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    • There's a clear argument to be made that the end of USSR really let capital off the leash so to speak. So if you imagine the theft of surplus value being a spectrum, after the USSR was no longer a counterweight, capital no longer had any reason to stay on the nicer end of the spectrum.

      So in the terms of tech, this means that tech is no longer developed to just be useful/practical unless there's an exploitive monetization scheme attached or in the works. This is basically the enshittification cycle. Cool new functional thing that's cheap/free. But really it's just a ploy for market/platform capture via market share etc. So within short order, that useful tech gets bled of it's value proposition as it approaches monetization/enshittification. The profit motive has recuperated the development of tech completely. It's almost impossible to create something useful if it doesn't already have some profit/rent seeking mechanism embedded. And if you try to do a startup to challenge some market giant, they most likely just buy it out and bury it before it becomes a serious threat. Maybe if your lucky, some aspects will get ported into the existing product in some half-assed manner to appease the user base.

      Sorry for the rambling rant, I had a few beers earlier.

    • The top 1% consumer in the world is basically comfortable at this point. There isnt really a consumerist way of making their lives better. Like you can sell more high quality stuff beyond the top 1% by making it cheaper through process improvements, but its not necessarily tech advancement.

      That's never what held back capitalist expansion, the direction of economic surplus towards the luxury of a tiny minority is a defining trait of feudal production that capitalism substantially reduced. It only played a role in technological progress back at a point when meaningful advancement was still achievable by kind of resources and directed effort of the eccentric and idle rich pursuing experimentation.

      The stagnation we have isn't a result of a lack of possible gadgets for the 1%, it's us pressing more and more often against the boundary of what research can be incentivized by the profit motive. Capitalist technological innovation has always been primarily about process improvements and expansion to/creation of new markets, with resources only directed where capital returns are reasonably expected; any scientific discovery is purely incidental. There's also the fact that most scientific advancement within capitalism has been state-backed, and neoliberalism has eroded the institutions involved.

    • Not because we’ve reached any sort of technological apex, but because we’ve perhaps reached a point where the capitalist mechanisms for innovation are sputtering.

      It's the neoliberal mechanisms. The machine was doing OKAY for tech progress under Keynesian policy. Not better than socialism but it wasn't the crawl we're currently seeing.

      The top 1% consumer in the world is basically comfortable at this point. There isnt really a consumerist way of making their lives better. Like you can sell more high quality stuff beyond the top 1% by making it cheaper through process improvements, but its not necessarily tech advancement.

      They do want immortality.

    • there has been no fundamental progress aside from like, better smaller transisters and better materials science and technique, but nothing fundamental

    • (The following is the perspective of an outsider enthusiast, please disregard or correct me where needed)

      Physics has plateaued somewhat, as well. Part of it is just the scale. It's difficult to learn things about particles that are smaller than the equipment you're using to measure things. It's also hard to justify the funding, too. "Hey, give us blempty hundred thousand dollars to disprove a hypothesis." Not quite as sexy or thrilling as the venture capitalists' pie in the sky.

      ...but... I also wonder if maybe... maybe we've gotten into a bit of a rut with established physics. Like for example, I don't understand wave-particle duality. The bit I specifically don't understand is the particle. Waves make sense, we can see interference patterns, light ever-so-slightly bends round corners, different wavelengths translate to different amounts of energy. But. The fuck is a particle. It really seams like it's just a neat trick to make the sums easier.

      • It really seams like it's just a neat trick to make the sums easier.

        Part of what's weird about fundamental physics is that it is, in a sense, all just tricks to make the math easier. When you get below the level of non-relativistic QM (and even, arguably, at that level), the distinction between the mathematics of the theory and the theory itself starts to collapse. Some of this is probably just due to the fact that events and patterns at that scale are just so unfamiliar to us and our everyday experience: we can make intuitive sense of things like forces, acceleration, mass, and other stuff that's in the ontology of classical mechanics because we live in that world. Fields, Lie groups, fiber bundles, and other essential bits of the formalism at the QFT level are much harder for us to understand, because they can only roughly be mapped onto things that are familiar from our lived experience. This is part of why things like QFT, QED, and other candidate "fundamental" theories just seem like bags of mathematical tricks: in a very literal sense, those theories are telling us that the world just is a set of formal relationships and interdependent patterns. When you ask something like "well what is the theory really telling us, beyond the math?" for classical mechanics, I can give you a story--a narrative--about the world that maps the mathematics onto familiar concepts. When you ask the same question about QFT, there's no easily accessible metaphor or story: it's structure all the way down. Statements like "light sometimes behaves like a particle" means nothing more or less than "it's useful to think of light as being quantized in some contexts, because the mathematics seems to work that way."

      • I'm also an outsider and I find it helpful to see things in a similar way.

