The Cult of AI: How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future
The Cult of AI: How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future
How one writer's trip to the annual tech conference CES left him with a sinking feeling about the future.
From the (middle of the) story: The reason CES was so packed with random “AI”-branded products was that sticking those two letters to a new company is seen as something of a talisman, a ritual to bring back the (VC) rainy season.
You're viewing a single thread.
The really sad thing as someone who was just in the job market searching for a development role is how much this reminds me of the blockchain fiasco.
There's so many usages for generative AI, but most of these companies are just popping up to either reuse ideas already made or just to get VC funding. Just like there are crypto bros, I say there are AI bros- business people who know very little about the technology and what it actually does and it's limitations, but are willing to start entire businesses around concepts that aren't even fleshed out yet.
The fundamental problem with tech in the 2020s is that it's pretty much done eating the world. The last big earth-moving platform shift was smartphones over a decade ago. Ever since they've just been trying to make wearables happen, then make VR/AR happen, then make web3 happen, then make AI happen.
They keep on trying to make these new platforms happen but they don't really have any compelling features. Before smartphones when I'd travel to a new city I'd buy a paper map.. and get lost. I don't get lost anymore. That's genuinely a different experience. Nothing since has created any sort of earth shattering change on that level.
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
Worth noting this is all a byproduct of capitalism as it exists today. Not nearly enough competition or regulation means every major change these days is really just "How can we put more ads in people's devices? How can we instill FOMO? How can we charge more money for less service?"
Look at how bad mainstream UX/UI has become, even on the biggest platforms with the most industry experience. Windows 11 is a fucking joke and everyone is certain the next one will be worse. We know Microsoft can design a good UI, but they choose not to because they don't care about the consumer except as it pertains to getting clicks and ad revenue. They shove Edge back in your taskbar after every update, they make finding your own shit on your computer impossible so you'll use Cortana. Who asked for icons to be centered by default? Who asked for them to fuck around with the start menu for at least the fifth time in two decades? Nobody. But everything they do is for the benefit of the shareholders.
Reaching you from a 2011(12?) MacBook.
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.
Ok then be specific.
Like, before smartphones I was lost in hamburg, looking at a paper map trying to figure out where the heck I was, trying to find the street names hidden in the brickwork of the buildings. I had to have a friendly person help me out. I've never been lost like that since smartphones. Give me a specific case where chatgpt would do something like that.
From a consumer perspective, it's less flashy, I guess. It's helped me figure out things that I can't find on a search engine, but that's not quite as big. From an engineer's perspective, all the tech for Google maps existed at the time, and for certain users accurate GPS with maps was already an established thing in 2000. On the other hand, we'd been trying to do anything useful with natural language since the 50's and had thoroughly failed.
From a business perspective, being able to lay off every order taker at your restaurant chain (and maybe the middle managers and bookkeepers too) is huge. It's obviously huge for order takers, and it's pretty big for the restaurant owners and anyone who eats at restaurants as well. I think that qualifies as "eating the world".
On the other hand, we’d been trying to do anything useful with natural language since the 50’s and had thoroughly failed.
That's really not true. For instance, machine translation and spam detection (document classification) were getting really good by the late 2000s. Image recognition was great beginning the late 2010s.
What we've seen in the last few years (besides continual incremental improvements in already-existing solutions) is improvement in the application of generative tools. So far the uses cases of generative models appear to be violating copyright, cheating on homework, and producing even more search engine spam. It can also be somewhat useful as a search engine so long as you want your answer to be authoritatively worded but don't care if it's true or not.
In the 50's they thought we would have intellegent robot butlers by the 70's. They had solved more structured problems that seemed hard, like chess, and figured language and simple physical tasks couldn't be much different. They came up with some hacky chatbots and things in the 20th century, but it was all cheap tricks like strategically changing the subject - I talked to these things enough to tell. ChatGPT passes basically every test of short-term language reasoning we can throw at it. It's solved the problem for really basic purposes. It can take your Wendy's order without any fine-tuning.
Alright, I'm going to respond to the rest of this in quip-like fashion, since you've touched on a lot of separate-ish points here, but the tone intended is still neutral.
