A radical idea - stop talking about things that don't exist like they do
A radical idea - stop talking about things that don't exist like they do
If you’ve read me for a while you know that – when it comes to tech reporting/talking about tech – I have been around the block a few times. Talked about some hypes, cut some supposedly magic technologies down to size. Sometimes even defending or advocating for certain tech. After a while the patter...
It’s so frustrating to see how egregious the future tense has become in all the talking about these products. Also the anticipation of a killer app is never going to sound not desperate.
An article written for people who do not exist. People who will listen to this article who are in the overlap with people who need to hear it.
sadly
With so many parts of tech operating like a mixture of religion and fandom this would be the atheistic answer. (This is my diametric opposite of a sneer.)
This causes me to reflect on contrasting currents in tech culture. I remember growing up with the Apple/Mac rumor culture around the time Steve Jobs came back, and how people had conditioned themselves to get hyped for any little tiny leak about upcoming products. A culture which obviously persists now, albeit in streamlined, advertiser-friendly blog spaces. By contrast, MacWeek magazine had a columnist calling himself Mac the Knife who claimed to have clandestine rendezvous with shady trenchcoat-clad characters in the back alleys of Cupertino... And somehow the new product reveals were almost always somewhat less whelming than the rumormill had built them up to be. Part of the Jobs idolatry that still dominates Silicon Valley is the clear strategy among empty-suit grifters like Altman that such hype is vital but Apple didn't do enough with it; that you should always be marketing what's around the corner rather than keeping it hidden away under lock, key, and NDA.
Contrast this with open-source culture, warts and all. What's in the repository is the basis of what comes next. You think superintelligence is imminent? OK, where's the code stubs that will serve as the foundation? Make a pull request for your mega-brain's medulla, let's review it. It's also a big reason why the current round of AI doesn't fit with open-source culture, no matter how many people are trying to force it. It is inherently an obfuscatory technology. Not just due to the sheer size of the data sets and weights involved, but also through the weird non-deterministic practice of configuring software through natural-language prompts. GIGO at scale, but you can keep the hype going by promising a lower percentage of garbage in the future.
The GIGO pipeline: Sure, it's garbage, but hear me out! What if we increased the throughput?
"Sure massively wasteful 'AI' systems could somehow solve the climate crisis but they probably most definitely absolutely won’t" so they probably absolutely won't lol. Half the time it works every time...
Credit is a funny thing. If you merely exist in proximity to a solution, you can, by some means, claim credit to it.
"AI solved the climate crisis, because look, the climate crisis was solved, and some people also used AI!"
AI is playing a role in the ongoing climate crisis. Namely that of the villain.
I’m sick of things being hyped on potential too.
VR is an example. (Michael Abrash predictions anyone?) Unfinished games are an example. (Multiplayer Cyberpunk 2077 anyone?)
VR is such an incredible thing for me because I somehow avoided any and all hype around it, then got to play around with some oculus thing at a conference and play Beat Saber and was like wow, this is really cool
And then you start reading people compare AI hype to VR hype and I'm just sitting there being like wait, was this ever supposed to be more than a Beat Saber platform? What did they claim it would do? Oh no.
Cold fusion only needs another 10 years to bake, but then it’ll be awesome.
That thumbnail looks like a motif from the Ringu video.