4 ms·

Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consume

Google didn't change it, it embodied it. The problem isn't AI, it's the pervasive culture of PR and advertising which appeared in the 50s and eventually consumed its host. Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate. PR and ad culture was there to support that. The goal was to change values and behaviours to get people to Buy More Stuff. OK. Then around the time the Internet arrived, industry was off-shored, and the culture started to become one of appearance and performance, not of substance and action. SEO, adtech, social media, web framework soup, management fads - they're all about impression management and popularity games, not about underlying fundamentals. This is very obvious on social media in the arts. The qualification for a creative career used to be substantial talent and ability. Now there are thousands of people making careers out of performing the lifestyle of being a creative person. Their ability to do the basics - draw, write, compose - is very limited. Worse, they lack the ability to imagine anything fresh or original - which is where the real substance is in art. Worse than that, they don't know what they don't know, because they've been trained to be superficial in a superficial culture. It's just as bad in engineering, where it has become more important to create the illusion of work being done, than to do the work. (Looking at you, Boeing. And also Agile...) You literally make more money doing this. A lot more. So AI isn't really a tool for creating substance. It's a tool for automating impression management. You can create the impression of getting a lot of work done. Or the impression of a well-written cover letter. Or of a genre novel, techno track, whatever. AI might one day be a tool for creating substance. But at the moment it's reflecting and enabling a Potemkin busy-culture of recycled facades and appearances that has almost nothing real behind it. Unfortunately it's quite good at that. But the problem is the culture, not the technology. And it's been a problem for a long time.

