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I remember seeing a talk from Jonathan Blow where he made a comparison: in the 1960s top engineers worked for NASA and put a man on the moon in a decade, basica
by thrance 2y ago
I remember seeing a talk from Jonathan Blow where he made a comparison: in the 1960s top engineers worked for NASA and put a man on the moon in a decade, basically doing computations by hand.
Today, we have super advanced computers and tech companies enjoy 100× times more of the top engineers than NASA ever had, and they are all working toward making you click on ads more.
- sandworm101 2y agoSomeone decided that marketing is now a tech problem. Artists have been replaced by software engineers. The net result is creepy AI emails. I fell for oldschool marketing yesterday. Im moving into a new appartment in a couple months. The local ISP who runs fiber in my new building cold-called me. I agreed over the phone to setup the service. That was proper target marketing. The person who called me knew the situation and identified me as a very likely customer with a need for service (the building has a relationship with the ISP). I would never have responded to an email or any wiff of AI chatbot. They only made the sale because of expensive human effort.
- pseudalopex 2y agoSales people were never artists. Cold calling is not art.
- johnnyanmac 2y agocold calling isn't an art, but smooth talking/networking is. There's no exact science to making people feel good and wanting to form a relationship with you (despite centuries of literature claiming that there is).
- pseudalopex 2y agoArt and an art have different meanings.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoBased on the response upstream, I assume they were talking about the latter. There's no art to door to door sales reading a boilerplate. There is an art to researching a customer and curating a proper response to make them feel good.
- pseudalopex 2y agoThey said artists. Artists means people who make art commonly. Not everyone with a non scientific skill. The word was incorrect no matter what they meant.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI don't always have perfect grammar on Hacker News either. Charitable interpretation.
- Jensson 2y agoProgramming and just about every other job is an art as well with that argument. If we aren't allowed to automate away that then we aren't allowed to automate anything.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoIt'll all vary based on what and who is automated. I'm sure there'd be less(but non-zero) fuss if we were trying to automate plumbing. I'm sure there'd be entire riots over trying to automate professional sports leagues. I'd say the art industry is somewhere in-between because of 1. Being a traditionally disrespected but non-trivial skill to acquire 2. A skill valuable for advertisement (good art -> pretty ads -> more money 3. A valuable skill, but not one many industries need full time work from 4. Due to #1, a "vulnerable" industry. There won't be too many millionaire artists to fight back against the AI Overlords compared to, say, Politicians or businessesmen. But it's not like I have any say on who or what gets affected.
- taneq 2y agoIf it's not an art then if we make the best example of something, what would that example be the state of?
- fennecbutt 2y agoOP is wrong anyway. Everything is art. Art is about interpretation not determinism.
- loa_in_ 2y agoIt's the tech that put you on a queue to be called
- sandworm101 2y agoThere was no tech here. My new landlord contacted the local ISP, the one they liked to work with, to say they had a new tenant arriving soon. I'd bet that my connection will have been setup long before I arrive, at a time convenient to the landlord and local provider. A landlord recommending a favored local vendor to a tenant, or a tenant to a vendor, is the sort of human relationship that predates electricity.
- bamboozled 2y agoIt’s as if real issues like climate change aren’t a thing that needs solving…
- echelon 2y agoJust wait. Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet. A sufficiently advanced personal assistant AI would use multimodal capabilities to classify spam in all of its forms: - Marketing emails - YouTube sponsorship clips - Banner ads - Google search ads - Actual human salespeople - ... It would identify and remove all instances of this from our daily lives. Furthermore, we could probably use it to remove most of the worst parts of the internet too: - Clickbait - Trolling - Rage content I'm actually really looking forward to this. As long as we can get this agent into all of the panes of glass (Google will fight to prevent this), we will win. We just need it to sit between us and everything else.
- madamelic 2y ago> Enough of us will get pissed off that we will develop AI agents that sit between us and the internet. Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results. It will come in the vein of "we are personalizing the output and improving responses by linking you with vendors that will solve your problems".
- echelon 2y agoThere will be a uBlock Origin for that.
- sebastiennight 2y agoI think GP's comment describes the business model of AdBlock / AdBlock Plus / Ghostery to a tee, and they collectively seem to be bigger in usage and notoriety than uBlock.
- mostlysimilar 2y ago> Until _that_ company gets overrun by MBAs who are profit-driven then they start injecting ads into the results. Found companies with people that share your values. Hire people that share your values. Reject the vampires. Build things for people.
