Speaker 1: Zone Media. Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue.
Speaker 1: I'm at Zychra and your host. As a reminder, you
Speaker 1: can buy Better Offline merchandise now. You'll find a link
Speaker 1: to it in the episode notes. You all seem to
Speaker 1: really like it. It's cool stuff. But I know some
Speaker 1: of you have also said recently that I've done too
Speaker 1: much AI stuff recently, and I wanted to take a
Speaker 1: little time to explain why I've been doing so, in
Speaker 1: part because I'm not going to change the generative AI
Speaker 1: boom is about far more than art, official intelligence, or
Speaker 1: cloud storage or data centers or what part of Hawaii
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg will buy next. I believe this movement is
Speaker 1: symbolic of a greater rot in the tech industry and
Speaker 1: indeed in media criticism, both inside and outside of the
Speaker 1: tech media, and that the nature of criticism must indeed
Speaker 1: change to meet this moment. Now, a few of the
Speaker 1: most consistent critiques in my work are mostly around my tone.
Speaker 1: I'm a hater, I'm a cynic, I'm a skeptic, I'm
Speaker 1: too emotional, I've gone overboard. The local townspeople should throw
Speaker 1: tomatoes at me. I should be treated in the way
Speaker 1: of Shrek and exiled from society, things like that. But
Speaker 1: in all seriousness, it seems the only way my work
Speaker 1: is reliably critiqued is to suggest that my emotions invalidate
Speaker 1: my criticisms somehow, and that saying fuck somehow weakens my arguments. Basically,
Speaker 1: that giving a shit is invalidating when it comes to
Speaker 1: criticizing something. And I find that putrid, by the way,
Speaker 1: but it's how things are, and I kind of get it.
Speaker 1: Most financial tech criticism is expected to be dry and clinical,
Speaker 1: and any emotional content should be positive or at the
Speaker 1: very least optimistic, And I do not believe this tone
Speaker 1: is sufficient for the seriousness of the matters at hand.
Speaker 1: We are, as I have said repeatedly several years, into
Speaker 1: a hysterical, illogical bubble, one launched off the back of
Speaker 1: two smaller yet no less hysterical bubbles, at times by
Speaker 1: the same people, some of them writing for the New
Speaker 1: York Times of the verge, We as a society have
Speaker 1: accepted the terms that the generative AI companies want us to.
Speaker 1: That we must destroy the environment, that we must steal
Speaker 1: from millions of people, that we must burn billions of
Speaker 1: dollars all in pursuit of a vague and specious outcome
Speaker 1: that will never really arrive. This isn't to say that
Speaker 1: we've had much choice in said acceptance. The media has
Speaker 1: repeatedly accepted and promoted these narratives, helped justify these costs,
Speaker 1: and presented ridiculous narratives as sensible ones. The outcome has
Speaker 1: been a massive transfer of wealth upwards, both into the
Speaker 1: market capitalization of hyperscalers and into the pockets of Sam
Speaker 1: Mortman and other founders pretending generative AI will become some
Speaker 1: sort of conscious intelligence or the next hypergrowth market, regardless
Speaker 1: of whether of these things is possible. The other outcome
Speaker 1: has been the rise of many new kinds of grifters,
Speaker 1: the ethermolics of the world that creates scientific sounding yet
Speaker 1: specious reviews of AI models, the slop filled AI newsletters
Speaker 1: with fake subscribe accounts, and the many many AI influencers
Speaker 1: that exist as extensions of AI companies pr departments. Yet
Speaker 1: the most worrying part has been the members of the
Speaker 1: media that have allowed this to happen. This isn't to
Speaker 1: say anybody is even Kevin rus and Case and Newton
Speaker 1: are included here. I don't think anyone's corrupt, but the
Speaker 1: media is unprepared, unwilling, or able to push back on
Speaker 1: the narratives. The structures that hold up tech and business
Speaker 1: media are not built to truly explain or criticize what's
Speaker 1: happening in the tech industry or even the economy at large.
Speaker 1: These structures are built not to ask is this real?
