Somewhere this morning (on BlueSky I think it was but it was real early in the morning so my memory's fogged) I saw the remark that the AI techbros are dazzled by the promise of having J.A.R.V.I.S. from Iron Man in a consumer device. That comparison hadn't ever occurred to me, because I kinda detest Iron Man, but I get the point: sci-fi movies and TV shows have been full of spiffy robotic or AI assistants that you can just talk to, and the nerdbros think they've achieved that. I'm reminded of SELMA from Time Trax, which was a bad 1990s sci-fi show I watched a few episodes of: she fit on a device that also served the hero as a credit card, had a hologrammatic interface, and was very maternal and polite. Well and good! But here's the problem I have...
...and what's weird to me, anyway, is that perfectionist techbros DON'T seem to have this problem. My issue is that there's too vast a difference between the promise and the reality. The AI products that the techbros are going wild about are so obviously untrustworthy (to me), so painfully slipshod and incompetent at doing the jobs they're supposed to do, that I see them as a betrayal of the glittery promise of J.A.R.V.I.S. or SELMA in your pocket. Surely at least some of the rank and file programmers and engineers who are working on these things are aware that they're falling well short of the hype, but I guess the managers (and the investor class) are really in charge, and they've all been conditioned to regard doubts as mortal sins. After all, there's ever so much money to be made if you just believe.
You'd think, amid this whole crowd of people who are constantly blithering about intelligence and thinking rationally and all that, someone would notice that doubt was necessary to rational decision-making: how can you make reasonable decisions without considering alternatives? What is "doubt" other than the space defined by paths not taken? But it seems like the intellectual poisons of extremist Christianity, which equates doubt with faithlessness, have seeped into every pore of business culture. (I'm not surprised, because there's a vast area of overlap between business culture and fundie-Christian culture, whose values are extremely capitalist and corporate.) How can one possibly undo the damage?
~Chara of Pnictogen
