The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction. These technologies don’t seem to be encouraging connection as much as commoditizing it.
Despite all of this hype, all of this media attention, all of this incredible investment, the supposed “innovations” don’t even seem capable of replacing the jobs that they’re meant to — not that I think they should, just that I’m tired of being told that this future is inevitable.
The reality is that generative AI isn’t good at replacing jobs, but commoditizing distinct acts of labor, and, in the process, the early creative jobs that help people build portfolios to advance in their industries.
One of the fundamental misunderstandings of the bosses replacing these workers with generative AI is that you are not just asking for a thing, but outsourcing the risk and responsibility.
Generative AI costs far too much, isn’t getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn’t do enough to justify its existence.
The rise of dot-com companies was pitched as a no consequences gold rush. We were on the precipice of a fictional future where everyone would be cashing in on the web. The reality was quite a bit more slow, and boring. Business on the web consolidated, as we now know, and left most people holding the bag. There’s no knowing exactly what will happen with AI technologies, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect something far more boring and centralized than what’s being promised.
All this has happened before. All this will happen again.
Each of these cycles has been larger and lasted longer than the last, and I want to be clear: each cycle has produced genuinely useful technology. It’s just that each follows the progress of a sigmoid curve that everyone mistakes for an exponential one. There is an initial burst of rapid improvement, followed by gradual improvement, followed by a plateau. Initial promises imply or even state outright “if we pour more {compute, RAM, training data, money} into this, we’ll get improvements forever!” The reality is always that these strategies inevitably have a limit, usually one that does not take too long to find.
Develop a simple, focused app that does what it says on the tin — not one where the tin talks back at you.
The marketing of A.I. reminds me less of the cryptocurrency and Web3 boom, and more of 5G. Carriers and phone makers promised world-changing capabilities thanks to wireless speeds faster than a lot of residential broadband connections. Nothing like that has yet materialized.
I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.
A very even-handed take.
I’m glad that I took the time to experiment with AI tools, both because I understand them better and because I have found them to be useful in my day-to-day life. But even as someone who has used them and found them helpful, it’s remarkable to see the gap between what they can do and what their promoters promise they will someday be able to do. The benefits, though extant, seem to pale in comparison to the costs.
I don’t believe the greatest societal risk is that a sentient artificial intelligence is going to kill us all. I think our undoing is simpler than that. I think that most of our lives are going to be shorter and more miserable than they could have been, thanks to the unchecked greed that’s fed this rally. (Okay, this and crypto.)
I like this analogy:
AI is like a dancing bear. This was a profitable sideshow dating back to the middle ages: all it takes is a bear, some time, and a complete lack of ethics. Today, our carnival barkers are the AI startups and their CEOs. They’re trying to convince you that if they can show you a bear that can dance, then you’ll believe it can draw, write coherent sentences, and help you with your app’s marketing strategy.
Part of the curiosity of a dancing bear is the implicit risk that it’ll remember at some point that it’s a bear, and maul whoever is nearby. The fear is a selling point. Likewise, some AI vendors have even learned that the product is more compelling if it’s perceived as dangerous. It’s common for AI startup execs to say things like, “of course there’s a real risk that an army of dancing bears will eventually kill us all. Anyway, here’s what we’re working on…” How brave of them.
As a self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s map.
This ability to “observe” software makes HTML special to work with.
You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work.
In this way “AI” is deeply dehumanizing: Making the spaces and opportunities for people to grow and be human smaller and smaller. Applying a straitjacket of past mediocrity to our minds and spirits.
And that is what is being booed: The salespeople of mediocrity who’ve made it their mission to speak lies from power. The lie that only tech can and will save us. The lie that a bit of statistics and colonial, mostly white, mostly western data is gonna create a brilliant future. The lie that we have no choice, no alternatives.
What we’re seeing is FOMO-driven dumb money thrown at technology by people who have no hope of understanding it. Just because everybody else is and because the GPTs and image generators have cool demos.
What’s going to happen, I’m pretty sure, is that AI/ML will, inevitably, disappoint; in the financial sense I mean, probably doing some useful things, maybe even a lot, but not generating the kind of profit explosions that you’d need to justify the bubble. So it’ll pop, and my bet it is takes a bunch of the finance world with it.
