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They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

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Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#31

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. S…

I think crypto is when the wheels really fell off.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#32
post #12

I mean if the tech industry wanted people to like it, maybe it should treat them better? We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents, and that is because, unambiguously, of industry and policy shaped by industry. Wages have stagnated. Cities have become places that are great if you have lots of money to spend and pretty hostile otherwise. Medicine has increasingly become a luxury, as has healthy foo…

> We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents

Wait, what?

My grandparents lived through a war and a famine, and came of age when over half the world lived in extreme poverty.

I don't think you fully appreciate how little of the world population could poo into a toilet not that many decades ago.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#33
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of it isn't even made to improve human life, it was just a matter of time until people wake up they're getting a downgraded experience to please shareholders and business owners.

I'm not that cynical, and I do think that a lot of tech has done good things for people. Even something like Facebook was useful at the beginning, even if that is obviously no longer the case.

Facebook can still be useful. I'm using it as a centralized portal for all local events (concerts, festivals...). Smaller events are very hard or impossible to discover or track any other way. But you have to train fb a bit, and ignore irrelevant stuff you'll still see. But there is a value in it, at least for me.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#34
post #9

> Not even Apple is like Apple anymore. A similar backlash happened a few weeks ago, when Apple launched its super-high-tech virtual reality headset. The early response on social media was mockery and ridicule—something Steve Jobs never experienced. I definitely remember a huge viral wave of mockery about the iPad in 2010. It was everything from stretching things and calling it "innovation" (as in, just a big phone),…

The AirPods were also roundly mocked and described as so weird looking no one would want to be seen dead wearing them when first announced.

A few years later, it seems like we all have them (or a very similar-looking competitor) in our ears.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#35
post #13

Sure, people hate tech. And tech clearly hates its own customers. So why hasn't something that doesn't hate its own customers disrupted tech? If anything, the enshittification is just getting worse. Prime video's random ads alone should have led to mass cancellations but it's not happening, is it? So what exactly will lead to people walking away as opposed to grumbling as things keep getting worse and worse? Reminds…

If tech and the customers hate each other, they wouldn't be making revenue. Of course, there's a couple of exceptions (e.g. monopolies, addictions) but that doesn't really describe AI for example.

I think the answer is that people simply do like the tech. We voluntarily use social media platforms (nosurfing is possible), and the average person clearly finds great use in ChatGPT, MidJourney, Character and AI in general.

Essentially -- the complaining doesn't represent what the market (the people) actually want. It's controversial for sure but the willing customer base is large enough.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#36

> "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human" Whether you are excited by AI or not that phase is just cringe BS and deserves all the booing, so maybe the crowd wasn't "booing ai" but just booing the crappy presentation full of corp speak.

Not only is it ‘cringe BS’, it’s what we here in the UK call bollocks.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#37

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. S…

> I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so,

It's not really the last decade or so. You can go back 20 years or more and find people really quite dissatisfied with tech companies like IBM and Oracle and Microsoft.

What really happened is that "you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" came for Google and Apple and what we need is to recognize that they're now IBM and Microsoft and we need a new Google and Apple.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#38
Can someone please elaborate upon this:

> If the current tech leaders can’t figure this out, they will be wiped away by history—that’s happened before, and will happen again.

When has this happened in history, to who, and what was the context? The examples I can think of were mostly related to technological advancements (mainframe to minicomputer, for example), and not related to general public anger.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#39
post #17

People are fed up with grift. There are two types of grift - pure cynical (crypto, vr, ai influencing & fake products) - make me a medical system that I know can never get approved - make me a business that will never ship a thing but get daddies tax bill halved - make me code assistants that don't actually help and pure mean: products that are exploitative or knowingly unethical. - make me a mental health chatbot wi…

Definitely. I wish there was a stronger and more efficient way to call out scammers of global caliber. A system which bans Elon Musk from ever speaking about self-driving cars sounds somewhat oppressive, but I would be inclined to give it a try since what we have now seems harmful and exploitative.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#40

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. S…

One of the other things is that all the automation appears to be extracting all the joy out of life.

Why paint a picture or take a photograph when AI will do it for you?

Why design and build an application that will solve creative problems when an AI will do it? You should just review automated PRs.

Rather than, why go into the asbestos removal business and destroy your lungs when we have AI to do it and you can spend your time learning the guitar?

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