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They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

80 points by imartin2k 3y ago

boraoztunc 3y ago
Very good read. We definitely deserve healthy innovation that contributes to human flourishing.
renewiltord 3y ago
> These people literally come to the event to learn about new things, and even they are gagging on this stuff. I remember the reactions on /r/technology when the iPhone or the iPad were announced. I remember the reactions when the M1 processor came out. Just like this audience, lots of people who subscribe to this stuff nominally care about new technology. But the truth is that where I religiously chant "We're ARSENAL, ARSENAL FC, we're by far the greatest team the world has ever seen" they chant something else. These reactions are meaningless. "The iPAD?! It's four iPhones stuck together HAHAHAHA and named after a MENSTRUAL PAD HAHAHA this is going to flop". The difference is that Arsenal will only fail to win the Champion's League once every year. These guys die a thousand deaths every day they see new technology.
- baq 3y ago
  I remember the reactions when the first M1 macbook actually landed in people's hands and honestly can't remember a single one which wasn't at least 'well I'll be damned this is actually ok' - and the great majority was 'this is a revolutionary device'. This kinda never happens in football, sorry ^_^
  - mriziq 3y ago
    “I can do everything at the same time” “u got the pro?” “No bro it’s the air”
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Yes, exactly. The people who use things like them. It was the same with the iPad. The ones who bought them loved them. But the groupies were booing all the way into it dominating that market sector. These people, nominally technology enthusiasts, appreciate very little.
padjo 3y ago
I remember Steve Jobs being heavily mocked at the time of the iPad release. So this maybe isn’t as new as the author claims.
keiferski 3y ago
I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. SV seems less interested in making "cyborgs" that enhance human abilities, and more interested in godlike AIs that aren't human at all.
- lovich 3y ago
  Ask truckers about this with the nearly decade long plus narrative that the second self driving is mastered they will be laid off, combined simultaneously with complaints about how no one is entering the lucrative trucking industry. I’ve had non tech family and friends who are currently dealing with the result of American cutthroat capitalism and barely able to cover living expenses despite having two people working full time, ask me how I felt about the risk of AI to my job. My answer has consistently been that I’m not afraid because one of these results happens. A: AI hits a peak soon and can’t replace any work I do, so it doesn’t matter. B: AI does get sophisticated enough to replace the work I do at which point we’ve basically reached almost star trek level tech where machines can do most of the work and we’ve allocated resources through society in a way that everyone benefits. And lastly the one I think is most likely C: AI automates all this knowledge work for the benefit of company owners and we end up either accepting it as a group and falling back to pre industrial serf like social structures or every rises up in a social revolution. To be honest I’d expect that going back to serfdom style rules would be the most expected and stable but the current group of western oligarchs don’t seem to care to make sure that their burgeoning serf class have their basic needs met and instead want to antagonize them for not being rich. It’s a really odd juxtaposition of rabidly independent culture where people believe they accomplished everything by the sweat of their own brow crossing with the results of of a society that lets an individual run a company of 10s to 100s of thousands of employees at the same time
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    Having your serfs' basic needs met was very rarely a care of the ruling classes in any state form that deserves the name "serfdom". Serfs dying in a famine was just one of those things that happened. There was perhaps a brief reversal after the Black Death, when so many serfs had died there was almost a competition for the labor of the survivors. My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.
mupuff1234 3y ago
> "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human" Whether you are excited by AI or not that phase is just cringe BS and deserves all the booing, so maybe the crowd wasn't "booing ai" but just booing the crappy presentation full of corp speak.
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  Not only is it ‘cringe BS’, it’s what we here in the UK call bollocks.
- krapp 3y ago
  SXSW is full of exactly the demographic of creatives that has been against AI for innumerable reasons, not the least of which is the tendency (if not intent) of the AI industry to commoditize their work and dehumanize their craft as a means of putting as much of them out of work as possible.. they were probably booing all of it.
verve_rat 3y ago
Yup. Over the last 10-15 years the innovation in tech has gone from cool tech that serves users, that improves lives, to instead legal engineering, user hostile tech and behaviour that milks users for every last drop of revenue. AI might be a cool tech that can serve to make the lives of actual humans better, but it might require breaking up big tech and fostering customer centric competition to realise any benefits to society at large.
