On the contrary: society has repeatedly rejected a lot of ideas that industries have come up with.
HD DVD, 3D TV, Crypto Currency, NFT’s, Laser Discs, 8-track tapes, UMD’s. A decade ago everyone was hyping up how VR would be the future of gaming, yet it’s still a niche novelty today.
The difference with AI is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a supply side push this strong before. I’m not seeing a whole lot of demand for it from individual people. It’s “oh this is a neat little feature I can use” not “this technology is going to change my life” the way that the laundry machine, the personal motor vehicle, the telephone, or the internet did. I could be wrong but I think that as long as we can survive the bubble bursting, we will come out on the other side with LLM’s being a blip on the radar. And one consequence will be that if anyone makes a real AI they will need to call it something else for marketing purposes because “AI” will be ruined.
AI’s biggest business is (if not already, it will be) surveillance systems sold to authoritarian governments worldwide. Israel is using it in Gaza.It’s both used internally and exported as a product by China. Not just cameras on street corners doing facial recognition, but monitoring the websites you visit, the things you buy, the people you talk to. AI will be used on large datasets like these to label people as dissidents, to disempower them financially, and to isolate them socially. And if the AI hallucinates in this endeavor, that’s fine. Better to imprison 10 innocent men than to let 1 rebel go free.
In the meantime, AI is being laundered to the individual consumer as a harmless if ineffective toy. “Make me a portrait, give me some advice, summarize a meeting,” all things it can do if you accept some amount of errors. But given this domain of problems it solves, the average person would never expect that anyone would use it to identify the first people to pack into train cars.
HDDVDs weren’t rejected by the masses they were a casualty in Sony’s vendetta against the loss of Beta and DAT. Both of which were rejected by industry not consumers (though both were later embraced by industry and Betas even outlasted VHSs). They would have won out for the same reasons that Sony lost the previous format wars (insistence on licensing fees) except this time Sony bought out Columbia and had a whole library of video and a studio to make new movies to exclusively release on their format. Essentially the supply side pushing something until consumers accepted it, though to your point not quite as bad as AI is right now.
8-Tracks and laserdiscs were just replaced by better formats (Compact Cassette and Video CD/DVD respectively). Each of them were also replacements for previous formats like Reel to Reel and CEDs.
UMDs only don’t exist still because flash media got better and because Sony opted to use a cheaper scratch resistant coating instead of a built in case for later formats (like Blu-ray). Also, UMDs themselves were a replacement for or at least inspired by an earlier format called MiniDisc.
Capitalism’s biggest feat has been convincing people that everything is the next big thing and nothing that has come before is similar when just about everything is just a rinse and repeat, even LLMs… remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings?
Unfortunately the masses will do as they’re told. Our society has been trained to do this. Even those that resist are playing their part.
On the contrary: society has repeatedly rejected a lot of ideas that industries have come up with.
HD DVD, 3D TV, Crypto Currency, NFT’s, Laser Discs, 8-track tapes, UMD’s. A decade ago everyone was hyping up how VR would be the future of gaming, yet it’s still a niche novelty today.
The difference with AI is that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a supply side push this strong before. I’m not seeing a whole lot of demand for it from individual people. It’s “oh this is a neat little feature I can use” not “this technology is going to change my life” the way that the laundry machine, the personal motor vehicle, the telephone, or the internet did. I could be wrong but I think that as long as we can survive the bubble bursting, we will come out on the other side with LLM’s being a blip on the radar. And one consequence will be that if anyone makes a real AI they will need to call it something else for marketing purposes because “AI” will be ruined.
AI’s biggest business is (if not already, it will be) surveillance systems sold to authoritarian governments worldwide. Israel is using it in Gaza. It’s both used internally and exported as a product by China. Not just cameras on street corners doing facial recognition, but monitoring the websites you visit, the things you buy, the people you talk to. AI will be used on large datasets like these to label people as dissidents, to disempower them financially, and to isolate them socially. And if the AI hallucinates in this endeavor, that’s fine. Better to imprison 10 innocent men than to let 1 rebel go free.
In the meantime, AI is being laundered to the individual consumer as a harmless if ineffective toy. “Make me a portrait, give me some advice, summarize a meeting,” all things it can do if you accept some amount of errors. But given this domain of problems it solves, the average person would never expect that anyone would use it to identify the first people to pack into train cars.
HDDVDs weren’t rejected by the masses they were a casualty in Sony’s vendetta against the loss of Beta and DAT. Both of which were rejected by industry not consumers (though both were later embraced by industry and Betas even outlasted VHSs). They would have won out for the same reasons that Sony lost the previous format wars (insistence on licensing fees) except this time Sony bought out Columbia and had a whole library of video and a studio to make new movies to exclusively release on their format. Essentially the supply side pushing something until consumers accepted it, though to your point not quite as bad as AI is right now.
8-Tracks and laserdiscs were just replaced by better formats (Compact Cassette and Video CD/DVD respectively). Each of them were also replacements for previous formats like Reel to Reel and CEDs.
UMDs only don’t exist still because flash media got better and because Sony opted to use a cheaper scratch resistant coating instead of a built in case for later formats (like Blu-ray). Also, UMDs themselves were a replacement for or at least inspired by an earlier format called MiniDisc.
Capitalism’s biggest feat has been convincing people that everything is the next big thing and nothing that has come before is similar when just about everything is just a rinse and repeat, even LLMs… remember when Watson beat Ken Jennings?
See also: Cars, appliances, consumer electronics, movies, food, architecture.
We are ruled by the market and the market is ruled by the lowest common denominator.