This is mostly about the intersection of finance, hype, and technology, but Tim mentions something that I’ve also been saying:
I’m super impressed by something nobody else seems to talk about: Prompt parsing.
Maybe it’s because I spent formative users playing text-only adventure games, but I am way more impressed by the way generative tools do natural language parsing than I am by their output.
Subvert the status quo. Own a website. Make and share links.
I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics.
— The Graduate
A fascinating look at the connections between hypertext and film editing. I’m a sucker for any article that cites both Ted Nelson and Walter Murch.
Remy has turned his linkrot-battling technique into a service that you can use. He has more details on his blog.
John Willshire has been pondering web marginilia AKA stuff you put in your sidebar.
He has a particular fondness for the good ol’ blogroll. I’ve still got my analogue equivalent on my homepage—the bedroll. It’s a list of links to people who’ve stayed over. Maybe I should also have a regular blogroll, but I suspect it would just be a reproduction of feeds I’m subscribed to.
Then there’s marginalia at the level of a blog post, rather than a whole blog. Kevin Marks points out that this is something that Vannevar Bush described his theoretical memex doing—a device I was just talking about. Kevin created a proof of concept showing outbound and inbound links.
Outbound links are annoted versions of the A elements in a blog post. Inbound links are webmentions (which should now include this post of mine).
Kevin has those links in the margins on either side of the blog post. I’ve also got links that go with my blog posts, but they’re displayed linearly:
Do they still count as marginalia when they’re presented vertically rather than alongside? For mobile devices, I’m not sure there’s any alternative.
When Mathew Modine’s character first shows up in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, I figured the rest of the cinema audience wouldn’t have appreciated me shouting out “VANNEVAR BUSH IN THE HOUSE!” so I screamed it on the inside.
The Manhattan Project was not his only claim to fame or infamy. When it comes to the world we now live in, Bush’s idea of the memex has been almost equally influential. His article As We May Think became a touchstone for Douglas Engelbart and later Tim Berners-Lee.
But as Matt Thompson points out:
…the device he describes does not resemble the internet or anything I’ve ever found on it.
Then he says:
What Bush was describing sounds to me like what you might get if you turned a browser history — the most neglected piece of the software — into a robust and fully featured machine of its own. It would help you map the path you charted through a web of knowledge, refine those maps, order them, and share them
Yes! This!! I 100% agree with the description of browser history as “the most neglected piece of the software.” While I wouldn’t go as far as Chris when he says web browsers kind of suck, I’m kind of amazed that there hasn’t been more innovation and competition in this space.
If anything we’ve outsourced the management of our browsing history to services like Delicious and Pinboard, or to tools like Obsidian and Roam Research. Heck, the links section of my website is my attempt to manage and annotate my own associative trails.
Imagine if that were baked right into a web browser. Then imagine how beautiful such a rich source of data might look.
I don’t think anything like this exists. So Bush’s essay still transfixes me.
I really, really like the progressive enhancement approach that Remy is taking here with outbound links:
When a real user clicks on a link, it’s swapped out to be redirected through my own endpoint that checks if the URL is still OK, and if so permanently redirects the visitor, otherwise my endpoint checks the Web Archive for the URL and permanently redirects to that instead.
I think I’m going to do the same! I’d have to rewrite the server-side code in PHP, but that shouldn’t be too tricky.
This could a project for the next Indie Web Camp I attend.
I don’t read Today in Tabs with any expectation of insight (it’s more like a junk-food guilty pleasure), but these two remarks stand out for their clarity and correctness:
The more I hear people selling AI encouraging everyone to be scared of AI, the more certain I am that it’s nothing to worry about. A few months ago the same people were all shilling crypto.
And:
AI images were fascinating in the Deep Dream eyeballs everywhere era. The “better” AI gets, the blander its output becomes, and the more obvious and unacceptable its errors. We’ve already seen peak AI, and the only interesting use of it will continue to be in generating novel failure modes for human artists to explore.
There are a lot of astute observations in here.