vurpo 🏳️⚧️
@thomasfuchs But it's not the actual nerds who fall for BS, it's all the people who didn't care until they saw the dollar signs, meaning they never understood the tech and history beneath.
(not to say nerds never fall for BS either, but that's a rarer case I think)
Sinistar7510
pettter
@slothrop @thomasfuchs it's called a helicopter
Rocketman
@thomasfuchs Dude, where’s my flying car?
(Never mind, I don’t actually want a flying car)
pettter
@slothrop @thomasfuchs (not snark, really, more illustrating the problems with the imagination of what "flying cars" would actually be)
pettter
@slothrop @thomasfuchs Most of all it would be _extremely dangerous_ because no technology is ever foolproof, and Things Fall Down make for Bad Shit Happening where they land/crash.
Same reason why drone deliveries aren't going to be widely used in a long while. Their failure mode is "murderbot" (thanks @RealSexyCyborg for that wording)
Rocketman
@pettter @thomasfuchs Yeah, a city filled with flying cars would actually be pretty shit.
Let’s just build trams or subways instead, mkay?
Ben Lee-Cohen
@thomasfuchs
I've been thinking about this framing a lot lately. I was always a big fan of Burke's Connections series and books, but also a skeptic of the "great man" theory of history, which I see these predictions as an extension of.
Do you think the problem is with these specific predictions, or with the idea of attributing sea changes to individual technologies instead of a confluence of sociotechnical changes that accrete over time?
Kornel
@thomasfuchs That's the emerging tech hype cycle & you seem to be ignoring that some of these things survive into the productivity phase.
3D printing has revolutionized product development.
Some people use voice assistants daily. Dictation has improved a lot.
LLMs are the piece of smarts that voice assistants lacked.
ADAS is now almost mandatory in cars. Not FSD, but saves lots of lives.
VR is slowly getting there, pushing very high-dpi screens, lighter electronics.
Josiah Wiebe
@thomasfuchs tech hype lives at the intersection of science and capitalism
xmlns="Dan"
@thomasfuchs Silicon Valley hopes AI will give them the one thing they want, more than anything in the world: an excuse for the obscenities they have unleashed and money they have wasted.
Until now that has been "the market", but that is now a problem as all decent people are disillusioned with capitalism.
The all knowing unknowable machine? That's something else entirely, and unlike economists who are the apologists for the current status quo, tech bros can be the priesthood of the new age.
Jyrgen N
@thomasfuchs I haven't quite given up on the self-driving car yet. I want it so that I can call it to my door, have it drop me off somewhere, and then it finds itself some parking space nearby. When I want to go back or elsewhere, I call it, and it picks me up where I am.
If this sounds a lot like a taxi, that's because it is. But other than with a taxi, I can leave my stuff in there, groceries and things.
Aleksander
@thomasfuchs I don't think nerds are taught or value critical thinking at all. Thats humanities - yuck!
The Trandalorian 🏳️⚧️
@thomasfuchs I'm every bit as much of a skeptic as you are, but I have to admit that at least the large language models are producing some surprising/interesting results. Whereas blockchain and self-driving cars always felt like a fool's errand.
George White
@thomasfuchs @charliejane lately I've been thinking of LLMs and generators like kaleidoscopes. They're altered reflections of whatever we point them at and so they're only able to contain what we give them while still producing outputs we might find fascinating.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.