I remember when I suggested that I shouldn’t learn to write in 1998, because you can just type on the computer, I was laughed at. I was told that at best I’d still need to learn to write, and at worst computers can turn out as a fad due to them requiring electricity to work, they can crash and go bad, etc. Pease note that my dislike of writing was heavily influenced by likely having dyspraxia, and a lot of cheaper pens/pencils being mildly painful to hold.
However, the very same people are now disencouraging anything that the AI is promised to replace. Don’t draw, just use Dall-E. Don’t code, just use ChatGPT. Don’t play music, just use Suno. Don’t make movies, just wait until it can do it good enough. The music one is even often being pushed by those who absolutely despised electronic music for “not requiring any talent, just pressing buttons”, all while AI music is literally what ignorant rock/metal kids thought electronic music production was. Even one person, who criticized me for using amp sims on my PC instead of a wall of tube amplifiers is more favorable than not towards AI music.
I wonder if those who now disencourage art classes in favor of a short lesson on how to prompt an image generator will also disencourage writing due to speech-to-text technologies. Maybe the problem is that they don’t use LLMs, but often a more primitive version of neural networks.
And I’m not 100% against new tools. I even use Neural Amp Modeler, sometimes even two instances with one having a Boss HM-2 response for that Swedish chainsaw tone. But these prompt machines are barely more than toys for real professional work, due to the lack of actual control beyond prompting.
Ooh, the “Smart” era. We still have “Smart” TVs from that era (as in, a device that still uses the “smart” prefix).
But there was a period not too long ago everything was called “smart”, which came down to shoving a SOC into some mundane household item and forcing an Internet requirement.
From that era we had such wonderful inventions as:
- the Smart Water Bottle (required a phone app. It reminded you about being thirsty),
- the Smart Tea Kettle (required an online connection to retrieve the specific boiling time/water temperature for proprietary tea blends),
- the smart juicer (required an Internet connection and an app to pour large, proprietary bags of Capri-Sun into a cup for you),
- the Smart Car (a tiny city car. Yes, that’s all it was; just a car… but smol).
The Juicero did at least crush actual fruit. But, it was hilariously over-built, and you could squeeze the bags of fruit by hand just fine.
The car isn’t from that era, though.
And has an actual, applicable use case. (Dense city outside north america with bad public transportation and a customer allergic to cycling).
If all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.
And sunken cost fallacy. Pretty much sums it up.
When the hole you’ve been digging starts flooding digging turns into bailing.
People seem to have forgotten 3D-TVs. There was a time where you couldn’t get a high-end TV without 3D functionality, it was going to be the future after all. Was it any good? No, but boy did the manufacturers try to push it. Look how that went.
No way was that pushed as hard. That was an upper middle class fad.
Yeah I don’t remember that. How long did it last? I assume it must’ve been around the mid aughts because that’s when 3d resurged in theatres.
3D was mostly limited to TV and cinemas. It’s not that outlook suddenly got 3DTV functionality
Not anywhere near the same scale.
I remember when the 3D TV oligarchs took over our government and created an over 1 trillion dollar bubble.
Bad comparison
Bad response.
I legit did forget about those. Weren’t there curvy ones too?
3D TVs weren’t bad tho, I still wish I played more of whatever PS3 Wipeout game used the feature, hell we still have the TV and glasses and ps3 around somewhere…
The AI push is definitely worse, but the second place, in my mind is the whole “smart” (insert mundane home gadget here).
I’m surprised I didn’t see smart toothpaste or anything.
Yeah they tried really hard to force smart things into every nook and cranny of your house.
This close enough? AI toothbrush… https://www.amazon.com/SAKYPRORAL-Toothbrush-Real-Time-Whitening-G5S/dp/B0DLVDD7K9
🤢
I’m sure oral-b isn’t far behind on that one. They’ve been making smart electric toothbrushes for a while.
Also HD. Everything was HD. Sunglasses, now with HD lenses.
Every ten years or so, someone tries to push “Smart Homes” again. You can find ads of these things going back to the 50’s. They want to vendor lock in every appliance in your home. The product lines themselves never actually last very long.
I have very much adopted and invested in smart technology and even I am massively annoyed by the fact that EVERYTHING connects to WiFi these days. My dishwasher can supposedly download new wash cycles or some nonsense. It’s obnoxious and it will never know wifi. I just like being able to automate things and make my life easier in simple ways. When I dismiss my alarm in the morning my kitchen lights turn on because the first thing I do is go feed the pets. It helps light up the house a bit during winter when I wake up and I love it. THAT is what smart home technology should be. Not a freakin toaster connecting to WiFi so it can alert you when your toast is done.
On the topic of smart toothbrushes, I did get given one to test out and it was actually pretty cool. After you finished brushing it would send a map of your mouth and what you brushed in case you missed any spots. The app ended up being a bit buggy so I got rid of it, but I could see how that type of thing could be useful, especially for certain demographics like kids. They had a way to gamify brushing your teeth for kids as well, which is silly, but could also be effective especially for autistic kids.
Smartphones
The Internet
PCs
Television
Telephone
Credit cards
Cars
Gaming consoles/games
My god cars… fuckin see ads any time I turn on the TV about the new Chevy Mozzarella.
Now with non-user serviceable stereos!
This is late stage supply-side economics if I’ve ever seen it.
EDIT: I hope this shit fails like 3D TV.
lol 3D tv isn’t in the same ballpark as AI. It is a bubble and the hype will die down, but it’s here to stay. Probably going to be as engrained as the internet is, but even that had a huge bubble in the early 2000s.
Some applications of it will stick around, but after the bubble bursts I suspect a lot of the evil offspring of clippy will hit the great dustbin in the sky.