techdmn 2y ago
Thank you, you've stated this all very clearly. I've been thinking about this in terms of "doing work", where you care about the results, and "performing work", where you care about how you are evaluated. I know someone who works in a lab, and pointed out that some of the equipment being used was out of spec and under-serviced to the point that it was essentially a random number generator. Caring about this is "doing work". However, pointing it out made that person the enemy of the greater cohort that was "performing work". The results were not important to them, their metrics about units of work completed was. I see this pattern frequently. And it's hard to say those "performing work" are wrong. "Performing" is rewarded, "doing" is punished - Perhaps right to the top, as many companies are involved in a public performance designed to affect the short-term stock price.
- rjbwork 2y ago
  Yeah. It's like our entire society has been turned into a Goodhart's Law based simulacrum of a productive society. I mean, here it's late morning and I'm commenting on hacker news. And getting paid for it.
  - fsndz 2y ago
    crazy that this is true and GDP just keeps increasing anyway
    - hyperadvanced 2y ago
      Of course GDP increases when the money supply does. It’s like people being incensed at “record corporate profits” amidst inflation - profits will always be record (give or take) because remaining the same is losing money relative to the free money being minted each day, etc. For whatever reason, people naively buy into GDP as a valuable metric, even knowing well that there would be something extremely mysterious going on if that number somehow shrank while the real value of the medium exchange also shrank
      - fsndz 2y ago
        this is not how GDP works
      - Eisenstein 2y ago
        Since when did increasing money supply increase GDP? Why didn't that work for Zimbabwe?
  - Eisenstein 2y ago
    Workers are many times more efficient than they were in the 50s or 70s or 80s or 90s. Where are our extra vacation days? Why does the worker have to make up for the efficiency with more work while other people take the gains? Do you seriously think that the purpose of life is to work all the time most efficiently? Enjoy your lazy job and bask in the ability for human society to be productive without everyone breaking their backs all the time.
1dom 2y ago
I like this take on modern tech motivations. The thing that I struggle with is I agree with it, but I also get a lot of value in using AI to make me more productive - to me, it feels like it lets me focus on producing substance and actions, freeing me up from having to some tedious things in some tedious ways. Without getting into the debate about if it's productive overall, there are certain tasks which it feels irrefutably fast and effective at (e.g. writing tests). I do agree with the missing substance with modern generative AI: everyone notices when it's producing things in that uncanny valley, and if no human is there to edit that, it makes people uncomfortable. The only way I can reconcile the almost existential discomfort of AI against my actual day-to-day generally-positive experience with AI is to accept that AI in itself isn't the problem. Ultimately, it is an info tool, and human nature makes people spam garbage for clicks with it. People will do the equivalent of spam garbage for clicks with any new modern thing, unfortunately. Getting the most out of latest information of a society has probably always been a cat and mouse game of trying to find the areas where the spam-garbage-for-clicks people haven't outnumbered use-AI-to-facilitate-substance people, like here, hopefully.
- skydhash 2y ago
  Just one nitpick. The thing about test is that it’s repetitive enough to be automated (in a deterministic way) or abstracted into a framework. You don’t need an AI to generate it.
  - closeparen 2y ago
    While I occasionally have the pleasure of creating or working with a test suite that's interesting and creative relative to the code under test, the vast majority of unit tests by volume are slop. Does it call the mock? Does it use the return value? Does "if err != nil { return err }" in fact stop and return the error? This stuff is a perfect candidate for LLM generation.
  - 1dom 2y ago
    I find it helpful for generating automated test suites in the style of the rest of the codebase. When working across multiple projects and clients, it reduces the mental load of having to remember or figure out how tests are expected to work in each codebase. I agree with your theory about tests. The reality of it is most code is garbage - often including my own - and in a lot of environments, the task is to get the job done in a way that fits in with what's there.
deephoneybear 2y ago
Echoing other comments in gratitude for this very clear articulation of feelings I share, but have not manifested so well. Just wanted to add two connected opinions that round out this view. 1) This consuming of the host is only possible on the one hand because the host has grown so strong, that is the modern global industrial economy is so efficient. The doing stuff side of the equation is truly amazing and getting better (some real work gets done either by accident or those who have not-succumbed to PR and ad culture), and even this drop of "real work" produces enough material wealth to support (at least a lot of) humanity. We really do live in a post scarcity world from a production perspective, we just have profound distribution and allocation problems. 2) Radical wealth inequality profoundly exacerbates the problem of PR and ad culture. If everyone has some wealth doing things that help many people live more comfortably is a great way to become wealthy. But if very few people have wealth, then doing a venture capital FOMO hustle on the wealthy is anyone's best ROI. Radical wealth inequality eventually breaks all the good aspects of capitalist/market economies.
closeparen 2y ago
You can outfit an adult life with all of the useful manufactured objects that would reasonably improve it for a not-very-impressive sum. Beyond that it's just clutter (going for quantity) or moving into the lifestyle/taste/social-signaling domain anyway (going for quality). There is just not an unlimited amount of alpha in making physical things. The social/thought/experiential domain is a much bigger opportunity.
llm_trw 2y ago
>Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate. For a very short period between 1945 to 1980 while the generation who remembered the great depression and WWII was in charge. It's been longer since that's not been the case. And it wasn't the case for most of history before then.
- hgomersall 2y ago
  I'm not sure it isn't a reflection of the rise of neoliberalism.
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Who says these are mutually exclusive? Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times.
    - rexpop 2y ago
      So weak men make hard men? You're welcome. How graciously the womenfolk leave us to our tragic autopoiesis.
      - forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Sure, by way of traumatizing an entire generation. Nobody thanked you.
        rexpop 2y ago
        I'm being sarcastic. This entire concept is bogus.
        forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Hah! I'm certain a lot of people want to believe it's bogus, mostly because of what that says about their character. Observed reality suggests there's some truth here. An example in miniature would be the frequency with which family fortunes are lost within a generation or two.
rexpop 2y ago
> draw, write, compose The primacy of these artforms is subjective, and there's no accounting for taste.
Terr_ 2y ago
> You can create the impression of getting a lot of work done. Or the impression of a well-written cover letter. Or of a genre novel, techno track, whatever. Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight." Oh, sure, qualitatively speaking it's not new, people could have used form-letters, hired a ghostwriter, or simply sank time and effort into a good lie... but the quantitative change of "Bot, write something that appears heartfelt and clever" is huge. In some cases that's devastating--like trying to avert botting/sockpuppet operations online--and in others we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."
sesm 2y ago
Very well written. I assume you haven't read "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard, that's why your description is so authentic and is more convincing then just referring to the book. Saved this post for future reference.
fsndz 2y ago
this is a top notch comment !
sangnoir 2y ago
> Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. And what did that get us? Radium poisoning and microplastics in every organ of virtually all animals living within thousands of miles of humans. Our reach has always exceeded our grasp.
Paddywack 2y ago
> So AI isn't really a tool for creating substance. It's a tool for automating impression management. I was speaking to a design lecturer the other evening. His fascinating insight was that: 1. The best designers get so much fulfilment out of practicing the craft of design. 2. With the advent of low cost “impression making”, the role has changed to one of “review a lot of mediocre outputs and pick the least crap one” 3. This is robbing people of the pleasure and reward associated with craftsmanship. I have noted this is applicable so many other crafts, and it’s really sad! Edited afterthought… Is craftsmanship being replaced by “clickandreviewmanship”?
zaptheimpaler 2y ago
Just yesterday I watched a video blaming China for "oversupplying" electric cars at low prices and how that was hurting car manufacturers elsewhere e.g Germany. These manufacturers were trying to secretly lobby for tariffs to be placed on Chinese cars, while publicly denying this because THEIR largest and growing market was China. They had some "expert" talk about how China is known to oversupply and is doing this to recover from their housing bubble. All of these experts were preaching the virtues of Western free-trade to the east when they were the ones exporting TO Asia 10 years ago, but now the balance flips and they all tell you how important tariffs are and how evil China is instead.. In summary, China makes useful things in mass and sells them to get out of a recession,the West prints money instead and shits on China for doing it better. They preach free trade while it helps them and put up tariffs when it doesn't. I'm not Chinese or some mega fan but it really struck me how corrupt and full of propaganda western culture is becoming and people don't seem to recognize it.
- User23 2y ago
  I agree with you, but it’s really simpler than that. China makes things and the west increasingly just sends emails.
- narag 2y ago
  Maybe we should stop subsidies to buy electric cars and let China subsidize on the production side instead, while lowering taxes on the production of our own cars.
- cudgy 2y ago
  > All of these experts were preaching the virtues of Western free-trade to the east when they were the ones exporting TO Asia 10 years ago 10 years ago? Try 40-50 years ago.
photonthug 2y ago
Thanks for writing your comment, I think it’s a public service. Cultural commentary that makes complex long term trends simple to understand isn’t often this clear or concise. What really makes it powerful though is that it manages to stay in a relatively detached observer-mode without becoming an angry rant. And so rather than provoking (understandable!) anger in others, hopefully it’s inviting more reflection. People who haven’t thought about it this way might take a harder look at what they are doing and who they really want to be. People that are already thinking along these lines will probably benefit from a reminder that they aren’t crazy.

