Yes, I'd prefer a university to a crazed billionaire, too.

Maybe if AI had developed in the hands of of people for whom profit wasn't the principal motivation, I'd have more faith in a good outcome. One is still possible, but just not as likely as I'd want it to be.

Ideally, losses will eventually be recouped. And if you're dealing with a managed brokerage kind of account (and/or mutual fund investments and/or most pension funds), chances are brokers are already starting to shift away from AI stocks (even though that's where most of the growth is) to play it safe. And the general rule of thumb when the stock market is shaky or erratic, as it has been recently, to invest less in stocks and more in bonds. In other words, people who buy heavily into AI stocks could take huge losses if the bubble bursts. Ordinary mortals who have other people managing their investments will typically sustain much lower losses. That makes it easier to wait for the eventual upswing.

Also, even though unrealized gains aren't taxable, unrealized losses can in some circumstances be deductible, so if your portfolio shrinks in value, that can result in a reduction in tax liability.

My portfolio (mostly inherited, not funded by my teacher's salary or my royalties) has gone up and down in value with economic fluctuations. But as far as income I receive directly from it, that has remained stable.

But I think the planners at the top have a long-term vision and know where we're headed. I'm an AI optimist. The world is going to sh*t, and we need something to hang our hat on. Too many people around the world live in poverty and much much worse. It's unacceptable. And the Status Quo has zero interest in changing anything. AI has the potential to force meaningful change through innovation.

We agree that there are a lot of problems. But the sticking point is still what it was the last time we touched on the same topic--how do we get from a for-profit model to an altruistic one? If there's too much money on the table to stop AI, isn't there too much money on the table to allow for the creation of utopia?

The medical examples you cite do indeed show a lot of promise, and it doesn't appear that, in general, they put that many people out of work. But even as these medical advances occur, corporate American is gearing up for massive layoffs. Since health insurance is still largely tied to employment, at least in the US, Timothy is right to point out that all those advances won't even affect a lot of people because they have little or no access to healthcare, and the population in that condition will increase, probably substantially.

We could restrict AI to things like medical data analysis where it can do better than humans. But we're not going to do that because there's a lot of money in enabling efficiencies that allow large corporations to cut jobs. And no one is stepping up to fund universal healthcare and/or universal basic income--let alone universal high income. So income inequality will become even worse, poverty will become even worse, and at some point, there won't be enough consumers to sustain a capitalist economy. If the decision-making is based on money on the table, as you suggest, then what incentive is there to take some of that money off the table to fund a more utopian vision.

In California and other places, we seen how large developers address affordable housing. They push through large structures, using affordable housing as a pretext. But the bottom story is usually retail--sometimes upscale retail. In the floors above, you may have ten affordable units for every hundred regular-priced or even luxury units. These large structures create problems with everything from traffic to air circulation--but they don't solve the underlying problem of affordable housing. Their whole purpose is to maximize developer profits with the tiniest nod to affordable housing.

That's how I see AI. Developers are motivated by profit. They may incidentally do some good along the way, but I doubt it will outweigh the harm.

To Lorri's point, yes, AI is more substantive than some of the .com startups were. But its stock is still valued far higher than it would be if the basis were what AI can reasonably do now. It's valued on what people think AI may be able to do at some future point. And when the valuation so far exceeds the gross domestic product, that leads to crashes.  In the .com bubble, valuation exceeded GDP by less than 50%. Now, valuation exceeds GDP by more than 100%. That suggests an even bigger crash than the .com one. Some may survive or even prosper in their wake, but that isn't guaranteed. 

Website visitors have long been mostly AI. Cloudflare reports on a typical day that I have more than a thousand unique visitors. I wish. Jetpack reports unique visitors in the same day as like 14. It's sometimes higher, but it never approaches the Cloudflare levels. That's because the CF stats don't distinguish likely human visitors, but the JP ones do.

It's not that CF doesn't know the difference. It does have routines to keep out malicious bots, and it can block AI-training bots pretty well. Since I applied more bot security, the bandwidth being consumed has dropped remarkably.

There are still a lot of potential human viewers out there. But it is also true that audience stats are skewed by bots.

If you use WordPress, there are a number of plugins (free and paid) that will block a lot of the fake traffic.

I host a site for a client that is a small, local organization.  It is not a website that is used daily.  Yet, several times this year, it exceeded its bandwidth by significant amounts before the month was even over.  The site was consuming more bandwidth than sites much larger and more active used.

But, I found a plugin that blocks bots and, I think, AI bots and whatnot and installed it.  Just used the free version of the plugin.  Also, had to watch the activity logs to identify some problem scrapers that weren't in the free list.  Anyway, once I got that installed and configured, traffic has gone way, way down to almost normal levels.

But it is a constant battle.  It's not just search engines scanning your site anymore or even the occasional scraper tools from sketchy Internet marketers.  Now it's all these AI bots scanning your site for content to use for its training material.

And, of course, they pay you nothing for the bandwidth they consume nor do you get any benefit from it.

Quote from: TimothyEllis on October 31, 2025, 12:27:03 AM

Where's the list of accomplishments?

For example:

https://www.futureaiplanet.com/2025/10/10-ai-healthcare-examples-2025.html

Only about half of that looks useful, and that half is unlikely to be available to the people who need it most.

The other half comes under 'f*ck no!". Like the Diabetes thing. No way in hell am I having a bot tell me to go for a ten minute walk. That isn't happening. Might be needed by some type 1s, but for type 2s, they have to be doing it wrong to need that.

The transcribing thing is truly terrifying, since none of the bots can actually turn voice into text reliably. All those bot reels where the text is not what was said, and really badly not what was said, show that. How anyone can trust those is terrifying.