Image recognition was great beginning the late 2010s.
That was literally the same tech we're talking about here, just earlier and with a slightly different structure.
For instance, machine translation and spam detection (document classification) were getting really good by the late 2000s.
You and me have different memories of older machine translation. It could replace words and a few phrases fine, but it broke or produced awkward phrasings very often. It didn't engage with the underlying meanings at all. Spam detection worked well, but not similarly smart, and IIRC in some case was neural nets again.
violating copyright,
Disagree.
It can also be somewhat useful as a search engine so long as you want your answer to be authoritatively worded but don’t care if it’s true or not.
Or if the answer is easily verifiable, like it has been in my own cases.
blockchain fiasco
What do you mean "fiasco"? Out of just 23,000 different cryptocoins, over 8,000 are still getting traded, just yesterday I saw a documentary about a sect using their own cryptocoin to pay its members for peddling ayahuasca and other psychedelics, there still are "crypto training camps" where teenagers get in debt to live all in a single room eating noodles, and the other day I got a call from the "Europe Blockchain Central" asking for a seed to unlock my funds... 🥳
business people who know very little about the technology and what it actually does and it's limitations, but are willing to start entire businesses around concepts that aren't even fleshed out yet
Those are just the "idea guys" looking for a "technological partner" to kickstart the next disruptive... yeah, I've heard the pitch too many times. Then again, 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 🤷
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.
Or maybe you could get in on the Dutch flower bubble, which was around then I think.
If you were part of the Spanish Inquisition, pretty much all of the witch trials ended up dismissed or with the accusing side getting punished... for holding a heretic belief in witchcraft. Not particularly wrong, if you ask me.
Similarly, nobody forces people to pay for BTC, unlike for example the US going around the world with a "you will accept USD and like it... or else". One is worse than the other, but it isn't Bitcoin.
That is not an accurate description of witch hunting and witch trials. It was a distinct business that emerged from capitalism and misinformation, in which the properties of women could be stolen for profit. Witch hunters would travel from town to town looking for vulnerable women to legally rob and kill, and those that testified they'd witnessed withcraft got a cut of the profit too. As a result of this practice tens of thousands of women were killed. Carl Sagan dedicated an excellent chapter of his book Demon-Haunted World to the topic, if you're interested.
Anyway, that is a bit of a side bar to the point you're missing. Just as it would once have been very profitable but deeply unethical to be a witch hunter, crypto was certainly profitable at a time but only in deeply unethical ways. The late crypto fad was little more an MLM scheme rife with fraud, and any profit extracted was at the expense of whoever is holding the hot potato when the worthless tulip market crashes (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor..).
That is not an accurate description either.
Witch trials have varied a lot from place to place: the French and the German were particularly willing to kill women for it, with England and America getting on the fad, not so much in other places. In particular in Spain, they liked to kill for "heresy", so claiming that witchcraft existed was a worse crime than getting accused of being a witch. Stealing "the properties of women" is BS, since back then women had no right to ownership; most anyone could steal would be some clothes, and the occasional piece of jewelry.
Crypto, works the same as any other asset: it has value as long as people believe it has value.
It doesn't work exactly like the USD, where denying USD's value puts you on the wrong end of US's army, and Bitcoin has a fixed limited supply, unlike the US being able to increase supply indefinitely, but otherwise the basics are the same.
Can't really excuse the mix of metaphors, since they're vastly different:
- "MLM" has someone at the top benefitting from everyone underneath; there have been cryptos with a "premine" spread among "initial investors", not so much with Bitcoin.
- "Tulip market" is a case of black box speculation (aka: loot boxes, gacha, or "surprise mechanics"); there is nothing of that in most crypto (except cryptokitties and friends), the spot value is clear upfront.
- "Hot potato", is how all markets work: check out what happened to the last people holding Gazprom stock when it got delisted at a value of exactly $0, or the stockholders of Theranos, or 23andMe, or... etc. More stocks get delisted all the time: https://stockanalysis.com/actions/delisted/
crypto was certainly profitable at a time but only in deeply unethical ways
This is patently false on several fronts. Crypto is as profitable as USD: scams are highly profitable, speculation can be profitable, holding it is as profitable as the growth in demand.