vasco 3y ago
> Not even Apple is like Apple anymore. A similar backlash happened a few weeks ago, when Apple launched its super-high-tech virtual reality headset. The early response on social media was mockery and ridicule—something Steve Jobs never experienced. I definitely remember a huge viral wave of mockery about the iPad in 2010. It was everything from stretching things and calling it "innovation" (as in, just a big phone), comparisons to women's sanitary pads, you name it. Mockery of Apple and Apple fanboys was one of the peak internet memes of the time. Mocking AI is tame in comparison.
- xanderlewis 3y ago
  The AirPods were also roundly mocked and described as so weird looking no one would want to be seen dead wearing them when first announced. A few years later, it seems like we all have them (or a very similar-looking competitor) in our ears.
  - alexvoda 3y ago
    What makes one mocked product succede while another fails? Google Glass and its users were mocked and it was a complete failure. The iPad was mocked and ended up as an underperforming division, yet still the market leader because everyone else dropped the ball really badly. AirPods were mocked but they are a wild success helped of course by the removal of the 3.5 jack.
    - xanderlewis 3y ago
      Well, Google Glass probably failed either because it didn’t work sufficiently well (the technology just wasn’t there yet) or because the purported utility it provided wasn’t actually that desirable. AirPods probably succeeded because (despite the at-first weird aesthetic decisions) they turn out to be far more convenient than wired earphones and nice to use. If the battery life and the rate of charging, for example, had not been as good, I don’t think they would have taken off. So I think mockery doesn’t really have anything to say about the potential success of a product; it fades rapidly anyway whether it succeeds or not. Humans get used to things incredibly quickly and are very adaptable. It’s both a virtue and a curse (because the other side of the coin is that we get bored quickly). If I were (even) more of an Apple fanboy I might argue that AirPods succeeded because Apple knows how to make fun, decidedly non-clunky products and Google doesn’t because it’s not in that business — it sells eyeballs to advertisers whereas Apple sells beautifully crafted hardware/software combinations to creative individuals. If Google had been first to try wireless earphones, they might have flopped and put everyone off the idea.
advael 3y ago
I mean if the tech industry wanted people to like it, maybe it should treat them better? We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents, and that is because, unambiguously, of industry and policy shaped by industry. Wages have stagnated. Cities have become places that are great if you have lots of money to spend and pretty hostile otherwise. Medicine has increasingly become a luxury, as has healthy food and a roof over your head. Meanwhile, in tech, the goodwill of the userbase has very rapidly and repeatedly been betrayed because capital wanted constant growth. News and media have been subsumed into a slog of ad-suffused "content" optimized to hook your attention. You are spied on in everything you do, supposedly to target more ads. Many new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force have been invented and then legalized by this industry Now I hate telling people I study AI because SV people made a really interesting methodology into an apocalyptic cult whose adherents are often smugly dismissive of most recognizable human values in favor of a vague future that sounds like living in a video game made of vibes, and the main use case the optimization-obsessed finance-twiddlers that run the show can imagine is replacing workers in every domain, starting with artists. Why should they like this? Technology for technology's sake is not what most people care about, and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests?
- akira2501 3y ago
  > and that is because, unambiguously Monopoly empires driven by tax revenues. > new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force It's a labor market. Monopolization destroys this too. Judges never include this market in their rulings. > and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests? What innovation? The last ten years have been incredibly stagnant. GPT itself is the product of "what if we just throw stupid resources at this old algorithm?" The desire for AI, is to me, a supply and demand problem, and represents a state of extreme artificial inefficiency in the system. Perhaps that's what AI should really stand for.
  - advael 3y ago