- paxys 2y agoAnd yet someone is building all those super advanced computers and AI models. Someone is launching reusable rockets into space. Someone is building mRNA vaccines and F1 cars and humanoid robots and more efficient solar panels. The "smart people are all working in advertising" trope is idiotic. Just an excuse for people to justify their own laziness. There is an infinite number of opportunities out there to make the world better. If you are ignoring them, that's on you.
- runlaszlorun 2y ago> And yet someone is building all those super advanced computers and AI models. Someone is launching reusable rockets into space. Someone is building mRNA vaccines and F1 cars and humanoid robots and more efficient solar panels. Which is true. But clearly far fewer people work doing that than in advertising or some other seemingly meaningless grunt work. And I’m including the technological plumbling work with many on this site, myself included, have depended upon to support themselves and/or a family. Which at best is effectively doing minor lubrication of a large and hard to comprehend system that doesn’t seem to have put society as a whole in a particularly great place.
- segmondy 2y agoWhich do you think is more important? Putting man on the moon or ecommerce? I reckon you been able to get on a device, see a biscuit ads, order one from foo.com and have it shipped to you. Think of how much tech it takes for that to happen, that is more tech than NASA built to send many to the moon, the internet, packet switching, routing, fiber optic, distributed systems, web servers, web browsers, ads, cryptography, banking online, and so on and so forth. We love to trivialize what is common, but that clicking on an ad is not an easy problem. Clicking on ads has generated enormous wealth in the world which is now bootstrapping AGI. Clicking on ads helped with our goal to AI today. Showing you the right ad and beating those trying to game it is machine learning heavy. When was the first time we started seeing spelling correction and next word suggestions? It was in google search bar. To serve the correct ads and deal with spam? heavy NLP algorithms. If you stop and think of it, we can drop a think line from the current state of LLMs to these ads click you are talking about.
- ksynwa 2y agoThey are clearly talking about one aspect of the industry which is the marketing part related to maximising engagement. It is not meant to be conflated with the e-commerce industry as a whole.
- batch12 2y agoMarketing manipulation and spam is less important.
- Jgrubb 2y agoThat last line kind of makes the point. Is any of that actually inspiring to a young child?
- thedevilslawyer 2y agoIt sure as heck is inspiring to a critical thinking adult. There's been enormous value added to all world's citizens.
- 2y ago
- aswegs8 2y agoFinancial incentives, huh?
- wasteduniverse 2y ago[dead]
- tim333 2y ago>they are all working toward making you click on ads more. Not all. Also men on Mars, AGI, Fusion etc.
- johnnyanmac 2y agowell the biggest tech companies with 100x's the computing power are. I'm sure if the collective FAANG all focused their funds and hardware on getting to Mars we'd see the seeds of terraforming in our lifetime.
- wongarsu 2y agoGoogle has 5 times as many employees as NASA, SpaceX, ULA, Rocket Lab and Aerojet Rocketdyne have combined. Which is actually a lot closer than I would have expected. But still, just Alphabet is a lot bigger than the entire US space industry. Adding Fusion probably doesn't change the numbers much.
- oceanplexian 2y agoIt’s not the fact they have 5 times the employees that surprises me, it’s how little they accomplish. SpaceX is launching multiple rocket ships into orbit every week. Google is.. releasing webpage CSS tweaks like “New Google Sign In Page” and a couple second rate AI products no one asked for when they get caught with their pants down.
- webninja 2y agoNo wonder. Have you seen the Federal government’s debt? It’s existential. At least your grandparents got to live a nice life. usdebtclock.org
- taneq 2y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but isn't the "government debt" the sum total of currency issued, rather than being like the balance on a credit card? It's better thought of as a measure of the size of the economy being governed. What you want to keep an eye on is the total inflation-adjusted 'value' of the economy, if this starts reducing then that's not good.
- webninja 2y agoIt depends on which country. Your country might be that way but in the U.S. it isn’t. In the U.S., 90% of the money is created by banks via loans and 10% of the money is created by the federal reserve via a small variety of open market operations such as the adjustment of federal interest rate. All USD created is tied to debt somewhere of some kind. This system gives the currency both scarcity as well as demand. All of the debt has to be paid back but it can’t all be paid back or else there would be no currency in circulation. One of the biggest reasons the USD is so strong is because the federal reserve is distinct, separate, and independent from the government. Most governments in history have eventually moved to influence or take over their central bank so they can spend even more wastefully & recklessly than before. America was designed with a unique separation of powers. Other’s weren’t. All of the rest of the world’s paper currencies have been worse to hold over the last 30 years and possibly more.