The headline here — “Apple avoids ‘AI’ hype at WWDC keynote by baking ML into products” — makes a really good point.
I tend to think a healthy, positive future for the technologies we currently call “AI“ looks a lot less like the hype juice that’s dominating the headlines and more like what Apple demoed today: assisting, augmenting, removing friction, out of the spotlight and woven into the fabric, empowering thought instead of replacing it.
I don’t want to get too gooey-eyed here and paint Apple as some kind of prophet or angel or something; we’re just talking about a company with a particular strength for product strategy, that’s all.
But even that is such a welcome antidote to the flotsam of nonsense ideas swirling in the wake of the AI hype. Maybe, just maybe, the magic secret product strategy sauce right now is focusing on actually benefiting people instead of focusing on screwing over labor.
@inthehands The problem with the latter approach is also that there is no real way to get back to the “user” focus if what you want to do is getting rid of the user in the first place.
@b3n
Yes, YES, and I this is something I really don’t get about the current OpenAI-flavored gold rush:
1. Make the processes that sell shit to consumers be faster and crappier
2. by putting those consumers out of work.
3. Profit!
@inthehands 2 is an externality, so neither the way VCs are set up nor the people running them are really geared to see it.
Thinking about it: the fact that the only externality these people are capable thinking about is “robots without bodies will destroy everything” should have been quite telling from the get-go…
@b3n
You’ve got a point, these people are not the brightest bunch by and large…but you’d think even the average VC would be able to spot the hole in the logic of “first I’ll make them unemployed, then I’ll siphon off even more of their income”
@inthehands @b3n This is not just a VC issue, it’s hole in our entire economic system. Incentives for companies are to minimize the number of people they employee and how much they pay them, which of course limits the number of people who can afford their products.