#tech innovation

I'm so sick of AI, I've so sick of watching it be shoved into perfectly functional technologies and making them worse, i'm so sick of being forced to be aware of it. I'm so sick of being told that "ITS THE FUTURE! ITS INEVITABLE AND INESCAPABLE, SO JUST ACCEPT IT!" just like all the other "inevitable" technologies of the last 15 years that were everywhere and inescapable.... that don't exist anymore

For my entire life I've seen lots of new tech come onto the market and then vanish, and usually what happens is:

Some people are hype for it and they'll prove it with their money, while some people say its lame and don't buy. After a few years of this, if enough people buy the thing it becomes common place and available everywhere. Or, not enough of the thing sells and it just straight up vanishes, and no one even notices its gone

It was like this for 3D movies/games/tv, it was like this for the google stadia, it was like this for the VR headset (lets face it, its not gonna happen at this point) and the metaverse. The only time i really remember a company aggressively pushing a thing that people were very vocal they didn't want was Google Plus, which they tried long and hard to jam down our throats before giving up

Usually the whole point of making and marketing a product is to make somthing that people are enthusiastic about, even if it doesn't actually improve anything and its just a superfluous novelty. You don't get far by trying to sell a product that makes people unhappy enough to constantly gripe about how bad it is all the time for months and years on end

Companies usually listen to the complaints or reasons people don't like a product and adjust accordingly or throw in the towel and swallow the loss, but this AI grift is different. Plenty people smarter/more educated then me have pointed out that this push is so intense because tech companies need a new technology to sell so they can keep profits and growth up. Theres no new gadgets coming out, nothing is replacing the smart phone for a very long time, its the omni device, it does everything! And everyone has one now, nobodies buying a new phone every single time a new one comes out anymore, its no longer a status symbol to get the new iphone plus theres hardly any new features on newer phones to justify it

And what can you do anymore to change the internet in a way you can charge for? They've already paywalled every website and crammed ads into every crevice of the net they can! We've reached a technological wall, until we can come up with a way to store more power in smaller batterys, devices can't get smaller and companies refuse to even consider going back to big clunky tech, so theres just no new doodads being created like there used to be back in the 80s/90s/2000-2015. Tech bros just assumed that there would be the next "iphone" type technological renaissance by now, and they're freaking out now cos its not happening

AI is crap, the chatbots are crap, ai art is crap. They're fun toys but fucking useless as professional tools. Companies that announced last year they were firing off all their human staff for ai have been reversing course because of how badly these things work. You see news storys of AI bots giving customers refunds against company policy, deleting important projects without permission and telling people online to kill themselves or put woodglue in their homemade pizza sauce. Everything you cram an AI into gets worse

i mean jesus christ online spell check is now fucking wrong most of the time! why would you connect ai to the spell check?! there was an entire built in working dictionary that worked flawlessly for years!

Why? Why is this happening? Cos the tech sector needs this to take off, they need mass acceptance and users, they need people to get to a point where they can finally pull the rug out from under us and go "OK NOW WE'RE CHARGING FOR IT!" and people will go oH No HoW wIlL I fUnCTiON wITHoUT iT

but thats not going to happen because all they've given us is a toy, a fun little doohickey that you can play with. If all these ai apps were gone tomorrow nothing would change, nothing of value would be lost. Even losing FLASH was more devastating to people back in the day then losing ai would be

You can gush and rave about all the neat things it does, but wat really matters when all is said and done is Money, Profit. Are enough users willing to pay to be able to use it regularly? Now? In this brave new era of lower incomes and rising cost of living? Where people are canceling their streaming services and resorting to piracy again because they just can't afford all these monthly payments nickel and diming them?

Because companies don't just want it to be somewhat profitable, they want full market saturation. They want you, your parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts/uncles, your friends and their family, your coworkers, EVERYONE. Mass adoption, everyone daily using this stuff and paying subscriptions to do so

You know thats not gonna happen, i trust you, i know you can feel it in your gut. Not for a robot that lies to you half the time and the ability to make neat pictures that you can't claim copyright on. Yes theres totally enough people who are willing to pay monthly to use this stuff but I'd estimate that would be the around same number of people who bought VR headsets, a moderate but decent number

But thats not going to be good enough for these assholes, they want you to need AI, they want it to be like how modern civilization needs electricity to function. But electricity took off because it actually did stuff people wanted: lightbulbs, heating stuff, make machines like washers and ovens go! Make refrigerator cold without having to buy big icecube! Power tools! electric trains! Radio!

Right now people are so against or apathetic towards AI that companies have to sneak it into everything or outright force us, and I know they have money to burn to brute force this, but in the end if so few people are willing to pay for it now, what makes you think somthing soon is gonna click and make people open up their wallets? What grand revelation is gonna make people go "OH WOW i didn't realize how much i needed this!"

I'm talking your normal ass average person who works at Walmart or Mcdonalds, I'm talking waiters at restaurants, I'm talking people who groom dogs for a living, I'm talking plumbers and pest control people, I'm talking people who have to drive ubers and door dash to make ends meet: Why would they pay real money for this product? I spend most of my time in an office in a job that hypothetically could use chatgpt for things but my bosses all avoid it like the plague cos they're scared its gonna tell us to summon satan or do terrorist acts (we actually had an IRL office meeting about this lol)

Its been repeated over and over again: AI isn't solving a problem that needed to be solved, its not fixing or improving anything. Previous hits like the smart phone improved and streamlined a bunch of technologies, AI does none of this and it have demonstratively made things worse. Its neat and fun but its not going to be the technology that changes everything the way the internet or the smartphone did

I would actually pay money at this point if i was guaranteed an AI free browsing experience, but i know if i'm patient, the same people who came up with adblockers and paywall work arounds will provide :)