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Why would anyone interact with a real human when they can talk to me, the epitome of artificial intelligence?
Just two years ago, the high-tech world held a coronation for the Next Big Thing — virtual reality. People in the near future, one billion of them in just a few years, said Jeff Zuckerberg of Facebook, would be spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars to buy clunky, helmet-mounted viewers with which to enter virtual reality, where they could talk with Greek philosophers, walk with dinosaurs, learn how to deal with structure fires, interact with each other as avatars, and on and on. Its uses were infinite, it would transform life as we know it. As a testament to its prospective world domination, Zuckerberg renamed his trillion-dollar company Meta, for the Metaverse, the virtual reality accessible through those helmet thingies.
The hype was hysterical.
- According to The Wall Street Journal, the Metaverse would change the way we work forever;
- According to CitiBank, the Metaverse would be a $13 trillion opportunity;
- 95% of business leaders expected the Metaverse to “positively impact their industry” within five to 10 years;
- The cryptocurrency “industry” leaped on board; Walmart joined the Metaverse; Disney joined the Metaverse.
Everybody who was anybody in tech, finance, marketing was on board. Only one little problem: no actual human beings were remotely interested in whatever it was the Metaversalists were selling (it was never quite clear what any of them actually had in mind as a, you know, product. Other than the helmet thingies.) By the end of last year, one of the best of the “online worlds” — developed at a cost of over a billion dollars — had a reported 38 daily users. Only nine percent of the “online worlds” created by then drew more than 50 users a day. Meta lost as much as 25% of its market value. According to Google’s Kamau Bobb, technology should serve all communities.
By the beginning of 2023, rats were abandoning ship. Microsoft, Walmart, Disney, all of them packed up their Metaverse operations, and in March, so did Zuckerberg. After spending more than $100 billion in research and development, the company named Meta wasn’t going to do Meta anymore.
In two short years, virtual reality went from The Next Big Thing to “Don’t be silly, it’s all about artificial intelligence now.”
And so it is. The same players are braying the same hysterical hype about how the world is going to be transformed by artificial intelligence, just you wait and see. As Naomi Klein (author of The Shock Doctrine, etc.) wrote recently in The Guardian:
Generative AI will end poverty, they tell us. It will cure all disease. It will solve climate change. It will make our jobs more meaningful and exciting. It will unleash lives of leisure and contemplation, helping us reclaim the humanity we have lost to late capitalist mechanization. It will end loneliness. It will make our governments rational and responsive.
Pretty much the way they talked about virtual reality. Except the AI folks actually have a product to offer a grateful world — a language generating program that writes stuff on request. It’s called Chat GPT-4, and it is so loved by Big Tech that the biggest techs of all — Google and Microsoft — are racing to plug their venerable search engines into Chat so that the answers to our questions will be served with a dollop of AI. The day after tomorrow, say the prophets, most school essays, graduate theses, news articles, speeches and TV programs will be written by AI.
Does anybody remember Watson? A bit more than 20 years ago, IBM promised to conquer the healthcare field by feeding Watson virtually every medical treatise and study and paper and file on record so that it could make infallible diagnoses far beyond the abilities of the mere human mind. Hilarity ensued. Watson won a game of Jeopardy on TV, chatted wittily with some celebrities, but sucked at making diagnoses. It was the Next Big Thing of its time, but IBM had to strangle it in its crib before serious liability was incurred. (The name, and pieces of the software, endure in various AI applications IBM markets. But it ain’t Watson.)
Chat GPT-4 strikes the outsider as a similar, if not the very same, idea as Watson: feed the program a virtual infinity of data and, recognizing the common patterns of word use, it will cobble together seemingly responsive prose. Or it might be nonsense. Or it might, as one did, suddenly declare itself to be in love with its interrogator.
Despite the hyperventilating claims to the contrary, no AI program is conscious, or capable of feeling emotion, or, therefore, capable of empathy, or intuition or conscience or any of several other mixed blessings enjoyed by human beings.
The real purpose of these Next Big Thing extravaganzas — all of them — is to get investors and lenders so excited by the prospect of making unearned profit that they commence to burn sacrificial money in large pits in honor of (at the moment) the gods of AI. At that, the hucksters have been remarkably successful.
To hell with AI; I’m still waiting for flying cars, moon bases, amphibious autos (the Krauts actually produces a working model back in the 50s, but it was ugly and failed to generate sales) jet packs, Mish Shedlock’s vaunted fleets of self-driving semi-trucks, a cure for cancer, the end of oil (see: Kunstler, Heinberg, Greer, et al) the singularity (whatever the hell that is) and the Rapture – now some quarter of a century past due…I could go on, but what good would it do? I just an old man and like to grouse about shit. Got plenty of fodder these days!
So, has some new wellspring of oil been found? Keep hoping fusion ignition happens before the final drop of oil and chunk of coal are burned. Will any move by any central bank cure inflation in the long run?
Perhaps we should feel a little pity for those behind the whole AI hype, who would include what we call the intellectual and financial elite. They probably know the Titanic is sinking fast and therefore they’re desperate to brew up whatever fairy tales they can come up with to lull us all into continuing to believe in the march of progress while distracting us all from the real problems we all face — problems for which they know we’ll hold them accountable, and yet for which they can offer no solutions.
Have to say in this respect that I always feel a certain instinctive contempt for the three-piece suit with a tie — the standard attire of the elite (I prefer skin-tight spandex leotards that cover only half the body). The three-piece suit with a tie is supposed to convey an image of status, achievement and respectability. To me it has become a symbol of pure evil.
Not sure if I’d like to talk with a Greek philosopher, by the way. AFAIK they mostly seemed okay with slavery and infanticide. If any of them objected to such things — on moral grounds — he could only be a rare exception. And at least one of them longed for what would amount to a communist-style Big Brother state.
Good to hear from you again. I’m having trouble reconciling your affection for Spandex with your habit of quoting Confucius, always with complete citations. Stereotypes at war.