Whoever said “the Internet never forgets” clearly doesn’t work with (or on preserving born) digital material.
The Internet “forgets” a lot of stuff, and in many cases those in control of certain platforms enact policies that lead to a lot of “forgetting.”
When seeing posts by AI advocates a fun game to play is to take whatever they’ve said and replace “AI” with “the messiah” or with “God.”
In many cases it quickly makes clear that they aren’t really talking about technology, they’re giving voice to a religious belief.
It was bullshit, but it was massively hyped by media outlets that haven’t learned anything from the last several years of tech hubris.
And those media outlets haven’t learned much, as can be seen in their breathless coverage of anything AI.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66913551
I’m not saying that everyone working on AI is in a cult, but 90% of the comments I see/hear from people working on AI absolutely sound like the things people in a cult say.
At a certain point they stopped building technology and started worshipping it as a divine savior.
The other day I was arguing with a colleague, & I said that I thought 95% of the funds getting thrown at AI would be better spent strengthening infrastructure to handle climate change. He said “AI will fix climate change.”
Now I think 100% of those funds should be redirected.
I recognize that I’m biased (I’m a historian of technology), but it’s a major problem in the popular discourse around technology that we tend to be unable to remember anything that happened more than six months (let alone several years) ago.
Too much contemporary popular writing on tech features a real failure to engage meaningfully with history, even recent history.
Much of this takes the form of ignoring earlier critics and earlier warnings. It’s easy to say “we didn’t see it coming” when you refused to look.
There are a lot of people who spent years saying he isn’t a superhero, and a lot of those people were mocked as technophobic Luddites by many of the same people who have recently become critical of him.
This is a good review, but the above point stands.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/18/elon-musk-walter-isaacson-book-review
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