They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing
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I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. SV seems less interested in making "cyborgs" that enhance human abilities, and more interested in godlike AIs that aren't human at all.
I’ve had non tech family and friends who are currently dealing with the result of American cutthroat capitalism and barely able to cover living expenses despite having two people working full time, ask me how I felt about the risk of AI to my job.
My answer has consistently been that I’m not afraid because one of these results happens. A: AI hits a peak soon and can’t replace any work I do, so it doesn’t matter. B: AI does get sophisticated enough to replace the work I do at which point we’ve basically reached almost star trek level tech where machines can do most of the work and we’ve allocated resources through society in a way that everyone benefits. And lastly the one I think is most likely C: AI automates all this knowledge work for the benefit of company owners and we end up either accepting it as a group and falling back to pre industrial serf like social structures or every rises up in a social revolution.
To be honest I’d expect that going back to serfdom style rules would be the most expected and stable but the current group of western oligarchs don’t seem to care to make sure that their burgeoning serf class have their basic needs met and instead want to antagonize them for not being rich. It’s a really odd juxtaposition of rabidly independent culture where people believe they accomplished everything by the sweat of their own brow crossing with the results of of a society that lets an individual run a company of 10s to 100s of thousands of employees at the same time
My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.
So you don't sound too correct.
There were plenty of earlier cases of one family of minor nobility killing another family of minor nobility and taking over their farmland and serfs, but successful peasant revolts that led to a change in the hierarchy were really rare (outside of Switzerland). Even the 1381 "Great Revolt" in England, which called for the abolition of serfdom among other things, is evaluated by the World History Encyclopaedia [1] as "largely unsuccessful" despite having many factors in its favour: a rise in the bargaining power of surviving peasants after the Black Death, and peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows. And yet Wat Tyler's head ended up on a pike, and despite the poll tax being rolled back, serfdom as an institution remained.
The longbow's reputation as a hard-counter to heavy cavalry is, I think, a little context dependent. The famous set pieces like Poitiers, Agincourt, Crecy all featured favorable terrain - and in the case of Agincourt, favorable weather - ideal for massed fire into predictable funnels (where, strictly speaking, the longbow served first and foremost as a horse killer).
All this to say, it's IMO a mischaracterization to imply the peasants in the aforementioned peasants revolt held the military edge relative to the crown and its allies. After the initial shock of the uprising, they were a clear underdog matched against a well resourced and ruthless opponent.
> My counter-argument to C: (I almost typed C:\> there, sorry) is that money in tech, in the end, still comes from people. Even if your business is using AI to optimise ad targeting, those ads still get paid for because the advertisers expect humans to hand over money at some point to buy products or play games or something.
I think the real risk of C is that the economy changes to something radically different, where everything is capital and labor is (basically) no longer required. The whole B2C economy just withers and dies, and is replaced by an economy centered on elite fantasy fulfillment (e.g. Elon Musks monopolizing resources to build mega-projects for themselves, perhaps with a smallish community of human pets kept as an audience).
There wouldn't be any serfs, because serfs had economic value to the medieval elites. But there may be a population of marginal people scraping by squatting and subsistence farming at the margins, hoping a mega-project doesn't displace them.
My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.
Both of these jobs - particularly the latter but where I live also the former - rely on a heavy surplus of disposable income sloshing around the economy. Once the money stops flowing the home stills start and the ski trips stop.
> My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.
The broad point you're conveying is reasonably clear, but I'm not even sure whether you're implying your friend is a SWE by virtue of their child tinkering with a REPL, or if you're referring to the future job prospects of said 10 year old.
Or is the idea that we will continue to organize our society around the ever more pointless concentration of wealth?
Maybe I'm being overly broad in my interpretation, because they did specifically single out "coding" - but having personally worked both in and out of tech I don't really see non-dev "desk jobs" as having any particular moat against automation (and potentially even less than devs, which admittedly means I disagree with the likes of Jensen Huang).
So, when programmers go - they won't go alone. At that point it's reasonable to ask what kind of human labor will be marketable enough to command upward-mobility salary tiers, or if the 99.9% are perpetually relegated to pouring Bezos & co drinks while teaching them how to telemark [1]
[1] dystopia aside it would be entertaining to watch
Let me further clarify it: winemakers, lobbyists, charismatic artists and anyone else whose job is based on relationships will also be fine. (Or folks like plumbers and electricians.)
The roles being automated away look like the quiet, tinkering alone genius types. First at the commodity level. But increasingly at the highest ones. The preserved jobs will be both high and low, and exist in the context of a more-productive society.
A more productive society is not incompatible with extreme inequality. Unless the middle is preserved, it's hard to see how all these winemakers and charismatic artists will find a market for their labor.
