#zeromarginalcost — Public Fediverse posts

Is AI overturning zero marginal cost dynamics ?

< " AI is software that sweats. " >

"The Internet taught us to imagine #software as #weightless. #Zeromarginalcost became the hidden physics of the technology industry. #Artificialintelligence breaks this #physics. Every act of machine cognition consumes something: electricity, chips, memory, networks, cooling. The longer the model reasons, the more physical resources it consumes. "

https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/tokens-as-industrial-energy

Is AI overturning zero marginal cost dynamics ?

< " AI is software that sweats. " >

"The Internet taught us to imagine #software as #weightless. #Zeromarginalcost became the hidden physics of the technology industry. #Artificialintelligence breaks this #physics. Every act of machine cognition consumes something: electricity, chips, memory, networks, cooling. The longer the model reasons, the more physical resources it consumes. "

https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/tokens-as-industrial-energy

The key challenge when digitizing major pieces of social and economic life along classic private sector scarcity models is that information and its processing intrinsically do not fit this mold. Rifkin termed this the #zeromarginalcost era and economists talk of non-rivalrous goods etc.

Monopoly seems to be the straightjacket invented to cage a bird that wants to fly free but this model is fighting a losing battle.

There are more phenomena involved eg. moore's law / Intel vs Nvidia but..

3/

The key challenge when digitizing major pieces of social and economic life along classic private sector scarcity models is that information and its processing intrinsically do not fit this mold. Rifkin termed this the #zeromarginalcost era and economists talk of non-rivalrous goods etc.

Monopoly seems to be the straightjacket invented to cage a bird that wants to fly free but this model is fighting a losing battle.

There are more phenomena involved eg. moore's law / Intel vs Nvidia but..

3/

@nina As someone who's used email since the mid-1980s, I've all but given up on it. Free is ultimately unusable. Telephony is rapidly heading the same direction.

In general, a whitelist / blacklist / greylist approach seems essential, paired with other spam defences. (I'm aware the nomenclature is questioned by some, I don't know of a standard replacement, though pass / question / block might work.)

Few commercial email providers implement this, and list administration itself is a PITA in most contexts.

New-account validation and classification is also a problem --- if a new contact wants to reach you via email, odds are strong they cannot, or will have difficulty. The ancient tradition of letters of introduction may need a modern reboot.

Other than that: I share your pain, I see no clear solution. There are few entities with an interest in resolving the problem. And SMTP email really is due for retirement (a view I've long resisted, but have come to accept.)

#SMTP #email #spam #filtering #spamfilters #ZeroMarginalCost #reputation #ReputationManagement