font-family: 'Arial';There's dark sides to Ai. As of now the majority use Ai only for entertainment, or use it to figure people out or search engines, or some form of companionship from friendship and up.
Then there are those employing Ai in a business sense.
When the majority catch on it'll be too late. They'll be late to employ Ai, while their late Ai business models will enter a congested market with older businesses, big ones, countless small busineses, and other Ai businesses and side hustles both early and established, and new and trying to catch up to the earlier entries.
People are losing jobs, in some cases people who use Ai are the ones keeping their jobs because of that reason. For others their required services are replaces with more cost effective solutions.
Ai increased the price of certain PC hardware. 16GB of RAM was $900. The price last I looked was about $600. The price drop indicates the Ai bubble is going to burst, as the big Ai companies aren't buying as much hardware to add to their clusters.
GPU's have appreciated in value. Nvidia is less interested in gaming and more into Ai, as they sell their chips in mass to corporations building and marketing Ai.
The operating cost of Ai requires more electricity than entire cities. Uses a lot of water in the process. It's an extremely high carbon footprint.
Our civilization will shift into an autonomous one where machines are working for the established, while serving the unestablished in charitable fashion. That being plenty for the rich, while the poor gains little for free. No middle class.
When a majority is poor, change will be in demand. Doing away with the financial system will be called for, which should increase what gains are acquired for free. A successful revolution will turn the civilization into one that overconsumes. Getting a vehicle can be easy, while getting a desired vehicle will come with a long waiting list.
Great things come with higher polarities. A celebrity is loved by millions more than you, but is also hated by millions more than you. Ai is great, but the negatives are as profound as the positives.
Aikido for Startups
When you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best.
This is especially true in a startup. In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do. I don't think a lot of people realize this, even in startups.
The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if you're running a big company and you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.
The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.
Back in 1995, we knew something that I don't think our competitors understood, and few understand even now: when you're writing software that only has to run on your own servers, you can do whatever you want.
This new freedom is a double-edged sword, however. Now that you can use any language, you have to think about which one to use. Companies that try to pretend nothing has changed risk finding that their competitors do not. we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs would be lower. If this were so, we could offer a better product for less money, and still make a profit.
When I was about nine I happened to get hold of a copy of The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. The main character is an assassin who is hired to kill the president of France. The assassin has to get past the police to get up to an apartment that overlooks the president's route. He walks right by them, dressed up as an old man on crutches, and they never suspect him.
Our secret weapon was similar. We wrote our software in obscure AI language, now it worked to our advantage. In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.
The people who understood our technology best were the customers. And so, by word of mouth mostly, we got more and more users. By the end of 1996 we had about 70 stores online. At the end of 1997 we had 500. Six months later, when Yahoo bought us, we had 1070 users. Today, as Yahoo Store, this software continues to dominate its market. It's one of the more profitable pieces of Yahoo, and the stores built with it are the foundation of Yahoo Shopping. I left Yahoo in 1999, so I don't know exactly how many users they have now,
A suspicious person might begin to wonder if there was some correlation here. The software was doing things our competitors' software couldn't do. Maybe there was some kind of connection. I encourage you to follow that thread. There may be more to that old man hobbling along on his crutches than meets the eye.
The startup is so great because of some magic quality visible only to devotees which is only the AI itself because its layers the humans in the company cant even process. Which is good for rooting out competition because your company employees cant even do espionage if they wanted to.
I'll begin with a shockingly controversial statement: Demons or angels otherwise known as mathematical functions, AI black boxes vary in power interating in matrice disjointed pattern abtsract continuums.
A suspicious person might begin to wonder if there was some correlation here. A big chunk of our code was doing things that our competitors' software couldn't do. Maybe there was some kind of connection. I encourage you to follow that thread.
The purpose of this article is not to change anyone's mind, but to reassure people already interested in AI, the power is multiplied by the fact that your competitors don't get it.
Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in the early 1970s, are now, just barely, on the radar screen. Macros, introduced by Lisp in the mid 1960s, are still terra incognita.
I'm not proposing that you can fight this powerful force. What I'm proposing is exactly the opposite: that, like a practitioner of Aikido, you can use it against your opponents.