Sure. And I don’t see why in the trades and service industry solid middle-class jobs won’t survive. I’m just commenting that, ironically, coding is turning out to be the 21st century’s auto line worker.
Just because software engineering is being done by AI does not apply most other jobs can, too—it’s just the impersonal ones.
Where to live, now that’s another problem. Buy an RV and head out to the desert? The food won’t fit into the RV though so, uh, I dunno.
Uh, anyway, point is, go watch Mad Max.
Most likely this was always the case, just a bit bigger and obvious now. I comfort myself with the belief that the number of cool and powerful tools released under properly free licenses can only grow, even if they proportion shrinks.
No longer do we buy software, it’s for rent.
Which is why I use FreeBSD.
It's not really the last decade or so. You can go back 20 years or more and find people really quite dissatisfied with tech companies like IBM and Oracle and Microsoft.
What really happened is that "you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" came for Google and Apple and what we need is to recognize that they're now IBM and Microsoft and we need a new Google and Apple.
Notice how Apple never had a "don't be evil" to begin with. Does that mean they were always evil or that they aren't now?
Why paint a picture or take a photograph when AI will do it for you?
Why design and build an application that will solve creative problems when an AI will do it? You should just review automated PRs.
Rather than, why go into the asbestos removal business and destroy your lungs when we have AI to do it and you can spend your time learning the guitar?
> Why paint a picture or take a photograph when AI will do it for you?
Yeah the tech fetishists think everyone should be awed and happy with the "beautiful" pictures the "AI" they made can generate, and reward them with copious back-pats (nevermind the output is crap and the tech boosters like them because they have no taste), but all they actually accomplish is to turn once-enjoyable things to ash. It's like how you can't even buy good quality basic clothes anymore, even if you want to, because everything is either flimsy cost-reduced crap or a Veblen good.
For instance, I'm starting to actively loathe header images, because they're getting replaced with "AI" generated garbage that (if it grabs my attention) always disappoints. People used to either not not have one or at least search around for a good photo or art image or something, but now many just throw up "AI" generated botshit to check a box one some "increase engagement" guide.
Header or “hero” images were always a bad idea. With or without AI.
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
You've articulated a subtle point that few (so far) are amplifying -- many of these "creative things" that we're having "GenAI" generate for us are the sort of things we want to do, for our own pleasure, even (especially?) when nobody pays us to do it. Supplanting those activities via "GenAI" is not a "win".
This is not the tech industries fault, but the media's: "There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story." [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
It seems like the fear of missing out on a possible profit has every tech-related company and their dog rush into the latest trends, without thinking about the mid to long term consequences of their choices.
It doesn't matter if it is about subscription models for everything, abusive private data gathering, or, more worryingly, unrestricted AI-everything. Their competitors might be doing it, so they have to do it preemptively. Very much similar to the Cold-War arms race.
All in all, it goes nicely hand in hand with an other expression: "Après moi, le déluge", literally translating to "After me, the floods", or, as we say in English:
Consequences be damned.IMHO this is not about tech being too good tho: it's about new tech being worse.
Yeah, it is often goes like "lets disrupt and see if we will be able to rip some benefits from the chaos after the disruption". And the fun thing that potential disrupters seem to believe that it is good for all, not only for them and only conditionally.
The first is that the industries being disrupted were the bad guys, but that doesn't mean they liked it. And because they were the bad guys, they couldn't just come out and say "Uber sucks because we don't like having competition". So what they do instead is turn over every rock looking for something to blame them for in the hopes they can get the government to thrash them hard enough to make the market uncompetitive again. Which, of course, damages those companies' reputations, as was the intention.
The second is that a lot of the companies that used to go on about disrupting things are now the incumbents in need of being disrupted, e.g. mobile app stores and big social networks. People look at them as the bad guys because they are, but the problem there is not that disruption is bad, it's that the gander should get what came to the goose.
AI might be a cool tech that can serve to make the lives of actual humans better, but it might require breaking up big tech and fostering customer centric competition to realise any benefits to society at large.
Whether you are excited by AI or not that phase is just cringe BS and deserves all the booing, so maybe the crowd wasn't "booing ai" but just booing the crappy presentation full of corp speak.
There are two types of grift - pure cynical (crypto, vr, ai influencing & fake products)
- make me a medical system that I know can never get approved
- make me a business that will never ship a thing but get daddies tax bill halved
- make me code assistants that don't actually help
and pure mean: products that are exploitative or knowingly unethical.
- make me a mental health chatbot without giving a shit that it tells people to kill themselves
- make me camera that records other people and tells me their weaknesses
- make me kill bots that will stop protestors from saying stuff my boss doesn't want to hear
I think that people are really sick of grifters. I know I am.
