debaser

According to the chatbot industry, there are two possible futures: 1) AI becomes superintelligent and kills all humans 2) AI becomes superintelligent and replaces most of human labor Both make the assumption that AGI/ASI is near, and both promote frontier lab IPOs. But there is a third possibility: 3) Chatbots reach diminishing returns. Scaling becomes unsustainable. Demand never materializes. If the chatbot industry cannot convince the public that 1) or 2) is real, it dies. If OpenAI or Anthropic do not successfully IPO, the entire economy will crash. If the reality is 3), we have witnessed the worst misallocation of resources in human history. Both the Navier-Stokes fiasco, where OpenAI brute forced a solution that was already implicit in its training data, and Anthropic’s coordinated threat to humanity, are part of a long series of psychological operations by these companies. Whether or not you think Jacob Coxon is being sincere (I don’t), Anthropic is blatantly using him as marketing: “Our product is so powerful it could kill everyone. If you don’t give us billions of retirees’ money at IPO, it will happen.” The truth of the matter is the third possibility—that LLMs are a useful software feature that will be harnessed, commoditized and absorbed into the tech stack—is what’s happening all around us. Scale is not the answer. The circular trillions being spent on data center construction is mass psychosis. The chatbot industrial complex is another crypto—a moderately useful technology turned into an abusive Ponzi through deceptive psyops. Chatbots are not going to kill us, but they may cause another great depression.