I remember when I suggested that I shouldn’t learn to write in 1998, because you can just type on the computer, I was laughed at. I was told that at best I’d still need to learn to write, and at worst computers can turn out as a fad due to them requiring electricity to work, they can crash and go bad, etc. Pease note that my dislike of writing was heavily influenced by likely having dyspraxia, and a lot of cheaper pens/pencils being mildly painful to hold.
However, the very same people are now disencouraging anything that the AI is promised to replace. Don’t draw, just use Dall-E. Don’t code, just use ChatGPT. Don’t play music, just use Suno. Don’t make movies, just wait until it can do it good enough. The music one is even often being pushed by those who absolutely despised electronic music for “not requiring any talent, just pressing buttons”, all while AI music is literally what ignorant rock/metal kids thought electronic music production was. Even one person, who criticized me for using amp sims on my PC instead of a wall of tube amplifiers is more favorable than not towards AI music.
I wonder if those who now disencourage art classes in favor of a short lesson on how to prompt an image generator will also disencourage writing due to speech-to-text technologies. Maybe the problem is that they don’t use LLMs, but often a more primitive version of neural networks.
And I’m not 100% against new tools. I even use Neural Amp Modeler, sometimes even two instances with one having a Boss HM-2 response for that Swedish chainsaw tone. But these prompt machines are barely more than toys for real professional work, due to the lack of actual control beyond prompting.
If all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.
And sunken cost fallacy. Pretty much sums it up.
When the hole you’ve been digging starts flooding digging turns into bailing.
I dunno furbies were everywhere
Omg Tamagotchi
They kept developing those for like 10 years after the 90s and made color ones
My company didn’t push idiot toys that speak gibberish on us, unless you count PMs.
i’ve met your c suite let’s be honest
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.
Does it change colors in hot water?
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
I can only hope your enter key is currently in the shop.
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.
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…)
come to mind with more recently over-hyped technologies
Major brands were not pushing those technologies on consumers. It was b2b at best.
Smartphones absolutely were.
It didn’t seem to be pushed as hard as this one though.
Seemed more like there was actual interest and positive utilisation of it, as compared to LLMs for general purpose.
Yeah, idk. Most people’s pictures and documents are in the cloud these days. I mean just use a computer or mobile phone without an internet connection and 80% of the stuff will have enough components running server-side and just stop working. Including unexpected things that could work fine, locally. And Bitcoin isn’t exactly how businesses pay their contractors and suppliers, either… Smartphones are used by ordinary people… But all of that can be used b2b as well. Quantum computing certainly isn’t something a regular person needs.
To pick nits, cloud computing isn’t over hyped. It is really, actually cool and useful.
Now saying that you have to use AWS, Azure, or whatever other cloud provider is dumb. But the tech used in cloud computing really is the future.
My desktop OS is built with the same tech and it’s amazing.
Edit: and I do a bunch of self hosting with cloud tech.
Yeah, you’re right. Cloud is a bit of a weird one. I guess I should have mentioned it along with phones as actual useful tech. I think what I meant is, at first it got slapped as a label on every product whether that was “cloud” or just their old server. And for the customers, it regularly means: “We all don’t know where your personal data is stored, probably in some datacenters of ours in the USA or with some of our business partners.” Which isn’t great for privacy, since it’s not transparent at all… But the tech itself is solid. We need horizontal scaling with big platforms. I myself have a small VPS as well, I don’t run cloud stuff on it but it magically runs leveraging some cloud technology in the background. Other than that I have a NAS at home, running some other services, but that’s a good old regular computer. 😃
quantum computing doesnt seem to have to pick up significant marketing as the others. bitcoin was largely a failure, as it wasnt heavily jammed into your everyday devices or software. using it as a form of payment seems to be worst than using cash/credit card.
cloud doesnt seem to be a scam, its heavily used by most companies, aka AWS
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 car isn’t from that era, though.
And has an actual, applicable use case. (Dense city outside north america with bad public transportation and a customer allergic to cycling).
It works outside dense cities too. It’s not FUN to drive on a highway, but the max speed of even the weakest 2nd gen model is not legal anywhere in my country. Not sure about first gen because Wikipedia didn’t list speeds for those and I CBA to look it up. The four door variants, though still tiny, had slightly bigger engines and therefore higher top speeds.
It was named after the Smart watch from the 1980s.
The Juicero did at least crush actual fruit. But, it was hilariously over-built, and you could squeeze the bags of fruit by hand just fine.
VR…
kinda reminds me of the dotcom bust
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.
The closest thing I can think of at the moment is Blockchain.
Yeah but honestly, this dwarfs that. It’s not even close.
Never had Blockchain forced into operating systems
Got a solid antivirus setup then?
Windows defender uses Blockchain? Why?
Edit:
Oh, I get it. The virus mines crypto. Antivirus stops the virus. Hence I have a good antivirus.
Went way over my head
There were hundreds of car companies in the US in the 1920s, financed with billions of dollars and with no chance of success.
That ended well didn’t it.
Crypto was pushed big in certain tech circles, but remained pretty niche to normies.
Every CEO is getting their dick hard over how many people they think they can fire once they get this AI thing finally figured out.
Don’t think is the prevailing sentiment. Of course when you rely on sentiment you leave logic and reason far behind.
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.
Yeah I don’t remember that. How long did it last? I assume it must’ve been around the mid aughts because that’s when 3d resurged in theatres.
I remember when the 3D TV oligarchs took over our government and created an over 1 trillion dollar bubble.
I wish I had a 3D TV.
Not anywhere near the same scale.
Bad comparison
deleted by creator
Bad response.
I legit did forget about those. Weren’t there curvy ones too?
3D TVs weren’t bad tho, I still wish I played more of whatever PS3 Wipeout game used the feature, hell we still have the TV and glasses and ps3 around somewhere…
No way was that pushed as hard. That was an upper middle class fad.
3D was mostly limited to TV and cinemas. It’s not that outlook suddenly got 3DTV functionality
‘Turbo’ everything in the 80s and ‘High Definition’ everything in the Aughts maybe?
