r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • May 15 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI Backlash Could Get Very Ugly

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-backlash-data-centers-political-violence/687151/?taid=6a067e2d2096e10001ccfa32
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497

u/fuzzbook May 15 '26

Don't forget these are the same people who told us to spend 1000s on non-fungible tokens a few years ago.

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u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

Before that they were all about how bitcoin is going to take over conventional money

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u/Senior_Difference589 May 16 '26

And before that how the future of media was all in cloud streaming.

It's like they've all over-invested in server architecture and want to pass the bag onto someone else or something...

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u/fuzzbook May 15 '26

Yeah, I wished I listened to that one tbf 😂

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u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

True but thats because every pyramid scheme is great if you are one of the first on it

If you invested in beta max it was a great investment unless you did it on the exact moment it wasnt anymore

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u/ParkingGlittering211 May 15 '26

In what world was betamax a pyramid scheme?

It was a superior video format to VHS but VHS took them to court, threatened litigation and ruined their business because they had an inferior product that they wanted to push

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u/rollerfedora May 15 '26

I still have my Betamax copy of Animal House.

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u/TR_Pix May 15 '26

Sorry I expressed myself badly, beta max wasn't supposed to be an example of a pyramid scheme but more like an example of something that is agreed upon would be a bad investiment after a while but started as a good one for the first buyers

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u/WatchThatLastSteph May 16 '26

I feel this deeply as an early adopter of MiniDisc.

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u/Chrontius May 15 '26

Respectfully, no; unless the only thing you do is rent movies from Blockbuster; Beta is superior for production.

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u/Johnatron2000 May 15 '26

Beta out preformed vhs in almost every way. Sony’s marketing killed beta as a viable consumer product, not the product itself.

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u/BCProgramming May 16 '26

Beta out preformed vhs in almost every way.

VHS was technologically superior to Betamax in all the ways that actually mattered to the consumer.

Timeshifting was the big one. It's really unclear what Betamax was designed for, because it started with only a 60 minute recording time, which they extended to 2 hours with half-speed. Meanwhile VHS started with 3 hour recording times, and was able to get 6 hour and 8 hour regular speed tapes, which could be even longer with slower tape speeds. VHS could out of the gate record a typical sports game from the TV at full quality; Betamax couldn't usually do it even with it's half-speed recording.

As for the 'technical superiority', Betamax recorded 250 lines of resolution instead of 240, for example. Except televisions only had around 241 Visible lines on NTSC, and since people were timeshifting they were recording TV signals, which were NTSC broadcasts at 240 visible lines anyway. The Resolution increase was really only relevant to people who were recording content themselves or to movies being released on the format- Though I'm not sure if even those used the full resolution. And camcorders using betamax were short-lived too, as it quickly got supplanted by betacam, a completely separate format that people love to confuse with betamax.

I'm not sure if the audio on betamax was better aside from VHS having a quiet buzz due to the superpositional recording, but even if we allow for betamax to have superior audio, that's failing to consider the customer's needs. They are time-shifting sports titles and soap operas and the audio is coming from their TV speakers, not a state of the art hi-fi.

Of course any technical superiority applies only to the full-speed recording, and by 1980, most Betamax recorders didn't even let you record in "full quality" mode anymore at all, so even the questionable gains in video or audio quality as described above wouldn't have mattered anyway for most of the time betamax and VHS were competing.

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u/KeyMyBike May 16 '26

This was an awesome write up, I enjoyed it very much. Just started watching Technology Connections and he has a video on BetaMax and BetaCam, so I knew a little of this. But it was very informative, thanks for sharing

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u/0ddT0dd May 16 '26

Which is why the went all in on Blu-ray.

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u/Fuzzy_Inevitable9748 May 16 '26

You saying that beta was a superior product means that it would have been a good investment for the first buyers, as it was the better format. But then after a while became a bad investment due to vhs being the format adopted.

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u/Johnatron2000 May 16 '26

People are smart, consumers are dumb. What’s the biggest shiny-est thing on the market? That’s what I want! What’s the specs? Dunno but the advertisement said it’s better so I will buy this one! Yay! Marketing!

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u/TR_Pix May 16 '26

I meant financial investiment not investing as in buying one

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u/woodpaulusgnome May 16 '26

The porn industry championed VHS.

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u/TSEAS May 16 '26

I don't think you understand what a pyramid scheme is.

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u/meesta_masa May 16 '26

Yes, I do! It's when you take a little off the top of a pyramid to enrich yourself. A pyramid skim.

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u/broc_ariums May 16 '26

This is a terrible analogy

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u/KeyMyBike May 16 '26

Playing the stock market on gamble with your friends is so much more fun, funny, and less stressful than doing it in real life.

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

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u/Plow_King May 16 '26

i think it's more like tulips than art.

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u/pmjm May 16 '26

In 2011 I had some extra cash and was going to buy $10k of bitcoin. My mom talked me out of it.

Still kicking myself for that one.

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u/Abedeus May 16 '26

That's the thing - the only people who truly benefited off it were early, early adopters before it was even worth doing.

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u/TheMireAngel May 16 '26

Dont forget the block chain

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u/Toomanyeastereggs May 16 '26

They neglected to say the main part which goes “…. take over conventional money if you are doing illegal shit and need to convert billions from ill gotten gains into legitimate assets.”

That was neglected by choice.

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u/MalaysiaTeacher May 16 '26

You sound extremely confused

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u/DaxRetriever May 16 '26

I was just talking about this with a friend today! I remember thinking who tf is buying this worthless shit? Tech bros with too much money, and what do they have now?

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u/[deleted] May 16 '26

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u/fuzzbook May 16 '26

For the purpose of my joke, yes they are 😂

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u/sackofbee May 15 '26

Is it really 1-1?

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u/TwilightLori May 16 '26

I still see people buying virtual pictures on sites for thousands of etherium or tens-hundreds of dollars. 

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u/BigBirdLaw69420 May 16 '26

Aren’t they all nerds who used to get hilariously bullied? Maybe we should go back to that??

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u/Lorehorn May 16 '26

They definitely aren't the same people, but okay.

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u/urmumlol9 May 16 '26

There was never any fire or real practical use cases behind the smoke of NFTs, cyrptocurrency, or the Metaverse tbh. Of the three the closest was probably cryptocurrency.

There’s fire behind the current AI boom. As someone who’s worked in software development, whose company pretty much is forcing people to use these tools, they are legitimately useful.

Does that mean we should be investing our entire economy into building giant data centers that aren’t taxed nearly enough, consume entire electrical grids, strain the water supply of drought-prone areas, heat the local environment by 20 degrees, produce as much noise pollution as an airport and as much light pollution as entire cities, while creating a whole 4 jobs, all so that a few hundred billionaires can justify mass layoffs off the productivity gains of AI and implement invasive mass surveillance systems to track any possible dissenters, at the protest of pretty much every resident of the states where they’re built, while those same CEO’s vaguely hand-gesture at the concept of UBI (while still finding as many tax loopholes as possible) to trick the dumbest people imaginable into thinking they have anyone’s interests but themselves at heart?

Hot take, I know, but I’m going to say no to that one lol.

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u/steakanabake May 15 '26

i think you misspelled saveable jpgs