You must log in or register to comment.
I did not read the full article since it is paywalled.
But well, nobody asked for the internet either.
Arguably though, people have constantly been asking for ways to connect and share information with people near and far. Town criers, sign boards, books and letters — the internet is arguably just an extension of these long pursued human interests, things humans have been asking for.
AI doesn’t match in the same way. I guess some people do want sycophants, right or wrong. But I think most people want truth, and want the environment to not be plundered.
I would say a lot of people would like competent assistants to do stuff like “Show me every email that mentions a hard drive order.” But not the AI they are trying to foist on us now.
What drive me up a fucking wall these days is how people will use AI to make a more “professional” message, then due to it’s verbosity it needs an AI to summarize on the receiving end.
Or read disclosure for my members so I don’t have to. But that it fucking things are fucking incompetent. Work insurance people will get line pissed that got me instead of banking. They will say I told the AI I needed to order checks. Yet it sends them to insurance division instead of banking.
Sucks because most customers hate AI answering the phone I especially hate it. It fucking dumb and I just want to talk to person.
But even job hunting had two prospective jobs tried to use AI to conduct the interview. They fucking outsourcing that. I refused both interviews.
We assume that the AI boom is the result of market demand. In reality, it is the result of investment decisions made by concentrated capital, which is reshaping the economy on its own terms.
But that’s always been true under capitalism. It’s just that in the past generally large capital expenditures have gone towards things the wealthy think will get them more wealth. There have always been capitalists who spend their money directing the economy to do what they want, rather than what the “market” wants. They just haven’t had the majority of the capital being spent.
The last 50 years has seen an unprecedented concentration of wealth. The wealthy are literally a thousand times proportionately wealthier than poor people than they’ve been at any other point in human history. There’s not much wealth to squeeze out of everyone else, so the economy is even more at the vain whims of those with all the capital as they look for things to spend it on.
Tech news has been reporting for literal decades that Apple, Amazon, Google, and similar have been sitting on giant war chests of profit with nothing to spend it on. Well, they’ve found something they want to spend it on, so they’re emptying 20 years of profits in 5. They’ve now completely blown through those stores, and don’t want to slow down, so now they’re taking on unprecedented levels of debt. Something is going to give out and things are going to get bad within the next 5 years.
Better take than their last one on AI
I remember after the rise of social media, the world was always going towards decentralized finance, blockchain and many other things. Hell even Meta burnt massive cash in metaverse which supported cryptos. But after Covid, the whole AI episode started playing out of nowhere, and even now, the whole push around it just feels unnatural, almost as if staged. Today’s so called AI success is 30% based purely on merit and 70% based on coordinated media management and unsoliciated offerings of desperate investment.
The innovations in AI/ML were always part of the modular infrastructure, specific to the enterprise level products and not su much for the retail users.
Lots of folks asked for AI, but not like this!
nobody asked for automobiles
AI has been around a lot longer than most people realize. Grouping all AI into whatever cloud garbage silicon valley tech bros are selling makes them look like Luddites.
Language is constantly evolving and the meaning of certain terms shifts between eras. Right now everyone understands “AI” to mean the LLM slop factories being forced on the world by a trillion dollars in investment cash. If you want to be upset about that, be upset at Silicon Valley for spending so much of that VC money on marketing to corrupt the public’s understanding.
Also, “Luddite” isn’t the insult you think it is. The luddites were a pro-labor movement, not an anti-technology movement, and many of the labor protections we have today (despite being under attack by big tech) are owed to their successes.
“A Luddite is someone who opposes new technology, computers, or automation. The word comes from 19th-century English textile workers who smashed factory machines that threatened their jobs, though today it is often used as a general label for anyone who dislikes or resists tech.”
Interesting lecture about meaning of words there bro.
Yeah, because the ownership class fought tooth-and-nail to corrupt the public’s understanding of the name, just like they’re doing now with ‘AI’. You can’t be mad at the bastardization of one term without being mad at the other when the same forces lead to both.
So: your point is the usage of AI in common vernacular should not have changed from its meaning 50 years ago, and using it in its modern sense as shorthand for LLMs and generative models is bad.
And your point is also that the modern usage of a Luddite is correct and you should ignore the original group and the conditions that led this group to smash the textiles because the usage of that word changing is fine and we should not look at original usage?
Got it. Words change. Sometimes. And other times no.
