Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses
MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?
AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.
Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.
The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:
Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:
Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:
https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies
Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:
I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.
The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:
The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.
Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:
So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":
A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.
According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."
Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.
What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.
Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.
See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:
Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.
"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:
During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."
Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.
Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
âś“ Live Streamingâś“ Interactive Chatâś“ Private Showsâś“ HD Qualityâś“ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
âś“ Live Streamingâś“ Interactive Chatâś“ Private Showsâś“ HD Qualityâś“ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Amazon Go, 22001 Ventura Blvd, Woodland Hills, CA 91364
Fro-yo girl here. After being disappointed by the absence of Pinkberry at the new Amazon Go Torrance, I wanted to make sure that the new Woodland Hills location carries Pinkberry. Fortunately it does! But the froyo machine was in the corner and a little hard to see. They need to add signs (maybe they will later). It took me awhile to find the entrance for the same reason.
Amazon Go is a nicer convenience store that has lower prices on some of the same items carried by Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, including prepared foods like soup, pizza, Wild Blue sushi, salads and premade sandwiches. They carry some better brands like La Fermiere yogurt, Chubby Snacks, vegan Glonuts (donuts), Rockenwager baked goods, etc. I noticed quite a few vegan and better for you snacks.
Amazon Go offers grab-and-go food and beverages, freshly prepared food including sandwiches, wraps, salads, breakfast burritos, breakfast sandwiches, and avocado toast, hot food (e.g., cheese pizza, sandwiches), snacks, essentials (e.g., batteries, dog & cat food, mailing supplies, phone chargers, over the counter medication, paper towels, tampons), coffee, pastries, Health-Ade, kombucha on tap, wine/beer, etc. It’s nice to have someone make your food to order and at a reasonable price. That’s not something that other convenience stores offer. You can place your food order at a kiosk.
Pinkberry froyo ($4.99, flat rate, includes toppings): Came out a bit runny and wasn’t as firm as Amazon Go Whittier. It also melted faster. Still, it’s a steal and you can really get your money’s worth. The froyo has a great tang. There are two flavors: original and pomegranate and three toppings: mini milk chocolate gems, chocolate chips, and granola.
Breakfast sandwich ($3 introductory price, $3.99 regular price): English muffin, ham, cheddar cheese, scrambled eggs, red onion. The breakfast sandwich is made to order and customizable. You can even add some things for free, like onions and tomatoes. The English muffin was bigger than usual. The thin ham wasn’t too salty either. I thought it was pretty good, better than a frozen or premade breakfast sandwich.
Fresh chocolate chip cookie ($1.99): A big cookie that’s soft, thick and chewy. It’s a bit dry but decent and a great value.
Fresh blueberry scone ($2.99): A big scone, not too sweet but on the dry side. Not bad though and great price.
As for the technology, scan your Amazon app to enter and the cameras will track what you pick up. They’ll charge your Amazon account when you exit. If there’s a problem, you can report it on your app. If you don’t like an item, you can request a refund. They had a customer service desk and a human can ring you up if you’d like. You can also drop off your Amazon returns there.
The tracking has worked every time I’ve gone to Amazon Go though it hasn’t always been accurate at Amazon Fresh for some reason.
Amazon Go has some parking spaces (not a lot of them) but the lot is shared and some of the spaces are for other businesses. There is no place to dine, so plan on taking your food to go or eating in your car.
Amazon Go, 22135 Hawthorne Blvd, Torrance, CA 90503
I like Amazon Go, Amazon’s version of a convenience store, but I had to take a star off because the Torrance location does not have self-serve Pinkberry froyo, unlike the Amazon Go in Whittier. I went there fully expecting to see Pinkberry. The information provided by Amazon Go to Yelp shows that they have Pinkberry in Torrance. I looked all over for the Pinkberry machine and to confirm, spoke to the store clerk. Except for that huge and sad difference between the two locations, the other aspects seemed the same.
It's a nicer convenience store and has lower prices on some of the same items carried by Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh, including prepared foods like soup, pizza, sushi, salads and premade sandwiches. For example, I just bought some chicken tortilla soup at Amazon Fresh for $6.99; the same soup was $5.99 at Amazon Go. The Positive Food meals are $12.99 at Whole Foods and $9.99 at Amazon Go. They carry some better brands like La Fermiere yogurt, Positive Food prepared food, Rockenwager baked goods, etc. Amazon Kitchen even makes banh mi sandwiches.
Amazon Go offers grab-and-go food and beverages, freshly prepared food including sandwiches, wraps, salads, breakfast burritos, breakfast sandwiches, and avocado toast, hot food (e.g., cheese pizza, sandwiches), snacks, essentials, coffee, pastries, kombucha on tap, wine/beer, etc. It’s nice to have someone make your food to order and at a reasonable price. That’s not something that other convenience stores offer. The food might not be amazing but it’s good enough. You can place your food order at a kiosk.
Three cheese melt sandwich on sourdough bread ($4.99): This was kept warm/hot but premade. Not bad and big too. The sourdough bread tasted buttered. The edges were crispy. There was a good amount of cheese. Simple but would be great with tomato soup.
As for the technology, scan your Amazon app to enter and the cameras will track what you pick up. They’ll charge your Amazon account when you exit. If there’s a problem, you can report it on your app. If you don’t like an item, you can request a refund. They had a customer service desk and a human can ring you up if you’d like.
It’s a new looking space in the parking lot of Hobby Lobby and Walmart.
