Disclaimer: Today’s post is going to be a good ole fashioned rant. The tech industry has lost its mind. If this is where you are hearing it for the first time, I need you to know that I won’t apologize for being the one to tell you. You were bound to find out sooner or later. What do I mean by this? Well pretty much everything is AI now. Nothing else matters. Just AI.
AI of course is a lie. There is no such thing as actual AI, only machine learning. Machine Learning is an interesting technology that can do some pretty cool stuff on a limited scale. But it’s neither intelligent nor creative and it does not actually comprehend. Thus it follows that no amount of hardware, wasteful power usage or even an infinite marketing budget will get around that basic truth. Sadly that isn’t stopping the industry from going totally insane trying to sell the general public on it. Here are a lot of links to a lot of examples of this. In case you didn’t realize it, every single word in the previous sentence links to a different AI related announcement or article from just the last three weeks.
It would appear that the tech industry has basically devolved into a slavering horde of snake oil sales people. Every single major company in this industry now firmly believes that you the customer are too stupid to be able to tell the difference between next level tech developed around actual AI and the cheap two-bit psuedo parlor trick bullshit they are trying to push on you instead. This includes Microsoft, Google, Apple, OpenAI, AMD, Intel and Nvidia. Meanwhile other more reputable companies appear to be dipping their toes into the water before going totally full retard on it ala the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
AI hype is bringing in all of the well known dipshit investors along with all of their ill-gotten money. This is why no major player seems able to resist the allure of it. This is what happens when all tech “innovation” is driven by a greed based economic system which rewards only the most sociopathic participants and leaves everybody else scrambling for crumbs in some kind Thunderdome-esque zero sum game. Of course knowing this won’t keep some people from telling you that this is just like the Cryptocurrency craze that came before it and that you shouldn’t worry too much about it. Those people are wrong. The AI craze makes the Crypto craze look like candy ass bullshit. Billions of dollars are being thrown around and every top tier tech industry participant is betting on AI hard. Crypto was mostly limited to second rate and third rate wannabe tech companies (excluding Nvidia who sold all the GPUs required to power it) and of course Banksters on Wall Street. AI is far bigger than that already and we are arguably still in the early stages.
Meanwhile, none of these companies seems to be spending much time on trying to actually improve the products they have that we actually use. It’s not like we the users don’t have problems and encounter bugs on a regular basis, but that seemingly doesn’t matter much nowadays. I suspect the reason for this is that there is no increased revenue to be had for fixing and maintaining products people are already using and more than likely already locked into tolerating for a multitude of reasons. That can only be accomplished by finding new ways to get between us and our wallets. Fixing bugs in Windows just reduces Microsoft’s profit margin whereas spying on your every move via Windows Recall and storing the data in a stunningly insecure mechanism all while promising to keep the data private makes way more financial sense if they are lying about the privacy aspect, which they most assuredly are.
Thats because these companies no longer care about building tools that enable us to solve our problems or be more productive. They only want to get more money from the customers they already have because they are generally too big to acquire too many more customers. Thus they can only accomplish this by selling us something new, not by fixing or ethically maintaining something we already have and perhaps even already paying for. Happy customers aren’t so desperate for relief that they are willing to buy into a scam hook, line and sinker. But unhappy customers are. That’s the real tragedy here: These companies are capitalizing on their previous failures by using our dissatisfaction with their current products to inspire us to believe in their new “AI” based ones.
The truth is that no matter how much money is spent, this technology will never live up to the promises that these companies are making. But they are okay with that. Most of them have been selling you broken bullshit for years now so they know that despite the bad taste it leaves in your mouth you’ll keep on ingesting more in the hopes that this is the time when one of their promises might actually come to fruition.
Mark my words: It won’t happen this time, the next or even the one after that. Big tech is a malignant cancer and the sooner we excise them from our lives, the better off we will be.