Report Blog Entry
I know I'm no one to speak about it, and I know the title seems exaggerated, but I think I want to tell my thoughts on this topic. Be warned, this feels more like a conspiracy theory rather than an actual investigation into the topic.
OpenAI is probably driving us towards a Second Great Depression (SGD)
For context:
As far as I'm aware (I fact-checked with humanly stupid sources, not AI, don't worry), the Great Depression was a severe economic crash that happened around 1929. It was a Wall Street crash where employment was lost, houses were taken by debt, and people lost everything in a period of less than a day. This affected EVERYONE, from businessmen who ended up bankrupt, to families that lost retirement, college funds, and their life savings. This got us severe repercussions in the United States and consequently in the rest of the world.
Previously, on the "Roaring Twenties" (AKA, gullible is written on the ceiling)
“When even shoeshine boys are giving you stock tips, it’s time to sell”, Joseph P. Kennedy(?)
I don't know why, but I always remember that quote. Does it sound classist? Yes, it actually does.... when it's out of context.
I know this decade brought a lot of good stuff. After all, it wasn't "roaring" just because everyone could afford food; the decade was marked with a lot of economic growth, and it made Americans actually think about others. Women got more rights, homosexuals got more visibility, and other countries were also growing thanks to the exportations. Not only that, but this decade also had a lot of development in movies, fashion, and overall, it had its good side; no one's here to deny it.
Yet at the same time, they prohibited immigrants, and became a little too comfortable with the idea of "easy money" and the life of constant luxury, becoming what we would call "greedy" by today standards, putting themselves in debt to buy stocks, sounds like a bad idea nowadays, but back then it felt like "ok, I'll ask the bank for 10,000 dollars that I actually can't repay, but I'll be using them in the stock market and they will instantly become 20,000 dollars, then I pay back the 10,000 and have my own 10,000, EASY MONEY! :D". Hence, once the Wall Street crash happened, people were actually in debt once they realized the money they didn't actually own was GONE, and there was only the debt left.
End of the free history lesson, on to the main topic (if you skipped, don't worry, the last section will be recalled)
Why is AI a leading way to a Great Depression?
This theory came right after I heard some interesting news about the new app from OpenAI, Sora: The Social Media (I know it's not called like that; I'm trying to be funny). Did you know it actually costs them 5 dollars to make ONE singular video on the app? They are making them for free, people are creating multi-accounts to make even more videos, so, in a few words, OpenAI is clearly losing money by expanding their "customer reach", making AI SO ACCESSIBLE that even a shoeshine boy teenager with no actual experience about anything can create a photorealistic video of Pikachu insulting the police.
Yeah, the large corporation's losing money, woe is them, who cares? You probably should, because the energy bill has gotten more expensive thanks to the extreme consumption of electricity that OTHERS are spending. And it's affecting other businesses as well. The ones investing in AI are not completely aware of how AI is going to turn out better; they have promised "super intelligence," yet, how do we establish it? Even if it's supposedly smarter than humans, how are we sure AI can even achieve human intelligence? Overall, we had only poorly redacted essays, fake videos, and an algorithm that learns only by stealing from others. It's already known that actual researchers (not CEOs that want to keep everything a secret) have stated a low chance of actually developing "super intelligence", and investors are basically feeding a bubble that won't last long.
The bubble
When you inflate the value of something to a point where it's unrealistic to think that it could achieve it, it becomes a bubble, for example, someone with an inflated ego thinks they can do stuff out of their capabilities, someone with inflated expectatives (or overtly positive) think stuff can never go wrong, and the best case scenario is always possible, not preparing themselves for failure.
In the "roaring twenties," there was this phenomenon of inflating the value of stocks by simply buying, not becoming better, in other words, you could have John Doe's business where he sold frozen mustard, no one actually bought it, but the actions would be skyrocketing because everyone was buying... actions, not frozen mustard, so by the Stock Market's standards, John's enterprise was a total success because their actions were increasing, even if he had almost no clients or real value.