You don't need to scam anyone to get a profit... but claiming that Mar-a-Lago makes you a billionaire while being valued at $18M, can make you president 🤷
Stealing “the properties of women” is BS, since back then women had no right to ownership;
That is not quite right. Married women had no property. Plenty of unmarried women had property, and with-hunting was a for-profit legalised industry of robbing these vulnerable women. But European history isn't really the point so let's move on.
I don't think your description of a tulip market is quite right. The point of the tulip market is just that the tulip itself has no inherent value other than the expectation that someone else will buy it for more. This has similar properties to an MLM in that eventually, the person at the end of the chain (holding the "hot potato") is out of luck. And I wouldn't say that is how all markets work, either. Healthy markets are built on products of value, not speculation.
Crypto is as profitable as USD
This is a minor point but note that holding USD is not profitable, due to inflation. This is a key difference between crypto and regular currencies. Crypto becomes more scarce over time and so will trend toward becoming more valuable, while the dollar becomes less valuable. Becoming less valuable is a good desirable trait because it encourages people to spend money and actually get the economy moving, rather than hoarding and speculating.
You seem to me like you've drunk at least a little of the cyber-libertarian kool-aid. If so, we'll probably not see eye-to-eye any time soon. But I'll try to give you a gist of my perspective on the whole affair and you can make of it what you will. The block chain does not offer any substantial benefit as a virtual currency over a regular database, as we have been using for decades. Systems like Steam's inventory, Neopets collectible pets and World of Warcraft have been creating virtual currencies that worked perfectly long before crypto came along, and without accelerating global warming by using a small country's worth of power to do it.
You will doubtless respond that decentralisation is the difference that the Block Chain brings along, the value offering. But no-one actually runs their own wallets. If Steam Inventory were using a block chain nothing would change in practice whatsoever because I'd just have a wallet stored and managed by Steam, and access it through a web interface just as I do now with Steam Inventory which is backed by a regular database. It would just be an implementation detail that makes no difference to the actual end-user, who is never going to run their own wallet.
Trust is brought about by regulation and insurance. I know my money is safe because my bank is backed by my country's central bank, and decades of regulations protecting my investments. With crypto the idea is that trust is guaranteed by the block chain, but again no-one actually runs their own wallets because it is a pain in the butt to do so. So what happens in practice is that you store your wallet with some third-party provider that can later run off with your money with minimal consequences or gets hacked and in either case you don't get your money back. Both of these scenarios have happened numerous times as I'm sure you must be aware, I hope I don't need to cite them here.
This isn't difficult to figure out, everyone that seriously looks at crypto knows it doesn't really have any practical use-case beyond money laundering and black markets. So why all the paragraphs and paragraphs of libertarian ideological banter about how Bitcoin will usher in a new age of peace and prosperity and fix all the world's problems etcetera etcetera? Because that is a great way of scamming people, and that is what crypto is at the end of the day. All the folks telling you to "hodl" and creating mountains of memes about how great it is to hold bitcoin and wait, were only doing so in the hope that the people who ate that nonsense up would be daft enough to hold during the next crash, which prevents the price from falling too far and enables the more Machiavellian crypto holders to cash out.
That's the really sad part of the whole affair. I think there are a number of people who genuinely drink the libertarian kool-aid and think that Bitcoin et al are somehow going to bring about a brave new world, and they're ultimately just being played for fools by the scam artists who peddle that crap without believing any of it.
What the libertarian dream has achieved is the same thing it always does, it causes exactly the problems regulation is intended to prevent. Insider trading occurs in at least 25% and possibly up to half of all crypto listings. Billions of dollars are stolen by scammers. Banks scamming their own customers (Which, funnily enough, was resolved quite neatly because of precisely the regulations that libertarians want to avoid).
Alright I'm tired. This is just a rant not an essay, you can take it or leave it. Nothing is proof-read. I don't really have a conclusion other than to say once again that crypto is a scam perpetrated by nasty horrible bad selfish people that are harming society and the planet.