Yeah us on the left as well as people who know even a little about technology have been calling it out for the snake oil that it is, but it seems like companies have managed to break through to the mainstream this time and made it appear like a shiny new wonder tool that'll do your homework and make you a sandwich and suck your dick or whatever
I really hope the hype dies down because it sucks seeing ChodeGPT bolted onto the side of a toaster just to get press attention from the most credulous marks in the tech scene
i've been kinda trying to put together a way to explain this (and why we can't ever change things in ways that are good) in my head for a while but i think in these specific cases?
bitcoin
doomed from rhe start, the only thing it does better than existing money systems is crimes. no real person wants to worry about some hundred-digit wallet ID to buy a soda or wake up tomorrow to find that half their money disappeared.
bitcoin is annoying nerd shit and people do not want to do annoying nerd shit when they can buy literally anything with amazon one-click or by tapping a plastic card against a plastic box for one point five seconds
metaverse
you have to spend like $3000 on VR equipment and empty out half of your living room to have space to use it.
people really, really hate new things1 and new ideas unless:
- it's their area of special interest
- someone they trust or revere demonstrates that the new thing is good, actually, first
online meetings are nobody's special interest
nobody worships zuckerberg. he's like bill gates levels of anti-cool.
AI bullshit
capitalism fucking loves it because they can displace labour with the world's shittiest machine so it's already got buy-in on the ground floor
because capitalism loves it, a mid tier manager can get a promotion by finding shitty ways to inject it into everyone else's daily lives
it's been shoehorned in everywhere so people had no choice but to get used to it. it's on your phone, it's in your search results, it's on your Microsoft™ Windows™ Task Bar™ at work and at home. it's baked into your development tools. it's auto-suggesting entire pre-writren replies to your friends' messages and emails that you can send with one tap. it's writing your news articles... it's managed to co-opt a small but visible portion of that same news space
so it's totally normalized, right? we were frog-in-hot-watered past the neophobic skepticism phase. it specifically did not really disrupt anything about most people's day-to-day until we were already used to it. and when the current batch of LLMs were first introduced to the public? it was in the form of chatbots. harmless little toys that have been around since ELIZA. junky little entertainment to kick around and laugh at when it gets something wrong in a funny way
and because it both displaces human labour, is normalized, and is also now available to people who arent companies, yeah, of course people are gonna use it to claw back some of their own undervalued time. it should be no surprise that full time university students who are under a physicslly impossible course load before they have to go work full time jobs are going to just generate an essay because it means they get to sleep for three nights a week
and idk, im no sociologist, i cant empirically point any one thing and say "this is the key!" but the stark difference seems to be that crypto and metaverse were nerd shit that was substantially more annoying to use than things we already have, and tried to be too disruptive when what most people really seem to want is for nothing to change, ever, until someone shows them that the new thing is better?
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"people are actually very neophobic and we present & manage systematic change like absolute dogshit" is, i think, a thing im starting to believe but it's been a struggle to compose it in a way that doesn't come off as some kinda nerd superiority complex talking down at folks because i don't believe in doing that and also don't think i'm exempt
i just had an additional thought about this, and it's that this time around, yeah, people have already just had AI normalized and its tough to claw back a tool people are already using, but...
this time around it's also us peddling the boring nerd shit that nobody cares about
nobody really cares about how the statistical math behind LLMs actually works, nobody really cares about the power consumption of GPU compute, to most people, "intellectual property" and copyright are probably boring lawyer bullshit at best, and the thing where asshole companies sue a kid for a million bucks for downloading a metallica song at worst
i almost guarantee that none of these are things that anybody but computer-touchers, maybe philosophy students, and people directly affected by AI displacing their work are probably going to think about
if we come at other people who aren't already interested in these things with these kinds of arguments, i think we're just going to get shut down because again, it's us peddling the boring nerd shit this time around and im not sure what to do about that
technologists can try to do our part by refusing to proliferate these tools as much as possible within our power, but this time maybe it's going to fall on the artists and songwriters to make a wider population care? i dont know