    Man I never seen someone do agreegument better. We basically are in accord on most matters of substance here I find nitpicking silly, but it is traditional in the agreegument format. I will only nitpick two things: 1. While I did put scarequotes on "innovation" for a reason (it is SV's favorite euphemism of course), it is worth noting that things like funneling money into a ridesharing app to create an entire fiefdom of "gig workers" to misclassify and then try to codify anti-labor policies into law by pretending to go to bat for them, or selling massive troves of data to a british analytics firm in order to steer elections toward "business-friendly" fascist demagogues, or creating a "non-profit" to make "safe and open" AI then partnering up with one of the most consumer-hostile and closed-source companies to ever walk the earth once a good opportunity to make bank popped up are certainly uh... creative 2. While a lot of progress in AI recently can definitely be summarized at a high level as throwing massive datasets and parallel processors at neural networks, if you zoom in there are definitely different algorithms coming through the noise, new kinds of network layers, training protocols, and objectives that we didn't have when ANNs first showed up. Like most actual real world science, it was a world of incremental progress that occasionally spawned a really useful application. I still think some advances in machine learning that have come out of all this nonsense have been meaningful and potentially useful, but it's difficult to separate signal from noise when the industry brain-drains academia to do research behind closed doors on whatever sci-fi shows up in the molochian wet dreams of the capitalist investor class
varelse 3y ago
Sure, people hate tech. And tech clearly hates its own customers. So why hasn't something that doesn't hate its own customers disrupted tech? If anything, the enshittification is just getting worse. Prime video's random ads alone should have led to mass cancellations but it's not happening, is it? So what exactly will lead to people walking away as opposed to grumbling as things keep getting worse and worse? Reminds me a lot of politics in the United States at this point: stuck with two disappointing parties with almost no chance of a third party really shaking things up because the one thing they can agree on is that a third party should never arise.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  If tech and the customers hate each other, they wouldn't be making revenue. Of course, there's a couple of exceptions (e.g. monopolies, addictions) but that doesn't really describe AI for example. I think the answer is that people simply do like the tech. We voluntarily use social media platforms (nosurfing is possible), and the average person clearly finds great use in ChatGPT, MidJourney, Character and AI in general. Essentially -- the complaining doesn't represent what the market (the people) actually want. It's controversial for sure but the willing customer base is large enough.
  - varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
ordu 3y ago
> the audience booed louder when the word disrupted was used as a term of praise Yeah, it is often goes like "lets disrupt and see if we will be able to rip some benefits from the chaos after the disruption". And the fun thing that potential disrupters seem to believe that it is good for all, not only for them and only conditionally.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The original use of "disrupt" was in the sense of, we're going to disrupt these porky record labels and rotten taxi medallion cartels. This got a bad reputation for two reasons. The first is that the industries being disrupted were the bad guys, but that doesn't mean they liked it. And because they were the bad guys, they couldn't just come out and say "Uber sucks because we don't like having competition". So what they do instead is turn over every rock looking for something to blame them for in the hopes they can get the government to thrash them hard enough to make the market uncompetitive again. Which, of course, damages those companies' reputations, as was the intention. The second is that a lot of the companies that used to go on about disrupting things are now the incumbents in need of being disrupted, e.g. mobile app stores and big social networks. People look at them as the bad guys because they are, but the problem there is not that disruption is bad, it's that the gander should get what came to the goose.
sgt101 3y ago
People are fed up with grift. There are two types of grift - pure cynical (crypto, vr, ai influencing & fake products) - make me a medical system that I know can never get approved - make me a business that will never ship a thing but get daddies tax bill halved - make me code assistants that don't actually help and pure mean: products that are exploitative or knowingly unethical. - make me a mental health chatbot without giving a shit that it tells people to kill themselves - make me camera that records other people and tells me their weaknesses - make me kill bots that will stop protestors from saying stuff my boss doesn't want to hear I think that people are really sick of grifters. I know I am.
- cjk2 3y ago
  Nailed it. The benefits are overstated and the negatives are sold as benefits.
- lewhoo 3y ago
  Definitely. I wish there was a stronger and more efficient way to call out scammers of global caliber. A system which bans Elon Musk from ever speaking about self-driving cars sounds somewhat oppressive, but I would be inclined to give it a try since what we have now seems harmful and exploitative.
PeterStuer 3y ago
One has to wonder wether those same people also boo when pundits praise advanced automation in factories. Feels like they suddenly discover luddism when the automation is coming into their own backyard.