Many of the cloud models will likely be taken offline due to operational cost.
Sorry but you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I think your idea of AI is very narrow to LLM for customer facing applications, but it has been and will continue to be used in thousands of applications.
No, the common definition of AI has largely changed to refer to LLM chatbots / “generative AI”. You can thank Sam Altman and his butt sucking buddies for that.
You just want to argue definitions because it tickles your fancy.
This very community is named “fuck AI” but I doubt you’ll find many people here against OCR (which is technically “AI”).
I literally research AI for a living, and the “common definition” just means it’s what you personally think, because to me the common definition of AI is… AI, which includes LLMs, CNN, LSTM, multi-modal, symbolic AI, generative AND discriminative, etc.
Good for you! 👍 Would you like a cookie? Here ya go: 🍪
It’s not what I personally think, dude. I don’t even like that the definition has shifted, but it has thanks largely to those with a chatbot fetish.
Again, look at the community you’re in. Do you think we’re here because of Google translate?
Yes I would like a cookie, thank you.
Words have meanings, so just be more specific is all I ask, because otherwise it negatively paints an entire technology with a broad brush.
‘Turbo’ everything in the 80s and ‘High Definition’ everything in the Aughts maybe?
It’s because it fucking sucks. Especially if you were already a person that knows how to search the internet and find the best answer already. That only took an extra 10 to 15 seconds most of the time, and you could be sure of where you got the information and whether this source is accurate or biased. That’s to say nothing of the dangers, which tech bros actually don’t give a shit about. The tech industry has historically gone from technological advancement to technological advancement in order to stay relevant and continue making the same level of money, or more than they were before. We finally reached a point where there’s not really any big problems to solve with the current tech, and no real obvious next step, so they are looking for their next big breakthrough and trying to force one in the meantime. The sad thing is what they want to be the next big break is just not there yet, to me it kind of seems like it won’t ever be the way they want it, and there’s no way to know when we might get there with it. So instead they are taking this disinformation robot and pushing it into the lives of everyone so that they can now use the disinformation and improved information gathering as their new business model, because just pausing growth is a death sentence for a company in unregulated capitalism. If your company can’t grow like a cancer, you become irrelevant and die
I can only hope your enter key is currently in the shop.
I remember a time when every day our letter carrier would bring us another AOL compact disc. It was incredible, there were AOL CDs littering the streets, crushed rainbow shards promising to connect you to the world.
I dunno furbies were everywhere
My company didn’t push idiot toys that speak gibberish on us, unless you count PMs.
i’ve met your c suite let’s be honest
Omg Tamagotchi
They kept developing those for like 10 years after the 90s and made color ones
Everyone has an attention-hungry tamagotchi. They moan when they want more electricity, and giggle when you connect them to a charger.
They sigh when you switch them off.
They make you feel uncomfortable when you leave home without them.
They want you to constantly feed them with information.
They are called smartphones now.
computers can turn out as a fad due to them requiring electricity to work, they can crash and go bad, etc.
But these prompt machines are barely more than toys for real professional work, due to the lack of actual control beyond prompting.
I’m guessing the guy that told you computers sucked probably thought they were being pushed too.
Removed by mod
Well, Cloud computing, Bitcoin/Block chain and Quantum computing come to mind with more recently over-hyped technologies… And I’m not sure what to make of the successful ones. Smartphones have certainly reshaped the world within my lifetime. I still remember when I was a kid and there was no wifi, just dial-up internet and you’d have to use landline phones and telephone booths. But smartphones weren’t forced on us back then… People adopted them on their own because they were massively useful… Still only took a few years and everyone had one. (And it’s just now that they’re forced upon us. I mean try riding a train or attend a concert or get an appointment without using smartphones…)
To pick nits, cloud computing isn’t over hyped. It is really, actually cool and useful.
Now saying that you have to use AWS, Azure, or whatever other cloud provider is dumb. But the tech used in cloud computing really is the future.
My desktop OS is built with the same tech and it’s amazing.
Edit: and I do a bunch of self hosting with cloud tech.
Yeah, you’re right. Cloud is a bit of a weird one. I guess I should have mentioned it along with phones as actual useful tech. I think what I meant is, at first it got slapped as a label on every product whether that was “cloud” or just their old server. And for the customers, it regularly means: “We all don’t know where your personal data is stored, probably in some datacenters of ours in the USA or with some of our business partners.” Which isn’t great for privacy, since it’s not transparent at all… But the tech itself is solid. We need horizontal scaling with big platforms. I myself have a small VPS as well, I don’t run cloud stuff on it but it magically runs leveraging some cloud technology in the background. Other than that I have a NAS at home, running some other services, but that’s a good old regular computer. 😃
come to mind with more recently over-hyped technologies
Major brands were not pushing those technologies on consumers. It was b2b at best.
Smartphones absolutely were.
It didn’t seem to be pushed as hard as this one though.
Seemed more like there was actual interest and positive utilisation of it, as compared to LLMs for general purpose.
Yeah, idk. Most people’s pictures and documents are in the cloud these days. I mean just use a computer or mobile phone without an internet connection these days an 80% of the stuff will have enough components running server-side and just stop working. Including unexpected things that could wirk fine, locally. And Bitcoin isn’t exactly how businesses pay their contractors and suppliers, either… But all of that can be used b2b as well. Quantum computing certainly isn’t something a regular person needs these days.
kinda reminds me of the dotcom bust
because the bubble is about to break, and google, MS, openai and other is cramming into as much other hardware as possible to recover the losses of putting all thier eggs in one basket. palintir and similar is trying to stave it off by peddling it to LEO on several countries.
MS largely neglected most of thier other products: xbox, Windows os versions for AI solely. and google largely neglects thier phones for AI.
