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.
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.
because the bubble is about to break, and google, MS, openai and other is cramming into as much other hardware as possible to recover the losses of putting all thier eggs in one basket. palintir and similar is trying to stave it off by peddling it to LEO on several countries.
MS largely neglected most of thier other products: xbox, Windows os versions for AI solely. and google largely neglects thier phone development for AI.
It’s being pushed in corporate America, hard.
AI companies are trying to peddle it to service/ or other industries so they end up holding the bag in the end.
3D Televisions and Movies. I loved that life at Best Buy and films.
cloud/virtualize everything was a big push too.
But that was pushed on companies and their developers more than consumers. “AI” is pushed on everyone. And their dog.
Had a few times I went out to recharge my social battery, and at least a couple of people I know over some drinks have gone whole hog on ChatGPT believing the shit’s gonna make them rich by supposedly making the process of coding or otherwise simplified instead of (re)learning programming by reading hours of documentation and running sample code.
I’ve literally had a friend I hadn’t talked to in over a decade show up out of fucking nowhere to pitch me on vibe coding as a career. Wild shit.
Thats literally my sister. She got her proposal approved by a local startup incubator so she thinks it’ll make her rich
What’s her proposal?
She started vibe coding and interfacing with multiple LLMs to get a sense of building applications but I don’t think any of them are full fledged or bug free. She then told the incubator that she has a workshop for building production ready programs and apps and she is hoping it all goes well when she starts this series of workshops. She’s a lot more confident in the idea than me. I’ve done some vibe coding exercises and haven’t had a fruitful session with it. This is the same sister that had a manic psychosis episode back in July-August from conversing with LLMs like GPT5 and Claude; her husband committed her to a psych ward for observation and she eventually was able to come out of the manic episode. It was super scary to see my sister in that state but telling her she shouldn’t use AI has been fruitless because she’s an adult and responsible for her own actions. Sorry to rant
I think that the reason behind this is twofold
- Imagine you want control over everything and everyone, what better way than to be a literal “friend” to them whispering ideas in their ear
- Imagine never having to pay employees. They’re the most expensive part of any business, by a lot. There are probably a few exceptions but rare ones.
AI by itself is amazing, and is being used in thousands of ways to tangibly improve the world. The problem is when capitalists get their greedy authoritarian hands on any technology, they try to squeeze as much power and money out of it at the expense of the common person.
they also have to try and sell it as a product, which AI hasnt done at all, its just being crammed into everything when its not asked.
I wanna add:
- imagine there is no demand after making the investment.
Totally valid. This is hopefully what ends up regulating the tech, total alienation.
God knows the government’s not going to do it.
The AI push is definitely worse, but the second place, in my mind is the whole “smart” (insert mundane home gadget here).
I’m surprised I didn’t see smart toothpaste or anything.
Yeah they tried really hard to force smart things into every nook and cranny of your house.
I have very much adopted and invested in smart technology and even I am massively annoyed by the fact that EVERYTHING connects to WiFi these days. My dishwasher can supposedly download new wash cycles or some nonsense. It’s obnoxious and it will never know wifi. I just like being able to automate things and make my life easier in simple ways. When I dismiss my alarm in the morning my kitchen lights turn on because the first thing I do is go feed the pets. It helps light up the house a bit during winter when I wake up and I love it. THAT is what smart home technology should be. Not a freakin toaster connecting to WiFi so it can alert you when your toast is done.
On the topic of smart toothbrushes, I did get given one to test out and it was actually pretty cool. After you finished brushing it would send a map of your mouth and what you brushed in case you missed any spots. The app ended up being a bit buggy so I got rid of it, but I could see how that type of thing could be useful, especially for certain demographics like kids. They had a way to gamify brushing your teeth for kids as well, which is silly, but could also be effective especially for autistic kids.
I have smart stuff too. Even got an oral-b “Io” series of “smart” tooth brush!
I’m actually not enthusiastic about it at all. I got the oral-b because I knew I have a problem that my brushing isn’t preventing cavities, so I did that in an effort to prevent visits to the dentist. It seems to be working. I just need my teeth fixed so I can not have to see a dentist again for a very long while.
Aside from that, most of the “smart” stuff in my house is lights. I intentionally do not have “smart” lights where safety is a factor, mainly kitchen/bathroom/basement/garage. I don’t want something, or someone being able to turn the lights off on me while I’m slippery and wet in the shower, at the highest probability of falling and hurting myself; or when I’m cutting up food in the kitchen and not being able to see where the blade is for even a second could result in serious injury; or when I’m working on something in the garage, with potential hazards all around, like tools, oil, fuel, and other dangerous items and products.
