Near the end of the episode, host Andy Polaine was musing about organizations pushing 'AI first' and burning tokens. This is his own view that AI economics don't add up and that prices will have to rise.
Yeah, there's absolutely no respect for the truth at all, right, yeah.
…their job may be requiring of them. Um, and it's pointing to a future where if all of work needs to be AI augmented, then we have a category of person who will be pushed out of jobs, and that's a scary future. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So, so far we don't have an answer for it, and, uh, we need to get one, so…
I mean, one of the other things of it is the economics of it don't stack up. I mean, I think it's pretty clear that, you know, the big players are not going to earn the money back that they need to in the timeframe that they have, uh, said. So, you know, they will get-- at the very worst, there's, you know, there's gonna be a massive collapse. Um, but also- Mm-hmm … even at the best, these things are gonna get very much more expensive and gentrified. There seems to be no kind of way out of that, um, because they've trained everyone to be-- use it very frivolously, and really it pr- should cost, you know, at least 10 times as much as it's currently costing people. Which I wonder- Yeah … if it will be a bit of a forcing function for, for some people or some organizations to go, "Oh, actually You know, it's not really worth doing that thing in AI anymore. Literally, it's not econo- it's, it's not worth spending the money on it because it's, you know, a prototype that was forty dollars is, "Oh, yeah, okay. Well, you know, we did it quickly." And for the prototype that costs four hundred when you've got sort of thirty people on their own prototyping because it's also they're not very collaborative tools, uh- Yeah … or not at all at the moment, uh, it starts…
Well, we're both parents, and I don't know if you had this experience with your kids, but there is a phase, and I suspect s- most people go through a phase, where you try lying, right? Yeah. When you're three years old, you try lying, and eventually you learn that there are a lot of good reasons…
No. Okay. Well, we are now definitely at the end of the show. As you know, it's named after the Brian Charles Eames film, uh, Powers of Ten, all about the relative size of things in, in the universe, and my one last question is, what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that…
So this is a tiny soapbox I get on occasionally, so I'll get on it again for this , uh, and that is it's a super boring but, uh, super critical thing. So the world is facing climate change, and we're all largely concerned about carbon dioxide, but there is a chemical out in the world on which…