Speaker 1: Or will this work? But when this works, what will
Speaker 1: it look like. They're built not to question whether an
Speaker 1: industry is like real at all, but to assume that
Speaker 1: there are always risks in building anything, and thus the
Speaker 1: most important part is discussing what the person in question
Speaker 1: wants to happen. Media's desperation for objectivity regularly deprives the
Speaker 1: reader of the value of being objective because objectivity is
Speaker 1: being conflated with being passive. True objective journalism, which is impossible,
Speaker 1: by the way, would say that both the Open AI
Speaker 1: raised a bunch of money and loses billions a year,
Speaker 1: and that to continue doing business they'll have to raise
Speaker 1: unbelievable sums of money every year. Instead, articles in open
Speaker 1: AI just print that they raised money and why they
Speaker 1: raised it, or that their products do something. No interest
Speaker 1: in finding out what there's something is whether it's important
Speaker 1: and whether it will lead to any outcome, probably because
Speaker 1: it won't. The initial consequences of this passivity are that
Speaker 1: venture capitalist anders select few startup founders have become very,
Speaker 1: very rich, The big tech firms have had something new
Speaker 1: to hock to their customers, and the access journalists have
Speaker 1: had a new thing to pretend they care about. And
Speaker 1: also a fallow tech industry has had something to get
Speaker 1: excited about. None of this money has trickled down to
Speaker 1: anybody other than the powerful, nor have any mass market
Speaker 1: productivity gains been realized, nor has society improved as a result.
Speaker 1: The only things that appear to have changed is that
Speaker 1: these companies need more money, and they don't even need
Speaker 1: to tell anybody why. The media just assumes they need
Speaker 1: it to build powerful AI. I think it's fair to
Speaker 1: say at this point that the generative AI boom hasn't
Speaker 1: done much of anything other than create new ways for
Speaker 1: software companies to sell software or access to models. There
Speaker 1: are no killer apps, no major shifts in the way
Speaker 1: we live our lives outside of innovations in fraud and
Speaker 1: harms to our power grid, and whatever use cases there
Speaker 1: may be for large language models. Are miniscule in comparison
Speaker 1: to the way that AI is discussed in the media.
Speaker 1: I am justifiably angry because I watch these bubbles form
Speaker 1: again and again in exactly the same way at every
Speaker 1: single p With the metaverus, with cryptocurrency, and now with
Speaker 1: generative AI, there have been obvious moments to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I get that this is what you say will happen,
Speaker 1: but what's happening today doesn't suggest that it will happen
Speaker 1: at all. And every time those moments have been missed,
Speaker 1: and the media is opted instead to ask, but what
Speaker 1: if it was true? When the media opts to trust
Speaker 1: whatever comes out of the mouth of a powerful person,
Speaker 1: the beneficiary is always always the powerful person in question. Yet,
Speaker 1: a better world would be one where the altmans and
Speaker 1: Amma days have to actually justify themselves, show what the
Speaker 1: models can do, give realistic projections. Know that they can't
Speaker 1: just say whatever and get quoted automatically, because this kind
Speaker 1: of accountability would make their current work overstanding their models capabilities,
Speaker 1: and running unsustainable and destructive businesses impossible or at least
Speaker 1: much more difficult. A better tech industry is one where
Speaker 1: the products we hear about actually exist, where hype cycles
Speaker 1: are built based on execution and outcomes rather than whether
Speaker 1: something may or may not be in the future. While
Speaker 1: there is always a place in the tech media to dream,
Speaker 1: to guess what might come next, to talk to people
Speaker 1: inventing things, to talk to researchers, and I have no
Speaker 1: problem with that, and it's fine to anticipate what the
Speaker 1: effects of these things could be, so much of this
Speaker 1: industry has become about those dreams, to the point that
Speaker 1: innovation is far less relevant than whether you can convince
Speaker 1: enough people that something might happen. Nevertheless, there is definitely
Speaker 1: something missing in Better Offline, and that's excitement. The feedback
Speaker 1: I got from my last monologue around fitness and tech
Speaker 1: I liked was profound, and I will be looking forward
Speaker 1: to doing more episodes like that, especially these monologues on
Speaker 1: the things that I use that I really enjoy, all
Speaker 1: the cool stuff that tech is actually doing. It's going
Speaker 1: to be a process to get there, but I think
Speaker 1: you're really gonna like what you hear when I start
Speaker 1: doing it. Don't worry, though, there's still so much rots
Speaker 1: economy bullshit to unpack, as you'll hear in tomorrow's episode