Cory Doctorow's take on Meta, AI and investors: "Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray"
Pluralistic: Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again) (07 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I enjoyed this breakdown of Meta and Zuck's constant drive for growth and the tragic way investors eat the narrative wholesale. Enjoy!
Idk he makes some pretty wild claims along the way
AI is not like a storage disk. if something more efficient came out tomorrow everyone would just scale up training and costs would just go up again
And yet they still haven't managed to get enough people to pay the subscription costs, except the guys trying to package it as a SaaS and hoping the customers don't notice they're just a fancy middleman.
They can scale up training all they want, there's a natural price point most customers won't go over. And if you're thinking about businesses paying that extra cost because they can save money on actual workers... Sure, for a few months, and then they realize what happens when they leave their super intelligent AI agents alone for a few weeks and a website changes the default layout, breaking the entire workflow, or when an important client receives an absurd automated email, or when their AI note taker and financial planning agent is incapable of answering why $20000 disappeared.
You’re right - he likes to be provocative and makes some big generalizations. Not sure about the costs of AI…would need more info on that but he seems to suggest it’s an exception to the general rule in computing.
An interesting McKinsey article on cost of AI. Basically it’s hard to predict, but the numbers here are staggering. And then there’s the “hidden cost” of environmental impact. All these data centers etc will add to CO2 emissions, which may worsen climate change and result in more climate disasters (drought, flooding, etc) that carry huge costs. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-cost-of-compute-a-7-trillion-dollar-race-to-scale-data-centers