The problem is not that this technologies are or aren’t a grift, the problem is that they are used to grift (and that the 4th power that is supposed to protect us against this isn’t doing its job).
In that sense : every next technology will be a grift. Look at spaceX, he sold refueling booster as the next step in human
space explorationevolution and finally its just another company used to mine our data. Grift+1 for stating that the technologies themselves are not the grifts.
LLMs are fantastic tools. Quantum Computing will have meaningful uses.
The grift is the marketing and the dumb C-Suites that fall for it.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes. That shit will be revolutionary.
To answer your real question though, I need an AI that will actually convert a basket of dirty laundry into a stack of neatly folded clean clothes.
I mean we have two machines that together convert a basket of dirty laundry into clean clothes. And then by appeal to authority (“There’s no law that says I have to fold my clean clothes.”), voila! It’s done.
Unacceptable. Pathetic. Is that the best humanity has to offer? Some brutish, crude machine that just agitates my clothes in soapy water? And a second machine that just blows hot air on it as it spins it?
No.
I should be able to put my dirty clothes in a receptacle, and say “Hey,
Robot OverlordGoogle. Start clothes cleaning cycle” and when I return the clothes are separated, cleaned, and neatly folded. At a minimum. Really the clothes should also be put away in my dresser by the AI.What if a robot came and gathered all your dirty clothes, made listings for them on craigslist (or whatever people use now), marked up above MSRP or whatever you paid (people will still buy them, even used, even at a higher price than new, if you include a note saying they were owned by a woman, whether they were or not), shipped them to the interested buyers, used the proceeds from those sales to purchase new, identical clothing to what you previously owned?
I’m sure at first I would love it because instead of having to purchase this robot it would be “free” to me.
But after everyone gets used to the clothes robots there would eventually be paid subscription tiers and the next time you open your drawers all your pants have DraftKings ads on the butt.
what if you could bypass that with a draftkings tattoo directly on your butt?
The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widely accessible.
This to me is the most exciting thing. And not just solar, but also modular nuclear power, fusion power, battery tech. The PRC is at the forefront of this green revolution.
Sure, they can lobby state legislatures to legalize balcony solar. Yet if I try to go around and convince those legislatures to legalize balcony fission, they look at me like I’m crazy! 😀
None of these technologies are a grift per say, the economic system we use to develop them and the marketing needed to ensure funding under the aforementioned hellscape are a grift.
capitalism
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Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities.
Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it.
The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.
What exactly are some of the use cases for an infinitely growing, append-only database built primarily so its largest users can rewrite history at will?
Why does a blockchain have to be one big omni ledger? Why do users need more than one token in it? Blockchain could be used for login tokens for a website or for proof of ownership of software licenses.
Yeah it’s currently flawed and used beyond the scale it’s capable of for things it’s not really good for, that was my entire point. Now the tech is tainted and reviled because of the grift and no one wants to touch it and explore what it could be useful for.
If login tokens are stored on a public ledger replay attacks write themselves. Public or private, keeping every login token ever is a horrible audit mechanism and doesn’t scale well. At scale, speed to generate becomes a concern. Not at scale, something lighter is faster.
A normal database scales better than a license blockchain and doesn’t require extra computation to write. Audit logs and hashes prevent extra edits. License files signed by a central authority don’t require a database and the central authority is functionally equivalent albeit less expensive than a blockchain.
I am still interested in a good use for the tech. I have yet to see one that is genuine.
Is it rewritable, or is it append only? You only wrote one sentence yet still managed to contradict yourself so I suspect you have a very meager comprehension of the technology.
As I understand, it’s normally append-only. But, with some implementations, if a malicious entity controls most of the block production, they can undo recent transactions at will.
Some resort to majority vote, in the case of disagreements. Theoretically, if someone owned/controlled over 50% of the database, they could rewrite it, and have their version seen as true.
For the few valid uses of it, that shouldn’t be a problem. It will also be reasonably detectable beforehand.
It’s not as simple as that. Each block solves the problem of the former block, so to change something five blocks back, you now need to solve six blocks prior to writing the next block, otherwise it’s not cryptographically valid. The resources required to accomplish that are not trivial, and it’s never been done. Very theoretical indeed, in the same sense you could theoretically run through a wall if all of your atoms missed all of the atoms in the wall when you should have collided.
Go ahead and prove me wrong. Show me blockchain implementations that are immutable post append. On my end, we can talk about Bitcoin forks. We can also talk about the current state of consensus mechanisms, each of which has the explicit ability for large actors to rewrite history in their favor. Even Monero is susceptible because this is fundamental to the blockchain in any form. It’s been a huge reason why I make sure I get paid up front for any consulting I do in this space.
Only the last few blocks are “rewritable,” which is why a certain number of confirmations are a necessity. Going any further back than that, would be a completely different chain - a fork. The last of of those occurring on Bitcoin was thirteen years ago when it was still encountering growing pains due to an uptake in usage. Forks of more than a couple transactions are not a frequent, regular occurrence by any exaggeration, so for all intents and purposes of modern crypto usage, it is immutable, not "rewritable.’
