AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots
Hopefully dirt cheap gpus and ram when the bubble bursts
Unfortunately most of the GPUs aren’t usable by gamers. We aren’t talking mining booms where miners buy up gaming GPU stock, then sell cheap when the bubble bursts.
We’re talking companies buying huge GPUs that don’t have video outputs and have an altered software stack to what’s used for gaming, missing all kinds of features and game specific patches.
Granted, many 4090/5090s were also used, and those will be usable by gamers, but even with a significant price drop on those, only richer gamers will find that to be viable.
Somewhat similar story for memory - a lot of it is tied up in HBM, or as GDDR on enterprise graphics cards.
I would pickup an inference GPU to run models locally. I can see a benefit in that especially if they’re on the cheap
don’t have video outputs and have an altered software stack to what’s used for gaming, missing all kinds of features and game specific patches.
True about those without video outputs. But in Linux, game specific patches are in Mesa and not in the graphics drivers for example.
Additionally, in windows (linux too?) one could use Moonlight / Sunshine to compute on the GPU and stream to secondary device (either directly, like say to a Chromecast, or via the iGPU to their monitor). Latency is quite small in most circumstances, and allows for some interesting tricks (eg: server GPUs allow you to split GPU into multiple “mini-gpus” - essentially, with the right card, you could host two+ entirely different, concurrent instances of GTA V on one machine, via one physical GPU).
A bit hacky, but it works.
Source: I bought a Tesla P4 for $100 and stuck it in a 1L case.
GPU goes brrr
And their energy usage must be outrageous
“Reverse centaur” is a super clunky term, I think we should say “Minotaur” instead.
A Centaur has the head of a person and the body of a beast, a Minotaur is the opposite.
Pretty sure a superb writer like Cory chose reverse centaur for a reason - to make it clearer that a human is becoming the servant of a machine.
The term isn’t just about which half is human though, it’s about the dynamic flip in humans relationship with tooling.
The “tool” part of the centaur is the horse body. All of the hard to duplicate bits of a human (reasoning, processing, fine motor skills) with the strength and speed of a horse. A reverse centaur is when a complex system is designed that needs a “dumb human” to do the complex bits while the system uses humans as an appendage.
Reverse centaur may sound clunky but is a really elegant one liner for Doctorow’s thesis.
I’ll salvage me a cheap PC upgrade once this stupid ship finally sinks.
Possibly, but components from AI centers cannot be reused easily (or at all) for consumer machines.
most of these companies will probably fail. it’s expected. but the AI paradigm is not going anywhere
I’m not a Leninist by any means. But on a mass scale, the need to grow for a Capitalist economy? Manifests itself in ways Lenin described as “Capitalist Imperialism”. If you only reach one chapter, the author says that’s Ch7, which becomes a short essay.
Lenin Argues against Carl Kautsky’s assertion that such a prospect looks like grabbing Land. Lenin argues that Capitalism needs no such political arm directly, only ownership of the economy by a foreign body. Eventually investment capital runs out of fertile ground at home and must find new markets to control.
As Russia’s economy stagnated, and the room for investment dried up, much of Putin’s moves were to open other countries to Russian Finance Capital. When that failed, taking new land became the fallback for having new oil and shipping investments. Not just land, but resources as Kautsky discussed.
And here Doctorow breaks down how that looks for single firms in monopoly or oligopoly, specifically in the tech sector, and its drive to constantly " invent new markets". A perfect compliment.
That’s what these data centers are - Empire. They will swallow your ability to compute. Moderate it. Control it. Direct it towards only their ends. Because at the end game, the most value extraction comes from not simply selling you a product, but selling you as a product to other businesses. Enshittification will continue until you can out-bid the corpos for your data sovereignty. Reverse Centaurs are easy to train, replace, and shift. Centaurs? Require actual investment, giving the worker some power.
The need for control? Emerges organically from the consequences of noncompliance. In both the puppet-state in response to its international industrial overlords, or its alternative in direct management by a foreign state. The money must flow, the growth must happen, or the party is over for much broader than their own dinner table.
