. The testers basically used ChatGPT, Grok etc etc to search each other and they just had massive brain farts at the 7th round of questioning.
Best thing you could probably do at this point is make slop and pass it off as real work.
When AI removes the need for so many jobs and people can't afford purchases and the economy collapses (again), how will the world's governments act? I can't see the US ever introducing universal basic income and the vast majority of countries simply can't afford it. I think AI might be one of those moments where it seemed like a great idea in the zeitgeist, but in retrospect, they just didnt plan for it, because all they wanted to do was just make as much money as possible. The current crop of James Bond baddies at the top of the ladder are happy to see the world burn, because they won't be around to give a shit when it all comes crashing down.
They’ll be around for it, but they’ll be insulated from it because they have more money than God.
All the money in the world cannot render someone immune to kinetic energy
it can, if it buys you a wall o flesh.
Better be paying those security forces top notch pay.
In Douglas Rushkoff’s “Survival of the Richest”, originally published on Medium on July 5, 2018, with the subtitle “The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.”, Rushkoff describes accepting an unusually well-paid invitation to speak about “the future of technology” at a luxurious private resort. He expected roughly 100 investment bankers, but instead found himself sitting at a table with five extremely wealthy men from the hedge-fund world. Their questions shifted from cryptocurrency to whether New Zealand or Alaska would be safer during a collapse—and then to their bunkers.
A brokerage-house CEO who had nearly finished building an underground bunker asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”
By “the event,” they meant a catastrophe such as environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear disaster, or an unstoppable virus. They worried that money would become worthless and their armed guards might take over. Rushkoff recounts them discussing combination locks on food supplies, disciplinary collars for guards, and robot security. His response was to treat their security personnel well and build relationships rather than rely on coercion.
They didn't like that answer.
https://archive.rushkoff.com/articles/1094-survival-of-the-richest.html https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
No billionaire wants to live in a bunker for the rest of their life. They want adulation, people fawning over them, etc. They'd also need to continue to receive supplies, fresh food (you think they are going to put up with dried rations?), hookers, travel, etc. If they are cut off they will be no better than Hitler in his bunker.
History has shown when the leadership is corrupt everyone around them follows suit. Stealing whenever they can, abandoning their posts at the first chance, incompetence, security goes to whoever pays them the most, etc.
And this is why they're investing so heavily in killer robot technology. The private armies protecting these bunkers, won't be comprised of humans.
Though there will probably be a heavily brainwashed IT guy shackled in a sub-basement Faraday cage beneath each bunker, for just in case there's any crisis that can't be 'reprogrammed' upstairs using the AIs, but these guys are going to be nigh on impossible to get to.
"What? I am going to have to work to build social capital, ridiculous. How do I buy it?"
Don't accept their money. "We've converted all cash to freedom bucks. Your money is no good here."
The new feudal lords will own everything and be super duper kind enough to let the peons and slaves toil the soil and keep 1/100th of the produce. Pretty sure that's literally how they want and expect things to become
I can’t see the US ever introducing universal basic income
Recent polling shows 66% of Americans support Medicare for all. The people will demand UBI once it's needed, the only question is whether the Epstein class will comply peacefully or not.
The US debt is so high now that a UBI would push it over the edge most likely without massive tax increases. Decades of being told all taxes on anyone are evil probably mean people would walk off a cliff before doing that.
I'm very concerned about this.
But I'm even more concerned that the jobs that AI kills are jobs that no one gets trained to do, and that no one will know how to do them when the computers stop working.
LLM is destroying the ability to think in kids. Even if you want to switch back and retrain people Gen Slop isn't ready for that.
Yeah but the job market will be hot for any Gen Alpha that even has half a working brain.
The people doing the hiring will be too addle minded to recognize a working brain.
Ai isn't even close to replacing a job yet. Its not even cheaper than a human. Anyone going into a field that people are fleeing due to Ai will be in huge demand when we move on to the next scam cycle.
Tech layoffs in the last few years arent jobs being replaced with Ai, they are from the massive amounts of overhiring that occured in 2020-2021
They say "Well people will just work in the upper levels, strategy, etc." Uhhh, how do they think people develop the skills and instincts for those positions? Sure, you can train someone to go through the motions but they won't know if they are good or bad, no experience with past mistakes and crisis, no sense of what will work or not, etc. It is like saying everyone will become the site manager but never put a house frame together or swung a hammer in their life.
Oh yeah, the AI companies realized this from the start, maybe not that it would happen this quickly, but that it would happen.
This is why they are hyping AI up further now, as they want to squeeze the final drop of blood from the stone.
This is pervasive throughout any segments where AI is leveraged. I’ve heard it called a Diamond-shaped market. What used to be a pyramid of entry-level to mid tier to experienced staff no longer has entry level. So it’s just mid tier and experienced staff. There is no one in the pipeline to move up. What happens then? The genie is out of the bottle. The big AI shops could close up now and it would only slow the decline as local models are getting more performant. I’m impressed at what Qwen can do on a MacBook with 32 gig of ram. The question I have is, what’s the solution? I got nothing other than hoping the process of decline drags out longer than I think it will.
Even the AI just wants to die.
Businesses destroying the skills development pipeline by eliminating entry level jobs.
Retail is so polluted with AI scams and deceptive ads that the public is being driven off of any but the most well vetted sites. This is on top of the massive scams problem worldwide.