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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

#71
Much tech _is_ getting worse. Particularly AI, much is about cheaply making a bot that works x% of the time, it's cheaper to piss off a few customers and pay no-one, than to do a good job.

No one likes that, it's cheap and nasty hackery.

People like tech that works 100% of the time, and keeps doing it. Stuff that could not be done before that can now.

People don't like churn. Constant upgrades. Built in obscelecense. AI that work 95% at best. Maps that make different decisions each time. UI fads. Framework wars. Google buying and killing services. Clis that are not automatable.

"The only thing that is constant is the rate of chane" is an observation that tech is not providing what was promised: automation.

Cheaper nastier flakey versions of what worked fine should get a boo.

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

#72

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 term ludite indicates that is nothing new.

IMHO this is not about tech being too good tho: it's about new tech being worse.

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

#73
post #6

> These people literally come to the event to learn about new things, and even they are gagging on this stuff. I remember the reactions on /r/technology when the iPhone or the iPad were announced. I remember the reactions when the M1 processor came out. Just like this audience, lots of people who subscribe to this stuff nominally care about new technology. But the truth is that where I religiously chant "We're ARSENA…

I remember the reactions when the first M1 macbook actually landed in people's hands and honestly can't remember a single one which wasn't at least 'well I'll be damned this is actually ok' - and the great majority was 'this is a revolutionary device'. This kinda never happens in football, sorry ^_^

Yes, exactly. The people who use things like them. It was the same with the iPad. The ones who bought them loved them. But the groupies were booing all the way into it dominating that market sector.

These people, nominally technology enthusiasts, appreciate very little.

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

#74
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spen…

> 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? Yeah the tech fetishists think everyone should be awed and happy with the "beautiful" pictures the "AI" they made can generate, and reward them with copious back-pats (nevermind the output is crap and the tech boosters like them because they have…

> I'm starting to actively loathe header images

Header or “hero” images were always a bad idea. With or without AI.

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same thing that makes any successful product succeed. The mockery is independent of the success.

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

#76
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…

> and that is because, unambiguously Monopoly empires driven by tax revenues. > new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force It's a labor market. Monopolization destroys this too. Judges never include this market in their rulings. > and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests? What innovation? The last ten years have been incredibly stagnant. GPT it…

Man I never seen someone do agreegument better. We basically are in accord on most matters of substance here

I find nitpicking silly, but it is traditional in the agreegument format. I will only nitpick two things:

1. While I did put scarequotes on "innovation" for a reason (it is SV's favorite euphemism of course), it is worth noting that things like funneling money into a ridesharing app to create an entire fiefdom of "gig workers" to misclassify and then try to codify anti-labor policies into law by pretending to go to bat for them, or selling massive troves of data to a british analytics firm in order to steer elections toward "business-friendly" fascist demagogues, or creating a "non-profit" to make "safe and open" AI then partnering up with one of the most consumer-hostile and closed-source companies to ever walk the earth once a good opportunity to make bank popped up are certainly uh... creative

2. While a lot of progress in AI recently can definitely be summarized at a high level as throwing massive datasets and parallel processors at neural networks, if you zoom in there are definitely different algorithms coming through the noise, new kinds of network layers, training protocols, and objectives that we didn't have when ANNs first showed up. Like most actual real world science, it was a world of incremental progress that occasionally spawned a really useful application. I still think some advances in machine learning that have come out of all this nonsense have been meaningful and potentially useful, but it's difficult to separate signal from noise when the industry brain-drains academia to do research behind closed doors on whatever sci-fi shows up in the molochian wet dreams of the capitalist investor class

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

#77

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 spen…

I'll break out one of my favorite Douglas Adams excerpts:

"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

You've articulated a subtle point that few (so far) are amplifying -- many of these "creative things" that we're having "GenAI" generate for us are the sort of things we want to do, for our own pleasure, even (especially?) when nobody pays us to do it. Supplanting those activities via "GenAI" is not a "win".

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

#78
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.

Many commenters here are older than me and have older parents. I forget because many are also younger than me and my parents are now grandparents. I'll be more specific: The post-WW2 economic boom (That is, roughly 75-80 years ago) was full of promise and prosperity for a growing middle class. We got a lot of technological progress and even political will toward egalitarian attitudes out of that, but the economic situation has taken a turn toward oligarchy since about the 70s (That is, 50ish years ago), and this has essentially destroyed this middle-class prosperity, while also capturing technological progress and grinding a lot of it to a crawl, focusing mostly on dystopian applications. That's why the crowd at sxsw boos at tech people talking about AI

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

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Google leaned into it by removing their motto "Don't be evil" when they realized it was holding them back from heretofore unseen levels of extraction^h^h^h profit.

Removing "don't be evil" was an unforced PR blunder but things like that have only symbolic effect. Nobody would care if they weren't doing actually evil things like putting their DRM in web standards and pretending that Android is open while doing whatever they can to thwart competing services from becoming popular.

Notice how Apple never had a "don't be evil" to begin with. Does that mean they were always evil or that they aren't now?

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same thing that makes any successful product succeed. The mockery is independent of the success.

This just shows how people live in their bubbles. Are you frequently hating on products like that? It's very likely your social bubble does too, and that's all you hear.

My own social media bubble proclaimed awe and interest in the new possibilities, presented their new startup ideas and hopes.

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