The growth must happen, or the very laws of a market crush the entire society down to well below this peak. No more growth stocks in growth industries, just cutthroat competition from the same corpos that keep out upstarts… Until some shock ruins somebody’s bag, and we get a chance at something interesting like the tech sector used to be.
Great to see Lenin’s analyses being applied more often. His concept of imperialism is the single greatest contribution to capitalist analysis after Marx.
Hopefully some cheap hardware.
I wanted C3PO from the AI boon. Instead, I lost my job and was replaced by AI.
-Sci-fi nerds who were hopeful of the future and AI
Haven’t read the article yet but hopefully it’s cheap used drives
Why do people keep listening to this guy?
Because he knows his shit.
Sure but nobody important cares and he’s just repeating himself ad nauseum.
I’m not sure it’s targeted at anyone “important” (what a classist term!). It is just analyzing the situation and predicting what happens next, for you and I to be prepared. It also hastens the end of the bubble ever so slightly, which is good - the sooner this poison-laced bandaid is ripped off the world’s economy, the faster we can start to rebuild something more meaningful, but now with new productivity tools by our side.
nobody important cares
And you’re sure of that because …
In most fairy tales, it takes more than one blow to kill the dragon…
and he’s just repeating himself ad nauseum
this is usually how you build mindshare of anything
This man has really built a career and following off saying common sense things…
I don’t know why people keep eating it up or acting like he’s a genius, but at least this time he isn’t coining a new term to “explain” something that leads to everyone using it but not understanding what’s actually happening.
He’s a good writer and leader on the technology front. He gets a bit repetitive but that’s because he is trying to get the word out.
He’s actually built a career on being an author…
I’m also assuming you only read the headline
I don’t think he’s necessarily a genius, but he is a force for good and a great writer. We do need someone to keep stating the truth, keep saying what’s right and what’s wrong, this is literally how we win the information war currently waged against us.
It’s the same with the genocide experts calling out genocide, or the eco-activists calling out climate change. It might be obvious common sense to you, but it might not be to other people, and this is precisely why it needs to be shouted from every rooftop we have available.
Oh, and also, if you actually read his works he clearly does more than just state the obvious and coin new terms (even though both of those are important too). He is deeply and intimately familiar with the technical and social structures of the modern internet, his analysis of various phenomena and trends is usually on-point and has some predictive power (it is more dialectical-materialist than most tech journalism out there). Most importantly he offers solutions to the issues facing us, and practices what he preaches too.
He is deeply and intimately familiar with the technical and social structures of the modern internet, his analysis of various phenomena and trends is usually on-point and has some predictive power
If you think he predicts anything, you’re streets behind
Most importantly he offers solutions to the issues facing us
He repeats what anyone could find in a five minute Google search from articles written by others.
I’ve never seen an original thought, he’s the Carlos Mencia of tech.
What you might think is “common sense” may not be for others. There is value in this being documented, otherwise the person without “common sense” may be influenced by someone with an agenda who does document their thoughts.
Same as when people make fun of “obvious” research, there is value in having it peer reviewed as a reference for future researchers.
There is value in this being documented, otherwise the person without “common sense” may be influenced by someone with an agenda who does document their thoughts.
Oh yeah, because no one has “documented” that AI is bullshit yet…
Only the brave Cory Doctrow could gather and disseminate this to the masses!
/s
The fuck’s with your beef? This is just one article he wrote. The guys written hundreds of pieces, maybe thousands, about all sorts of technology related issues
Timing. Saying common sense stuff before others gives you an edge and being the first to say it with any eloquence, in a way people want to listen and are accepting of what’s being said. A lot of what Cory Doctorow says can be hard to hear or hard to deliver without sounding condescending like NDT. His talent is in the delivery.
He also has a ton of experience in this space, he’s worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for almost 25 years. On top of that, he’s whip-smart and enjoyable to read or listen to
Saying common sense stuff before others
Yeah bro…
No one else has pointed out AI will fail before 1/18/26…
Only the great Cory Doctrow could identify something that no other human has ever even contemplated.
I heard next, he’s going to release a blog post that Nazis might not be nice people
Again, did you even read the oped