        Everything can be divided up in different ways: relations of production, forces of production, social relations, means of production, mental conceptions, etc, etc. Science/technology is another one. They're all interconnected. Each one can develop even if the others stagnate. But there's a limit to how much anything can develop on its own. They either all develop or you reach a wall.

        The hard sciences are near the wall. There's room for a little bit of development but nothing can flourish. Google '[discipline/science] funding' and have a look at what's required to secure research funding (or don't—it won't be fun lol). There is zero percent chance that any funder will knowingly pay a research team to conclude, 'capitalism must end'. There are research questions you're just not allowed to ask.

        Not to mention that scientists are hemmed in on all sides by IP. Good luck advancing knowledge if you're not allowed to start at the most advanced point because some imperialist items the IP and keeps it locked away because reasons.

        Researchers of all kinds know the system is terrible but without organisation none of them can do anything about it. And they're mostly labour aristocrats if they work in western research institutions, which means they are unwilling to even accept what the problem is beyond the surface detail of restrictive gatekeeping.

        There's only so much even the best scientist can achieve in this system.

      • I feel like unless we figure out an extremely clever trick, we need just gigantic particle accelerators or quantum computers orders of magnitude better than we can currently conceive of to make substantial steps forward in physics anymore. Like, we're not even talking "Well, the USSR/China could do it because they weren't/aren't as beholden to the profit motive", we're talking particle accelerators the size of fucking countries, and helium liquid cooling on large scales to maintain quantum coherence unless we figure out more room-temperature shit.

        String theory is a neat idea and I do genuinely find it interesting and have read books on it, but at the end of the day it's just a giant "so what" to me. Not "what's the point of making physics advancements" obviously, but "what's the point of creating these massive, complicated theories if we need a particle accelerator the size of the solar system to prove them right or wrong".

  • Not to be too doomer, but if you have things you like on the internet, get an external hard drive and start saving. It's gonna be hard to find things soon

    • It's already gotten much harder for me to Google good sources of information that goes against the mainstream capitalist ideals compared to a few years ago

      It's not just AI, the US state will also greatly expand their control on the flow of information as they continue to increase the need to suppress workers domestically and internationally

      • Use Yandex. I'm not joking, I have started to get better results on it and the image search is genuinely much better, in particular the reverse image search is waaaaay better.

      • The CIA and other financial institutions already read books from leftist authors to find stats that they need to conceal - Super Imperialism — Michael Hudson

        "Politicians in charge of national statistics encourage popular misunderstanding, but my statistical analysis tells a different story from what is widely believed. A few years ago I sought to update my calculations on the impact of U.S. military spending and foreign aid on the balance of payments. But the Commerce Department had changed Table 5 of its balance-of-payments report, dealing with foreign aid and other government programs, in a way that no longer reveals the extent to which foreign aid programs generate a transfer of dollars from foreign countries to the United States. I phoned the statistical division responsible for collecting these statistics, and in due course reached the technician responsible for the numbers. “We used to publish that data,” he explained, “but some joker published a report showing that the United States actually made money off the countries we were aiding. It caused such a stir that we changed the accounting format so that nobody can embarrass us like that again.”

        I realized that I was the joker who was responsible for the present-day statistical concealment."

        https://medium.com/@davi./super-imperialism-f7e92ba1f4f0

        And:

        "Well, I thought that this was going to be a warning to other countries. And indeed, there was a very quick Spanish translation and Japanese translation. But the main purchases, as we’ve talked about a year ago, were the CIA and the Defense Department.

        Immediately Herman Kahn hired me to the Hudson Institute and gave a very large grant for me to explain to the government how imperialism was working. And the U.S. government used this as a how-to-do-it book."

        https://michael-hudson.com/2021/10/we-make-the-rules/

      • Google doesn't even want to help you find information anymore. 5 times a fucking day the thing gets pissed off that I'm rephrasing my searches, and makes me click the captcha box. It just wants you to click ads, buy shit, and fuck off- not find out information for free.

        The antitrust case against Google right now is going to be huge. The actual chance of them losing isnt high, even though they should, but just the existence of the lawsuit is going to make them tamp down on their anticompetitive behavior until the smoke clears. Last time this happened, it happened to Microsoft. That's when we GOT Google in the first place, and a lot of other new kids on the block. We could see some actually amazing search tools appear in a few years because of this, especially if they actually lose

  • As someone that works with cleaning up after AI, nah don't worry, capitalism and climate change with keep it in a tight cage. Future peoples will be confused why capitalist Murica had such limited trite uses for AI similar to how the Imperialist Romans only used the steam engine for opening temple doors or similar stories.

    To add, Chat gpt's answers are curated by people not given too long to QA select questions and areas, like the story of the mechanical Turkish chessplayer most of AI's brain power is still human-derived and these workers (esp non-imperial core) are very low paid and non experts in their fields.

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