And now we're clamouring to reinstate them. Not just digitally (in the form of e.g. limitations and boundaries on attention demanding apps and activities), but politically / internationally as well, if you lean that way.
Tbh, a lot of EU protectionism vs. US tech seems not to keep the competition out. In fact, with the amount of free press US startups get and the size of their coffers, they can simply roll over the local competition in EU markets most of the time.
What it's terribly good at is adding burdens that the US giants don't face early on, slowing down the early growth between 28 fragmented markets. I don't know specifically about how China works, but the question is proving product-market fit, and for that, you need a lot of users fast.
In the EU, it's a different battle country to country as the media environment, the markets, the regulation etc. are all fractured.
Google is already killing itself. The search experience has been getting steadily worse and worse on one end, but on the other, they're slowly strangling the incentives that were offered to publishers (ranking, traffic & monetization) to develop content for the "open web as dominated by Google".
Now, everyone who's running a website for a living is doing platform-native content for traffic and pairing it up with a newsletter-backed website or straight up investing in brand advertising campaigns to have access to their own audiences still, without relying on Google to deliver them.
My guess is that we're in for the second wave of Big Aggregators, but it's tough to say what the technological twist behind it will be, so it's not just a reddit 2.0.
Also his criticism is very specific. Most of contemporary anti-capitalist or marxist thought that gets published is very, very abstract and hence toothless. It's easy to entertain radical ideas as long as they don't pit you against your employer.
> Another thing that I hear from time to time is an argument along the line of "it just predicts the next word, it doesn't actually understand it". Rather than an argument against AI being intelligent, isn't this also telling us what "understanding" is? Before we all had computers, how did people judge whether another person understood something? Well, they would ask the person something and the person would respond. One word at a time. If the words were satisfactory, the interviewer would conclude that you understood the topic and call you Doctor.
You call a Doctor 'Doctor' because they're wearing a white coat and are sitting in a doctor's office. The words they say might make vague sense to you, but since you are not a medical professional, you actually have no empirical grounds to judge whether or not they're bullshitting you, hence you have the option to get a second or third opinion. But otherwise, you're just trusting the process that produces doctors, which involves earlier generations of doctors asking this fellow a series of questions with the ability to discern right from wrong, and grading them accordingly.
When someone can't tell if something just sounds about right or is in fact bullshit, they're called a layman in the field at best or gullible at worst. And it's telling that the most hype around AI is to be found in middle management, where bullshit is the coin of the realm.
Hmm, I was actually thinking of a viva situation. You sit with a panel of experts, they talk to you, they decide whether you passed your PhD in philosophy/history/physics/etc.
That process is done purely by language, but we supposed that inside you there is something deeper than a token prediction machine.
The tech anti-intellectualism is different though. Like you see these kinds of posts that approach the subject as if no one ever has seriously studied it, and the tell is always that there's barely a scholarly work cited, but there's plenty of metaphors to describe how say, sociological phenomena work by way of "it's just like XY tech or business model."
Like I get the acclaim, if you're raised in this environment, the business tech vocab will feel more familiar. Is it a good / better way to describe the world than the established scientific field? No.
But reading the "Peasant and his body" by Bourdieu instead would not have the same... social coinage in tech as reading the influencer of the realm.
Tried to conduct a survey last autumn to learn about people's experiences with using AI SDR products. We pretty heavily promoted it in sales spaces, and got a jack total of less than 20 fills, with an overwhelmingly negative sentiment, echoing the comments you'd see about this space on reddit / linkedin etc.
Vaporware the whole lot of them, with spoofed ARR numbers to trigger investor FOMO.
Anecdotal backup: as a child I had a horrendous dust allergy that led to multiple hospital visits. To mitigate the problem, my mom became a clean freak, trying to keep our apartment dust-free.
The allergy persisted until I grew up and moved out on my own without having a vacuum cleaner. Living in a messier environment led to the allergy basically disappearing.
Could it have been an allergy to something other than dust ?
I have an allergy to a specific cleaning product ingredient for instance, although I never got to know what exactly. It was not something commonly used, I never triggered it by myself and only reacted when helping cleaning a friend's house decades ago.
My kid also seems to have it, but again it only ever happened once at a shop, and no allergy test raised it (other stuff were found though)
Counter-anegdote. I grew up in the countryside, I am allergic to hay, pollen, dust mites, cat and horse saliva, and more.
I moved to a big city when I was ~20 and my symptoms got better, but I'm still allergic to all that - it's simply not putting me in hospital anymore.
Doctors told me most people grew out of the worst symptoms over time.
BTW I also somehow got allergic to kiwi fruits between primary school and my late 20s. I ate them rarely and at one point I found out they make me throat swell like a balloon. Didnt' happened before.
I mean if you're publishing a book, especially a tell-all one, you'd go and talk to sources familiar with the matter who can independently verify whether the statements are true or not to shield you against defamation lawsuits.
Publishing anything dodgy about the biggest tech executives on the planet without that would lead your company getting nuked from orbit
