The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble (Cory Doctorow)

[usonian]

Someday, we’re gonna feel pretty silly about our autocomplete worship.

A very negative view, compared to the sorta-neutral one I posted the other day.
https://democraticunderground.com/100217995000
All the ways AI is going to change (not steal) your job (Fast Company)

A long article ( Writers Write! ) with lots of links.
CC BY 3.0 license
but way too long to quote adequately

Edit:

Did I forget the URL? It's https://doctorow.medium.com/the-ai-hype-bubble-is-the-new-crypto-hype-bubble-74e53028631e
Also:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

A very small bit of the article.

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

A lot of comments at Hacker News, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285790 ranging from:

This is a terribly ignorant take and disappointing to see coming from a science fiction author.

to

AI has created a lot of euphoria pumped by VC money once again which can only result in disappointment of expectations since this is the 'pump' part of the hype cycle.

Sooner or later we will see if any of these so-called AI companies are actually making any money or will survive at all.

In 2010, almost everyone was a 'tech company'. Now almost everyone is a 'AI company'. This bullshit needs to stop.

The comments on Hacker News are often by entrepreneurs and serious developers, and sometimes me ( 8 or so, to date! )

[BannonsLiver]

1. But I've been told by posters here that it will doom us all?

[usonian]

3. Stuff that's in the early phase of a hype cycle is really unpredictable.

Gartner Hype Cycle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

You never know how it's going to end up.
Unfortunate when things are put to misuse by .... well, you know the list ....

Yes, there will be good uses. Especially if AI speeds up (accurate) medical diagnoses and so on.
And there will be dumbshit ones.

[Habitation]

4. Just don't step in front of an auto-complete and you'll be fine!

[Yavin4]

2. A lot of very smart people in the 90s said the exact same thing about the internet.

Tell me, how could we have shut down the world economy in 2020 without it.

In my former profession, AI tools right now could render 80% of the jobs obsolete.

[intrepidity]

5. I'll go read it, because I am trying to stay informed on the topic

but my immediate reaction is skepticism, if only for the silly comparison to cryptocurrency. Will perhaps return here later to post something more.

[zonemaster]

6. I don't think this is being over-hyped, at least not significantly

Corporations and defense (and other) agencies didn't stand to make / save billions of dollars on crypto. For corporations who compete against one another, the ones who successfully leverage AI to save costs, accelerate development, etc. will soon thereafter be eating the lunch of their competitors who don't - i.e., there will be a very strong desire to stay at the head of the pack. And the stock market will punish those that fall behind.

I think AI is going to have an impact similar in magnitude to the dawn of the internet, itself. You're going to have so many companies dedicating serious resources to wielding and improving a very powerful set of rapidly developing AI tools. Crazy shit is going to go down. Time-frame is the $64k question, which is kind of unpredictable, at this early stage.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. I think AI is not over-hyped, but this is not the inflection point. There is no general AI, yet

There will be general AI, later. That will be an inflection point.

Currently, AI is expensive (massive banks of linear processors) as Doctorow identifies, and requires sophisticated long-running training. It's great for chat bots and complex searches and making bizarre artwork/memes (fakes) that almost always have visible flaws.

But ...

Today's AI helps build tomorrow's AI. So the pace is accelerating. But in any kind of development there are plateaus and pauses as one thrust of technology reaches its limits and others are not clearly superior.

Another inflection point may occur if highly capable AI becomes installable into phones (pocket computers) and devices, not only on servers.

When your house gets very good at anticipating your wishes before you even state them, by finding patterns that are hard to explain, but amenable to even current AI tech if applied. For example, if on average you make a martini 50% of days, that's not usable for prediction. But it might turn out that if you arrive by car 20 minutes later and put a steak in the fridge on Thursdays you are 93% likely to make a martini, well, you probably didn't know that yourself.

[Johonny]

9. This is what I think

I think the AI run up right now is based on the promise of AI of tomorrow. But when this tomorrow comes and it's general worth are very hard to price in, and likely the short term traders will eventually end this run up. My assumption is during July earnings.

[hunter]

8. If a stupid machine can do the work then it's a stupid job to begin with.

Nobody wants to face the horrid reality that most of us have jobs that are not making the world a better place. We're merely feckless cogs in the destructive world economy that supports asshole billionaires and tyrants as it traumatizes the rest of us.

As Theodore Sturgeon obsrved, "Ninety percent of everything is crap."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

It really doesn't change the world if that "autocomplete" crap is generated in electronic circuits or human brains.

We live in a world that's already saturated with crap.

The only reason I have any sympathy for those who lose work to these machines is that our fucked up society doesn't provide adequate social safety nets for people whose work is automated and their jobs made redundant.

There's a another side to this too. Some jobs really ought to be eliminated if we want to make the world a better place.

For example, mining coal for electric power production is a job that needs to go away right now. France quit burning coal for electric power twenty years ago, pensioning off or finding other employment for the displaced coal miners. That needs to be accomplished worldwide.

Advertising powerful pharmaceuticals that have potentially severe side effects to the general public is another job that ought to go away. The creative people who do this work deserve better.

Personally, I don't see any television advertising in my daily life. I've eliminated it from my universe, and I'll make no apologizes to the people who make their living producing it. My world is a much nicer place without it.

I agree with Doctrow's conclusion:

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.