Fuck AI

kinda reminds me of the dotcom bust

cloud/virtualize everything was a big push too.

I think that the reason behind this is twofold

• Imagine you want control over everything and everyone, what better way than to be a literal "friend" to them whispering ideas in their ear
• Imagine never having to pay employees. They're the most expensive part of any business, by a lot. There are probably a few exceptions but rare ones.

The AI push is definitely worse, but the second place, in my mind is the whole "smart" (insert mundane home gadget here).

I'm surprised I didn't see smart toothpaste or anything.

Well, Cloud computing, Bitcoin/Block chain and Quantum computing come to mind with more recently over-hyped technologies... And I'm not sure what to make of the successful ones. Smartphones have certainly reshaped the world within my lifetime. I still remember when I was a kid and there was no wifi, just dial-up internet and you'd have to use landline phones and telephone booths. But smartphones weren't forced on us back then... People adopted them on their own because they were massively useful... Still only took a few years and everyone had one. (And it's just now that they're forced upon us. I mean try riding a train or attend a concert or get an appointment without using smartphones...)

If all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.

And sunken cost fallacy. Pretty much sums it up.

Company pushing their own app so hard that everything that could be done in web or html5 is now app. I think this is one of the more recent "we gonna do it else we're being left out" stuff, but before the blockchain and AI push. Also "smart" everything and "iot" everything. Absolutely insanity.

This push is what Business to Business sales looks like, the unrelenting combination of FOMO and ease of use. It reeks of comparative spending where people who don't know what they are doing buy things for a business based on what competitors are purchasing instead of what their organization needs for the business.

This happened with cloud computing 10 to 15 years ago and is why Cloudflare going down means nothing works.

It happened before with workstations. And before that it was telephony (and that's why desks have phones even if no one uses them). Before that it was an open office concept.

Business fads are annoying because they are a whole different culture of people I don't relate to making choices I don't care about. But AI is connecting all things, businesses and people. The problem is AI doesn't fit any problem quite right so it is being shipped around to all parts of the market to find buyers. It hasn't found a sustainable amount of money yet and the combo of business and user subscriptions isn't cutting it. This is the bubble and when no one is found to want it then the buzz will die down and we can be prodded into another societal gimmick.

Had a few times I went out to recharge my social battery, and at least a couple of people I know over some drinks have gone whole hog on ChatGPT believing the shit's gonna make them rich by supposedly making the process of coding or otherwise simplified instead of (re)learning programming by reading hours of documentation and running sample code.

OK ok yes and I have a theory about it!

So... my theory is that, and it might be shocked, by VCs, investment banks, business angels, C-suites, so basically people with BIG money are actually learning. I know, I know, sounds crazy but hear me out.

I think they are learning NOT about a topic, say AI, or XR, or 3D printing, etc no, that's pointless, no they are instead learning about real materials, things like pretty curve published on Harvard Business Review or McKinsey Quarterly or HackerNews. These people learned over time about the Gartner hype cycle and they are learning to both ride it AND amplify it. VCs have a big incentive for big bets. They do NOT care about your mom&pop software shop which might just reach a million paying customers. No, they make BIG bets that nobody else can, that's their cornered market. If it doesn't reach a billion users, not even customers, then it's just not interesting to them. They want, no they NEED, something that will grow fast, very fast, and big, VERY big. This way they fund the infrastructure and in exchange they get the only thing they care about, shares. Everything else is just a hurdles to go over, or remove entirely thanks to lobbying.

They specifically look for this dependency so that they can't be bought out, 1000x return on projects that need them. It's a parasitic relationship that they excel at. Now again this isn't new but IMHO what you are hinting at, the amplitude of the push is arguably new.

One person at the center of this embodies it perfectly : Sam Altman. He lead YCombinator at the heart of the SiliconValley. SV isn't special for the skills, they are plenty of very smart people everywhere else. What's special is that smart people go there to go money, a lot of money very fast in exchange for the promise of tremendous growth. Altman has seen hundreds if not thousands of such proposal and he evaluate them. He knows precisely what sticks, what people offered but also what promises get funded.

He keeps on doing exactly that. He keeps on promising MORE.

So... yes I think the AI push is bigger than anything else. It's bigger than cryptocurrencies, it's bigger than the metaverse, it's supposedly THE technology that changes everything else. We heard this before. In fact we hear this at the beginning of every cycle. This time though grifters, because no matter how big the bank account is, they still are grifters (look at Musk, promising constantly what everybody wants to hear, delivering a fraction of it so small it became a joke) who get their power through getting everybody to push for their promises.

TL;DR: yes and it's a pattern. Everything gets pitched as more revolutionary than ever before.

The closest thing I can think of at the moment is Blockchain.

I remember a time when every day our letter carrier would bring us another AOL compact disc. It was incredible, there were AOL CDs littering the streets, crushed rainbow shards promising to connect you to the world.

because the bubble is about to break, and google, MS, openai and other is cramming into as much other hardware as possible to recover the losses of putting all thier eggs in one basket. palintir and similar is trying to stave it off by peddling it to LEO on several countries.

MS largely neglected most of thier other products: xbox, Windows os versions for AI solely. and google largely neglects thier phone development for AI.

It’s being pushed in corporate America, hard.

This is late stage supply-side economics if I've ever seen it.

EDIT: I hope this shit fails like 3D TV.

It's because it fucking sucks. Especially if you were already a person that knows how to search the internet and find the best answer already. That only took an extra 10 to 15 seconds most of the time, and you could be sure of where you got the information and whether this source is accurate or biased. That's to say nothing of the dangers, which tech bros actually don't give a shit about. The tech industry has historically gone from technological advancement to technological advancement in order to stay relevant and continue making the same level of money, or more than they were before. We finally reached a point where there's not really any big problems to solve with the current tech, and no real obvious next step, so they are looking for their next big breakthrough and trying to force one in the meantime. The sad thing is what they want to be the next big break is just not there yet, to me it kind of seems like it won't ever be the way they want it, and there's no way to know when we might get there with it. So instead they are taking this disinformation robot and pushing it into the lives of everyone so that they can now use the disinformation and improved information gathering as their new business model, because just pausing growth is a death sentence for a company in unregulated capitalism. If your company can't grow like a cancer, you become irrelevant and die

People seem to have forgotten 3D-TVs. There was a time where you couldn't get a high-end TV without 3D functionality, it was going to be the future after all. Was it any good? No, but boy did the manufacturers try to push it. Look how that went.

Ooh, the "Smart" era. We still have "Smart" TVs from that era (as in, a device that still uses the "smart" prefix).

But there was a period not too long ago everything was called "smart", which came down to shoving a SOC into some mundane household item and forcing an Internet requirement.

From that era we had such wonderful inventions as:

• the Smart Water Bottle (required a phone app. It reminded you about being thirsty),
• the Smart Tea Kettle (required an online connection to retrieve the specific boiling time/water temperature for proprietary tea blends),
• the smart juicer (required an Internet connection and an app to pour large, proprietary bags of Capri-Sun into a cup for you),
• the Smart Car (a tiny city car. Yes, that's all it was; just a car... but smol).

The most similar all-permeating changes I could think of would be the surveillance ("targeted") advertising that slowly took over most of the web. Just like the AI craze, users did not get a choice of whether it is enabled, but unlike AI, it mostly happened behind the scenes.

3D Televisions and Movies. I loved that life at Best Buy and films.

I dunno furbies were everywhere

100% yes. No technology is equivalent. Hated or shunned by those who know the limitations, pushed by all the billionaires, and cheerfully accepted by most of the non-technical population.