This is the circle of life. FAANG is the new IBM.
Who will succeed them?
Chinese big tech? Next gen full remote startups? Or will the public stop trusting tech entirely ?
Chinese big tech? Next gen full remote startups? Or will the public stop trusting tech entirely ?
Political party propaganda cells are already using AI tools to distribute fake images. Once the tech gets a little better, we’ll likely get videos and audio too.
The Indian elections in 2024 will likely be the testing grounds for large scale AI generated propaganda. Just a few days ago, the ruling party’s IT cell was circulating morphed images of protestors that were impossible to tell from the real thing. I suspect this will ramp up to a massive scale within the next 12 months.
I don’t know what happens once no one trusts anything online. Maybe we’ll finally give up our black mirror prisons.
This, not helmets, is actual “virtual reality” and it’s quite dystopian.
In the US we are almost to the point where liberals and conservatives cannot even have a discussion because they have no shared context. They inhabit parallel universes with entirely different “facts,” many of which are either bullshit or cherry picked without context to support a narrative. At the center of each mob is a loose knit group of special interests and amoral online propagandists. It feels like the beginning of something incredibly dark. I can’t see it getting better since the incentives point the other way, including large monetary incentives and winning elections.
Some people are turning it off but I fear they are very much in the minority.
Consensus seems to imply that it’s a grassroots thing.
I don't think that's because of tech.
I'm still optimistic about tech and the internet; I think the split society that we seem to have arrived at has other causes.
The internet and cheap computers made it possible for kids to invent cool stuff in their bedrooms, without having to invest in expensive manufacturing machinery or employing people. That's still possible; CPUs, memory and storage are cheaper and more faster than ever, and 3D printers have democratized the prototyping of physical objects.
I think the problem that hit tech was big money. Nowadays, if you invent something cool, one of two things will happen: either you'll get a cash offer so generous you can retire at 25, or you'll get hit with a meritless lawsuit that it's pointless to defend, because your adversary is backed by megabucks, and can litigate until you're bankrupt.
My enjoyment and optimism as a software engineer towards the internet at large has gone down dramatically, and I too believe we're 5 years away before quitting the Internet will be fashionable as not having a TV was in the 90s.
Between government control, Big Tech, toxic social media and now AI generated bullshit, the Internet as we know it, the single virtual space where everything is accessible from everywhere by everyone, won't last for very long.
But already today we're living on a dead Internet made of siloes and a single search engine hegemony. You can call it a meme, but the signs are all there, we're all enjoying our cozy FAANG jobs and any kind of tech activism pushing against this devolution, like the old cypherpunk movement or the hacking scene of the 90s, is pretty much extinct or too busy doing bug bounties for money.
Can you elaborate?
My memory of the 90s was my mother saying that TV was considered so important that not having one was the official reason for her friends being denied the opportunity to adopt until they got one.
Internet today is like that except quite a more than adoption depends on it.
If you say the President is a pedophile, and provide fake evidence to people who don’t like him, they’ll just dislike him more, they aren’t going to go against their own thoughts and think “I don’t like the President but clearly he isn’t really a pedophile.” That is too complex for most people. They don’t want to defend something they don’t like. People are simpletons.
Do I think they're perfect, absolutely not, not even close. But compared to Google, Amazon and Facebook (which IMO just seem like total and utter nightmare fuel freak shows), they just seem sane, trustworthy and purposeful to me.
Netflix, I'm fairly neutral about, I just think their products and their shows are absolutely shit so I plan to cancel my subscription soon, I don't feel strongly about it.
Personally, I don't own an Apple product I don't constantly get value out of. Whether it's a 10+ year old Macbook Pro, iPhone or an Apple Watch.
I'd never trust anything but iCloud with anything I'd like to keep private. Meta? lol not a freaking chance in hell.
People will generally only pay for things that make them pay by being closed. So we can’t have nice open completely free (as in freedom) things because there is no way to finance their creation.
Not by a wide margin. Steve Job's Apple and Tim Cook's Apple is very different. To the point I would even argue you might as well call it a different company.
At least the "Better World" in Tim Cook's view is very different to Steve Jobs's "Better World". The message Tim Cook is sending in its PR and marketing is very different to the message Steve Jobs is trying to tell/sell.
A deflationary race to the bottom ends at the bottom.
That they killed off Blackberry and Windows Phone is impressive from a business standpoint, but which fruit the phones have as a logo probably didn't change the world all that much.
Apple is very good at marketing, but they did not invent the concept of PDA (that's how these devices were called back then) with the iPhone - they just came up with a yet another PDA which was decent, and were very good at marketing.
The term Personal Digital Assistant was coined by John Sculley while CEO of Apple when describing the Newton MessagePad, so akshually they did invent the concept.
Yes there were Windows CE devices that predate iPhone. I had a few, including the hx4700. They universally sucked.
I know downplaying Apple’s role in computing history is the cool thing to do on the orange site, but get real. The mobile world completely changed when Apple announced iPhone. We know that Google pivoted on the acquired Android OS. Would they have done so as quickly had the iPhone never happened? Given their track record, probably not.
I was on windows mobile before iPhone and the browsers were essentially useless. It was a game changer when safari mobile was a thing.
Apple killing off flash by refusing to support it was a great moment for the mobile web.
I'm a couple decades late with this advice, but - did you try Opera Mobile on PocketPC back then?
It was good. I had no chance to compare with early Safari on iOS, but it was on par or better than the default browser on my early-2010s Android device.
It is so weird how this all was forgotten.
What Apple did was achieve bringing the first smartphone to market that reached critical mass in sales and mainstream adoption. They didn't invent smartphones, but they did create the mobile market.