Okay. Let’s talk about AI.
Yes, again. The Macalope knows, believe him.
Much like many things these days, there is a somewhat wide gulf of beliefs about the state of artificial intelligence. The Macalope would not be surprised to learn that, also like other things these days, the two sides cannot even agree on what to call the gulf itself.
(It’s called topical humor, look it up.)
Let’s take a look at the “Yay, AI!” side. Writing for The New York Times, Kevin Roose says: Powerful A.I. Is Coming. We’re Not Ready.
Roose believes that one day very soon a company will claim to have created an artificial general intelligence and whether or not it’s truly an AGI won’t matter because AI will have lapped the human race. Game over.
Sounds dramatic. But, you may ask, how did Roose come to this conclusion? Good question, imaginary reader being used as a rhetorical construct! The answer is, and the Macalope quotes, “[spending ] a lot of time talking to the engineers building powerful A.I. systems, the investors funding it and the researchers studying its effects.”
Indeed, Roose quotes many such AI proponents, most of whom are making big bucks on it. Not by selling anything, of course, but by being showered in venture capital funds. Strangely, the people being hit in the face with wads of $100 bills shot out of a t-shirt canon think AI is super cool and amazing. What a shocking turn of events.
So, our imaginary reader says, small follow-up question: How many people does Roose quote who are skeptical about AI?
Again, your questions are spot on, imaginary reader. Let’s just scan through the article here and, oh, none. It’s zero. Not a one. He does link to some dismissively, however. So that’s something.
Nnkay.
This is a bit of a pattern with Roose. As late as 2022, he was trying to prop up crypto by lauding the Helium Network, an Internet of Things networking company that struggled to get building owners to deploy its technology until it got the brilliant idea of taking on the Ponzi scheme that is cryptocurrency as an incentive. Subsequent to Roose’s hagiography about the company, it was found to be falsely claiming Lime and Salesforce as clients and earlier this year was charged with fraud by the SEC.
IDG
Anyway, “AI is amazing and is about to surpass everything you know” is one opinion about AI. Here’s another from The Verge’s David Pierce: All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets.
It will probably not come as a surprise to readers imaginary or otherwise that the Macalope is more on the side of AI being bad and wrecking things than it being super-awesome and about to make humans obsolete. Oh, no doubt there will be many a CEO who will be more than happy to be sold a bill of goods and ram through AI replacements to actual workers no matter what the disastrous effects are. (“Hey, if summarily replacing knowledgeable workers with cut-rate ideological garbage is good enough to destroy the U.S. government then, by God, it’s good enough to destroy my company!”) But in terms of actually replacing people on a comparable functional level, no.
An AI cannot learn things. It cannot experiment and review results scientifically. What it can do is scrape the things that actual humans have already done and claim with certainty to have the correct answers, whether it does or not. To be fair, the Macalope can think of a few humans it could replace who already function like that.
Pierce notes the negative effect AI is having on the tech industry.
In the meantime, the tech industry allowed itself to be so distracted by these shiny language models that it basically stopped trying to make otherwise good gadgets.
Is it weird to want to make out with a sentence? Probably. Still… just a little wouldn’t be wrong, would it? MMMMWAH!
Some companies have more or less stopped making new things altogether, waiting for AI to be good enough before it ships.
Apple is usually pretty good at walking and chewing gum at the same time. Still, you have to wonder what truly useful technologies could have been delivered if the company had not been struggling to make something of the DashCon ball pit that is Apple Intelligence.
AI has its uses, to be sure. But trying to ram it everywhere is something no one asked for and does not work. The Macalope places the blame for this on the venture capital machine, which loves nothing more than to pump a technology as a must-have in order to make itself even more filthy rich. After years of shrugging off people saying “Apple must” do a particular thing, it is disappointing to see it fall into the trap now.
