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.
I guess my point is that people who don't understand the tremendous power of non-corporate cooperation and interoperability inspired by a higher calling than making money will never be able to build anything very powerful since they will always be too busy fighting each other.
The internet is powerful because of the ways it is standardized. And the same people excited by that power generally try to destroy this aspect of the internet. Because that vast power can't be controlled by one person.
@futurebird It's funny because I was just thinking about how so much of the Linux ecosystem was built by people just trying to make a thing that works and gets the job done and how I worried money getting too high of an importance can ruin that. I keep thinking of Mozilla in particular.
Ok, they weren't ever like that Linux equivalent by any means and were always a business essentially, but I just can't forget the way they started seeing dollar signs more and more and stopped making the browser their own users wanted and started focusing solely on how they could make money off of their users instead. The biggest reason anyone even used Firefox was to get away from Google and they went and became Google 2.0. It's madness and it hurts us all.
I guess money can't not corrupt?
@sinvega @futurebird Yes, that is a fair point. I know I'm very much afraid of that sort of thing and doing all I can to build up within my (rather severe) limits.
And to be fair, the thing I was most thinking about was actually kind of one such example. A very low level thing doing donation requests at a fundamental. It's a free thing and they absolutely deserve donations (heck, I'd love it if they got enough to fund their activities for years in advance) but I don't think donation requests should be low level... And when I stated such, the general attitude I got back was "you're not paying, so you get no right to say anything about it" from most people on here who responded. (They didn't say that themselves though, so I'm not blaming them.)
At some point (mid 00s?), the "talented engineers" in "talented engineers invent something brilliant, change the world, and get rich" got displaced by wealthy MBA students who replaced "something brilliant" with "rich guys' dumb ideas". They so thoroughly cloned Steve Jobs' aesthetic that nobody noticed for a long time, enough that VCs still got paid.
AI is now the second or third iteration of this but eventually, the Emperor's nudity will sink in.
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.
@futurebird
Interop is the bane of capitalists, as Cory Doctorow often says.
The AI space is already starting to try to squeeze out competition, which will further worsen interop. Microsoft for example has announced a new "service" that blocks all AIs except Copylots, err I mean copilot.
I didn't even remember "matter" that's how hard it failed.
NOT A SINGLE ENTITY OF THIS UNIVERSE,
IN ITS COURSE OR BIRTH OR DEATH,
REMOVES OR ADDS TO THE TOTAL SUM OF THE COSMOS
YET THE TOTAL SUM OF ADVANTAGES
BROUGHT BY APP-CONTROLLABLE FRIDGES
IS NEGATIVE AND IMPLIES FURTHER DIMENSIONS
I mean: With smart home stuff or bitcoin, it was mostly a "you do you" situation (except when blockchain started to get mentioned at business meetings, to the loud groaning of the more tech-affine people).
The AI hype reminds me more of being surrounded by diehard Apple fans:
They do annoying stuff and then tell you all about it. And then start to criticize you because you don't do the same thing.
"You should use a Mac because it makes you more creative and working becomes sooo much easier."
"You should use AI because that way you are done in half the time so you can do exciting stuff like work even more."
I've always been a bit of an apple fan, though I only think I was annoying in the late 90s when using a mac felt like you really were doing something different.
@futurebird
There is this special "religious zealot" vibe some people have.
Their focus doesn't have to be tech. Can be meditation. Or bicycles. Or weird protein shakes.
But in any situation they will invariably come up with their current object of obsession as a solution.
"Maybe I should clean up the cellar this weekend."
"You should use meditation for that. It's the best. Honestly, I don't understand how people ever got anything done before it was invented."
@wakame @futurebird After I switched a certain workplace to Moodle and saved them millions they had been paying Adobe, a high-school educated director who allegedly got that position thanks to connections told me to "put Moodle on blockchain so that people can't cheat on exams".
ETA: Don't get me wrong, many competent people only have high school education, but for a director in that company a master's degree was a requirement.
Reminds me of Amazon announcing a "centralized blockchain"... which is just a database.
Next time I get a weird requirement, I will try to figure out if I can create a company that provides exactly that.
"We are syncing the Moodle database to the Tamper-Proof Centralized Blockchain ™️ now."
MIM attacks as a service?
@futurebird It was years after the first automobiles were popular before people standardized things like stop lights. SAE bolt standards?
The beginning is always messy; money and sanity are usually at odds.
How long ago did we start getting standardized chargers?
@futurebird Yes. I think the difference is that IoT (depending on the definition of course, but in general) is totally possible and doable from a computer science, networking, information science perspective. It's the economic, and also legal and security questions that are not solved.
Wheras the current "AI" (as described by it's marketing) is not possible.
But it's not really a "new media form" it's a new production method.
@futurebird Yes! But some of the results are qualitative changes to accustomed forms of media. Recipe websites, for example, have become even more annoying than before AI. Everything is becoming more verbose, because it’s so easy to extract text (any text) from the slop machine.
Still, I’m with you that the main change is in how media are produced. I just think there’s a component of new media panics in some of the analysis, and we need to bear that in mind.
@futurebird LLMs might "succeed" but the major result will be that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
By "poor" I mean anyone who makes less than a million dollars a year from what they own.
@futurebird I recall a pretty large amount of skepticism during the dot-com bubble. But of course, there's a reason we now call that the "dot-com bubble"...
Although I think in hindsight it could be argued that a lot of those ideas weren't as crazy as they seemed at the time...
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