Has there ever been a sustained backlash and doubt about a new big technology like what we are seeing with AI? Where the most vocal critics are tech people?
It's similar to bitcoin, to NFTs...
It's also similar to the internet-connected device trend, though I don't remember the resistance and doubt to that being as intense. I was mostly very excited about "the internet of things" I still put wifi in places where it doesn't belong with the most flimsy of excuses.
It's just really unusual to hear some of my biggest "early adopter" friends filled with bile for AI. And well I'm right there with them. I'm irritated most by the dishonesty of the claims about what it can do. With "internet of things" the objection was not "you can't track your water bottle on the internet, it won't work the way you describe" it was more like "why would you want to do that?" and "your data will be sold to companies, you will be spied on"
Both proved to be correct.
The "internet of things" failed to deliver on it's most exciting promises mostly due to corporate resistance to interoperability. Alexa can't make a google calendar event, your light system is in a war with the system that controls the thermostat.
Every company aimed for market dominance, boxing out the others, and it has made everything harder to use, more buggy and worthless.
But it's probably for the best that seamless control did not materialize. This is protecting us from 'agentic' AI agents running around causing even bigger problems.
Alexa struggles to communicate with different brands of lights, and this is by design in this desperate hope that people would lock in and buy everything from one company. AI agents will face even worse issues since the concept of interoperability isn't even on the radar of these clowns. They think they can just power through it.
This would be much more concerning if IoT had been more cooperative and standardized. But it's a huge mess and if you have a good working network devices it's an isolated island.
The capitalism of it all was protective by being inefficient.
@futurebird It’s still not great because if you have IoT devices on the same network as your regular devices, it makes it much easier to hack into your meteor and all your stuff.
Also you can do things like see the inside of someone’s house through their poorly secured nanny cams and baby monitors. 😬
I sort of disagree on the iot stuff but not entirely.
The out of the box iot systems tend to be broken promises and insecure garbage but the hobbyist market is a really amazing, we wired up our apartment with smart switches (zigbee so no direct Internet connection but local mesh only) and it feels like the future we were all promised but was stolen from us.
But then the parts that are good are the ones built on open source and open standards with cooperation as one of the core requirements and that is exactly the mindset you're talking about
@futurebird @MisuseCase Not as isolated as you might think. Some of these security issues grow really big. People are hacking into vacuum cleaner robots and getting cameras inside people's houses for example. And there's the famous example of public camera systems being wide open with practically no protection whatsoever. There was even something about a smart toilet (I kid you not, an actual real thing) being hacked.
They're not really isolated and that, in itself, is the biggest problem...
But then even some things that kind of are are still pretty bad. Anyone can just walk near your home and hack into all kinds of bluetooth devices. And, through Bluetooth, even into other things. (A lot of stuff like the actual pairing process lacks really basic security.)
IoT is a hot mess.
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