techdmn 2y ago

Thank you, you've stated this all very clearly. I've been thinking about this in terms of "doing work", where you care about the results, and "performing work", where you care about how you are evaluated. I know someone who works in a lab, and pointed out that some of the equipment being used was out of spec and under-serviced to the point that it was essentially a random number generator. Caring about this is "doing work". However, pointing it out made that person the enemy of the greater cohort that was "performing work". The results were not important to them, their metrics about units of work completed was. I see this pattern frequently. And it's hard to say those "performing work" are wrong. "Performing" is rewarded, "doing" is punished - Perhaps right to the top, as many companies are involved in a public performance designed to affect the short-term stock price.

rjbwork 2y ago
Yeah. It's like our entire society has been turned into a Goodhart's Law based simulacrum of a productive society. I mean, here it's late morning and I'm commenting on hacker news. And getting paid for it.
- fsndz 2y ago
  crazy that this is true and GDP just keeps increasing anyway
  - hyperadvanced 2y ago
    Of course GDP increases when the money supply does. It’s like people being incensed at “record corporate profits” amidst inflation - profits will always be record (give or take) because remaining the same is losing money relative to the free money being minted each day, etc. For whatever reason, people naively buy into GDP as a valuable metric, even knowing well that there would be something extremely mysterious going on if that number somehow shrank while the real value of the medium exchange also shrank
    - fsndz 2y ago
      this is not how GDP works
    - Eisenstein 2y ago
      Since when did increasing money supply increase GDP? Why didn't that work for Zimbabwe?
- Eisenstein 2y ago
  Workers are many times more efficient than they were in the 50s or 70s or 80s or 90s. Where are our extra vacation days? Why does the worker have to make up for the efficiency with more work while other people take the gains? Do you seriously think that the purpose of life is to work all the time most efficiently? Enjoy your lazy job and bask in the ability for human society to be productive without everyone breaking their backs all the time.

