When I was young and starting out with computers, programming, BBS’ and later the early internet, technology was something that expanded my mind, helped me to research, learn new skills, and meet people and have interesting conversations. Something decentralized that put power into the hands of the little guy who could start his own business venture with his PC or expand his skillset.
Where we are now with AI, the opposite seems to be happening. We are asking AI to do things for us rather than learning how to do things ourselves. We are losing our research skills. Many people are talking to AI’s about their problems instead of other people. And they will take away our jobs and centralize all power into a handful of billionaire sociopaths with robot armies to carry out whatever nefarious deeds they want to do.
I hope we somehow make it through this part of history with some semblance of freedom and autonomy intact, but I’m having a hard time seeing how.
this bubble can’t pop soon enough
was dotcom this annoying too?
Surprisingly, it was not this annoying.
It was very annoying, but at least there was an end in sight, and some of it was useful.
We all knew that http://www.only-socks-and-only-for-cats.com/ was going away, but eBay was still pretty great.
In contrast, we’re all standing around today looking at many times the world’s GDP being bet on a pretty good autocomplete algorithm waking up and becoming fully sentient.
It feels like a different level of irrational.
Dot com bubble was optimistic. AI bubble is pessimistic. People thought their lives would improve due to improved communication and efficiency. The internet was seen as a positive thing. The dot com bubble was more about monetizing it, but that wasn’t the zwitgeist. With AI people don’t see much benefits and are aware it’s purpose is to take their jobs.
With the dot com bubble, it was mainly mom and pop investors that were worst off, but many companies died. With AI bubble it seems like it’s the companies that will do worst when it crashes. Obviously, it affects everyone, but this skews more to the 1%. So hopefully it’s a lesson on greed. Unlikely though.
To me, this is more annoying. But I might have been too young and naïve back then.