- doktrin 3y ago
  > Feels like they suddenly discover luddism when the automation is coming into their own backyard. Sounds to me like you're describing a broadly universal human trait. I for one certainly can't claim with a straight face to always place the concerns of others on a fully level footing with my own. Can you?
  - PeterStuer 3y ago
    Nope. Guilty as charged guv. Admittedly one of the drivers that got my naive 15 yo interested in AI in the early 80's was the hope of eliminating the need for 'work' and tbh, especially my own future work (not AI, as that would be my hobby). :)
Bengalilol 3y ago
To anyone interested, I deeply (no pun intended) recommend reading this essay which goes back in time in order to pinpoint the reasons we are all stranded. https://arturoduran.com/2023/07/18/the-era-of-the-tyrant-individual-the-end-of-our-common-world/ https://arturoduran.com/2023/07/18/the-era-of-the-tyrant-ind...
- disqard 3y ago
  Thanks so much for sharing this resource! It looks like much of Eric's work remains untranslated into English -- have you read the original works in French?
  - Bengalilol 3y ago
    Yes, I've read all his works. He sounds like obvious, but the build-up he provides is quite "to the point". There are some videos / interviews of him on youtube. Although those are in french, with the automatic translator you _could_ get some good points out of these. Search for "eric sadin thinkerview" https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eric+sadin+thinkerview https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eric+sadin+thin... I recommend 'La fin d’un monde commun', 'Éric Sadin : l'asservissement par l'Intelligence Artificielle ? ' and finally 'IA : le devenir légume de l’humanité ?'. I hope you this can be of any value.
    - disqard 3y ago
      Sorry about the delayed ack, but Many Thanks for sharing those pointers!
yourapostasy 3y ago
Can someone please elaborate upon this: > If the current tech leaders can’t figure this out, they will be wiped away by history—that’s happened before, and will happen again. When has this happened in history, to who, and what was the context? The examples I can think of were mostly related to technological advancements (mainframe to minicomputer, for example), and not related to general public anger.
- alexvoda 3y ago
  Vive la révolution française!
Stranger43 3y ago
I don't think it's that people fear that AI will make everyone live in luxury while the machines do all of the hard work, it's that people realize that LLM's and ML models have enough limitation and caveats to be of limited value outside of a few niche's where they are treated as statistical models and not "The AI Revolution". The last 2 decades have seen a stagnation at the front end of technology and while this have led to a commodification it's also demonstrated that web 2.0 and crypto was mostly grifts by companies and organizations that don't really have an usefull vision. so as the web 2.0 revolution that originally inspired people at conferences like SXSW turned into an dystopia in the hands of companies like Twitter, Facebook and google, new grifts are going to get a whole lot more scrutiny going forwards.
dakial1 3y ago
I think the author might be mixing the tech with the capitalist model that governs tech nowadays. All new innovations eventually get corrupted by the need of making the shareholders happy and that’s the danger here with AI. Not saying we should go full socialism here but there might be a smarter way of giving incentives (and punishments) to companies so that we can reach an equilibrium of all stakeholders interests (including the shareholders of course). Otherwise there is no good intentioned (don’t be evil) tech/AI that will resist the ruthless capital markets.
teknopaul 3y ago
Much tech _is_ getting worse. Particularly AI, much is about cheaply making a bot that works x% of the time, it's cheaper to piss off a few customers and pay no-one, than to do a good job. No one likes that, it's cheap and nasty hackery. People like tech that works 100% of the time, and keeps doing it. Stuff that could not be done before that can now. People don't like churn. Constant upgrades. Built in obscelecense. AI that work 95% at best. Maps that make different decisions each time. UI fads. Framework wars. Google buying and killing services. Clis that are not automatable. "The only thing that is constant is the rate of chane" is an observation that tech is not providing what was promised: automation. Cheaper nastier flakey versions of what worked fine should get a boo.
locopati 3y ago
Go back and watch the old MCI amd AT&T ads from the early 90s at the dawn of the web. They had an optimism that feels false coming from Apple & Google & all the others now. We know better now that they're interested in money and market share more than benefits to people's lives. The latter is an incidental reason to achieve the former. It was that way back then too, but it feels more blatant now.
sarimkx 3y ago
I urge everyone to take some time out to read some of the comments on this post. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/they-praised-ai-at-sxswand-the-audience/comments https://www.honest-broker.com/p/they-praised-ai-at-sxswand-t... Some really interesting perspectives in the comments.