1dom 2y ago

I like this take on modern tech motivations. The thing that I struggle with is I agree with it, but I also get a lot of value in using AI to make me more productive - to me, it feels like it lets me focus on producing substance and actions, freeing me up from having to some tedious things in some tedious ways. Without getting into the debate about if it's productive overall, there are certain tasks which it feels irrefutably fast and effective at (e.g. writing tests). I do agree with the missing substance with modern generative AI: everyone notices when it's producing things in that uncanny valley, and if no human is there to edit that, it makes people uncomfortable. The only way I can reconcile the almost existential discomfort of AI against my actual day-to-day generally-positive experience with AI is to accept that AI in itself isn't the problem. Ultimately, it is an info tool, and human nature makes people spam garbage for clicks with it. People will do the equivalent of spam garbage for clicks with any new modern thing, unfortunately. Getting the most out of latest information of a society has probably always been a cat and mouse game of trying to find the areas where the spam-garbage-for-clicks people haven't outnumbered use-AI-to-facilitate-substance people, like here, hopefully.

skydhash 2y ago
Just one nitpick. The thing about test is that it’s repetitive enough to be automated (in a deterministic way) or abstracted into a framework. You don’t need an AI to generate it.
- closeparen 2y ago
  While I occasionally have the pleasure of creating or working with a test suite that's interesting and creative relative to the code under test, the vast majority of unit tests by volume are slop. Does it call the mock? Does it use the return value? Does "if err != nil { return err }" in fact stop and return the error? This stuff is a perfect candidate for LLM generation.
- 1dom 2y ago
  I find it helpful for generating automated test suites in the style of the rest of the codebase. When working across multiple projects and clients, it reduces the mental load of having to remember or figure out how tests are expected to work in each codebase. I agree with your theory about tests. The reality of it is most code is garbage - often including my own - and in a lot of environments, the task is to get the job done in a way that fits in with what's there.

deephoneybear 2y ago

Echoing other comments in gratitude for this very clear articulation of feelings I share, but have not manifested so well. Just wanted to add two connected opinions that round out this view. 1) This consuming of the host is only possible on the one hand because the host has grown so strong, that is the modern global industrial economy is so efficient. The doing stuff side of the equation is truly amazing and getting better (some real work gets done either by accident or those who have not-succumbed to PR and ad culture), and even this drop of "real work" produces enough material wealth to support (at least a lot of) humanity. We really do live in a post scarcity world from a production perspective, we just have profound distribution and allocation problems. 2) Radical wealth inequality profoundly exacerbates the problem of PR and ad culture. If everyone has some wealth doing things that help many people live more comfortably is a great way to become wealthy. But if very few people have wealth, then doing a venture capital FOMO hustle on the wealthy is anyone's best ROI. Radical wealth inequality eventually breaks all the good aspects of capitalist/market economies.

closeparen 2y ago

You can outfit an adult life with all of the useful manufactured objects that would reasonably improve it for a not-very-impressive sum. Beyond that it's just clutter (going for quantity) or moving into the lifestyle/taste/social-signaling domain anyway (going for quality). There is just not an unlimited amount of alpha in making physical things. The social/thought/experiential domain is a much bigger opportunity.

llm_trw 2y ago

>Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. There was always a lot of scammery around it, but the bedrock goal was to make physical things happen - build things, invent things, deliver things, innovate. For a very short period between 1945 to 1980 while the generation who remembered the great depression and WWII was in charge. It's been longer since that's not been the case. And it wasn't the case for most of history before then.

