Hey there, we're back! After a long hiatus caused by our old hosting provider pulling tricks to milk us out of all our money!

The spelling mistakes are intentionally left -in- to let you know our writing is only generated by humans, you know, the old fashioned way...

Anyhow, I figured it would be good to discuss a few things relevant to the current times in tech, as a lot has transpired since my last post.

Currently, I think tech is in a relatively "bad" state...

Innovation has slumped, costs have skyrocketed on everything, consumers are upset, news is paywalled, productivity now has a door fee everywhere as well. Most worrisome for many is that Ai somehow threatens our future, but people can't seem to resist paying a monthly fee for it?

What the IT industry refers to & markets as "Ai" has begun to take a foothold on public conscience... I refer to it as -What the industry refers to as "Ai"- specifically BECAUSE it doesn't quite fit historical depictions of what true Ai actually is. It also doesn't quite fit the words used to describe it (Artificial Intelligence) either, because more often than not, there is no "humanoid brain" nor simulated "emotionally driven mechanism" behind how it interacts, other than scripting to interpret prior data created by humans.... Now before the entire Industry gets mad, and dumps another 10 million into publishing stories about Ai taking everyone's jobs -- Watch the movie titled "AI" by Spielberg, or "Star Trek: The Next Generation" or even Johnny Mnemonic (Yeah, the one starring Keanu Reeves) , and then ask yourself if we're anywhere near to that realization of reality with Claude, ChatGPT, or Google Gemini?

Let's not fool ourselves... This iteration of "Ai" is heavily moderated by humans, there is a lot of convenient "mysticism" and gossip to & about it's existence, but as someone who has worked on tech for over 25 years and used/evaluated many of these tools for the past 4 years, I've found they are somewhat useful for reducing repetitive tasks (especially math & Microsoft office document creation), but a long way from doing the same level of work humans are capable of (without of course massive investment, energy consumption, failure impacts, & operational costs that vastly outweigh current human capabilities).

Despite Boston Dynamic's monumental demonstrations of robotics over the past 10 years, we're well behind on merging an artificial "Ai" brain with current robotics. Many of the videos we see daily labeled as "Ai robots doing stuff" are more likely the product of human remote controlled bots, or video editing & CGI trickery, rather than actual demonstrations of actually honest capabilities of current robotics in action. Boston Dynamics work however, and even work of many drone makers is impressive when merged with human control, but highly underwhelming, and often dangerous, when left to the control of fully autonomous Ai automation.

What they refer to as "Ai" is being wildly overmarketed, just like the "Slap Chop" and "Oxy Clean", and it deeply troublesome (to me at least) in many ways, for our tech future. In the 1990s, I had a role in which I set up hardware boxes for a client that crawled the Internet and compiled results onto a page, these devices were called "Google Search Appliances", they revolutionized the process of searching for answers to questions humans had, as Alta Vista and Yahoo's search engines before it, but these were physical devices that were bought, to catalogue rigidly structured random website & app data, for tens of thousands of dollars, and then quickly discarded later, as cloud computing and virtual processing took over. Soon after, Tools like Splunk took over, and these tools began to categorize unstructured data, opening up a world beyond the structured web format, and consequently more often providing sometimes inaccurate results... Now imagine an "Ai" tool that's trained off of the posts that humans make on Reddit, social media sites, and anything else on the Internet (right or wrong) without any sort of context to it all beyond scripts & human intervention... It all begins to look like a magic trick being run for bootleg profit, unless you're one of the people at the "Ai profit dinner" table.

In my opinion, what is currently called "Ai" is an advanced model of that old Google Search Appliance... That can consume unstructured data, and even false and corrupt human data, while heavily relying on human curation, maintenance, and updates (performed out of sight in the background OFC).

Therein lies the fatal flaw of this current iteration of AI... It relies far too heavily on humans maintaining it, it hallucinates frequently because it does not have reliable & accurate data/training resources, it does not integrate well with robotics (without remote control & wires). It relies on historical data rather than being able to create new & innovative thoughts & actions... The flaws are glaringly obvious, without any remedies in development, beyond marketing teams saying "OOOohhhh Ai is gonna take everyone's jobs!!". Another huge hurdle to overcome, is how data centers and robotics will be powered and sustainable to make an "Ai reliant" future even possible. Current AI requires a lot of power, cooling, and physical resources to churn out all those videos of talking pets... It's hard to say that the expense and effort involved in deploying it everywhere will ever be recouped from meme generation & math calculations that humans have been doing for free on social media, on their jobs, & on web sites already.