80 points by imartin2k 3y ago

Very good read. We definitely deserve healthy innovation that contributes to human flourishing.

> These people literally come to the event to learn about new things, and even they are gagging on this stuff. I remember the reactions on /r/technology when the iPhone or the iPad were announced. I remember the reactions when the M1 processor came out. Just like this audience, lots of people who subscribe to this stuff nominally care about new technology. But the truth is that where I religiously chant "We're ARSENAL, ARSENAL FC, we're by far the greatest team the world has ever seen" they chant something else. These reactions are meaningless. "The iPAD?! It's four iPhones stuck together HAHAHAHA and named after a MENSTRUAL PAD HAHAHA this is going to flop". The difference is that Arsenal will only fail to win the Champion's League once every year. These guys die a thousand deaths every day they see new technology.

baq 3y ago
I remember the reactions when the first M1 macbook actually landed in people's hands and honestly can't remember a single one which wasn't at least 'well I'll be damned this is actually ok' - and the great majority was 'this is a revolutionary device'. This kinda never happens in football, sorry ^_^
- mriziq 3y ago
  “I can do everything at the same time” “u got the pro?” “No bro it’s the air”
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Yes, exactly. The people who use things like them. It was the same with the iPad. The ones who bought them loved them. But the groupies were booing all the way into it dominating that market sector. These people, nominally technology enthusiasts, appreciate very little.

padjo 3y ago

I remember Steve Jobs being heavily mocked at the time of the iPad release. So this maybe isn’t as new as the author claims.

keiferski 3y ago

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. SV seems less interested in making "cyborgs" that enhance human abilities, and more interested in godlike AIs that aren't human at all.

lovich 3y ago
Ask truckers about this with the nearly decade long plus narrative that the second self driving is mastered they will be laid off, combined simultaneously with complaints about how no one is entering the lucrative trucking industry. I’ve had non tech family and friends who are currently dealing with the result of American cutthroat capitalism and barely able to cover living expenses despite having two people working full time, ask me how I felt about the risk of AI to my job. My answer has consistently been that I’m not afraid because one of these results happens. A: AI hits a peak soon and can’t replace any work I do, so it doesn’t matter. B: AI does get sophisticated enough to replace the work I do at which point we’ve basically reached almost star trek level tech where machines can do most of the work and we’ve allocated resources through society in a way that everyone benefits. And lastly the one I think is most likely C: AI automates all this knowledge work for the benefit of company owners and we end up either accepting it as a group and falling back to pre industrial serf like social structures or every rises up in a social revolution. To be honest I’d expect that going back to serfdom style rules would be the most expected and stable but the current group of western oligarchs don’t seem to care to make sure that their burgeoning serf class have their basic needs met and instead want to antagonize them for not being rich. It’s a really odd juxtaposition of rabidly independent culture where people believe they accomplished everything by the sweat of their own brow crossing with the results of of a society that lets an individual run a company of 10s to 100s of thousands of employees at the same time
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Having your serfs' basic needs met was very rarely a care of the ruling classes in any state form that deserves the name "serfdom". Serfs dying in a famine was just one of those things that happened. There was perhaps a brief reversal after the Black Death, when so many serfs had died there was almost a competition for the labor of the survivors. My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.

mupuff1234 3y ago

> "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human" Whether you are excited by AI or not that phase is just cringe BS and deserves all the booing, so maybe the crowd wasn't "booing ai" but just booing the crappy presentation full of corp speak.

xanderlewis 3y ago
Not only is it ‘cringe BS’, it’s what we here in the UK call bollocks.
krapp 3y ago
SXSW is full of exactly the demographic of creatives that has been against AI for innumerable reasons, not the least of which is the tendency (if not intent) of the AI industry to commoditize their work and dehumanize their craft as a means of putting as much of them out of work as possible.. they were probably booing all of it.

verve_rat 3y ago

Yup. Over the last 10-15 years the innovation in tech has gone from cool tech that serves users, that improves lives, to instead legal engineering, user hostile tech and behaviour that milks users for every last drop of revenue. AI might be a cool tech that can serve to make the lives of actual humans better, but it might require breaking up big tech and fostering customer centric competition to realise any benefits to society at large.