If any of it is rewritable, none of it is immutable. You can’t have it both ways.
Notice I put quotes around rewritable. That’s because it’s not the correct term, and I was being charitable in engaging in your straw man argument. It’s actually a collision of timing, where two solutions are presented for the same block in a short amount of time, and until the consensus is reached by the majority, both are temporarily valid. Once consensus is reached, it’s final. There’s no going back. In that sense it is not rewritable, it is immutable. It’s just fuzzy for the first fifteen minutes which branch will resolve as the actual Blockchain in the event of near ties.
I don’t think you’re using straw man correctly.
You’re naively referring to how consensus should work while completely ignoring both the well-defined attacks I referenced and the reality of large actors in a consensus network. You don’t know what you’re talking about or you don’t understand how the theory works or you’re possibly just being obtuse. No matter what, this is pointless. Good luck.
Yup they have their uses, but what happened here is like in a world where hammer is not invented yet, but the invention of the hammer causes every single industry to start using hammer for all their existing process without considering whether they are appropriate or not.
These technologies are not grifts.
The way they are often employed is absolutely a grift.
Blockchain is a very cool concept. Getting people to pay $1,000 for a picture of a cat and imply that it has value because it’s on a blockchain is grift.
Ai is a cool technology. It has become a grift because the companies behind it are sucking up massive investor dollars, destroying the worldwide computing parts market, and persuading managers to axe jobs promising the AI can take their place.
If quantum computing actually starts to work some of it will be used for grift because many current encryption schemes could potentially be cracked using quantum computers.
The picture wasn’t even on the blockchain. It was a url which links to a picture of a cat sitting on someone else’s server
Was it even that or just a hash of the url (or whatever text/data was being “confirmed”)?
It was some sort of hash system. The blockchain didn’t want to store large amounts of data on the chain itself so it would store some sort of hash of the image file and as I recall a pointer to a server where that file was located.
The whole thing was totally fucking stupid but people poured tons of money into it
All technology from this point on will be a grift, because the grifters have all the power.
Seriously
The technologies were/are not grifts. They were used as buzzwords to enable the grift of spending investor money.
Capitalism makes every innovation into a grift
I agree. No matter how much a technology will eventually be useful, it’s always turned into a gift beforehand, then there’s the collapse and only after that it settles into a reasonable thing.
See: the dot-com bubble
So what innovation would socialism turn into a grift?
Vanguardism, as seen in Russia and China.
We’ve seen this movie already
All technologies are grifts when controlled by the capitalist class and marketed under the logic of capitalism. Simple as that. Even the simple hammers you find at a hardware store are a side effect of some rich asshole’s money hoarding operation.
For this reason, I do not reject the listed technologies outright. (Although I do not personally know of a non-capitalist use for Blockchain, I’m open to suggestions.) I reject the capitalists who control these technologies.
Let me see if I got this right. By that logic if I can see that people need spoons to eat their soup and I provide said spoons at a price that covers my costs and earn me a profit for my hard work to produce them, I’m an asshole that hoards money?
Depends. Are you one of the workers in the spoon production process? Then no, you’re not an asshole that hoards money, at least not on that basis.
Do you privately own the factory? Do you privately own all the spoons that the workers produce under a series of “”“voluntary”“” employment contracts? Then yes, you’re hoarding money (more precisely, hoarding the means of production and products).
Profits are just wealth stolen from workers.
I’m a bit surprised that you’re reacting to that particular clause in my comment because it’s bog standard socialist analysis. Like I’m not saying anything controversial there unless you’re just not a socialist.
Gene therapy and stem cells.
There is one from Japan about regrowing teeth, and then the one (forget where) about a 4 hour gene therapy treatment that basically cures issues some people have around cholesterol.
Although maybe the first one might turn into a grift. Like honestly, if I could GMO in/ Stem cell in like, just one alligator tooth into my grill, I might just.
Would you like to have a big dick that put a horse to shame? Sign up for our premium gene argumentation stem treatment for monthly subscription of $67. Fine print: if you canceled, dick felt off.
dick felt off
Vibe.
Nah they’re not inherently grifts; they’re pushed by grifters making money off the back of them.
I think Lemmy users are more likely to call these grifters out for what they are, because the user base has proportionally more technically minded people who understand what the technology is. Lemmy users have to an extent self-selected themselves into the fediverse. On other social media the absolute number of technically minded people will be higher but the proportion of technically minded people is much lower, so the voices are drowned out by those who don’t understand he technology and it’s limitations. And of course the grifters target those platforms with a lot of propaganda, because ultimately it’s about selling shares and inflating share prices.
Anyway to answer you question, CRISPR gene editing is revolutionary and will have major impact. Nuclear Fusion despite it’s slow emergence will also be revolutionary. Immunotherapy is an ongoing revolution; it’s not a quiet revolution but it’s also not getting the general focus it probably should be as AI appears to dominate the current zeitgeist.
We are actually living through extraordinary times; AI is a part of it but AI seems to be the bit getting most of the attention because we’re in the middle of a stock bubble driven by AI speculation.
