They spent a couple of years doing exactly that with Sam Bankman-Fried, and learned nothing after that rotten edifice collapsed. They just moved on to the next Sam.
The people Zitron is talking about are no longer journalists. They’re courtiers to the rich and famous, and often delusional ones at that. And if that isn’t bad enough, the “genius” techbros whose boots they lick have also convinced some of them to burnish the reputation of JD Vance.
I’ll post this sequence from the 1994 movie The Paper (co-incidentally directed by the same person who did the film version of Hillybilly Elegy) once again.
The other day, when Tesla’s bartender robot was shown off, some rich VC fellow on Twitter gloated specifically about it putting humans out of work and ending the need to even interact with them.
That attitude, by the way, is what might keep “AI” a viable industry. If this industry can make a credible promise that their products can cut 1% or more of the headcount off the balance sheet of any company, no matter what its size, that’s all it will take for corporate America and Wall Street to keep them in business. All the other applications of LLMs are sideshows and details.
Of course, most of these anti-social greedpigs aren’t thinking about what happens to society in general and their lifestyles if that number goes to 10%, mostly because they agree with Thatcher that there’s no such thing as society. The ones who are thinking about it see a neoliberal UBI or DS9-style sanctuary districts as “solutions”.
