At Least The Robber Barons Built Things
The 'AI Revolution' is another trend that we're realizing doesn't create anything new
Recently, I came across this article about how searching on Google “can you melt eggs” returns an answer of yes. This was due to the fact that the website Quora was using an AI chatbot to automatically reply to some more basic inquiries from its users, and even when that answer was wrong, it still got promoted to the top of Google’s search results. A more gruesome example is that MSN recently had to pull an AI generated headline that announced the death of former NBA player Brandon Hunter by declaring him “useless at 42”.
If you anything about AI, you know that these chatbots are trained on the internet itself and base their answers on data collected online. The next version of ChatGPT is currently training on an internet inundated with data from its previous versions, meaning these problems will only compound as time goes on. After less than a year of wide spread popularity, ChatGPT and AI in general are having their fundamental limitations exposed. If I told you two years ago that AI would have something in common with the von Hapsburgs, you might think it was going to try to take over the world from the shadows, but it turns out that AI is a lover and not a fighter.
(I’m going to be using ‘AI’ as interchangeable with chatbots and image generators because that’s what the buzzword generally indicates)
Still, the recent AI explosion is probably the most impressive leap in technology that I’ve seen in years. I grew up in the early 00s to the mid 2010s, that’s when most of my ‘formative memories’ are from. This was a time of great technological change, the internet was confined to small computers in the corner of my kindergarten classroom but became the only way that I could submit most of my schoolwork by freshman year of high school. When my dad got the original iPad around the time of release, I had a real sense that there was something new happening in the world. The future was coming, and we all had a glimpse of it. That doesn’t happen anymore, technology doesn't feel like it’s going anywhere.
Maybe this is because we are living in the future, I mean, that had to happen eventually. Maybe it’s nostalgia, after all, I’m talking about a time when my brain was far from fully developed. But there’s something to this. Let me ask you: what was the last major piece of consumer technology you remember that felt really significant? You might have said ChatGPT or an AI image generator, maybe it was when you got a VR headset that didn’t need to be hooked up to a desktop. But besides that, it’s been pretty sparse over the past five years.
Even as the Covid-19 lockdown prompted an unheard of necessity for technology and generated an equally unheard of amount of capital for Silicon Valley, what did the world get? Well, there was cryptocurrency. Crypto wasn’t new, but by early 2021, it received a new legitimacy as the industry’s total valuation skyrocketed, by November of that same year, it had a market cap of $3 trillion. But then the crash came, and by the same time in 2022, the market cap had fallen to $832 billion, lower than the pre-pandemic peak. A similar story happened with the ‘Metaverse’, Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious plan for rendering a 3D virtual world that users would work(???) and socialize(???) in using VR headsets. This didn’t take off, and a year after the project announcement. The cost of the project alone was $36 billion, and Meta’s stock price lost $700 billion, leaving the tech giant less valuable than it was in the run up to the pandemic. I won’t even get started on what happened with NFTs, you all know how those things went. In total, the sector lost an eye-watering $7.4 trillion over the course of a year. Both crypto and Meta are currently hovering above their pre pandemic highs, but if you extrapolate the trend from then until now, it resembles modest growth. Crypto has grown 27% from January 2018 until now, and Meta has grown 33% since its July 2019 high.
But this is all to ask, what did we get out of it? How is society as a whole better off now that this rise and fall has occurred? Apps! There are now more apps. God are there more apps, and not even original ones. Everything is just paving over an existing service and making it maybe a little more efficient or outright suffocating its competitors.
For all the hype, it turned out the Metaverse was just basically a version of the game Second Life, which came out almost 20 years before the announcement of the Metaverse. And you know what? Second Life still worked better than the Metaverse! One of the biggest technology companies couldn't make something that worked better than the thing furries use to role-play with each other! Billions of dollars spent with near perfect name recognition, and it ran out of steam in under a year.
The Metaverse disaster makes me think of what John D. Rockefeller did. Aggressively cutting into his own oil profits initially, bankrupting his competitors, and then absorbing them into Standard Oil. He was a ruthless capitalist of the all American variety. He forged the identity of American Capitalism by both facilitating the construction of thousands of oil wells and of pipelines and by crushing workers and regulators under his boot. Today’s corporate tyrants have more wealth than Gilded Age robber barons, have bought off as many politicians, and have an even more Darwinian ideology. But today’s would-be Rockefeller’s don’t even act on their killer instincts. Instead, the ultra wealthy of the present expand their companies by hoping their incredible mass will eventually grow enough to suffocate all potential competitors under their body like a beached whale. However, there’s still time for today’s tech giants to impress. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg will turn it around and use his vast fortune to found a school that’s somehow even more evil than the Rockefeller founded University of Chicago.
