I started my IT career in 2011, I have enjoyed it, I have got to do a lot of interesting stuff and meet interesting people, I will treasure those memories forever.
But, starting with crypto turing general computing from being:
"Wow, this machine can run so many apps at the same time!" or "Holy shit, those graphics look epic!" or "Amazing, this computer has really sped up that annoying task!"
To being:
Yo! Look at how many numbers I can generate!
That brought down my enthusiasm severely, but hey, figuring out solutions to problems was still fun.
Then came AI/LLMs.
And with it, a mountain of slop.
Finding help about an issue has gone from googling and reading help articles written by something with an actual brain to mostly being rephrased manuals that only provide working answers to semi standard answers.
Add to that a general push to us AI in anything and everything, no matter how little relevance it holds for the task at hand.
I also remember how AI was sold to the us at first, we were promised to do away with boring paperwork, so we could get on with our actual job.
What did we get? An AI that takes the fun and creative parts, leaving the paperwork for the workers.
We got an AI that we need to expect to be stealing our work and data at every point, giving us shit work back, while being told that we should applaude it and be grateful for it.
And the worst thing, the worst thing is that people seem happy with it. I keep getting requests to buy another Copilot license or asking for another AI service to be added to our tenant, I am sick of it!
We got an AI that somehow has slithered onto the golden throne and can't be questioned.
I am not able to leave the tech market at this time, but I will focus on more tangible hobbies going forward.
This year, I have given myself a project, I will try to build a model railway in a suitcase. That will be a Z-scale tiny world in a suitcase.
I have never done anything remotely like it, but I feel like I need something physical to take my mind off tech.
Sorry for the rant, but I just came off of a high from realizing and putting words to my feelings.
As someone with similar feelings in general and a similar history, I feel you are blaming only the latest and worse effects on tech and of tech on society.
I started my career in parallel with mobile devices and smartphones. The whole idea of new possibilities, new ways to interact with tech, miniaturization, etc., is what called me most as it was a huge field starting and I tried to find my path forward. I've seen from close, real close, how an incredible tech, full of possibilities has been slowly been captured by the market capitalists that inevitably always ended up controlling the direction of every company.
This is not caused by crypto, this is not caused by LLMs. The origin is greed and capitalism. Decisions being made to make number go up.
Really, crypto is a fascinating tech, it's not the fault of the technology that crypto-bros came to conquer everything and misuse it and abused it to make a quick buck.
LLMs are impressive, think about it, we have managed to completely break the Turing test. We have machines that sound so human that mostly everyone is in a constant suspicion that everything they see is made by an LLM. LLMs sound so human that they are full of confidence and mostly always full of shit. Just think about it, AI is just a representation of humanity, what we do with it just represents and highlights the issues in society.
The reality is that those two, have just suffered a faster, the fastest we've seen yet probably, tech lifecycle - growth, hype, plateauing, and eventually decline and enshittification of any service related to the tech.
Consider search engines, their demise is not because of AI, AI is just the last blow. I used to be very good at finding what I wanted, I knew how to use the tool to make the best of it. Slowly over the years much as I want, I cannot get the results I want without a lot of effort. I haven't somehow become shit at it, the tools and the tech have been modified and changed until it has become useless, the whole point is not finding anymore, but making you search as much as possible.
Consider the mobile hardware field as it is now, compared to the years when it started blowing up with all kind of devices and possibilities. The market has been captured, a few companies remain, releasing the same thing over and over with the latest and bigger number each year. Slowly the whole wild world we had of custom roms, has been captured so that if you get out of the fenced field your apps won't work because it is not safe. Apps check that you are using them in an unmodified and perfectly controlled OS where you own nothing. Apple has always been king of fenced fields, but now Google is doing all it can to imitate it, squeezing in and trying to capture as much of their open field into their very high fenced safe areas. They want to control the source of apps, the developers, and remove the freedom from the devices. It's crypto and LLMs at a slower pace. Working for so many years as a developer I can feel how I'm more and more tied up to the whims and wishes of companies that don't pay me the salary, I keep bringing this up and make a safer path for the future but the company that does pay my salary doesn't care, they just want the latest BS and hyped concepts.
People like you or me, we have a special vantage point. We know how we can still fight that, we know what are the alternatives, we know what the tech could become. We need to bring that knowledge to everyone, keep pushing for FOSS solutions, keep teaching everyone that tech is not difficult, it's not magic, but it requires learning and education. It requires not falling on the path of less resistance, and fight against lobbying and market capture. It's tough, when we just get so tired of constantly fighting it. What I think you find so tiring is not Crypto and LLMs but how tech is being guided to its demise, to become a tool for control and nothing more.
Blockchain Radicals: How Capitalism Ruined Crypto is a fascinating read.
I struggle with this, especially in my Socialist org. Everybody (Leftists) seems so anti-tech. I get it, the oligarchs and fascists currently own basically all tech right now, and are weaponizing it against us. But it really is useful tech in the right context ... we have to wrestle control back and fight!