> It's like people complaining about "poor quality plastic trinkets" that replaced well-made household items.
Actually, people had to be made to see it as cheap so they would throw away and re-buy more.
https://desis.osu.edu/seniorthesis/index.php/2024/09/15/crea...
> “It was a really difficult sell to the American public in the post-war period, to inculcate people into a throwaway living,” she says. “That is not what people were used to.”
> A solution companies came up with was emphasizing that plastic was a low-cost, abundant material.
> A 1960 marketing study for Scott Cup said the containers were “almost indestructible,” but that the manufacturer could still convince people to discard them after a few uses. To counter any “pangs of conscience” consumers might feel about throwing them away, the researchers suggested a “direct attack”: Tell people the cups are cheap, they said, and that “there are more where these came from.”
> A few years later, Scott ran an advertisement saying its plastic cups were available at “‘toss-away prices.”
It wasn't plastic itself, and likewise it's not "AI" itself.
We do have an abysmal track record as industrialized nations however, and more recently, in many parts of the software industry.
But we can change it. With so many things, tech people spent so much time and energy debating... like cookies or HTTPS or whatever... we often heard/said that while we care so much about doing the right thing, we can't achieve anything at work because consumers don't care. Well, this time, pretty much all of the world cares a lot. I mean, the Vatican just blogged about it!
Maybe we just "have to live with it", but in that case, there is also no utility in pointing that out, since we literally have to live with it. And of course, it's really about the shape of the "it", and how it's used, not that there is one that will never go away. That is also true about most things: stuff we don't currently use is in the museum or text books. Nothing goes away away, but we no longer drink out of lead cups, even though we still use lead. We don't have x-ray machines in shoe shops, even though we still use x-rays.