Hard disagree, at some point investors are going to start asking these AI companies when they will be done burning cash and when the profits will start rolling in. Arguably OpenAI is already starting to see these concerns. If the US gets a new government at some stage there might be enough political will to draw a line in the sand with NVidia and tell them to stop manipulating markets. Finally there may be some pushback against datacenters literally killing the areas they are built in. What we are seeing is a fraud against the world originating from a group of hyper rich arseholes that may last a surprisingly long time, but eventually they will need to pay the piper.
I did have someone tell me this has all the hallmarks of the space race. We are going to see enormous amounts of efforts and resources thrown into AI only for these pioneers to realise there is no clear way to monetise at which point all that energy will be redirected, until then China keeps on egging the US on to make them increasingly commit more and more of their economy to a concept that is going to be a lead anchor on the country left holding the bag.
It's so frustrating seeing the government fiddling in the margins to grab headlines rather than, doing something constructive. This is going to devolve into a game of whack-a-mole trying to make it look like it is achieving something other than what it is (normalising the idea of having to dox yourself to access the internet). Meanwhile I have just lost all the passive ability to monitor what my teens watch on YouTube, and the easy ability to check in on their conversations on Snapchat. They have thrown my kids out into the wild west of barely moderated YouTube and dubious chat apps.
If they had implemented strong laws around algorithmic outputs, human moderation, and online harassment then we would have been applauding them for holding the social media companies to account. Instead what they have done is laid another part of the foundation of a surveillance state.
In essence the governments desire to be seen to be doing something is dovetailing neatly with the shit heads that want everything we do online to be monitored, recorded and as a byproduct more heavily monetised.
Also since they are doing this to protect the children, is there a number of children they are willing to sacrifice to achieve their goals. How many marginalised kids have to self harm before they start to ask the question "Are we the baddies?" We already know that social media has had Perverse Incentives at play that have shaped it, so while it sounds hyperbolic I don't imagine it's beyond the pale that the LGBTQI+ kid who lives in a rural area with 0 local support is going to be affected by their online support networks disappearing. The kid suffering from domestic violence suddenly becomes voiceless and can't work out who they trust enough to reach out to. The bullying goes to the all new special app all the kids on the playground are using that is hosted out of another country that doesn't give a shit about Australian laws and becomes impossible to take down as we have just taught our kids to work around the tissue paper blocks the government keeps relying on.
On top of all this, we don't have comprehensive data privacy laws, and while the government says it will levy massive fines against companies that don't take reasonable steps to secure our data, the reality is that they will not, and if they tried to what's to stop the companies deciding that Australia is not an economically sound country to operate in and just up stumps and leave rather than paying the $85,000,000 fine?
This is all just the surface level thoughts I have of this debacle.