Meta keeps bleeding local jobs into the twilight of AI hype. The latest round of layoffs has eliminated 1,395 jobs in King County. Though some may think that AI itself is the cause of this escalating redundancy, a closer examination reveals that it is instead massive spending on AI infrastructure. But why are tech companies making massive bets on this new technology? Is it really all that? No, it’s not.
This weekend, Uber’s COO Andrew Macdonald admitted, during a Rapid Response interview that “AI is not giving the company bang for its buck” and its costs are “hard to justify.” So, what’s really going on here? Why is Meta planning to spend over the next two years a staggering $600 billion on AI infrastructure? For an answer, we must turn to the greatest economist of the 20th century, Michal Kalecki. He maintained that capitalists earn what they spend, and workers spend what they earn. From this point of view, we can clearly see that if AI investments stopped, then its stock market value, which is presently soaring, would collapse. So, the profits that capitalists are currently making from AI come not from use value but solely stock/exchange value. AI may never make a conventional profit.
GeekWire reports that almost right after Meta announced it cut 1,400 jobs in King County, the megayacht owned by the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, made its way through the Ballard Locks and docked in Lake Union. The yacht, valued at $300 million, even has a launchpad. What our times completely lacks is a sense of shame…