Beware the cloud of hype - The History of the Web

I’m not going to necessarily weigh in on the AI thing. History, to me, is much more interesting in the long view. So I’ll be doing a bit of fence sitting on that one until some more of it plays out.

I think that the source of moral qualms, even in the face of some utility, has been well documented by others. But Paul Ford, in a recent Wired article, comes at AI from a slightly different angle. Everything that AI does, it does “badly and confidently.” Which leaves Ford is in awe of AI for just how shameless it is.

But the current crop of AI leadership is absolutely unsuited to this work. They are themselves shameless, grasping at venture capital and talking about how their products will run the world, asking for billions or even trillions in investment. They insist we remake civilization around them and promise it will work out. But how are they going to teach a computer to behave if they can’t?

It is a shamelessness driven almost entirely by a fortress of hype erected around the entire industry. The “leaders” in this space can do no wrong. They will drive things forward at any cost, and they are protected by vague platitudes and imagined potential that everyone promises is just around the corner.

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