The benefits are overstated and the negatives are sold as benefits.
I definitely remember a huge viral wave of mockery about the iPad in 2010. It was everything from stretching things and calling it "innovation" (as in, just a big phone), comparisons to women's sanitary pads, you name it. Mockery of Apple and Apple fanboys was one of the peak internet memes of the time. Mocking AI is tame in comparison.
A few years later, it seems like we all have them (or a very similar-looking competitor) in our ears.
Google Glass and its users were mocked and it was a complete failure.
The iPad was mocked and ended up as an underperforming division, yet still the market leader because everyone else dropped the ball really badly.
AirPods were mocked but they are a wild success helped of course by the removal of the 3.5 jack.
AirPods probably succeeded because (despite the at-first weird aesthetic decisions) they turn out to be far more convenient than wired earphones and nice to use. If the battery life and the rate of charging, for example, had not been as good, I don’t think they would have taken off.
So I think mockery doesn’t really have anything to say about the potential success of a product; it fades rapidly anyway whether it succeeds or not. Humans get used to things incredibly quickly and are very adaptable. It’s both a virtue and a curse (because the other side of the coin is that we get bored quickly).
If I were (even) more of an Apple fanboy I might argue that AirPods succeeded because Apple knows how to make fun, decidedly non-clunky products and Google doesn’t because it’s not in that business — it sells eyeballs to advertisers whereas Apple sells beautifully crafted hardware/software combinations to creative individuals. If Google had been first to try wireless earphones, they might have flopped and put everyone off the idea.
> AirPods probably succeeded because (despite the at-first weird aesthetic decisions) they turn out to be far more convenient than wired earphones and nice to use. If the battery life and the rate of charging, for example, had not been as good, I don’t think they would have taken off.
You're missing the social aspect to the rejection of Google Glass. IIRC the term "glasshole" was also a reaction to the privacy-invading aspect (little to no indication if the person is recording or not). AirPods had none of that, so if you liked how they worked, you could use them and not really bother anyone.
I think the Apple Vision Pro will fail for similar reasons, at least as something that people take out and about except in very limited circumstances. I had the additional downside over Google Glass that obscures the wearers facial expression (even despite their overwrought attempts at a technical solution).
My own social media bubble proclaimed awe and interest in the new possibilities, presented their new startup ideas and hopes.
However if you're attributing widespread product adoption to the erosion of cultural conservatism towards [new thing], then I think that underplays the role of product iteration. AirPods shrank their form factor and eliminated the cigarette-butt aesthetic, EVs became highly quality competitive, Amazon expanded from being a bookstore, etc.
Sure — products evolve and potentially assume a less controversial (mockable) form, but I think most of the change is in perception. Almost all of the products we use daily would probably look completely weird if we could somehow see them for the first time out of context. I’m currently typing on a tiny little touchscreen QWERTY keyboard on a device that is ostensibly a mobile telephone; none of this makes sense when first presented but we’ve all come to accept it as being as normal as breathing air.
No one likes that, it's cheap and nasty hackery.
People like tech that works 100% of the time, and keeps doing it. Stuff that could not be done before that can now.
People don't like churn. Constant upgrades. Built in obscelecense. AI that work 95% at best. Maps that make different decisions each time. UI fads. Framework wars. Google buying and killing services. Clis that are not automatable.
"The only thing that is constant is the rate of chane" is an observation that tech is not providing what was promised: automation.
Cheaper nastier flakey versions of what worked fine should get a boo.
We live in the smoking ruins of the world of our grandparents, and that is because, unambiguously, of industry and policy shaped by industry. Wages have stagnated. Cities have become places that are great if you have lots of money to spend and pretty hostile otherwise. Medicine has increasingly become a luxury, as has healthy food and a roof over your head. Meanwhile, in tech, the goodwill of the userbase has very rapidly and repeatedly been betrayed because capital wanted constant growth. News and media have been subsumed into a slog of ad-suffused "content" optimized to hook your attention. You are spied on in everything you do, supposedly to target more ads. Many new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force have been invented and then legalized by this industry
Now I hate telling people I study AI because SV people made a really interesting methodology into an apocalyptic cult whose adherents are often smugly dismissive of most recognizable human values in favor of a vague future that sounds like living in a video game made of vibes, and the main use case the optimization-obsessed finance-twiddlers that run the show can imagine is replacing workers in every domain, starting with artists. Why should they like this? Technology for technology's sake is not what most people care about, and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests?
Monopoly empires driven by tax revenues.
> new horrendous ways of abusing the labor force
It's a labor market. Monopolization destroys this too. Judges never include this market in their rulings.
