[FRIAM] Cory Doctorow on AI hype vs Crypto Hype
Gary Schiltz
gary at naturesvisualarts.com
Thu May 4 12:10:49 EDT 2023
I love the graphic! I've had the misfortune of twice jumping on that roller
coaster just before the Peak of Inflated Expectation - once for the AI
boom/bust of the mid 1980s and once for the dotcom boom/bust of the late
1990s. Jumped on too late to make a killing, but didn't get too badly
damaged by the Trough of Disillusionment either.
On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 10:34 AM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>
> https://doctorow.medium.com/the-ai-hype-bubble-is-the-new-crypto-hype-bubble-74e53028631e
>
> I *am* a fan of LLMs (not so much image generators) and blockchain (not so
> much crypto or NFTs) in their "best" uses (not that I or anyone else really
> knows what that is) in spite of my intrinsic neoLuddite affect.
>
> Nevertheless I think Doctorow in his usual acerbic and penetrating style
> really nails it well here IMO.
>
> I particularly appreciated his reference/quote to Emily Bender's "High on
> Supply" and "word/meaning conflation" in the sense of "don't mistake an
> accent for a personality" in the dating scene.
>
> A lot of my own contrarian commments on this forum come from resisting
> what Doctorow introduces (to me) as "CritiHype" (attributed to Lee
> Vinsel)... the feeling that some folks make a (a)vocation out of kneejerk
> criticism. It is much easier to *poke* at something than to *do*
> something worthy of being *poked at*. I appreciate that Doctorow doesn't
> seem to (by my fairly uncritical eye) engage in this much himself... which
> is why I was drawn into this article...
>
> I also very much appreciate his quote from Charlie Stross:
>
> *corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that
> consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them
> try to steer them in better directions:*
>
>
> *https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
> <https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future> *
>
>
> I could go on quoting and excerpting and commenting on his whole article
> and the myriad links/references he offers up but will curb my enthusiasm
> and leave it to the astute FriAM readers to choose how much to indulge
> in. It was a pretty good antidote for my own AI-thusiasm driven by long
> chats with GPT4 (converging on being more like long sessions wandering
> through Wikipedia after the first 100 hours of engagement).
>
>
>
>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives: 5/2017 thru present
> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20230504/87b99901/attachment.html>
More information about the Friam
mailing list