Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses
MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?
AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.
Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.
The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:
Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:
Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:
https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies
Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:
I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.
The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:
The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.
Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:
So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":
A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.
According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."
Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.
What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.
Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.
See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:
Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.
"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:
During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."
Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.
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I had coffee last year with a guy - I won't use his real name - who told me he was "building a business." I asked what it did. Dropshipping
I get the sense that nobody under the age of 60 has ever heard of a phrase that I had to learn forty-plus years ago in Business Administration 120 (Intro to Business): "defensible value proposition." You either have one or you don't.
You see an opportunity to make money? Great! What's stopping the next person who sees it from coming along and undercutting you? The next thousand people? Once you're all undercutting each other on price, what's left of your plan to actually make money?
Unless you were born rich, no plausible answer includes the word "passive." You were the first to grab a location that's better than anybody else will be able to? Defensible. You have specific area knowledge that will be hard to replicate? Defensible. You're willing to work harder and work longer hours than anybody else in the same line of work? Probably delusional, but if true, defensible.
"I'm a middleman running ads on the Internet to connect online orders to remote manufacturers"? Zero barrier to entry. Which is how you were able to afford to get into it in the first place, wasn't it? If even you can do it, why won't everybody? "I'm subcontracting with the best Search Engine Optimization specialists in the world"? They're selling their services to everybody else, too. "Then I'll be the one who masters SEO"? That's not passive. And the market participants have real expertise already and a dozen years' lead on you.
(Once again, I am begging you all to go read David Maurer's The Big Con. All of your favorite writers have already read it, and it will make you perceptibly, measurably less gullible than you were before.)
Lately, I’ve felt nostalgic for the cluttered aisles of the local video store. It was more than a place; it was a portal, a weekend ritual…
While technology has streamlined the minutiae of our daily routines, it has not elevated our quality of life to the exalted heights forecast by the pundits and prophets of Silicon Valley. Ours is an age of marginal convenience, not measurable betterment.
"The math becomes brutally simple. Thousands of supporters brave the bitter cold outside the Capitol Rotunda to celebrate a win that isn't theirs. Under the warm dome of power, Donald Trump stands alone in triumph. This is his America, where the people cheer their own exclusion and call it victory. In the end, there was only ever going to be one winner."
I used to be good at spinning stories. Give me a half-baked startup idea, a semi-charismatic founder and a fistful of VC dollars, and I coul
6 months ago, I left the bullshit industrial complex
by Joan Westenberg
I used to be good at spinning stories. Give me a half-baked startup idea, a semi-charismatic founder and a fistful of VC dollars, and I could write a story compelling enough it barely mattered whether there was an ounce of truth in it.
I was running a profitable tech PR agency. It looked impressive enough on LinkedIn. It paid for fancy dinners and weekend getaways. I had the clients, the connections, and a couple of shiny awards gathering dust on my bookshelf. My phone buzzed constantly.
But something was starting to unravel.
Like a loose thread on a comfortable sweater. You know you shouldn't pull on it, but you can't help yourself.
A nagging doubt. An odd moment of "Jesus, what the hell am I doing?"
I would lie awake at 3 AM, staring at the ceiling. My life was slipping away, and I had nothing to show for it but a series of cynical half truths paid for by shit shovelling wannabe billionaires hell bent on leaving the world worse off than they found it. I knew I was a part of something poisonous. It had been years since I'd displayed a shred of journalistic integrity.
The thread kept unraveling.
One morning, I sat down at my desk to craft yet another press release touting yet another "game-changing" startup that had raised - yet another - $25 million. And I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd written something I believed in. The words that used to flow felt like trying to squeeze ancient toothpaste from an empty tube.
That was the day I cracked.
It wasn't about the individual startups or the overhyped products. It was the whole damn ecosystem—if we can call it that. The inflated valuations, cult-like frat house “culture,” and the relentless, mindless pursuit of growth that comfortably glossed over the human cost of "disruption."
