Ed Zitron is enjoyably mouthy and rude about AI and AI people, but it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest that someone most people have never heard of helped create the AI backlash. He is just putting it into words.
You know what created the AI backlash as well as anyone, and it is: AI and AI people.
If e/acc voices were not so abrasively, obtrusively YOLO about their technology, if their entire take on what they earn millions to do was not so easily reduced to “yeah it sucks that your job will go away, learn AI I guess LOLz” then there would be far less to have a backlash against.
Being lectured about the future by people who do not have a fucking business plan for how they will repay a trillion dollars and who might actually crash the economy does tend to grate on the nerves of the reality-based. Being told again and again that we will be ruled over by two firms that ultimately amount to the corporate equivalent of trust fund kids, that is annoying.
If you want to convince people otherwise, find an analyst who is not churning out AI slop.
As to the “predicting it for years” thing, the first correct-with-specifics predictions of the subprime crisis were published in 2004, by a pretty fringe outlet (karmabanque) and its author, Max Keiser. I remember not being shocked at all when it finally happened, or being shocked at LIBOR rigging. Because Max
Keiser presented his reasoning on his crazy radio show, and told his listeners what signs to look out for.
If someone is right for the right, well-informed reasons and presents that reasoning, it doesn’t always matter all that much if their background is unconventional. They tend to be dismissed, and they were back then. “People will always need houses” is what we were told, as if that was enough to ward off massive structural problems.
Like I say, I find his tone enjoyable, some of his predictions are interesting (and he has already been proved right on its risks to Oracle for example).
I'm not interested in self-soothing and I am not afraid of AI. I am even a bit less bearish than Zitron. I am concerned about a world that is fucking stupid enough to fall for the elements of grift, but I am insulated enough from the consequences, for now, that it's not my primary concern.
I admit that I read this stuff for self-soothing, although the self-sooth is not about AI going away, just that SotA will become expensive enough that everyone stops shilling digital garbage everywhere all the time.
If SotA does not go up in price (ala open weights), then everyone will continue to shill digital garbage AND the stock market will presumably get ravaged. So I'm really crossing my fingers about cost increase and- full circle- this hope is why I like to self-soothe with these articles (i.e. I cannot attest the articles' veracity but it makes me feel good that a human writer is speculating convincingly about instability).
That said, I sense that the ravaging is a forgone conclusion, unless someone pulls a(nother) rabbit out of a hat. I'd qualify agentic coding was a rabbit, so it could happen again I suppose.
I think the big picture is whether the big two can mask the real cost of tokens (inference and training) long enough to survive; that OpenAI is seeking government investment suggests that they can't.
Ed Zitron helps you see the broad absurdities in this situation and more importantly helps you understand that at various levels there is chicanery: they need more money constantly so they make weird unprovable claims to people who lack the skills to critique them, they exploit not jusT FOMO but actually fear of their own products to market them, their suppliers are making such ruthless use of SPVs as to conjure a possible apparently entirely legal Enron-scale disaster, they are attempting to scare the US government into backing them, and they have tried to get the index funds to back them before they have any hope of profit. None of it is normal; much of it is operating in the face of whatever still passes for principle in the US tech and finance industries. The broad picture is obscured by smoke.
But as fascinating as it is, it's only background information and it only broadly supports one's instincts; anything can still happen. For me, the main instinct it provides some support for is that the market is so terrifyingly lacking in verifiable fundamentals and stable predictable pricing that ultimately people will be driven to open weights and local models to keep control of their businesses; anything else is not a sane bet. So it broadly supports my instincts about my local-first approach, to find sustainable value.
The thing about pulling rabbits from hats is that the rabbit was always there; it's not a new rabbit. With a bit of understanding about how GPTs and LLMs work it is clear that code analysis and generation is not just a good application, it is the utmost practical and profitable one, because nowhere else in broad human effort do we communicate only in context-free grammars. Nothing else is actually going to prove to be more valuable financially).
(Formal pure maths is the "purest" one which is why we see its value in chugging through maths puzzles. But is there as much money to be found there?)
You know what created the AI backlash as well as anyone, and it is: AI and AI people.
If e/acc voices were not so abrasively, obtrusively YOLO about their technology, if their entire take on what they earn millions to do was not so easily reduced to “yeah it sucks that your job will go away, learn AI I guess LOLz” then there would be far less to have a backlash against.
Being lectured about the future by people who do not have a fucking business plan for how they will repay a trillion dollars and who might actually crash the economy does tend to grate on the nerves of the reality-based. Being told again and again that we will be ruled over by two firms that ultimately amount to the corporate equivalent of trust fund kids, that is annoying.
If you want to convince people otherwise, find an analyst who is not churning out AI slop.
As to the “predicting it for years” thing, the first correct-with-specifics predictions of the subprime crisis were published in 2004, by a pretty fringe outlet (karmabanque) and its author, Max Keiser. I remember not being shocked at all when it finally happened, or being shocked at LIBOR rigging. Because Max Keiser presented his reasoning on his crazy radio show, and told his listeners what signs to look out for.
If someone is right for the right, well-informed reasons and presents that reasoning, it doesn’t always matter all that much if their background is unconventional. They tend to be dismissed, and they were back then. “People will always need houses” is what we were told, as if that was enough to ward off massive structural problems.