The Cult of AI: How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future

I think this is the thing right here.

We're hitting walls when it comes to increases in computing power. We've made transistors nearly as small as they can get, so all we can do now is parallelize the processing (multi-core, etc.). But even then, computing power has reached such a point that most people don't even notice the difference from one generation of hardware to the next. I have a MacbookPro from 2015 that still runs like a champ. I'm sure I'm going to start hitting walls when it comes to what hardware macOS will support, but the hardware itself is perfectly fine. So unless you're into specific niches (gaming, video production, 3D modeling, high-end workstation needs, etc.), incremental shifts these days are literally nothing to get excited about.

Operating systems barely change between major upgrades. Beside the horrendous change of the System Settings pane in macOS to look like it's iOS and iPadOS counterparts, you'd be hard pressed to see much of a difference in macOS from the last 4-5 versions.

The web has coalesced into a handful of walled gardens, AI generated content, SEO-driven content, algorithmically driven content, with every website looking just like every other one, every post looking like every other, and big UX shifts just for the sake of a version number change.

And the tech industry has become so toxic, predatory, and socially harmful that it's really hard to feel exciting by anything anymore. More landfill fodder from companies that are actively destroying democracy? The latest AI product to use as an excuse to layoff massive numbers of people and wreck entire industries for a garbage product, just to pad the bottom line? Fuck all of that.

The paradigm shifts we're seeing now aren't technological, capitalists are just using technology as an excuse to wreak havoc on society. It's fucking bleak

ChatGPT is waay more surprising from the perspective of 2000 than Google Maps. Even if this is as good as it gets that's another complete reshaping of our society as all the rote natural language jobs go the way of "computing clerk" - which was a thing, before mainframes and electronic calculators replaced them.

Otherwise, yeah, they've become so accustomed to "disruption" they have trouble imagining it stopping, even though it totally could.

just yesterday I saw a documentary about a sect using their own cryptocoin to pay its members for peddling ayahuasca and other psychedelics

Finally! A use case!

if I had spent the time to mine just a few hundred BTC back when I first heard of them, I’d now be a millionaire 🤷

If I had lived in the 17th century it would have been very profitable to get involved in witch trials and witch hunting. But being profitable doesn't make it any less wrong.

I mean, they’re not going to succeed, like they can’t even get it to come up with new stuff.

They built an ouija board and have decided to worship it. Can’t wait till it tells them to start paying tithes and indulgences to the people who are totally not moving the view piece.

Paperclips?

I have the hope that fundamentally, any super-intelligent mind will find humanity interesting. At least more interesting than lifeless rocks or nature without humans. Curiosity is a fundamental trait for intelligence, and no matter how big an AGI gets, a whole planet full of dumb humans doing all sort of crazy stuff would still be more interesting. Basically, who would want to be all alone in the universe? Isn't a diverse, freely developing civilization the perfect daytime soap?

But that all depends of course, an AGI that is "programmed" with capitalism and profit maximizing as it's root tenet is basically doomed to be a paperclip maximizer. We can only hope that it's smart enough to see the folly in this. Theoretically it should be.