Just as importantly: we have to stop amplifying tech bosses’ chosen narratives about their products’ destructive potential, because this helps them raise more money and do more terrible things. Bernie Sanders needs to stop insisting that the US government should own 50% of the money-losingest corporations the world has ever seen and start talking about how they will not get a government bailout when their investment bubble bursts.
I’m not sure Zitron’s stance is about AI’s capabilities as much as what the financial situation is, and the capabilities question is more the investors playing roulette that AI will somehow become AGI and change labor forever.
However from what I’ve heard of his views, it’s usually “hey maybe we shouldn’t be investing another trillion into an industry that took a trillion and isn’t profitable”, and how that the bulk of the US economy is between two non profitable AI companies and cloud providers, with cloud providers using most of their cloud on AI and AI getting most of their money from cloud providers. And that inherently is fucked from a financial perspective, and will end when they run out of money to invest. Pop.
We need to separate two concepts with the AI conversation. Is it a real technology? Yes, it is. And it works, often. It isn’t the scifi world ending technology they want you to believe in, but damn can it make an android app quickly. And get most of the buttons right, if you test it enough and ask nicely.
And there’s the other concept: a financial bubble. A financial bubble can exist regardless of whether a technology is real. The dot com bust happened and destroyed forward thinking companies like pets.com and WebVan, because at that time no one wanted to buy groceries or pet food online… And those companies at least didn’t know how to profit doing so.
Consumer trust in internet purchases took roughly 20 years to catch up to the real internet technology, and here we are. Pets.com or WebVan are basically just replaced by Amazon, another dotcom company that was actually run profitable like a business. And if you won that roulette guess on an online book seller, you would’ve made a fuck ton of money.
AI is causing a financial bubble because, regardless of what it is, the investors are stupid gamblers who are drunk in the casino and want to win everything they lost in this fucked inflation economy.
A bubble has very little to do with a technology and its utility and much more to do with investor behavior, and right now we have the makings for an economic disaster.
“Works” by whose definition? I am a software engineer woth over 10 years of professional, continuous employment and experience. How does Claude work for me, exactly? My company paid for every employee to have a subscription and all it has ever helped me legitimately with is debugging cryptic python errors since they fired all the python devs
Bubbles have always been about the idiocy of investors. Yes.
False, it’s able to fool c-suite execs and gullible rubes into thinking they can build an app. In reality, these vibe coding projects all fall apart. Zitron relies on Nik Suresh’s arguments, which I agree with, that software development: shipping, running, and supporting software, is a hell of a lot more than just code.
The bad quality of the code and resulting app is really a secondary discussion to whether this can really count as software development. One of my favorite software development tools of the last decade is actually a Microsoft standard called LSP, which allows text editors to talk to compilers to get code suggestions and linting as you type. You used to have to use an ‘integrated’ text editor, or IDE, that usually only worked with one or a handful of languages. Now, everyone can use their editor of choice.
The ai craze, to me, is much lower in productivity gains than LSP for software development, it might be negative because you are handing off the one part of software development that ties all of its subdisciplines together. It’s crazy how fast the industry standard went from ‘clean code’ and concerns about whitespace, furiously tracking issue lifetimes, to just throwing up their hands, actively telling people not to care. I hate both paradigms, to be clear, but at least they were trying to measuring things in the former.
The public furor over it does have to do with technology. The consumers don’t know that they already trust and have been using AI so much everywhere. Autocomplete was once considered AI. Same goes for image search, voice recognition/dictation, spam filtering, search results, map navigation, etc. Do they even know their daily doom scroll feeds are based on the field of AI. Where’s the anger about all that stuff?? AI is and has been everywhere. I don’t see people trying to burn down Google image search or their Netflix feed. People just don’t know they’ve been immersed in it on a daily basis for far longer than LLMs.
It’s a matter of relative perspective but if you showed someone from about pre-2000 the kind of AI/ML stuff we have now, they’d be mind blown. It wasn’t even that long ago that object recognition was considered one of the major hurdles in the field. Right now that is unimpressive technology such that nobody even considers it AI anymore.
Right now the goal post is at, why can’t I command it produce an end product like a Star Trek computer. Has anyone stopped to think at how far the field has come. It’s not about what it can’t do, nobody thinks about what it can in any other way than unimpressive.
There’s not only a disconnect in economic, but also technological perspective. Both need a correction.