Somewhere along the way, I'd allowed my writing—the thing that used to give me purpose—to be co-opted by the bullshit industrial complex. I'd convinced myself that I was part of something bigger, something world-changing. But deep down, in the quiet moments between pitch meetings and product launches, I knew better.
It was a slow-building wave, gathering momentum with every story I was hired to spin, every tone-deaf founder I media-trained to sidestep hard questions, every time I was asked to massage the numbers and make a struggling startup look like a unicorn in waiting.
Going back to my roots as a writer felt like coming up for air after a long, deep dive in a river of shit. The first few months were disorienting as hell. It's tough adjusting to life outside the echo chamber. I've had to relearn how to write without an agenda, how to ask questions without anticipating the "right" answers, how to look at the tech industry with clear eyes.
There are days when I question my decision—when I gather up the courage to look at my dwindling bank account, for example. Tech has a way of tempting you back, whispering sweet nothings about stock options and catered lunches.
Well-meaning friends in the industry have texted, called, emailed. They've told me that I'm burning bridges, that a critical stance will make me unemployable in tech circles. They've advised me to soften my tone, to find a middle ground that won't alienate potential future employers or clients.
I get it. I do. In an industry built on network effects, taking a stand can feel like career suicide. The pressure to conform, to go along with the prevailing narrative, is immense. Trust me, I know.
But then I sit down to write, and I remember why the fuck I'm doing this. I write about the human cost of gig economy apps that treat workers as disposable resources. I write about the venture capital industry that repeatedly and stubbornly fails to invest in anyone who doesn't look like Mark Zuckerberg's clone.
I can't go back to writing comforting VC pandering fictions. I won't do it, no matter how many zeroes are dangled in front of me.
This isn't to say that I've become an anti-tech fanatic, railing against all notions of progress. Technology has potential when it's guided by ethical considerations and a genuine desire to improve the human condition. I've spent the last 6 months interviewing founders who are building companies without following the VC playbook, without setting fire to the world around them.
But I have zero faith in the idea that unfettered vulture capitalism and a blind pursuit of "disruption" will lead us to a better world.
I've seen how perverse incentives and boiler room pressure to deliver exponential growth can warp even the most idealistic founders' vision. I've watched brilliant minds get sucked into the vortex of funding rounds and vanity metrics, losing sight of why they started their companies in the first place.
I'm reminded of a quote attributed to Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." For years, my salary—and my sense of self-worth—depended on not understanding the deeper implications of my work. I can't keep faking blameless ignorance.
I don't know where this will lead me. The tech industry has a long memory.
So it goes.
At least I have my integrity. The machine may grind on, but I'm glad to have stepped off the treadmill.
Howard Zinn said: "You can't be neutral on a moving train." Tech is an out-of-control locomotive with no fucking brakes, and I've chosen where I stand. It may not be a comfortable or lucrative position, but it's one I can live with.
And for the first time in years, when I look in the mirror, I can recognize the person looking back. That's worth all the stock options in the world.
You can’t measure life in tweets. We’re so dependent on an instant feedback loop now that if we aren’t getting likes, responses, comments and views, we can feel as though our lives are smaller than they should be. That they mean a little less. What if we can’t rate our happiness in Instagram engagement, we think. We may not be happy at all!
But life is bigger than that. Life had value in every second of every moment in every century before social media was invented. It has value now. In the work we do to care for ourselves and our families, in the moments we enjoy peace and passion. In the smells and sounds of the kitchen and the world outside our windows after it rains.
We can only a measure a life in the things that have real value. The engagement will come and go. The followers will come and go. But you and I? We’ll be right here.
I was 14 when I realised I was transgender. One of my biggest fears was what that would mean for my career
Sorry, this article may be behind a paywall.
I really want to write a piece on the absolute joy of being transgender.
Being trans is not a tragedy. It’s not a sob story. It’s not a death sentence. It’s not a curse. It is hard - when people make it hard for us - but I wouldn’t choose to be anything but trans. ✨🦇✨
— Joan Westenberg (@Jonwestenberg) October 19, 2019