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I really disagree about fusion. It will have nearly zero impact on the electricity and power market. It’s dead on arrival economically. There’s no way a fusion plant is going to be cheaper than a fission plant. And it’s already far cheaper to provide base load power with solar and batteries than it is to do so via fission. And this is the state today. Imagine how cheap these will be when commercial fusion finally happens. Realistically, even for constant 24/7 power output, fusion will probably cost 3-5x what solar does. Fusion plants would have a smaller physical footprint, but no but no one really cares about that. There’s no shortage of space to put panels.
Fusion will have a lot of utility in the very far future. As humanity ventures ever further outward, it will be invaluable for true deep space colonization. Fusion provides the power necessary to expand to the Outer Solar System and beyond. 500 years from now, fusion will be a really big deal to folks trying to make it out there. Fusion allows you to turn any random ice ball in the Kuiper belt into a colony capable of supporting millions. And it would probably be a necessary prerequisite for interstellar colonization.
But for anyone living closer to the Sun than the asteroid belt, fusion will be of little use beyond perhaps niche isotope synthesis or as a neutron source.
Calling blockchain a pure grift ignores the serious enterprise-level work being done to solve real logistical problems. The technology behind NFTs isn’t just for JPEGs it’s used to create a unique and immutable digital identity for stuff like physical shipping containers and pallets as digital twins. In a global supply chain where a single shipment passes through dozens of untrusted parties like factories, freight forwarders, ports, customs, and warehouses a distributed blockchain ledger provides a single source of truth that replaces manual emails, scanned paper documents, and spreadsheets. Smart contracts can automate releases upon verified scans, directly reducing the demurrage and detention fees that cost millions of dollars. The big hurdle isn’t that the tech doesn’t work or is a grift, it’s getting competing companies to agree on common standards and invest in the infrastructure. The speculation was a sideshow, but the underlying utility for tracking physical assets across trust boundaries is a real thing
Capitalism is what makes them grifts. Llms could be neat. Theft at scale, environmental impact, and using it to kill little kids (anyone but jfc the kids killed wtf) is the problem. Its always the horrid companies and governments who look at any tech like “can i hurt people with this? I totally can…”
AI is not a grift but it is very much a dangerous rudderless ship right now.
Quantum computing is also not a grift.
Hell I feel dirty saying this but you could argue blockchain is not a grift either.
The problem in all these things is the people not the technology.
That’s the thing. When you were browsing bitcoin subreddits during the “golden days” it was pretty bizzare to see people talking about how cool it is and thia is the future and all, and to make it viable, you have to use it, like you know… A currency. But then they also made fun of the guy who bought a pizza with his bitcoin. Haha what a loser, he bought. A pizza for 40k no now 100k dollars. We are all holding, right, no one is selling, right guys?? We’re all in the same boat.
Motherfucker, it’s so obvious that EVERYONE was treating it like a get rich quick scheme.
It’s worth remembering the hype cycle when it comes to these things.
The honest question is where are we with AI in its current state?
I’d disagree about the blockchain. It doesn’t actually provide anything useful and massively wastes resources, because it requires a ton of energy doing useless calculations for a fake token that you just gamble with on the internet. Countries that ban it are immediately placed in an economic advantage because they free up tons of resources to actually go into producing real physical things and not meme coins, which is a big reason why China has largely banned Bitcoin, viewing it as a major burden on their energy infrastructure while contributing nothing real to the economy.
There are a lot of libertarian weirdos in tech who try to push certain technologies solely for ideological reasons. They will tell you how ideological superior the blockchain is for decentralizing things and thus not making you dependent on Uncle Sam. But they don’t actually provide any utility to that other than ideology.
The only non-ideological explanation I have ever received is that the blockchain is good because it makes it easier to break the law if the law is unjust. If for example you want to pay someone for something that is wrongfully made illegal to begin with, you can pay them in Bitcoin and get away with it easier.
That to me, however, is a bit of a bizarre argument. Saying that X should be legal because X can be used to break the law makes little coherent sense. Obviously, the law at that point is the problem and is what should be changed. If you have the power to influence what is legal (and thus to actually act upon the question of whether or not something should be legal), then obviously we should choose to get rid of the unjust law, not to legalize Bitcoin. If we do not have the power to influence what is legal, then the conversation is moot anyways.
NFTs were even worse, because nobody has ever made a non-ideological argument for NFTs. They are always justified based on some weird ideological belief about the sanctity of some nebulous “private property” registered on the blockchain. Laughably, blockchain technologies do not have the storage capacity to practically hold entire images, so they just held links to the images, and so many now lead to nowhere because the original servers they were registered with are down.
People often hate me for the fact that I often defend the utility and potential utility of AI and quantum technologies (even if I do agree that companies hype it and push out slop, that does not prove the technologies themselves are entirely a scam). But I have always been a critic of blockchain and the “metaverse,” because those were hypecycles which nobody could actually give me a single coherent explanation of how these things might improve human society at all in any material way.
