I won’t stump for ALL of our generation, but I feel those around this age have the unique perspective of growing up during the tech/internet revolution, and living now in what’s come next while still remembering what it was like before all this stuff was considered “essential”.
Foldable road maps, library catalog systems to find books, using phones and mail (the paper kind) to communicate with people, not trusting everything we saw on TV or read in a newspaper (who remembers those?), and so on.
I love technology. I’m sitting here in front of a 48" 32:9 curved screen, typing on a split ergo programmable keyboard with easily-replaceable switches, have an e-ink tablet that I take notes on for meetings, two phones with NFC charging, a host of laptops, tablets—even my guitar amp has hot-swapping boards in it to balance current to the power tubes giving me unparalleled range of tones. All my creative work syncs to a NAS from which I also run a media server I can access anywhere. Tech is awesome.
But I am no sucker. I didn’t buy into the crypto hype. I didn’t buy into the metaverse. I laughed at (and was laughed at about—at least at first) NFT nonsense. “AI”, more specifically LLMs, are the next hype cycle for suckers, except this time the grifters lucked out like never before—their best marks are billionaires and business leaders who don’t want to experience the FOMO of being the one to avoid the bandwagon, no matter the cost. Neural networks and machine learning are interesting tech, but these hyped applications of that tech are, to me, extremely lackluster and dressed up like the Emperor wearing his New Clothes. I’m not afraid to point and say that he’s stark naked, despite the masses’ hostile reaction to the bursting of their figurative and financial bubble. I’ve said nothing so far of the ethical or environmental impacts, but the fiscal failure sidesteps any dubious moral perspectives with cold hard numbers, and numbers which are very big, and very red.
Most of all, I’m ever so increasingly frustrated by the masses insisting that this tech is inevitable, that it must be used, that it must become daily life, even as we remember getting by just fine in the years prior to its marketing explosion. We didn’t die of tech asphyxiation then, and we won’t now, except by choice. The costs are high, and the value is middling. No large company has come out and said “wow we let AI run the show and it generated this amazing new product that everyone loves!” or “AI saved us billions!” At best, corporations are uneasily watching and waiting, on the bandwagon but not driving it. They’re selling the public the idea of LLMs being important, because LLMs are not self-evidentially important. This is not Steve Jobs holding up an iPhone and the world realizing holy shit phones will never be the same again. That product has plenty of marketing behind it, but the marketing is just fashion accessory fare for the most part. They sell you on why you want to buy the newest model, but they don’t need to sell you on why you want to buy a smartphone in the first place. LLMs are being marketed on the basis of trying to make a desperate case, at a ledger loss that would and should make corporations bleed out, in hopes of addicting a critical mass of users before they finally sigh in relief and hit the public with the brick reality check of profitable pricing models. Actually, that might not even be possible, because OpenAI and Anthropic tried that earlier this year and it blew up in their faces.
Too, there is the element of centralized control of information. The more that users trust and rely on these tools, the more their owners can shape and steer the zeitgeist as has been shown by myriad papers on social media algorithm practices. Politically, ideologically, and socially, these few seek to control the distribution of information to shape the future more favorably for their own interests. A public whose primary source of information is devoid of reference to perceived-negative political views would have a difficult time organizing a concerted opposition against a controlling narrative, especially when a wide swath of the media reporting on AI simply parrot whatever the startups tell them, with no facts checked, no numbers added up, and all in the future tense. They want to sell us today, with today’s money, what AI will do, what it will mean, and what it might become tomorrow. It’s the kind of vaporware that buyers of the past would decry as snake oil and run out of town. But generations have changed, and I am not speaking ill of young people. Elders are mystified by tech indistinguishable from magic as well, even when the magic is poorly done and prone to hallucinated errors.
Tech must work for me, or it’s not useful. As Cory Doctorow said, ask: whose benefit is it for? I’m not subscribing to my screwdriver and socket wrench. I’m not letting an app tell me how to organize my day or how to think. Critical thinking skills are in rare supply.
A long rant/vent, but given the thread title, I thought I’d get out the soap box as in the days of old and throw down a few more words than in prior posts.
TLDR I’m a hater. I’m a hater of the marketing, and disappointed in the way that the media is complicit, and disappointed in all the people cosplaying as Faust. It’s not even Halloween.
. I wasn’t sure what happened with Selarian’s post, anybody can just spam-report a comment they don’t like and it gets automatically terminated? 
