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Big tech has spent $155 billion on AI this year. It’s about to spend hundreds of billions more
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Transatlantic telegraph, I think, was very expensive, or Panama channel projects. Before they were finished to any useful degree.
In this particular case - I don't think it's more expensive than Soviet attempts at turning Kazakh steppe into agricultural land, let alone all the space and defense projects.
It's an ideology-driven effort all right - an idea that you can create an inherently totalitarian technology. Probably caused by the popular (in the 90s and early 00s) belief that the Internet is inherently anti-totalitarian, so there's a need to compensate. Both are wrong.
I think there was an inherent demand behind those examples though. Just the number of lives lost looking for the northwest passage showed how useful the Panama canal would be.
You're also comparing government spending in a lot of those cases Vs private capital. That fact shows how much power has shifted in the world already.
Well, in the Soviet example everything was government.
And governments seem to be so excited by the prospects of this "AI" so it's pretty clear that it's still their desire most of all.
EDIT: On telegraph and Panama you are right (btw, it's bloody weird that where it sounds like canal in my language it's usually channel in English, but in the particular case of Panama it's not), but they might perceive this as a similarly important direction. Remember how in 20s and 30s "colonization of space" was dreamed about with new settlements supporting new power bases, mining for resources and growing on Mars and Venus, FTL travel to Sirius, all that. There are some very cool things in Soviet stagnation - those pictures of the future lived longer than in the West against scientific knowledge. So, back to the subject, - "AI" they want to reach is the thing that will allow to generate knowledge and designs like a production line makes chocolate bars. If that is made, the value of intelligent individuals will be tremendously reduced, or so they think. At least of the individuals on the "autistic" side, but not on the "psychopathic" side, because the latter will run things. It's literally a "quantity vs quality" evolutionary battle inside human kinds of diversity, all the distractions around us and the legal mechanisms being fuzzied and undone also fit here. So - for the record, I think quality is on our side even if I'm distracted right now, and sheer quantity thrown at the task doesn't solve complexity of such magnitude, it's a fundamental problem.