I’ve got this absolutely massive draft document where I’ve tried to articulate what this person explains in a few sentences. The gradual removal of immediate purpose from products has become deliberate. This combination of conceptual solutions to conceptual problems gives the business a free pass from any kind of distinct accountability. It is a product that has potential to have potential. AI seems to achieve this better than anything ever before. Crypto is good at it but it stumbles at the cash-out point so it has to keep cycling through suckers. AI can just keep chugging along on being “powerful” for everything and nothing in particular, and keep becoming more powerful, without any clear benchmark of progress.

Edit: just uploaded this clip of Ralph Nader in 1971 talking about the frustration of being told of benefits that you can’t really grasp https://youtu.be/CimXZJLW_KI

100% on point. More people must remember that everything we know about large companies' operations is still completely valid. Leadership doesn't understand any of the technologies at play, even at a high level- they don't think in terms of black boxes; they think in black, amorphous miasmas of supposed function or vibes, for short. They are concerned with a few metrics going up or down every quarter. As long as the number goes up, they get paid, the dopamine hits, and everyone stays happy.

The AI miasma (mAIasma? miasmAI?) in particular is near perfect. Other technologies only held a finite amount of potential to be hyped, meaning execs had to keep looking for their next stock price bump. AI is infinitely hypeable since you can promise anything with it, and people will believe you thanks to the smoke and mirrors it procedurally pumps out today.

I have friends who have worked in plenty of large corporations and have experience/understanding of the worthlessness of executive leadership, but they don't connect that to AI investment and thus don't see the grift. It's sometimes exasperating.

what i'm trying to understand is the bridge between the quite damning works like Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Myth by John Kelly, R. Scha elsewhere, G. Ryle at advent of the Cognitive Revolution, deriving many of the same points as L. Wittgenstein, and then there's PMS Hacker, a daunting read, indeed, that bridge between these counter-"a.i." authors, and the easy think substance that seems to re-emerge every other decade? how is it that there are so many resolutely powerful indictments, and they are all being lost to what seems like a digital dark age? is it that the kool-aid is too good, that the sauce is too powerful, that the propaganda is too well funded? or is this all merely par for the course in the development of a planet that becomes conscious of all its "hyperobjects"?

Hilarious.

Only five years ago no one in the computer science industry would have taken a bet that AI would be able to explain why a joke was funny or perform creative tasks.

Today that's become so normalized that people are calling things thought to be literally impossible a speculative bubble because advancement that surprised everyone in the industry initially and then again with the next model a year later hasn't moved fast enough?

The industry is still learning how to even use the tech.

This is like TV being invented in 1927 and then people in 1930 saying that it's a bubble because it hasn't grown as fast as they expected it to.

Did OP consider the work going on at literally every single tech college's VC groups in optoelectronic neural networks and how that's going to impact decoupling AI training and operation from Moore's Law? I'm guessing no.

Near-perfect analysis, eh? By someone who read and regurgitated analysis by a journalist who writes for a living and may just have an inherent bias towards evaluating information on the future prospects of a technology positioned to replace writers?

We haven't even had a public release of multimodal models yet.

This is about as near perfect of an analysis as smearing paint on oneself and rolling down a canvas on a hill.