> and why should they when the last ten years of "innovation" has on balance mostly been against their interests?
What innovation? The last ten years have been incredibly stagnant. GPT itself is the product of "what if we just throw stupid resources at this old algorithm?"
The desire for AI, is to me, a supply and demand problem, and represents a state of extreme artificial inefficiency in the system. Perhaps that's what AI should really stand for.
I find nitpicking silly, but it is traditional in the agreegument format. I will only nitpick two things:
1. While I did put scarequotes on "innovation" for a reason (it is SV's favorite euphemism of course), it is worth noting that things like funneling money into a ridesharing app to create an entire fiefdom of "gig workers" to misclassify and then try to codify anti-labor policies into law by pretending to go to bat for them, or selling massive troves of data to a british analytics firm in order to steer elections toward "business-friendly" fascist demagogues, or creating a "non-profit" to make "safe and open" AI then partnering up with one of the most consumer-hostile and closed-source companies to ever walk the earth once a good opportunity to make bank popped up are certainly uh... creative
2. While a lot of progress in AI recently can definitely be summarized at a high level as throwing massive datasets and parallel processors at neural networks, if you zoom in there are definitely different algorithms coming through the noise, new kinds of network layers, training protocols, and objectives that we didn't have when ANNs first showed up. Like most actual real world science, it was a world of incremental progress that occasionally spawned a really useful application. I still think some advances in machine learning that have come out of all this nonsense have been meaningful and potentially useful, but it's difficult to separate signal from noise when the industry brain-drains academia to do research behind closed doors on whatever sci-fi shows up in the molochian wet dreams of the capitalist investor class
Wait, what?
My grandparents lived through a war and a famine, and came of age when over half the world lived in extreme poverty.
I don't think you fully appreciate how little of the world population could poo into a toilet not that many decades ago.
Things only got worse if you exclude everybody who didn’t already have it super good.
I have little granular information about the economic and political policies of most of the world, and will not claim to. I can mostly only talk about the US, where I live, though to be fair, this article is about a US festival wherein US industries got booed. Also, while it's great that we have ended the most obvious forms of nominal discrimination against racial minorities, there are a lot of thinly-veiled ways in which discrimination is still rampant, and trends like the decline of labor power and the automation of various decisions actually exacerbate these
https://arturoduran.com/2023/07/18/the-era-of-the-tyrant-ind...
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/they-praised-ai-at-sxswand-t...
Some really interesting perspectives in the comments.
Sounds to me like you're describing a broadly universal human trait. I for one certainly can't claim with a straight face to always place the concerns of others on a fully level footing with my own. Can you?
> If the current tech leaders can’t figure this out, they will be wiped away by history—that’s happened before, and will happen again.
When has this happened in history, to who, and what was the context? The examples I can think of were mostly related to technological advancements (mainframe to minicomputer, for example), and not related to general public anger.
The last 2 decades have seen a stagnation at the front end of technology and while this have led to a commodification it's also demonstrated that web 2.0 and crypto was mostly grifts by companies and organizations that don't really have an usefull vision. so as the web 2.0 revolution that originally inspired people at conferences like SXSW turned into an dystopia in the hands of companies like Twitter, Facebook and google, new grifts are going to get a whole lot more scrutiny going forwards.
Not saying we should go full socialism here but there might be a smarter way of giving incentives (and punishments) to companies so that we can reach an equilibrium of all stakeholders interests (including the shareholders of course).
Otherwise there is no good intentioned (don’t be evil) tech/AI that will resist the ruthless capital markets.
Reminds me a lot of politics in the United States at this point: stuck with two disappointing parties with almost no chance of a third party really shaking things up because the one thing they can agree on is that a third party should never arise.
I think the answer is that people simply do like the tech. We voluntarily use social media platforms (nosurfing is possible), and the average person clearly finds great use in ChatGPT, MidJourney, Character and AI in general.
Essentially -- the complaining doesn't represent what the market (the people) actually want. It's controversial for sure but the willing customer base is large enough.
I remember the reactions on /r/technology when the iPhone or the iPad were announced. I remember the reactions when the M1 processor came out. Just like this audience, lots of people who subscribe to this stuff nominally care about new technology. But the truth is that where I religiously chant "We're ARSENAL, ARSENAL FC, we're by far the greatest team the world has ever seen" they chant something else.
These reactions are meaningless. "The iPAD?! It's four iPhones stuck together HAHAHAHA and named after a MENSTRUAL PAD HAHAHA this is going to flop".
The difference is that Arsenal will only fail to win the Champion's League once every year. These guys die a thousand deaths every day they see new technology.
This kinda never happens in football, sorry ^_^
These people, nominally technology enthusiasts, appreciate very little.