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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

AI has repeatedly experienced the same fate: there's some interesting progress, it gets hyped all out of proportion, and finally reality kicks in and some sort of backlash hits hard.

Most of this repeating trope could have probably been avoided if the field had not been given the name "artificial intelligence".

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The issue isn't AI. It is that we went from a mentality of "How can $NEWTECH improve the lives of millions and make earth an utopia?" to "How can I use $NEWTECH to sell people a thing they don't need, lock them in and become meta in the market so I can please the shareholders?".

And there is a whole caste of people in the latter camp who all pat each others backs and believe they are the absolute elite, with all kind of self-lies why what they do is actually good.

Of course capitalism always had people like these, but what feels new is how they celebrate themselves as saviors while being anything but. And the worst thing is that this often isn't some mask, they truly believe that.

Capitalism gives them all the excuses to take character traits that in any good functioning society would mark them as social outcasts and pretend they are strengths.

The robber barons of the gilded age had the same beliefs in their innate superiority, and thought they were the ones pushing humanity forward, in spite of the "stupid masses". All the while paying private militia to shoot at striking workers.

So no, sadly this is not new. I'd even say things have gotten somewhat better.

I'm not sure this is new; it's easy to forget (there's a success bias in what people end up remembering; people remember the iPhone, but not, like, Windows for Pen Computing), but the tech industry has been trying to fob all manner of bullshit off on the general public for decades. Most of the exhibits at CES fall into that category. I think maybe what _is_ new is the _scale_ of the efforts; we start to see this with blockchain stuff about a decade ago, where really quite significant amounts were spent by major players before quietly giving up, then a step up with 'metaverses' (where amounts spent get into the tens of billions), and now LLMs.

Actually, maybe the real inflection point was 3D TVs, about 15 years ago; there was quite a big push and many industry participants damaged themselves quite badly on it. Amazon Alexa-type things are another possible example.

It's actually genius though. The cynical will focus on the emptiness of the hype, when in reality it is making more than enough progress to be a great detriment to society.

All of AI's successes get re-branded as not-AI. Quadcopters were AI when I was in school a few decades ago. Image recognition/classification was AI. Recommendation algorithms were AI. Voice recognition was AI. Smart speakers were AI.

I fully expect generative AI to get rebranded as something else once it becomes useful someday. AI is just a catch-all term for math that looks like magic.

I have an Addams Family pinball machine. There's a flipper in the middle of the playfield that automatically kicks the ball if the ball passes through a certain lane.

That too is AI, according to the machine's manual.

Next concept: "artificial dickheads"? :)

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