Freddie deBoer
The conversation about artificial intelligence remains absurd, hype-ridden, and utterly out of touch with actual material reality. I could have written that sentence in 2024, 2023, or 2022, and it would have also been true. But it felt particularly true earlier this week, when America woke to the news that the stock price of Nvidia, a Silicon Valley company responsible for a lot of our AI breakthroughs, had tanked because a Chinese start-up had succeeded in quickly and cheaply making comparable models.
Many, many powerful people have said that artificial intelligence is one of the most important human inventions of all time. My reaction to them is: Wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.
Here’s an important human invention: plumbing. Bringing fresh water from one place to another, and disposing of human waste via engineering. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes could do this, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period when most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And as cool as launching satellites and orbiting the earth and traveling to the moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.
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