There is no reason a major percentage of people couldn’t one day find usefulness or enjoyment out of VR, the devices are simply an order of magnitude too expensive right now and inherently it isn’t an experience you can share easily but it is a genuinely new experience for people and that is indisputable.
AI on the otherhand is a cancerous process of stealing (legally or not) well curated large datasets, throwing them into a woodchipper, creating an extremely lossy compression of all that data that is fed to people through a device that constantly hallucinates and then using the sometimes decent output of all of that to rationalize austerity for the humans and institutions that created the datasets and true value in the first place.
VR is an exciting new technology with tenuous and awkward beginnings, AI is a process of self immolation of knowledge and the practices and values that safeguard and maintain it for the public benefit, it is not just unsustainable, it is a process of extraction done by the ruling class to diminish and enclose public resources that leaves a diminished wasteland of byproducts in its wake…like mountaintop removal but applied to knowledge and learning itself.
Yep, but you start with the same argument. VR tech ‘may some day’ be cheap and accessible enough to be truly useful widely.
Exact same case with AI. Its pretty shit now, but may evolve into more useful products one day much later when tech evolves.
Injecting obscene amounts of capital on either path is stupid because the end goal is unlikely to be close and the market isn’t proven.
A lot of people forget that VR headsets and gear have existed in evolving forms for decades, then big tech got hold of it and went bananas with it circa 2015 spending enormous amounts of money. Myself and anyone my age went ‘um this is still the same old tech - it’s very expensive, it gives you a headache, and it’s cool but it’s not incredible. This will die in a few years when nobody buys it’. And so it did.
Big tech is the problem in both cases - they need to always have a new shiny bauble to dangle at investors and say ‘this is the future and it will make us all trillionaires!’.
Fully in agreement that the way they’ve implemented LLMs is far more cancerous and illegal than anything that happened with VR, but there are still valid parallels.
There is no reason a major percentage of people couldn’t one day find usefulness or enjoyment out of VR, the devices are simply an order of magnitude too expensive right now and inherently it isn’t an experience you can share easily but it is a genuinely new experience for people and that is indisputable.
AI on the otherhand is a cancerous process of stealing (legally or not) well curated large datasets, throwing them into a woodchipper, creating an extremely lossy compression of all that data that is fed to people through a device that constantly hallucinates and then using the sometimes decent output of all of that to rationalize austerity for the humans and institutions that created the datasets and true value in the first place.
VR is an exciting new technology with tenuous and awkward beginnings, AI is a process of self immolation of knowledge and the practices and values that safeguard and maintain it for the public benefit, it is not just unsustainable, it is a process of extraction done by the ruling class to diminish and enclose public resources that leaves a diminished wasteland of byproducts in its wake…like mountaintop removal but applied to knowledge and learning itself.
Yep, but you start with the same argument. VR tech ‘may some day’ be cheap and accessible enough to be truly useful widely.
Exact same case with AI. Its pretty shit now, but may evolve into more useful products one day much later when tech evolves.
Injecting obscene amounts of capital on either path is stupid because the end goal is unlikely to be close and the market isn’t proven.
A lot of people forget that VR headsets and gear have existed in evolving forms for decades, then big tech got hold of it and went bananas with it circa 2015 spending enormous amounts of money. Myself and anyone my age went ‘um this is still the same old tech - it’s very expensive, it gives you a headache, and it’s cool but it’s not incredible. This will die in a few years when nobody buys it’. And so it did.
Big tech is the problem in both cases - they need to always have a new shiny bauble to dangle at investors and say ‘this is the future and it will make us all trillionaires!’.
Fully in agreement that the way they’ve implemented LLMs is far more cancerous and illegal than anything that happened with VR, but there are still valid parallels.
VR is an actual technology, AI is just a weapon the ruling class is using to encode a set of cultural norms that further dehumanize workers.