AI isn't being marketed to consumers. AI is being marketed to investors. Regardless of whether or not it boosts sales, so long as it keeps driving up the stock price, they'll keep tossing around the word AI.
Every ad break included ads for Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Salesforce Einstein.
We are in a full on AI product marketing cycle.
I mean, some of it may be about getting end-users to pay for AI-thingies, but running the ads can also be seen as investor-posturing even if if it doesn't say "buy our stock", and there may be a corporate goal of boosting the (free) usage-numbers in order to present that to investors, etc.
Likewise, everybody and their dog has ChatGPT installed and think of AI as this magical thing that's gonna change the world, so they are potential indirect customers.
I then tweak the example to suit my needs exactly.
But it takes away only a small amount of busy work. It's not as helpful as AI proponents make you believe.
It’s a fraction of a percent of the population that have used it.
The main purpose of Big Pharma's saturation advertising spend on TV networks is the buying of influence with those networks - not marketing, secondary or otherwise.
I say this with the utmost respect and concern for my friends, family, and neighbors:
This attitude is part of the reason why the rust belt exists - filled with towns and cities that are a shell of their former selves. Areas of constant economic hardship, endemic drug use, etc.
The two big factories in the town I went to high school in are closed. Needless to say things aren’t going well… Yelling at the TV didn’t do anything to prevent that and it’s not going to do anything to prevent the next wave of it.
It’s harsh, but an important lesson since the beginning of time:
Adapt or die.
Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists. Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
I agree. Problem is it didn't do anything when they were saying the exact same things that led to the closure or significant job loss of the manufacturing that was the core of these communities:
1) "Hah, my factory job is complicated. The Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, etc will never figure it out." Racist/xenophobic but said at the time. Even more wrong.
2) Look at robotics. It also took some time for the technology to develop and many of these same people looked at early implementations and thought the exact same thing: "Oh those robots don't really work and they never will". Then their factory jobs became a fraction of the head count with a completely different skill set...
Throughout history this has played out over and over again.
> People have the power to vote with their wallets (and their actual votes), and they should do so.
Key word being /should/. Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets. The same people who laughed at and dismissed the Chinese are going to Wal-Mart everyday and buying goods from (you guessed it) - China. They're also voting for the same corporate-funded politicians.
For many of these people their best option now is working at the large Amazon warehouse down the road where they pick and pack goods largely from (you guessed it again) - China. But even then there just aren't that many of those jobs and as the horror stories reported in the media show they're routinely abused there.
> Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists.
Next time you're in the US visiting New York, California, Florida, etc come visit the rust belt in "flyover country" and see just how devastating the effects of this are. I see and live it (to some extent) everyday.
> Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
A huge factor and the ultimate root of the problem but back to voting, wallets, etc: in the real world this isn't going anywhere and from what I see it's just getting worse.
My concern comes from seeing the blight and literal deaths in MY community. My concern now is AI is coming for the white collar workforce as well.
Another old adage:
"Don't underestimate your enemy/competition".
The only way to prevent this is to reign in capitalism. Neoliberalism does not work.
> Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets.
Unfortunately, yes. People are strongly influenced by propaganda. Propaganda is often bankrolled by corporations. A good start with be curb lobbyism and make it more transparent.
Maybe. Or (maybe) yelling at the TV is a lot easier (and more visceral) than thinking "Hmm, this whole AI thing just might work out. Maybe I should treat the threat seriously this time just like my dad should have with the Chinese, robots, etc". As I said in my other reply it's generally not a good idea to outright dismiss what is even in the early stages a pretty clear potential threat to your livelihood.
> The markets can adapt also.
This can mean nearly anything and I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate in this context.
You could be out of a job with as little control of the whole situation as those rustbeltians you have such disregard for.
NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt. The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.
When you ship off a persons job in mass this is what happens.
I'll admit I was a bit angry and offended when I first read this. Did you miss the part about how horribly this has affected my friends, family, and neighbors? I say this expressly out of concern and literal, actual love.
Where do you live?
> NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt.
As I said in my other reply the generation before this one also outright dismissed the ability for Mexico, China, etc to take their jobs. In any case it certainly wasn't prevented.
> The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.
Again, as I said in my other reply what little manufacturing is left is a fraction of the jobs with a completely different skill set - CNC programming, etc. While you're off on Java because (frankly) you don't know what you're talking about it's pretty much exactly this.
I think OP referenced Java because it was the hot language of the 90s/early 2000s that people would harp on about studying.
Sort of like how people nowadays go to bootcamps to study JavaScript and Python
I’m not sure what your point is substituting one language for another - you can’t take a guy who’s painted cars his whole life and retool him to “cnc programming” even if the lathes didn’t git moved with the rest of production. The c suite did hit their stock goals tho so at least that is good!
If you’re telling a blue collar worker who’s been laid off “adapt or die” then you have contempt for those very love ones you claim to sympathize with.