In the past, when an industry was overvalued, something was left behind, for better or for worse. General Motors went bankrupt in 2009, but left behind millions of cars. You can argue over whether those were good for the world, but you can still drive one of those cars, or even sell them for scrap metal when they stop working. What does the Metaverse leave behind? It’s hard to think of anything, but that might be the best case scenario.
As AI becomes the new industry buzzword, I fear we will just be reliving the Metaverse debacle again. Mark Zuckerberg has already announced a new chatbot for Facebook Messenger, and AI has been all the rage among tech industry followers. Go on Twitter and you’ll see thousands of people talking about how AI is the next big thing.
The truth is, ‘AI’ might end up being a net negative technology for the world as a whole. This is a theory I started to have before I read about AI passively sabotaging the world’s biggest search engine. Recently, Twitter has been swarmed by what I would describe as ‘cyborgs’. These are users trying to take advantage of the monetization opportunities offered by paying for Twitter, and leave replies to the tweets of big accounts so they can farm engagement. What is pretty clear from looking at these replies is that they are generated using a chatbot. If you see a blue check replying to a big account, there’s a very good chance it will be with something that’s technically true but would not be said by a normal human being.
It’s just a new form of spam, sure, there’s a little more finesse, but it’s still just fluff that doesn’t add anything of value. Nothing of value is being created in the screenshot above, even an advertisement for a crypto scam would theoretically be directing people to spend money on something. But this is just an ouroboros of human verbal discharge being plugged into a Twitter account to generate 80 cents a day. And that’s what ChatGPT is going to be basing its future models on, because chatbots can output faster than any human could.
You might been yelling at me in your mind that what I’m talking about is just capitalism. All these tech companies are seeking the maximum profit at other’s expense and maintaining that profit using whatever means necessary. What I lament specifically is that this version of capitalism is so utterly bland. At least the Dot-Com Bubble was against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving industry, Pets.com was a bust, but the investment trends that created that website made up the early internet. The same can’t be said for the new trends.
Crypto, the Metaverse, AI, all of this is built on top of the existing online infrastructure, and all of it just ends up only creating problems. The way crypto does is fairly obvious, most economists realize that it’s a zero sum game at best, the Metaverse didn’t bankrupt too many people at least. But then AI chatbots come along and seem like they’re a trend that creates something of value until we see them in action. AI has some value, it can remove much of the tedium from writing if you need something like a cover letter. But the AI chatbot model can only ever be average or worse compared to contemporary writers, it’s based on massive quantities of human data after all. Placing your faith completely in AI chatbots as a replacement for human writers is like starting a restaurant that just serves dry corn flakes.
Only time will tell if AI will add more value with its convenience that it takes by polluting the internet as a whole. And I don’t mean social value, I mean we have yet to see if companies are going to be willing to put up with AI after however many years of engagement farming, algorithm degradation and pseudo copyright infringement it’s used for until more is spent on dealing with AI than is gained from using it. If it ends up being a massive headache, getting rid of it won’t be like scrapping excess Standard Oil equipment, it’ll be like getting gum out of a rug.
The difference between this and the dot com bubble is that a lot more of the value will go to the established tech players. They're integrating the new AI breakthroughs into Google Photos and Adobe Photoshop. Companies are salivating at the thought of replacing 90% of their staff with an a few GPUs. There will still be some successes from this batch of startups, but a lot of Pets.com's whose lunch will get eaten by Microsoft or whoever else.
Oh also, the "Brandon Hunter Useless" article probably used AI to reword someone else's article, but that's not why it's so badly written. They're using another program after the first one to combat plagiarism detectors (and maybe AI detectors) which replaces certain words with what it thinks are synonyms. The AI probably wrote "a highly regarded highschool basketball player" which gets mangled into "a extremely regarded highschool basketball participant".
You missed "self-driving" in the list of technology doesn't feel like it’s going anywhere. Lots of hype, no beef.