vasco 3y ago

> Not even Apple is like Apple anymore. A similar backlash happened a few weeks ago, when Apple launched its super-high-tech virtual reality headset. The early response on social media was mockery and ridicule—something Steve Jobs never experienced. I definitely remember a huge viral wave of mockery about the iPad in 2010. It was everything from stretching things and calling it "innovation" (as in, just a big phone), comparisons to women's sanitary pads, you name it. Mockery of Apple and Apple fanboys was one of the peak internet memes of the time. Mocking AI is tame in comparison.

xanderlewis 3y ago
The AirPods were also roundly mocked and described as so weird looking no one would want to be seen dead wearing them when first announced. A few years later, it seems like we all have them (or a very similar-looking competitor) in our ears.
- alexvoda 3y ago
  What makes one mocked product succede while another fails? Google Glass and its users were mocked and it was a complete failure. The iPad was mocked and ended up as an underperforming division, yet still the market leader because everyone else dropped the ball really badly. AirPods were mocked but they are a wild success helped of course by the removal of the 3.5 jack.
  - xanderlewis 3y ago
    Well, Google Glass probably failed either because it didn’t work sufficiently well (the technology just wasn’t there yet) or because the purported utility it provided wasn’t actually that desirable. AirPods probably succeeded because (despite the at-first weird aesthetic decisions) they turn out to be far more convenient than wired earphones and nice to use. If the battery life and the rate of charging, for example, had not been as good, I don’t think they would have taken off. So I think mockery doesn’t really have anything to say about the potential success of a product; it fades rapidly anyway whether it succeeds or not. Humans get used to things incredibly quickly and are very adaptable. It’s both a virtue and a curse (because the other side of the coin is that we get bored quickly). If I were (even) more of an Apple fanboy I might argue that AirPods succeeded because Apple knows how to make fun, decidedly non-clunky products and Google doesn’t because it’s not in that business — it sells eyeballs to advertisers whereas Apple sells beautifully crafted hardware/software combinations to creative individuals. If Google had been first to try wireless earphones, they might have flopped and put everyone off the idea.

advael 3y ago

I mean if the tech industry wanted people to like it, maybe it should treat them better? We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents, and that is because, unambiguously, of industry and policy shaped by industry. Wages have stagnated. Cities have become places that are great if you have lots of money to spend and pretty hostile otherwise. Medicine has increasingly become a luxury, as has healthy food and a roof over your head. Meanwhile, in tech, the goodwill of the userbase has very rapidly and repeatedly been betrayed because capital wanted constant growth. News and media have been subsumed into a slog of ad-suffused "content" optimized to hook your attention. You are spied on in everything you do, supposedly to target more ads. Many new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force have been invented and then legalized by this industry Now I hate telling people I study AI because SV people made a really interesting methodology into an apocalyptic cult whose adherents are often smugly dismissive of most recognizable human values in favor of a vague future that sounds like living in a video game made of vibes, and the main use case the optimization-obsessed finance-twiddlers that run the show can imagine is replacing workers in every domain, starting with artists. Why should they like this? Technology for technology's sake is not what most people care about, and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests?

akira2501 3y ago
> and that is because, unambiguously Monopoly empires driven by tax revenues. > new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force It's a labor market. Monopolization destroys this too. Judges never include this market in their rulings. > and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests? What innovation? The last ten years have been incredibly stagnant. GPT itself is the product of "what if we just throw stupid resources at this old algorithm?" The desire for AI, is to me, a supply and demand problem, and represents a state of extreme artificial inefficiency in the system. Perhaps that's what AI should really stand for.
- advael 3y ago
  Man I never seen someone do agreegument better. We basically are in accord on most matters of substance here I find nitpicking silly, but it is traditional in the agreegument format. I will only nitpick two things: 1. While I did put scarequotes on "innovation" for a reason (it is SV's favorite euphemism of course), it is worth noting that things like funneling money into a ridesharing app to create an entire fiefdom of "gig workers" to misclassify and then try to codify anti-labor policies into law by pretending to go to bat for them, or selling massive troves of data to a british analytics firm in order to steer elections toward "business-friendly" fascist demagogues, or creating a "non-profit" to make "safe and open" AI then partnering up with one of the most consumer-hostile and closed-source companies to ever walk the earth once a good opportunity to make bank popped up are certainly uh... creative 2. While a lot of progress in AI recently can definitely be summarized at a high level as throwing massive datasets and parallel processors at neural networks, if you zoom in there are definitely different algorithms coming through the noise, new kinds of network layers, training protocols, and objectives that we didn't have when ANNs first showed up. Like most actual real world science, it was a world of incremental progress that occasionally spawned a really useful application. I still think some advances in machine learning that have come out of all this nonsense have been meaningful and potentially useful, but it's difficult to separate signal from noise when the industry brain-drains academia to do research behind closed doors on whatever sci-fi shows up in the molochian wet dreams of the capitalist investor class

