THOSE MEN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Why So Quiet Now, Tech Bros, After Roaring About ChatGPT?
How does it feel to be exposed by a cheap Chinese knockoff?
Dear God, how close you tech bros and investors came to the goal. The media have retained a bottomless appetite for loud, empty technobabble since the DotCom days; and with Trump’s inauguration, the whole enchilada was in your grasp. You damn-near nailed it: DonOld was ready to pump half a trillion dollars of taxpayer money into pampering your energy-guzzling, insatiable, brain-dead pet. Colossal investments and the consequent share-price inflation masquerading as “growth” — justified by mere noise and demanding nothing more than enduring hype — were so close you could taste them. The dream was about to materialize.
Oh, but the money is only part of it. More importantly, you sneaky bastards were about to devalue labor on a scale we haven’t seen since the New Deal. Your trillion-dollar word guesser was always meant to intimidate workers, not replace them. AI has always been about creating a credible threat of replacement.
Your roadmap, in case anyone was wondering:
1: Install horseshit-AI-bullshit;
2: Sack costly employees entitled to salaries and benefits;
3: Re-hire former employees as gig workers to make horseshit-AI-bullshit function;
4: Profit.
You got so close to ruining and dispossessing the ambitious middle-class masses whom you resent paying. You’ve already triumphed over the less educated and semi-skilled, convincing them that collective bargaining is a Communist plot to overthrow the West, and persuading them to accept $5 worth of tax credits in exchange for $500 worth of crucial public goods and services because “it’s their money, after all, and they know best how to spend it.”
AI is aimed at your next target: educated and skilled middle to upper-middle-class salaried workers. Its core purpose is enhanced social cleansing: it will see the middles replaced, certainly not with AI substitutes, but rather with local gig workers and H-1B wage slaves from China and India serving as cloud minders. We’ll have STEM graduates on zero-hours contracts paid an hourly wage to tend the machinery and verify the results, while English and history majors perform micro-tasks like data entry for pennies a click from home. Both classes will die before escaping their student debt loads. AI will lay the yellow brick road leading to that greedy billionaire’s / financier’s / corporate CEO’s paradise, where “middle class” will mean still having a car to sleep in.
But then came DeepSeek. Those meddling Chinese just had to show the world how little intelligence there is in Artificial Intelligence; how it need not consume trillions in research funds and data-center costs to generate what trivial, albeit amusing, shit it can; how it will never accomplish a single human thing, ever. How could it? The people who design and sell and promote it would themselves fail the Turing test.
Like the Great and Powerful Oz, proprietary AI impressed and frightened people who don’t know better, which describes virtually everyone in the mainstream press and political realm, and many in business and finance. But now, even the Normies have peered behind the curtain to see the smoke machines and horn compressors of your grotesquely-overpriced shower of shit laid bare, and have recognized it for what it is.
This latest tech scam is a real justification for legislation requiring all AI to be open source. That’s the only way governments can protect themselves from yet another gargantuan fraud involving vast amounts of badly-needed public money ending up in the hands of techno-hucksters bearing black boxes. A sudden transfer of immense public wealth in exchange for zero public goods nearly happened in the USA. Had it not been for the Chinese, it would have.
So how does it feel, Bros? Come on, speak up, you mighty conquerors, you masters of imaginary worlds. You’ve been running your mouths nonstop for a couple of years now about all the miracles you’re poised to perform, with hardly an ounce of resistance or even skepticism from the media. Why so quiet all of a sudden?
