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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

#41

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

keiferski wrote: post #5

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…

> the message coming from the tech industry

This is not the tech industries fault, but the media's: "There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story." [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

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

#42

Post by guappa »

red_admiral wrote: post #14
lovich wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask truckers about this with the nearly decade long plus narrative that the second self driving is mastered they will be laid off, combined simultaneously with complaints about how no one is entering the lucrative trucking industry. I’ve had non tech family and friends who are currently dealing with the result of American cutthroat capitalism and barely able to cover living expenses despite having two people working…

Having your serfs' basic needs met was very rarely a care of the ruling classes in any state form that deserves the name "serfdom". Serfs dying in a famine was just one of those things that happened. There was perhaps a brief reversal after the Black Death, when so many serfs had died there was almost a competition for the labor of the survivors. My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that mo…

Serfs might decide to kill the local lord. And most local lords didn't have a huge standing army to prevent that.

So you don't sound too correct.

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

#43

Post by doktrin »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #27
posix_monad wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you are a programmer. In my view, if AI can do software engineering, then I don't think any white collar job is safe.

Software engineering at the CTO level, sure. Coding? It’s looking like the chess versus go of jobs. My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.

> My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure.

Both of these jobs - particularly the latter but where I live also the former - rely on a heavy surplus of disposable income sloshing around the economy. Once the money stops flowing the home stills start and the ski trips stop.

> My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.

The broad point you're conveying is reasonably clear, but I'm not even sure whether you're implying your friend is a SWE by virtue of their child tinkering with a REPL, or if you're referring to the future job prospects of said 10 year old.

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

#44

Post by alexvoda »

yourapostasy wrote: post #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.

Vive la révolution française!

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

#45

Post by fransje26 »

keiferski wrote: post #5

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…

There is a french expression that kind of describes the feeling: "une fuite en avant", which can be translated as "a headlong flight forward", to describe an escape from the problem by blindly rushing ever forward.

It seems like the fear of missing out on a possible profit has every tech-related company and their dog rush into the latest trends, without thinking about the mid to long term consequences of their choices.

It doesn't matter if it is about subscription models for everything, abusive private data gathering, or, more worryingly, unrestricted AI-everything. Their competitors might be doing it, so they have to do it preemptively. Very much similar to the Cold-War arms race.

All in all, it goes nicely hand in hand with an other expression: "Après moi, le déluge", literally translating to "After me, the floods", or, as we say in English:

    Consequences be damned.

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

#46

Post by red_admiral »

guappa wrote: post #42
red_admiral wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having your serfs' basic needs met was very rarely a care of the ruling classes in any state form that deserves the name "serfdom". Serfs dying in a famine was just one of those things that happened. There was perhaps a brief reversal after the Black Death, when so many serfs had died there was almost a competition for the labor of the survivors. My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that mo…

Serfs might decide to kill the local lord. And most local lords didn't have a huge standing army to prevent that. So you don't sound too correct.

With the exception of Switzerland, this didn't tend to go too well in the middle ages - the early modern age was the first time this became viable "at scale", hence the French Revolution.

There were plenty of earlier cases of one family of minor nobility killing another family of minor nobility and taking over their farmland and serfs, but successful peasant revolts that led to a change in the hierarchy were really rare (outside of Switzerland). Even the 1381 "Great Revolt" in England, which called for the abolition of serfdom among other things, is evaluated by the World History Encyclopaedia [1] as "largely unsuccessful" despite having many factors in its favour: a rise in the bargaining power of surviving peasants after the Black Death, and peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows. And yet Wat Tyler's head ended up on a pike, and despite the poll tax being rolled back, serfdom as an institution remained.

[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/Peasants'_Revolt/

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

#47

Post by alexvoda »

xanderlewis wrote: post #34
vasco wrote: 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.

What makes one mocked product succede while another fails?

Google Glass and its users were mocked and it was a complete failure.

The iPad was mocked and ended up as an underperforming division, yet still the market leader because everyone else dropped the ball really badly.

AirPods were mocked but they are a wild success helped of course by the removal of the 3.5 jack.

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

#48

Post by red_admiral »

doktrin wrote: post #43
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering at the CTO level, sure. Coding? It’s looking like the chess versus go of jobs. My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.

> My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. Both of these jobs - particularly the latter but where I live also the former - rely on a heavy surplus of disposable income sloshing around the economy. Once the money stops flowing the home stills start and the ski trips stop. > My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely. The broad point you're conveying is…

AI might not come for the ski instructors, but climate change will. Already being felt in Europe.

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

#49

Post by krapp »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #7

> "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.

SXSW is full of exactly the demographic of creatives that has been against AI for innumerable reasons, not the least of which is the tendency (if not intent) of the AI industry to commoditize their work and dehumanize their craft as a means of putting as much of them out of work as possible.. they were probably booing all of it.

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

#50

Post by doktrin »

xanderlewis wrote: post #34
vasco wrote: 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.

If you're arguing that initial criticism doesn't meaningfully predict future potential, then I fully agree. We've seen this in everything from EVs to streaming services to a megacorp like Amazon : plenty of rocky if not outright lampooned beginnings.

However if you're attributing widespread product adoption to the erosion of cultural conservatism towards [new thing], then I think that underplays the role of product iteration. AirPods shrank their form factor and eliminated the cigarette-butt aesthetic, EVs became highly quality competitive, Amazon expanded from being a bookstore, etc.

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