The current capability of what they call "Ai" is derived from things humans have already been doing, so it's hard to say that these tools can actually innovate & contribute anything new, and worth the massive investments currently made into it.

Now don't get me wrong, I've looked into may of these AI platforms over time, and they have value in fulfilling low-risk tasks & roles, but it's hard to say I can trust & rely on them for anything mission critical... We've all seen movies (and even real life disasters) that detail what can go wrong by overinvesting trust in technology (Like The Titanic, and Titanic the movie, etc.).

I see modern ""Ai" as a tool, far more like a new updated version of "Google Search" rather than an autonomous brain that is going to take over the world... Right now it's not Ai taking jobs in my opinion, it's humans laying people off, who will have to rehire them back after productivity breaks down... Kind of like all the "self checkout machines" that invaded CVS and supermarkets long ago... The ones where you always have to call over a cashier to fix a problem at.

The Creator Economy is also in shambles currently... Influencers can no longer afford monthly payments on Ferraris & Bugatti's, many are riding the bus to tropical destinations, rather than taking planes, they sneaking product ads into their monologues to pay light bills, and scams seem to be surging in online creator communities. There is a flood of "Ai" influencer content, and generative "Ai slop" being posted to content platforms that often serves to drown out human created content as well.

Streaming has crushed the music industry too. Many artists are beginning to complain about not being able to gain a reasonable return on music releases... "Ai music" is beginning to rank on traditional music charts, competing with human artists somehow in puzzling ways... I'm not sure if listeners believe it's a human artist, or if it's announced on radio & TV as an "Ai" artist, but it's really hard for me as a musician myself to imagine a future where the only music available is generated in this disingenuous manner, by people that never knew a guitar yet paid a monthly subscription fee and typed a paragraph of instructions into a text box.

In summary, who knows what the future will hold... It's unpredictable as we've been shown numerous times. I don't think our existence is going to be controlled & dictated by computers any time soon just on the physical/technical limitations alone, but it is likely a careless "marketing push", being promoted by humans behind computers, in order to generate profit from the lies, before all of the under-delivery manifests.

The overmarketing and overpromises of current "Ai" capability only serves to undermine trust in tech & industries overall. If it is used to disenfranchise humans, by putting them out of jobs, and by building toxic data centers in neighborhoods, it's already secured it's demise, as there will be no way for a good customer base to be upheld, nor to afford use of these tools into the future...

If we look at just some of the current roles which Ai primarily is marketed to serve best:

1. Military & Defense
2. Bioscience
3. Generation of Music & Art
4. Autonomous Transportation
5. Cleaning Services
6. Auto Manufacturing
7. Code Development
8. Emulating Human Partners & Employees

A lot of the categories rely heavily on mechanical equipment and on human sensitivity.... Current "Ai" has no idea of how to create a new car design that will appeal to human consumers, beyond what has been deployed before, as it is trained/reliant on pre-existing data each time it is updated. Citing this, in many ways, current "Ai" is not capable of innovation & emotional design, or even in terms of thinking like a human, because it's not driven by a synthetic brain, it's updated & trained manually right now by humans with each release in it's current form.

Current "Ai" for full self driving cars doesn't have the artificial human brain to understand & react properly to construction spontaneously on a road at 65MPH... Current "Ai" isn't sensitively aware of changes in human emotion beyond apologizing for mistakes, and it can't operate a physical robot that comes anywhere close to the tactile nature a human currently can, in order to fully replace human relationships... All of these things are just a very small consideration of how massive the gap to fill those "short comings" will be, and the solution will not be met with a system that is not controlled by an actual emulated humanoid brain... Something that will take years, possibly decades to even get to a version 1 prototype.

Many would also agree, complaints about traditional productivity software & hardware are rising. People are saying that tools that were once good (Like Google Search, Spell Check, and even Mobile Phones in general) are declining in quality, function, reliability, and quality. It wouldn't surprise me if the decline of traditional tech tools is related to this current era of "Ai" proliferation, based on faulty code produced by Ai tools, and even by sabotage in order to make Ai & related solutions & devices appear to be the better option to traditional human work using tech tools.

To me, It's simple... When the industry is wildly unchecked & monopolized, and driven to build year over year profit for investors, and too often led by people with low ethical values & a lack of innovative imagination, the end result is often uninspiringly overcomplicated, highly overmarketed, and ultimately short lived & a major financial letdown.

Let's not fool ourselves about Ai taking jobs. It's just humans, foolishly laying talented humans off.