varelse 3y ago

Sure, people hate tech. And tech clearly hates its own customers. So why hasn't something that doesn't hate its own customers disrupted tech? If anything, the enshittification is just getting worse. Prime video's random ads alone should have led to mass cancellations but it's not happening, is it? So what exactly will lead to people walking away as opposed to grumbling as things keep getting worse and worse? Reminds me a lot of politics in the United States at this point: stuck with two disappointing parties with almost no chance of a third party really shaking things up because the one thing they can agree on is that a third party should never arise.

CaptainFever 3y ago
If tech and the customers hate each other, they wouldn't be making revenue. Of course, there's a couple of exceptions (e.g. monopolies, addictions) but that doesn't really describe AI for example. I think the answer is that people simply do like the tech. We voluntarily use social media platforms (nosurfing is possible), and the average person clearly finds great use in ChatGPT, MidJourney, Character and AI in general. Essentially -- the complaining doesn't represent what the market (the people) actually want. It's controversial for sure but the willing customer base is large enough.
- varelse 3y ago
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ordu 3y ago

> the audience booed louder when the word disrupted was used as a term of praise Yeah, it is often goes like "lets disrupt and see if we will be able to rip some benefits from the chaos after the disruption". And the fun thing that potential disrupters seem to believe that it is good for all, not only for them and only conditionally.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
The original use of "disrupt" was in the sense of, we're going to disrupt these porky record labels and rotten taxi medallion cartels. This got a bad reputation for two reasons. The first is that the industries being disrupted were the bad guys, but that doesn't mean they liked it. And because they were the bad guys, they couldn't just come out and say "Uber sucks because we don't like having competition". So what they do instead is turn over every rock looking for something to blame them for in the hopes they can get the government to thrash them hard enough to make the market uncompetitive again. Which, of course, damages those companies' reputations, as was the intention. The second is that a lot of the companies that used to go on about disrupting things are now the incumbents in need of being disrupted, e.g. mobile app stores and big social networks. People look at them as the bad guys because they are, but the problem there is not that disruption is bad, it's that the gander should get what came to the goose.

sgt101 3y ago

People are fed up with grift. There are two types of grift - pure cynical (crypto, vr, ai influencing & fake products) - make me a medical system that I know can never get approved - make me a business that will never ship a thing but get daddies tax bill halved - make me code assistants that don't actually help and pure mean: products that are exploitative or knowingly unethical. - make me a mental health chatbot without giving a shit that it tells people to kill themselves - make me camera that records other people and tells me their weaknesses - make me kill bots that will stop protestors from saying stuff my boss doesn't want to hear I think that people are really sick of grifters. I know I am.

cjk2 3y ago
Nailed it. The benefits are overstated and the negatives are sold as benefits.
lewhoo 3y ago
Definitely. I wish there was a stronger and more efficient way to call out scammers of global caliber. A system which bans Elon Musk from ever speaking about self-driving cars sounds somewhat oppressive, but I would be inclined to give it a try since what we have now seems harmful and exploitative.