The basement is mostly for when we do any work on the home appliances, wiring or plumbing. Don’t want to be holding a leak with one hand, waving frantically with the other to try to trigger the motion sensor to turn the lights back on…
Living and sleeping areas, hallways, bedrooms, etc, are all smart lights. They’re mostly RGB so we can do “party mode” or something, if we want… Largely they’re just told to turn on or off, but some household members have found that being able to turn the lights on a specific color for a specific time of day is useful, so the RGB stays. I put in some smart light switches too, some for areas that I don’t care to put in “smart” lights, one notable example is the outdoor/porch lights, I have it set up on a timer to turn on/off with the sunset/sunrise, that way I can use cheap, throw away LED lightbulbs around the outside of the house and if they get damaged or destroyed by weather or vandals, I basically don’t care… Not that we’ve had any vandals around here, I’m just prepared in case that were to ever happen.
Most lighting control, even smart light switches too smart lights, is handled through a hub of sorts; I have home assistant, but it’s not necessarily the best for everyone. When a light switch is pressed, no power delivery changes, it just sends a command to HA to command the lights to turn on. The lights are powered 24/7, so we can turn on the lights with our phones. Most of the light switches have little more than basic controls of on/off for the respective group of lightbulbs. Any color control is either programmed or configured from the app.
A small number of bulbs are still in Phillips hue, and when I have the money those will be taken out because Phillips stuff is expensive for what you get. Easy to get into, but extremely limiting and the output sucks compared to alternatives.
My home is mostly zwave for the exact reason you mentioned. I don’t want my wifi to suck because my fridge needs to be online 24/7. Not that I have, or would ever own a “smart” fridge… I just know the technology and putting some 50+ lightbulbs and light switches on wifi would generally make the wifi terrible. I picked zwave because it operates mainly on the 900mhz ISM band, well away from the 2.4/5ghz of wifi.
I get why so many use Wi-Fi, but I hate that. Just make it a module that you can plug in. Then give people a choice of wifi, Ethernet, ZigBee, zwave, matter/thread, or nothing. FFS.
Anyways. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk, I guess?
Every ten years or so, someone tries to push “Smart Homes” again. You can find ads of these things going back to the 50’s. They want to vendor lock in every appliance in your home. The product lines themselves never actually last very long.
Also HD. Everything was HD. Sunglasses, now with HD lenses.
This close enough? AI toothbrush… https://www.amazon.com/SAKYPRORAL-Toothbrush-Real-Time-Whitening-G5S/dp/B0DLVDD7K9
🤢
I’m sure oral-b isn’t far behind on that one. They’ve been making smart electric toothbrushes for a while.
the higher end ones use AI/smart tech. i have the lower end one which is basically no different just without all the shitty techa nd less expensive. sonicare is another one, i bought an offbrand one that comes with 6 brusheads and a electronically , you can set your brush settings custome settings.
the higher ends are quite expensive, and you look at the review they suffer more failures/useless than the “lower endones”
This is late stage supply-side economics if I’ve ever seen it.
EDIT: I hope this shit fails like 3D TV.
lol 3D tv isn’t in the same ballpark as AI. It is a bubble and the hype will die down, but it’s here to stay. Probably going to be as engrained as the internet is, but even that had a huge bubble in the early 2000s.
Some applications of it will stick around, but after the bubble bursts I suspect a lot of the evil offspring of clippy will hit the great dustbin in the sky.
Many of the cloud models will likely be taken offline due to operational cost.
Sorry but you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I think your idea of AI is very narrow to LLM for customer facing applications, but it has been and will continue to be used in thousands of applications.
No, the common definition of AI has largely changed to refer to LLM chatbots / “generative AI”. You can thank Sam Altman and his butt sucking buddies for that.
You just want to argue definitions because it tickles your fancy.
This very community is named “fuck AI” but I doubt you’ll find many people here against OCR (which is technically “AI”).
I literally research AI for a living, and the “common definition” just means it’s what you personally think, because to me the common definition of AI is… AI, which includes LLMs, CNN, LSTM, multi-modal, symbolic AI, generative AND discriminative, etc.
Good for you! 👍 Would you like a cookie? Here ya go: 🍪
It’s not what I personally think, dude. I don’t even like that the definition has shifted, but it has thanks largely to those with a chatbot fetish.
Again, look at the community you’re in. Do you think we’re here because of Google translate?
I remember a time when every day our letter carrier would bring us another AOL compact disc. It was incredible, there were AOL CDs littering the streets, crushed rainbow shards promising to connect you to the world.
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.
It was named after the Smart watch from the 1980s.
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.
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.
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.
I dunno furbies were everywhere
Omg Tamagotchi
Everyone has an attention-hungry tamagotchi. They moan when they want more electricity, and giggle when you connect them to a charger.
They sigh when you switch them off.
They make you feel uncomfortable when you leave home without them.
They want you to constantly feed them with information.
They are called smartphones now.
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.
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…)
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
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. 😃
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.
