so like I said, I work in the tech industry, and it’s been kind of fascinating watching whole new taboos develop at work around this genAI stuff. All we do is talk about genAI, everything is genAI now, “we have to win the AI race,” blah blah blah, but nobody asks -
you can’t ask -
What’s it for?
What’s it
for?
Why would anyone want this?
I sit in so many meetings and listen to genuinely very intelligent people talk until steam is rising off their skulls about genAI, and wonder how fast I’d get fired if I asked: do real people actually want this product, or are the only people excited about this technology the shareholders who want to see lines go up?
like you realize this is a bubble, right, guys? because nobody actually needs this? because it’s
not actually very good? normal people are excited by the novelty of it, and finance bro capitalists are wetting their shorts about it because they want to get rich quick off of the Next Big Thing In Tech, but the novelty will wear off and the bros will move on to something else and we’ll just be left with billions and billions of dollars invested in technology that nobody wants.
and I don’t say it, because I need my job. And I wonder how many other people sitting at the same table, in the same meeting, are also not saying it, because they need their jobs.
idk man it’s just become a really weird environment.
Like, I remember reading an article and one of the questions the author posed and that’s repeated here stuck with me, namely: what is it for? If this is a trillion dollar investment what’s the trillion dollar problem it is solving?
I finally think I have an answer to that. It’s to eliminate the need to pay another person ever again. The trillion dollar problem it’s solving is Payroll.
Except like… it’s not solving that
either.
A metaphor I’ve been using lately is that being a tech-interested person and watching the AI hype is like if you had followed the development of blenders for years. You watched them go from prototypes that were basically just a spinning open blade all the way to a design that has the potential to be a consumer Vitamix! It’s really cool! Blenders have come such a long way, and they’re ready for prime time!
And then you turn on the news and see otherwise rational, intelligent people saying “gosh, imagine, soon we’ll replace all of our chefs, and our surgeons, and our high school teachers with blenders!” and your friends and family all nod and agree and say things like “wow, blenders can basically do everything now!” And when you ask people “are you HIGH?!” they show you the new blender they bought, and how well it makes a smoothie, and then they act like that’s evidence for a statement like “blenders will replace 90% of the workforce” not being utterly nonsensical and deranged.
“Scientists just have to fix the hallucination problem!” they say. When you ask what the hallucination problem is, they say “I’ll show you” and then they put their unfinished math homework into the blender and hit pulse. “You see, I wanted it to
solve those math problems, but it just shredded the paper. It must have
hallucinated a world where the answer to 2+2 was puree.” When you point out that it did exactly what it was designed to do, because a blender
cannot do math and it will
never do math and expecting it to be able to do math just because it can make both smoothies
and soup is ludicrous and bizarre, they tell you that they’re sure that blenders will be able to do math any day now, just you wait, “I mean, look how far they’ve come! A year ago I would have said that blenders could never be strong enough to blend ice into sorbet, but now they can. So who are you to say they’ll never do math???”
The thing is, there are
plenty of things that LLMs and generative AI are good for. OCR is still a vital need, and AI is
excellent at it. Facial recognition is an area where AI has a lot of potential. It can be used as a screening step for the analysis of all sorts of large datasets. Better autocomplete on your phone is a real thing that real people want. There are a ton of problems that these tools genuinely do solve!
…But none of them are
trillion dollarproblems, and that’s an issue, because no one wanted to pour a trillion dollars into “improved OCR” and “somewhat better autocomplete”.
So, we get snakeoil to make up the weight. It’ll
solve payroll; it’ll
democratize visual art; it’ll make it so that
anyone can do
anything – you name it, blenders will do it, eventually! Once we’ve fixed the problems with using blenders to do everything, including tasks which aren’t blending things, then blenders
willbe worth the trillion dollars that people have already spent developing them! Look at the progress we’ve already made: we’re working on attaching a calculator to the blender, and that could make it so that blenders
can do math! Don’t you dare suggest that calculators already exist and work just fine without being attached to blenders – we
need our blenders to do math, because we
promised that one day they’d be able to do everything! And they will! Blenders are the future and don’t you
dare suggest that maybe that future is just “we can blend things now”; if you so much as breath those words, the bubble will pop.
SMITH then created randomly generated song and artist names for audio files so that they would appear to have been created by real artists rather than artificial intelligence. For example, an alphabetically consecutive selection of 25 of the names of the AI songs SMITH used is as follows: “Zygophyceae,” “Zygophyllaceae,” “Zygophyllum,” “Zygopteraceae,” “Zygopteris,” “Zygopteron,” “Zygopterous,” “Zygosporic,” “Zygotenes,” “Zygotes,” “Zygotic,” “Zygotic Lanie,” “Zygotic Washstands,” “Zyme Bedewing,” “Zymes,” “Zymite,” “Zymo Phyte,” “Zymogenes,” “Zymogenic,” “Zymologies,” “Zymoplastic,” “Zymopure,” “Zymotechnical,” “Zymotechny,” and “Zyzomys.”
Similarly, an alphabetically consecutive selection of 25 of the names of the “artists” of the AI songs SMITH used is as follows: “Calliope Bloom,” “Calliope Erratum,” “Callous,” “Callous Humane,” “Callous Post,” “Callousness,” “Calm Baseball,” “Calm Connected,” “Calm Force,” “Calm Identity,” “Calm Innovation,” “Calm Knuckles,” “Calm Market,” “Calm The Super,” “Calm Weary,” “Calms Scorching,” “Calorie Event,” “Calorie Screams,” “Calvin Mann,” “Calvinistic Dust,” “Calypso Xored,” “Camalus Disen,” “Camaxtli Minerva,” “Cambists Cagelings,” and “Camel Edible.”
I admire Ray Kurzweil’s advocacy of radical ideas. However, like so many scientists and tech mavens he has never been able to frame the essential humanistic components of his master plan in a compelling way. When you promote powerful notions of human transformation it obviously becomes important not to portray humanity as something that must be overcome. Therefore it would seem to be essential to include a Future Humanities department as part of the Singularity University’s curriculum.
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