shout out to calacanis, consistently one of the funniest people on twitter while being completely serious. what can i say, the dude just has a comedic gift
Wait, they're actually calling themselves TCOT? Insert trite comment about "first as tragedy..." or "time is a flat circle" here. Are the AI guys going to start getting into Favstar?
I was eating a chicken sandwich at a Wingstop yesterday for lunch (not a bit), and the woman sitting behind me was talking to her friend on the phone, telling her how she uses ChatGPT to clean up essays before submitting them, and how this is "not plagiarism". She looked to be an older high school or younger college student, but I didn't want to interrupt her to check. It was neat to see!
Yep, right on analysis. "Sometimes what seem like obvious outcomes never come to pass, while the real futures emerge unexpectedly and accidentally." captures it. Though I do think this is the beginning of some major new transformation of society on the scale (or bigger) than the Internet. But no one know what it will be yet.
SEO idiots became Crypto idiots became AI idiots. The grifters are parasites feeding on hype, and stuff like this is basically spam. I have yet to see one of these hacks show some lasting impact on anything.
Doesn't this feel like a serious opportunity for sabotage? E.g., these influencer guys are all full of shit, so folks should be polluting their streams by putting out even more full-of-shit nonsense--"how AI can generate ten start-ups for you that will all get VC funding!" followed by GPT-generated business plans for start-ups that have already failed, only with new names; "Hundreds of turnkey-ready menu designs for fast casual chain!" with a bunch of rabidly disgusting AI-generated recipes ("scallop puree scones", "fermented avocado mate with blueberry root pulp"), etc. Drown the noise with more noise.
While I'm finding a lot of use out of AI, and have my own takes on the matter, I find the general "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING" mantra of these influencers as an obvious byproduct of a society lacking in meaningful opportunity. Them latching on to AI is just the latest trend, but alas - this needs to be said!
The harsh truth is many startups do marketkng like this, they treat their marketing strategies like AI influencers. These people jump from trend to trend, which is doable for one person social account. But businesses should never do marketing like this to survive in long term.
Whenever a tech is proclaimed to be The Future, it pretty much falls victim to Baby Atlas Syndrome.
Atlas is the mythological Titan tasked with the burden of holding the world on his shoulders. Now what if this were his fate all along, but Atlas is born in human form and must age into his ideal from birth as a baby? And the world is put on the shoulders of an infant who can't walk, hold in his waste, talk, or have self-awareness of the enormity of his obligation?
Baby Atlas goes splat.
We go through this hype-splat cycle about every half-decade or so. Tech comes up with a thing that it sells as civilization-changing that we will have to live our lives around. Before electricity, one technology would be foundational for an empire to achieve geopolitical and economic dominance, usually because said empire was able to come up with a literal killer app and change the nature of warfare. Gunpowder. The printing press. Metallurgy. Railroads. Electricity would turbocharge innovation, where most of humanity could expect to see at least one civilization-changing technology in their lifetimes. In the 20th century, there had been dozens of 19th century technologies that achieved mass adoption and innovated well beyond almost all of recorded history -- the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the television, fossil fuels and petrochemicals, chemical refrigeration and later air conditioning/HVAC, the shipping container, the silicon chip, personal computers, and finally the internet.
It's really, REALLY hard to come up with something civilization-changing like this, and there's no particular rhyme or reason why any of these technologies achieved mass adoption when, how and why they did.
The internet is ripe for hucksters to push bezzles of technologies that will be The Future. It's come in 5-year lifecycles. The late 1990s was e-commerce, producing only one winner: Amazon. The early 2000s was "Web 2.0" and blogs. It had its moment in the sun but culture moved on. The late 2000s and early 2010s was social media -- the Great Recession put everything in hibernation -- the gig economy and short-term rentals. The late 2010s was blockchain and crypto.
The early 2020s are the AI. What do all of these have in common? All of these technologies are Baby Atlases expected to transform the world, hyped as such, and create a frenzy of speculative high-growth, no-value transactions to cadge money into the VC/startup ecosystem.
It doesn't matter what the tech is. There's always a tech designated as Baby Atlas. There's always a culture of guru/-fluencers, VC types and party flunkies, and when one bezzle fails -- like crypto did spectacularly -- there's always another bezzle to keep the pump-and-dump (for investors) or burn-and-churn (for workers) momentum going.
My favorite is seeing one post about how prompting will be 100k salaried job, but then another - assuming the higher level rank you mention, - talk about how prompting is going to be automated and nobody will need a prompter - it is Goya's painting in action of Saturn Devouring his son
shout out to calacanis, consistently one of the funniest people on twitter while being completely serious. what can i say, the dude just has a comedic gift
Wait, they're actually calling themselves TCOT? Insert trite comment about "first as tragedy..." or "time is a flat circle" here. Are the AI guys going to start getting into Favstar?
