The not-so-secret secret of software for the past 40 years is that it has, more often than not, provided solutions to problems created first and foremost by it.

The not-so-secret secret of software for the past 40 years is that it has, more often than not, provided solutions to problems created first and foremost by it. This is not pessimism or ludditism, I am just trying to say something simple. The spreadsheet or the database is something that is self-validating: the very innovation of the database makes it first and foremost possible to consolidate massive amounts of data in one place; the whole world can suddenly orient itself around this possibility, and then almost imperceptibly it presents itself to us as a kind of teleological end point, as a "solution to a problem." One can possibly reply here: well, people wanted all the data in one place, and they just had to figure out how to do it, so there you go, the database. But this belies, in an important (if admittedly more philosophical) way the specific character of how an innovation or technology evolves and ultimately concretizes into day to day life. This is why and how the iPhone was cool, but now most of us agree that having an app for your toaster or Taco Bell is pretty dumb. Now entire people's careers have been made around solutions to problems that only exist because of prior innovations. One might quibble that there is some kind of surplus of benefit at the end of the day, but that's not really the point. Posts like these, along with sentiments we see from so many people now, show a kind of, if you will, crisis of identity. The plausible language black box, slop-bot, beautiful and promising proto-consciousness, whatever you want to call it, is unmoored from what was previously the fiery organic back-and-forth of capitalism<->tech. In part because it is not actually a response to problem, it is a kind of "discovery," but also in part because, it seems, it is in essence too general and too unstable to easily slot into one thing or another. Now we have all these very business-oriented people looking at this thing, measuring the elephant, and saying "well gosh darn-it, there is something here, there just has to be." We are burning all these resources to get something, but I truly don't think people even know what they want at the end of the day, because it hasn't followed the same chain of commoditization like social media, databases, phones, etc. This is why there is such confusion: is AI the thing itself, or the tool we use to get... something? How can something be so impressive but not, as it seems, so easily fitted into a product? I suspect this will continue to break peoples brains and empty investors pockets for a long time yet. If I was an evil capitalist, I would work on a better narrative, or rather, work on actually articulating a problem that "was there all along," which the bots can then solve. I haven't really seen that in a substantial sense, and at this point I love the LLMs just for its resistance to such things. Just to say, this whole blog post I think is quite exemplary of this contradiction.