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The airline industry since its birth has had a collective net loss, in aggregate, despite moving hundreds of millions of people. The industrialisation essentia
by onion2k 3mo ago
The airline industry since its birth has had a collective net loss, in aggregate, despite moving hundreds of millions of people.
The industrialisation essentially socializes the cost across a lot more people though, so even though it doesn't make a profit it does mean people can have air travel without it costing millions per flight for the few people who can afford it. Essentially the economies of scale from having lots of flights isn't enough to make it profitable but they are enough to make it affordable.
There's no spare money to extract from the airline industry but it's still very useful. The same could be true for AI in the long term.
Sometimes the goal of an industry is to exist rather than to make a profit, because the benefit to society is more important than profit. People don't like that though so they do a bit of creative accounting or head-in-the-sand denial around it.
- tehjoker 3mo agoin the case of airplanes the only thing thats the private market is the planes and the ticket, the entire system of airports, safety, navigation is state subsidized and when the market fails it gets bailed out. the oil is subsidized by constant warfare. it's just an illusion for reganomics so a few rich ppl can make a buck off of a public utility.
- eru 3mo agoHow does constant warfare subsidise oil? In case you haven't noticed: both the latest US-vs-Iran war and Russia-vs-Ukraine war have made oil and gas a lot more expensive than the peaceful counterfactual.
- tehjoker 2mo agoThat's because they fucked up. I don't know where you've been but we have been dominating oil markets since the end of WW2. The dollar is sometimes called the "petrodollar" because we shifted from a gold basis to a petrol exchange basis. The latest fuck ups may signal the beginning of the end.
- cloudie78 3mo ago> There's no spare money to extract from the airline industry but it's still very useful. The same could be true for AI in the long term. Of course it could, let’s start with making the models open weight and entirely open source. Fully publicly owned and not shaped to maximise profits for the shareholders. Oh wait, Scam Altman entered the chat and turned a non-profit lab into the next biggest IPO vehicle the world has ever seen. OpenAI launched as a nonprofit research institution. Its announcement explicitly said it wanted to pursue AI “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” produce value for everyone rather than shareholders, publish research and share patents broadly.
- xmprt 3mo agoI think in this case, the OP is talking about "loss" from a financial perspective. Airlines are incredibly useful for society but don't make money and operate on razor thin margins. AI will likely have a similar financial picture. Of course you'll have you Claude and Codex enthusiasts just like you have the Delta vs United frequent flyers but a lot of people just book the cheapest ticket they can find from an aggregator website.