I was eating a chicken sandwich at a Wingstop yesterday for lunch (not a bit), and the woman sitting behind me was talking to her friend on the phone, telling her how she uses ChatGPT to clean up essays before submitting them, and how this is "not plagiarism". She looked to be an older high school or younger college student, but I didn't want to interrupt her to check. It was neat to see!
Yep, right on analysis. "Sometimes what seem like obvious outcomes never come to pass, while the real futures emerge unexpectedly and accidentally." captures it. Though I do think this is the beginning of some major new transformation of society on the scale (or bigger) than the Internet. But no one know what it will be yet.
SEO idiots became Crypto idiots became AI idiots. The grifters are parasites feeding on hype, and stuff like this is basically spam. I have yet to see one of these hacks show some lasting impact on anything.
Doesn't this feel like a serious opportunity for sabotage? E.g., these influencer guys are all full of shit, so folks should be polluting their streams by putting out even more full-of-shit nonsense--"how AI can generate ten start-ups for you that will all get VC funding!" followed by GPT-generated business plans for start-ups that have already failed, only with new names; "Hundreds of turnkey-ready menu designs for fast casual chain!" with a bunch of rabidly disgusting AI-generated recipes ("scallop puree scones", "fermented avocado mate with blueberry root pulp"), etc. Drown the noise with more noise.
Thank you Max, this one really struck a cord.
While I'm finding a lot of use out of AI, and have my own takes on the matter, I find the general "THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING" mantra of these influencers as an obvious byproduct of a society lacking in meaningful opportunity. Them latching on to AI is just the latest trend, but alas - this needs to be said!
The harsh truth is many startups do marketkng like this, they treat their marketing strategies like AI influencers. These people jump from trend to trend, which is doable for one person social account. But businesses should never do marketing like this to survive in long term.
Whenever a tech is proclaimed to be The Future, it pretty much falls victim to Baby Atlas Syndrome.
Atlas is the mythological Titan tasked with the burden of holding the world on his shoulders. Now what if this were his fate all along, but Atlas is born in human form and must age into his ideal from birth as a baby? And the world is put on the shoulders of an infant who can't walk, hold in his waste, talk, or have self-awareness of the enormity of his obligation?
Baby Atlas goes splat.
We go through this hype-splat cycle about every half-decade or so. Tech comes up with a thing that it sells as civilization-changing that we will have to live our lives around. Before electricity, one technology would be foundational for an empire to achieve geopolitical and economic dominance, usually because said empire was able to come up with a literal killer app and change the nature of warfare. Gunpowder. The printing press. Metallurgy. Railroads. Electricity would turbocharge innovation, where most of humanity could expect to see at least one civilization-changing technology in their lifetimes. In the 20th century, there had been dozens of 19th century technologies that achieved mass adoption and innovated well beyond almost all of recorded history -- the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the television, fossil fuels and petrochemicals, chemical refrigeration and later air conditioning/HVAC, the shipping container, the silicon chip, personal computers, and finally the internet.
It's really, REALLY hard to come up with something civilization-changing like this, and there's no particular rhyme or reason why any of these technologies achieved mass adoption when, how and why they did.
The internet is ripe for hucksters to push bezzles of technologies that will be The Future. It's come in 5-year lifecycles. The late 1990s was e-commerce, producing only one winner: Amazon. The early 2000s was "Web 2.0" and blogs. It had its moment in the sun but culture moved on. The late 2000s and early 2010s was social media -- the Great Recession put everything in hibernation -- the gig economy and short-term rentals. The late 2010s was blockchain and crypto.
The early 2020s are the AI. What do all of these have in common? All of these technologies are Baby Atlases expected to transform the world, hyped as such, and create a frenzy of speculative high-growth, no-value transactions to cadge money into the VC/startup ecosystem.
It doesn't matter what the tech is. There's always a tech designated as Baby Atlas. There's always a culture of guru/-fluencers, VC types and party flunkies, and when one bezzle fails -- like crypto did spectacularly -- there's always another bezzle to keep the pump-and-dump (for investors) or burn-and-churn (for workers) momentum going.
Anti-Humanism is a self replicating enshittification business model https://aaronlee.substack.com/p/anti-humanism-is-the-san-francisco and it's purveyors are like the Borg https://aaronlee.substack.com/p/the-borg
thank you for writing this..
I misread the title as Slapped rather than Stopped. I like my misread title better.
https://mastodon.social/@kpgraham/110254932783011392
how about no
That postrat thread is just incredibly embarrassing. "Yeah I'm hacking the collective mindframe by vagueposting on twitter"
My favorite is seeing one post about how prompting will be 100k salaried job, but then another - assuming the higher level rank you mention, - talk about how prompting is going to be automated and nobody will need a prompter - it is Goya's painting in action of Saturn Devouring his son
Greg Isenberg always manages to top everyone when it comes to these types of threads https://twitter.com/gregisenberg/status/1648677152005451777?s=20