393
Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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Technology
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AI Slop is a sub-optimal replacement that requires enormous amounts of materials and second-order human labor to produce. Like so many other industrial innovations, it's a waste-production machine that has the added benefit of occasionally producing consumables.
We get to run the AI Slop machine at a profit because the market for slop is heavily monopolized and the consumer base is cash rich and alienated from its laboring peers. But a downturn in the domestic economy, a sudden shortfall in cheap raw materials, a major shift in popular consumption habits, or a higher quality alternative at a lower price point all put AI slop at risk of losing profitability.
It's a far more fragile industry than any Slop Advocate wants to admit. And it needs an enormous structural investment to function.
A step forward into what, though? Mass overproduction resulting in economy-wide enshitification and a crisis of excess waste all carried enormous tail costs.
Are you really better off today buying furniture from IKEA that won't last ten years, rather than inheriting antiques from your parents that have endured for the last century? Are you better of driving a car built in a big machine-factory than riding a trolley that was designed custom for the city lines? Are you better of eating individually plastic-wrapped slices of fake cheese than carving a chunk off the giant wheel in your pantry?
Idk, man. Views differ on that one.
Most people dont have the choice of inheriting pieces of furnitute with a value of months worth of wages when they first get a home of their own.
Do you think trolly buses are a pre-industrial thing, with their electric powered engines running on steel rails through dense urban areas?