“Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.”
To the former point, I think it was Doctorow that coined the term “enshittification”.
To be fair to Big Tech, they’re not any worse than healthcare companies, or airlines, or any of the countless (sometimes it seems basically all) corporations that have been steadily turning the crank on making the modern experience a little worse every year for typical people (I’m not interested in silly summary statistics like per-capita GDP or the CPI, those are gamed to hell: give me an arithmetic mean and I’ll give you a corrupt system).
It’s that so recently they were so much better. When I joined a FAANG in 2011 I had no issue wearing company gear around. People would be like: “that’s awesome I use that every day it’s great”. By 2018 I was lying in coffee shops and bars about what I did for a living (one of the main reasons I left).
Regarding AI broadly construed, it could be used as a wildly powerful tool for leveling the playing field, the way Google was when it appeared. It’s in the hopes of realizing that outcome that I work on it and am so vocally critical of those who just trivially don’t want that.
But it could also become the greatest tool for oppression since the firearm, and I think the public is starting to get wise to the fact this is unfortunately the path we’re on.
It’s trite, but I always come back to this: when the robots are finally capable of doing all the work, do we get Star Trek TNG or Blade Runner.
The technology is a step in either direction depending on how it’s used and regulated.
“Perhaps the blowback is a sign of a wider weariness that people have accumulated towards big tech companies over the past few years, mixed with a nebulous malaise about 'AI' and what it means for the status quo and people's livelihoods.”
To the former point, I think it was Doctorow that coined the term “enshittification”.
To be fair to Big Tech, they’re not any worse than healthcare companies, or airlines, or any of the countless (sometimes it seems basically all) corporations that have been steadily turning the crank on making the modern experience a little worse every year for typical people (I’m not interested in silly summary statistics like per-capita GDP or the CPI, those are gamed to hell: give me an arithmetic mean and I’ll give you a corrupt system).
It’s that so recently they were so much better. When I joined a FAANG in 2011 I had no issue wearing company gear around. People would be like: “that’s awesome I use that every day it’s great”. By 2018 I was lying in coffee shops and bars about what I did for a living (one of the main reasons I left).
Regarding AI broadly construed, it could be used as a wildly powerful tool for leveling the playing field, the way Google was when it appeared. It’s in the hopes of realizing that outcome that I work on it and am so vocally critical of those who just trivially don’t want that.
But it could also become the greatest tool for oppression since the firearm, and I think the public is starting to get wise to the fact this is unfortunately the path we’re on.
It’s trite, but I always come back to this: when the robots are finally capable of doing all the work, do we get Star Trek TNG or Blade Runner.
The technology is a step in either direction depending on how it’s used and regulated.