And I think that’s why talk of AI bums me out. AI isn’t a solution looking for a problem—it’s a market strategy made by people who aren’t even thinking about problems. Tech companies want to make sure they own the future, even when they’re not sure what the future is going to be. It’s so, so boring, and it’s making me very sleepy.
Activity tagged "tech industry"
So what gives? Why the hell would the famously liberal denizens of Silicon Valley and the idealistic dreamers behind Bitcoin and AI possibly be in the tank for such a nakedly fascistic candidate? … is a question you would only ask if you’ve been asleep for the past 15 years.
There’s people who are really angry about a lot of tech stuff who disagree with each other about everything, including whether or not they really even have a problem. But all of their problems start with the fact that there’s a lot of commercial surveillance. So these people might disagree about everything else, but they will agree that their problem could be solved if we could do something about commercial surveillance.
So if you think Mark Zuckerberg made grampy into a QAnon, or if you think Insta made your teenager anorexic, or if you think that TikTok is convincing millennials to quote Osama bin Laden, right? Or if you think that it’s ugly that red state attorneys general are following teenagers into out-of-state abortion clinics, or that Google reverse warrants reveal the identity of everyone in a black lives matter demonstration or for that matter, the January 6th riots, or if you are worried about deep fake porn, or if you’re worried that people of color are having the surveillance data captured about them mobilized to discriminate against them in employment and financial products, right? All of these different things all start with cutting off the supply of surveillance data.– Cory Doctorow
Journalists are quick to insist that it’s their noble responsibility to cover the comments of important people. But journalism is about informing and educating the public, which isn’t accomplished by redirecting limited journalistic resources to cover platform bullshit that means nothing and will result in nothing meaningful. All you’ve done is made a little money wasting people’s time.
But instead we’re all-in on deskilling the industry. Not content with removing CSS and HTML almost entirely from the job market, we’re now shifting towards the model where devs are instead “AI” wranglers. The web dev of the future will be an underpaid generalist who pokes at chatbot output until it runs without error, pokes at a copilot until it generates tests that pass with some coverage, and ships code that nobody understand and can’t be fixed if something goes wrong. If you think companies are going to pay “AI” wranglers senior-level pay in the long term, or that they’re going to pay for the time it takes to rewrite or properly comprehend the code being generated, then you’re missing the point of why employers are adopting the technology. The point is to pay fewer of us less: replace senior coders with junior, specialists with generalists, and the trained with untrained. We’re left in a world where we still suffer from the same anxiety, pressure, and burnout as before. Except this time we get paid less, if we have a job at all. This is an obviously worse way of making software. It makes for software that’s less reliable, less effective, and less productive for the end user.
Stack Overflow, a legendary internet forum for programmers and developers, is coming under heavy fire from its users after it announced it was partnering with OpenAI to scrub the site's forum posts to train ChatGPT. Many users are removing or editing their questions and answers to prevent them from being used to train AI — decisions which have been punished with bans from the site's moderators.
The components sourced from an intern fixing ChatGPT’s output just enough for it to run and the exhaustively tested ones from a senior developer are equivalent in the eyes of management.
And one is much, much cheaper than the other.
If you’re unlucky enough to have to use any of this garbage we’re shipping and calling ‘software’, now you know why it all feels a bit shit.
If you work as a software developer, it means employers will continue to emphasise frameworks over functionality because that makes you easier to replace. They will sacrifice software security to make your job easier to outsource. They will let their own businesses suffer by shipping substandard software because they believe they can recoup those losses at your expense.
This is what unions were made for
AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
AI can be kind of useful, but I'm not sure that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm.
Heise Online published a translation of my review of Chris Dixon's Read Write Own.
super cool that all these companies have decided to make customers opt OUT of having their data sold for AI training purposes
"but no one would do it if it was opt-in!"
yeah, THAT IS THE PROBLEM