hgomersall 2y ago
I'm not sure it isn't a reflection of the rise of neoliberalism.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  Who says these are mutually exclusive? Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times.
  - rexpop 2y ago
    So weak men make hard men? You're welcome. How graciously the womenfolk leave us to our tragic autopoiesis.
    - forgetfreeman 2y ago
      Sure, by way of traumatizing an entire generation. Nobody thanked you.
      - rexpop 2y ago
        I'm being sarcastic. This entire concept is bogus.
        forgetfreeman 2y ago
        Hah! I'm certain a lot of people want to believe it's bogus, mostly because of what that says about their character. Observed reality suggests there's some truth here. An example in miniature would be the frequency with which family fortunes are lost within a generation or two.

rexpop 2y ago

> draw, write, compose The primacy of these artforms is subjective, and there's no accounting for taste.

Terr_ 2y ago

> You can create the impression of getting a lot of work done. Or the impression of a well-written cover letter. Or of a genre novel, techno track, whatever. Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight." Oh, sure, qualitatively speaking it's not new, people could have used form-letters, hired a ghostwriter, or simply sank time and effort into a good lie... but the quantitative change of "Bot, write something that appears heartfelt and clever" is huge. In some cases that's devastating--like trying to avert botting/sockpuppet operations online--and in others we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fuck it, personal essays and cover letters are meaningless now, just put down the raw bullet-points."

sesm 2y ago

Very well written. I assume you haven't read "Simulacra and Simulation" by Jean Baudrillard, that's why your description is so authentic and is more convincing then just referring to the book. Saved this post for future reference.

fsndz 2y ago

this is a top notch comment !

sangnoir 2y ago

> Western industrial culture was based on substance - getting real shit done. And what did that get us? Radium poisoning and microplastics in every organ of virtually all animals living within thousands of miles of humans. Our reach has always exceeded our grasp.

Paddywack 2y ago

> So AI isn't really a tool for creating substance. It's a tool for automating impression management. I was speaking to a design lecturer the other evening. His fascinating insight was that: 1. The best designers get so much fulfilment out of practicing the craft of design. 2. With the advent of low cost “impression making”, the role has changed to one of “review a lot of mediocre outputs and pick the least crap one” 3. This is robbing people of the pleasure and reward associated with craftsmanship. I have noted this is applicable so many other crafts, and it’s really sad! Edited afterthought… Is craftsmanship being replaced by “clickandreviewmanship”?

zaptheimpaler 2y ago

Just yesterday I watched a video blaming China for "oversupplying" electric cars at low prices and how that was hurting car manufacturers elsewhere e.g Germany. These manufacturers were trying to secretly lobby for tariffs to be placed on Chinese cars, while publicly denying this because THEIR largest and growing market was China. They had some "expert" talk about how China is known to oversupply and is doing this to recover from their housing bubble. All of these experts were preaching the virtues of Western free-trade to the east when they were the ones exporting TO Asia 10 years ago, but now the balance flips and they all tell you how important tariffs are and how evil China is instead.. In summary, China makes useful things in mass and sells them to get out of a recession,the West prints money instead and shits on China for doing it better. They preach free trade while it helps them and put up tariffs when it doesn't. I'm not Chinese or some mega fan but it really struck me how corrupt and full of propaganda western culture is becoming and people don't seem to recognize it.

User23 2y ago
I agree with you, but it’s really simpler than that. China makes things and the west increasingly just sends emails.
narag 2y ago
Maybe we should stop subsidies to buy electric cars and let China subsidize on the production side instead, while lowering taxes on the production of our own cars.
cudgy 2y ago
> All of these experts were preaching the virtues of Western free-trade to the east when they were the ones exporting TO Asia 10 years ago 10 years ago? Try 40-50 years ago.

photonthug 2y ago

Thanks for writing your comment, I think it’s a public service. Cultural commentary that makes complex long term trends simple to understand isn’t often this clear or concise. What really makes it powerful though is that it manages to stay in a relatively detached observer-mode without becoming an angry rant. And so rather than provoking (understandable!) anger in others, hopefully it’s inviting more reflection. People who haven’t thought about it this way might take a harder look at what they are doing and who they really want to be. People that are already thinking along these lines will probably benefit from a reminder that they aren’t crazy.