This is the economic system you and others choose to support, by your rhetoric if nothing else. The purpose of a system is what it does &c &c
The Rust Belt exists (primarily) because the companies who owned all the big manufacturing in the late 20th century outsourced all of that labor to Asia.
If people who live there have a higher-than-average distrust of big corporate bullshit, it's an effect of being abandoned by them, not the cause of it.
This makes sense if you ignore every single example of AI-based features popping up all over consumer-facing services
That being said, GP has made the implicit assumption that they can't market it to investors as AI and to consumers as something else, and if investor interest in AI doesn't ebb, then I expect they will find a way to do just that.
How would you pitch a feature with erratic behavior?
To your second question, I believe a popular adjective might be 'invigorating'.
As "creative", "diverse", and "enriching". ;)
"the AI browser".
So yes I do see it in marketing.
what’s the next big bubble?
I think everybody remember that all but a few addicts got quickly bored of second life in the mid 00's and it was not worth trying a second time.
That's harsh, dude! ;-)
Tablets: These should be revolutionary. In practice, they're not, and I'm trying to sort out why.
The biggest gripe is that there's no single use for which a tablet is a preferred option, other than as an e-book reader, and numerous others for which it is distinctly less-than-optimal, with smaller smart (or "dumb") phones being better for on-the-go comms, and full-featured laptops or notebooks being preferably for virtually all compute applications.
I'd made that case in a Diaspora* post a few years back: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e100...>.
The most detailed critique is in this comment to that thread, with a (sorry, poorly-rendering at most screen-widths) table:
<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e100...>
I've used tablets for about a decade now (first an Android Samsung device, 3+ years on an Onyx BOOX e-ink ebook-reader, though it's really an Android tablet), and my assessment of them as less-than-serious compute devices remains, even with the addition of an external keyboard and Termux (a Linux-on-Android environment). There are simply too many compromises from the Android environment. And everything I've seen about iOS suggests that they would be worse as a general-compute device, despite some clear wins over Android/Google/Samsung elsewhere.
I'm not sure if tablets can break through or not. I'm leaning increasingly to a number of independent devices: tablet (for ebooks and podcasts), laptop (for real work), a small phone, preferably feature, possibly something like the Light Phone, independent image/video and audio capture (dedicated camera, point-and-shoot or DSLR, handheld audio recorder, see NYT's reviews: <https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-voice-re...> ... and note that reporters make heavy use of such equipment). At this point I'm not even sure I want a general-purpose phone of any sort given the heavy abuse of that channel (smishing / robocalls / fraud / harassment), though a wide-spread alternative doesn't seem to have emerged yet.
I hope EU will make this illegal if it isnt yet, they seem to be the only real power these days not giving a fuck about revenues of corporations in the first place when deciding stuff.
But I suppose you could view that as a neural network with a single neuron.
Maybe the real AI was the friends we made along the way.
-- https://soyacincau.com/2024/05/15/samsung-bespoke-ai-laundry...
If you can't defeat the people talking about the AI bubble, join them?
It's so Samsung. Back when Internet of Things was a thing, I went to an IoT meeting in SF where one of the speakers was from Samsung. They had a refrigerator with a tablet built into the door. The tablet and refrigerator shared nothing but power, and cost more than a comparable refrigerator and tablet separately. I asked the speaker why they built this, and was told that there's a fraction of the market that likes to show off their kitchens who will buy this stuff.
One problem... it only showed 3 shelves on the fridge side. You couldn't PTZ the camera around the entire fridge. No way to see the stuff stored in the door. No way to check the freezer, etc. Most reviewers concluded it was practically useless.
And if it can't identify the item, it can even ask the user to identify the item ("pasta I made last night") and how long they think it will last.
If it's made by a committee of idiots, it will just repeatedly say "Cannot identify item. Please name this item."... if it's actually good it will just have different beep tones for different states (Beep A: "All good", beep B: "Can't identify item", beep C: "Can't see expiration date", etc)
For corporations I’m sure they like whatever cash they squeeze out of whatever percent of people have this “get the most expensive offering” strategy but it seems likely the end goal is more about gradually normalizing more expensive offerings at all levels. After you get there, you can start removing useful things that justified cost originally (like headphone jacks) to push whatever else people now need (ear buds). Smart phones are the obvious example of this sort of thing, where major carriers will basically force customers to get use either the latest iPhone or android, and then act like your existing phone is a potato and you must be crazy to think that they could make it ring.
Not just a push to require smart phones but the latest ridiculously large one with features no one cares about, at a price point that it becomes a major investment for many households, and now needs a payment plan. whereas logic,progress and naive expectations of capitalism would suggest that such things would be getting cheaper, and represent a *smaller* chunk of your monthly wages.
Fix photos?
Oh walstreet cares about ai. What’s our ai plan. Internal team, we are buying a new AI dev product that’ll reduce headcount needs by 10%. Csuite sounds great!
You need to put AI to raise money or appeal to a broad swath of consumers, but educated consumers and enterprise buyers are increasingly rolling their eyes at it.