PeterStuer 3y ago

One has to wonder wether those same people also boo when pundits praise advanced automation in factories. Feels like they suddenly discover luddism when the automation is coming into their own backyard.

doktrin 3y ago
> Feels like they suddenly discover luddism when the automation is coming into their own backyard. Sounds to me like you're describing a broadly universal human trait. I for one certainly can't claim with a straight face to always place the concerns of others on a fully level footing with my own. Can you?
- PeterStuer 3y ago
  Nope. Guilty as charged guv. Admittedly one of the drivers that got my naive 15 yo interested in AI in the early 80's was the hope of eliminating the need for 'work' and tbh, especially my own future work (not AI, as that would be my hobby). :)

Bengalilol 3y ago

To anyone interested, I deeply (no pun intended) recommend reading this essay which goes back in time in order to pinpoint the reasons we are all stranded. https://arturoduran.com/2023/07/18/the-era-of-the-tyrant-individual-the-end-of-our-common-world/ https://arturoduran.com/2023/07/18/the-era-of-the-tyrant-ind...

disqard 3y ago
Thanks so much for sharing this resource! It looks like much of Eric's work remains untranslated into English -- have you read the original works in French?
- Bengalilol 3y ago
  Yes, I've read all his works. He sounds like obvious, but the build-up he provides is quite "to the point". There are some videos / interviews of him on youtube. Although those are in french, with the automatic translator you _could_ get some good points out of these. Search for "eric sadin thinkerview" https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eric+sadin+thinkerview https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eric+sadin+thin... I recommend 'La fin d’un monde commun', 'Éric Sadin : l'asservissement par l'Intelligence Artificielle ? ' and finally 'IA : le devenir légume de l’humanité ?'. I hope you this can be of any value.
  - disqard 3y ago
    Sorry about the delayed ack, but Many Thanks for sharing those pointers!

yourapostasy 3y ago

Can someone please elaborate upon this: > If the current tech leaders can’t figure this out, they will be wiped away by history—that’s happened before, and will happen again. When has this happened in history, to who, and what was the context? The examples I can think of were mostly related to technological advancements (mainframe to minicomputer, for example), and not related to general public anger.

alexvoda 3y ago
Vive la révolution française!

Stranger43 3y ago

I don't think it's that people fear that AI will make everyone live in luxury while the machines do all of the hard work, it's that people realize that LLM's and ML models have enough limitation and caveats to be of limited value outside of a few niche's where they are treated as statistical models and not "The AI Revolution". The last 2 decades have seen a stagnation at the front end of technology and while this have led to a commodification it's also demonstrated that web 2.0 and crypto was mostly grifts by companies and organizations that don't really have an usefull vision. so as the web 2.0 revolution that originally inspired people at conferences like SXSW turned into an dystopia in the hands of companies like Twitter, Facebook and google, new grifts are going to get a whole lot more scrutiny going forwards.

dakial1 3y ago

I think the author might be mixing the tech with the capitalist model that governs tech nowadays. All new innovations eventually get corrupted by the need of making the shareholders happy and that’s the danger here with AI. Not saying we should go full socialism here but there might be a smarter way of giving incentives (and punishments) to companies so that we can reach an equilibrium of all stakeholders interests (including the shareholders of course). Otherwise there is no good intentioned (don’t be evil) tech/AI that will resist the ruthless capital markets.

teknopaul 3y ago

Much tech _is_ getting worse. Particularly AI, much is about cheaply making a bot that works x% of the time, it's cheaper to piss off a few customers and pay no-one, than to do a good job. No one likes that, it's cheap and nasty hackery. People like tech that works 100% of the time, and keeps doing it. Stuff that could not be done before that can now. People don't like churn. Constant upgrades. Built in obscelecense. AI that work 95% at best. Maps that make different decisions each time. UI fads. Framework wars. Google buying and killing services. Clis that are not automatable. "The only thing that is constant is the rate of chane" is an observation that tech is not providing what was promised: automation. Cheaper nastier flakey versions of what worked fine should get a boo.

locopati 3y ago

Go back and watch the old MCI amd AT&T ads from the early 90s at the dawn of the web. They had an optimism that feels false coming from Apple & Google & all the others now. We know better now that they're interested in money and market share more than benefits to people's lives. The latter is an incidental reason to achieve the former. It was that way back then too, but it feels more blatant now.

sarimkx 3y ago

I urge everyone to take some time out to read some of the comments on this post. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/they-praised-ai-at-sxswand-the-audience/comments https://www.honest-broker.com/p/they-praised-ai-at-sxswand-t... Some really interesting perspectives in the comments.