When a bubble pops, it's always "depressing" (ha) to see its form disappear in less than a second. They are fragile, so you can't expect a bubble to last forever. That happened on the already mentioned Wall Street Crash.
The bubble of AI
Here's the interesting part: an economic crash would already be expected if we think for a second about how unrealistic it is to think that AI will become a replacement for humans. Once the promises turn out to be popped, investors will lose money, and yadadi yadada, we will be a little poorer than before. But this is not the only bubble I'm talking about
The intelligence bubble
Have you written an essay with AI? I sure have, not entirely, I have "asked for its help with organizing my ideas" or "teach me how to do x or y", "I'm not dependent on AI". While I'm on the side of people who have asked ChatGPT to explain their Physics homework, we could also be atrophying our own capability to see a 10-minute-long video about it. Everyone's essays suddenly became "better" after AI became a thing, but people's critical sense has been proven to be decreasing due to the dependence on AI, even if people are "learning", this unreliable professor can disappear within a few minutes as several shutdowns" were reported this year (periods of hours where ChatGPT didn't work at all), and what we're left with? People who don't know how to interpret information outside their specific situation.
What relation does it have?
If you don't rely on AI to decide what to have for breakfast, you could've already inferred it, but I'll write it down anyway since we need to state it clearly:
Roaring Twenties / AI Decade (this one)
A new opportunity to make money / A new tool to generate content (that can make money)
It's extremely easy to invest / It's extremely easy to use it for everyday life
"If you don't invest, you're stupid" / "If you don't use AI, you're falling behind"
People put themselves in debt for the progress / People are not learning for the progress
It's fueled by the promise of easy money / It's fueled by the promise of "making stuff easier"
People were getting too comfortable with luxury / People are getting too comfortable with automation
Its promises were wavering after some years / It's already an unreliable source of information
Almost all of the US was after a promise of a better economy / Almost all the WORLD is after a promise of "making our lives easier... somehow."
We could be more fucked than before
Imagine a decade of students without education. When the Great Depression happened, we still had education at least, yeah, it was an economic crash, but not an intellectual crash, we still had the knowledge to survive... AI's not giving us that opportunity.
Think about it, if we lose our main source to write essays, what are we going to do when the teacher asks for another one, we can't write it since we don't know how to do it, we fail, or we drop out since "school's too difficult without AI", yeah, a drop out is bad, but imagine a major drop out in students and grades after AI's gone, imagine people not knowing how to FUNCTION without AI, imagine workers not doing their work at all.
The lack of AI would not only affect our economic state but also our lives as a whole, considering how invested some people are in it.
We still have stocks, we're still going to have AI
It's not like the stock market disappeared, right? We still have it, but not everyone jumps into it, or probably you have, if you listened to a guru on Instagram, yet we all know that investing is no joke, it's an actual risk where you have to know what you're doing before investing.
My prediction (based on all that has been said) is that we're surely going to have AI, it just won't be that easy to access it. Why? Not only because people would be afraid of putting their work into it, and probably people are going to re-learn all the skills they avoided due to AI, even if it's because of a lack of options, but AI won't be as predominant as it is right now :)
Just a thing for our minds....
AI is a new thing, and every new thing is scary, not every new thing is a good thing, but we can't assume every new thing is inherently bad, this is just a theory, based on vague research rather than statistics and arguments from qualified people, I would personally recommend you to stop using it, but I lack the authority to force people to do so, even with my own arguments about how "using AI is bad" I can't be 100% sure about an upcoming Great Depression due to the wavering state of AI's trustworthiness from both our wallets and our brains.
Do what you think is best.
And thanks for reading :)
- Elías, a spider :3
References (if you want to know more about it)
Wall Street crash of 1929 - Wikipedia
Yeah, Wikipedia isn't the epitome of trustworthy information, but it's free, and relatively human, also, this isn't full research, it's just a theory, an AI theory
Comments
Displaying 0 of 0 comments ( View all | Add Comment )