Comment by 4gotunameagain
11 hours ago
So, silicon valley decides to use their playbook of expand at all costs by burning money to acquire the market (like a carcinoma), and it is the users fault ?
Should we be blamed about uber destroying the taxi business, or airbnb the hotel one? Oh sorry, "disrupting".
Uber was dirt cheap, now it is the same price as taxis, and the people working for it (the "partners", not employees) have no social benefits.
Airbnb was cheap and humane, now it is THE cause for housing crises and massive residential property "investment".
The playbook of silicon valley is destructive, not disruptive.
It is by design aimed towards wealth accumulation. The ones with most money can capture the market, and make even more. It really is late stage capitalism.
And the more wealth inequality there is, the more pain, poverty and instability will be as well. AI will only exacerbate this.
Uber and Airbnb are not autonomous robots.
If people wouldn't use their services, nothing would happen. They would just go bankrupt.
So yeah, I'd say it's entirely people's fault. Because people just wanted to use their services without thinking what they're causing.
Customers who think only about themselves and noone else.
> Customers who think only about themselves and noone else.
When was this ever different? And do you expect it to ever change?
I disagree completely. You cannot expect every consumer to be fully educated and aware of the consequences of their purchasing power.
This is the role of legislation, educated experts creating policies so that you don't have to do business analysis before making a purchase.
Would I pay 10x the price for tokens and be outcompeted by other companies, hoping that openAI will go out of business ? This is entirely unrealistic.
Was the business model of Uber ever a secret? What about AirBnb?
Even if we argue that we can't require from every human being to understand what they're doing, I'd still argue that there are more people who perfectly understand it and don't care than people who have no idea how such a business operates.
> You cannot expect every consumer to be fully educated and aware of the consequences of their purchasing power.
Huh? I cannot expect that people understand consequences of their actions? What are we, animals? Of course sometimes things aren't simple, and we cannot predict that using some service will create some longterm effects that in the end will be harmful. Some things are hard to predict.
But some things are easy to predict and my point is that this was exactly this case.
I mean, now we all know what Uber and AirBnb did, and we still use them because we don't care (generally speaking, I've used uber maybe 3 times in my life, AirBnb never).
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