A good excerpt from Ed Zitron's "Cargo Culture" about AI and irrationality.

[erronis]

https://www.wheresyoured.at/cargo-culture/?ref=ed-zitrons-wheres-your-ed-at-newsletter

Ed is a wonderful writer who has been warning about the AI bubble for quite some time.
He does write some nice long pieces - I just enjoyed this one segment enough to share it.

Last week, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel debuted Snapchat Specs, a $2195 pair of augmented reality glasses with a demo that makes it apparent that nobody in the C-suite has spoken to a normal person in years. The tech industry desperately craves its next iPhone, but years of growth-at-all-cost management consultancy poison has twisted the already-flimsy mission statements of Silicon Valley from creating societal value and innovation to creating shareholder value and a kind of banal, nihilistic accelerationism that mostly comes down to "how do we make the next thing that will make number go up."

Snapchat Specs are expensive, aesthetically vile, and lack any meaningful use cases. Snap's own demos are clunky and ugly, looking somewhere between a neutered Vision Pro and the original Google Glass concept video, except even then every example feels like something somebody came up with in a boardroom:

SPIEGEL: What do people do? Drums? They walk around...uh...Tokyo? They look for...uhh...directions, I guess? They look for how to fix a car? People still drive cars, right?

WORMTONGUE-ESQUE PRODUCT MANAGER: Oh yes sir, yes...exactly. Sometimes they even have "boards" of things, for their work, you see.

SPIEGEL: I bet they golf too, right?PM: Yes sir. The person you are imagining -- one who can afford a $2195 pair of augmented reality glasses -- would play golf, but also be so bad at golf that they need the glass-

SPIEGEL: DID YOU JUST LOOK AT ME? I TOLD YOU NOT TO LOOK ME IN THE EYE! NO EYE CONTACT!

This is, of course, a joke. I have no idea if you're allowed to look Evan Spiegel in the eye if you work at Snap. I also have no idea if anybody actually considered what a regular human being might do with the product it's been desperately trying to launch for nearly a decade. A single conversation with a regular person would likely have them tell you that they wish their shit worked better or that the internet wasn't so full of scams and pop-ups and slop and misinformation. They wish there weren't so many ads. They wish their apps weren't confusing and full of dark patterns and ways to trick them into subscriptions or clicking ads or being annoyed.

That's because there're only so many things you can do for the user until you start doing stuff to the user.

. . .

Despite decades of progress in hardware making computers faster, cameras better, and storage larger, the actual experience of using the computer has gotten materially worse. We've hit a wall as far as where mobile and desktop user interfaces can take us, and every attempt at making voice-activated platforms like Alexa replace (or even compete with) them has proven fruitless, with Amazon's various Echo devices and services losing billions of dollars a year.

This is what I call the Rot-Com Bubble. Big tech has hit the wall of what modern software can do, and in turn run out of hyper-growth ideas. Nobody has the next Google Search, iPhone, cloud computing, mobile app store ,or other idea that would allow Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon to keep growing at a rate that justifies their valuations. While this is partly a natural process -- there are only so many ways to do things! -- it's also a direct result of incentivizing and promoting products that create revenue growth or sustain monopolies, which in turn focuses your R&D and hiring efforts toward those who can come up with ways to make Numbers Go Up.

Put another way, the tech industry has become the largest cargo cult of all time.