AI feels like a real mania, a genuine collective break from reality among the ruling class. They might as well be pouring billions of dollars into an attempt to replace all jobs and knowledge with a large bronze idol of Dagon.
They also just have too much money and no vision at all for what to do with it. For all the VC money poured into tech in the last 15 years the best they could come up with was "hopefully the self driving electric taxi becomes a thing" and "what if there was more shit you could gamble on?"
Clear to me we'd be much better served putting taxes back at great society levels and publicly funding the basic research it's too boring or unprofitable for these dolts to get interested in. They're in some green new deal while we at it.
Look at what happened with Boeing for an in-a- nutshell explanation of what went wrong there. The new bosses dumped its experienced engineers - the people who actually made the product that made the company work - for refusing to make share value a #1 priority. Management has become a parasite.
It didn't matter that it ended up costing a lot more money, or that now they have a mostly unusable product (the Dreamliner, mostly sitting unused atm) and will probably end up facing multiple lawsuits at some point.
An entire parasitic ecosytem has grown up around the $ for r&d & higher ed.
Impossible is usually not the goal. It's usually just make what's incrementally better. Then somebody takes an incremental improvement from elsewhere and capitalizes on it. Moonshots don't actually achieve much in the long run, even if they're neat.
It needs to all be taxed away from them into general funds owned in part by everyone, subjecting investment and development to democratic needs and wants.
