> I think you’re failing account how many people, who are not extremely gullible, are influenced simply by repetitive narratives and group think.
Like all those people who work for money, to buy things; repeat, repeat.
Take away human language and its hallucinated meaning and we’re just meat based cassette tapes repeating yesterdays application of agency; output complete sentences, feel validated by the dopamine buzz for engaging in anything, eat, shit, go to bed.
A whole lot of daily life is just repeating yourself. Office jobs are “capitulate to group think”. Society requires a whole lot of capitulate to group think; everyone needs a tribe and finds one in the end.
Only people working directly on infrastructure, health, and tech breakthroughs are moving the needle and even then in small repetitive steps.
If you think you’re above that altogether then you’re the one chanting propaganda. Given the complexity of the universe, no center, you have no idea if you’re moving anything forward or backward; you can’t even point in the direction “forward”. Make more 1900s technology and software? Repeat. yawn
This attitude of shrug and say “that’s how it works” seems common with older accounts.
You know going into this the next generation can come along and change the rules. Maybe the past should have thought about that before having kids shrug
Physics doesn’t put an obligation on us to serve the elders catechisms and chants. It does empower us to overwhelm through strength and raw numbers.
Throwing up their hands is not a good political position of the generations who need to trust the next generations won’t just drug them up and stick them in poorly run state care.
I mean history suggests that’s the case. Took centuries for Copernicus to exist.
AI has been an idea for decades. It wasn’t until transformers in the last few years we had big gains.
Google and giant institutions focus on fiat revenue stability over the long term, in line with political ideology. Few big ideas come out of that. I think what Adam Smith is said to have written applies; division of labor taken to the extreme will result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.
We iterated on our current political system over the Boomers lives. Next generations are tired of the threat of brute force from the elders who the kids now see as in no position to back up those threats given their age. They’re abandoning norms of the last 30-40 years, which IMO, is enabled by abandonment of thousands of years of obligation to preserve religion.
There are shorter iterative periods too; 15 years ago comic movies went crazy with Iron Man, iPhone blew up; now we’re iterating on AI generated content and spatial headsets. 15 years prior (with some wiggle room for margin of error) “information super highway” was coming.
On the shorter scales there seems to a pattern of 3-5 year warmup and 7-10 year plateau, with a cooldown of 2-3 years as the masses lose interest. This aligns with neuroscience experiments that show our brains devalue old patterns after roughly 15 years.
Generational churn and lack of generalized sense of obligation to the past (via abandonment of religious buy in by westerners) could free the future to live in cycles that align with scientific measurement versus obligation to be parrots that recite past memes.
Stock was juiced by cheap money, cultural zeitgeist for magical mobile phone tech. Macro economic trends have nothing to do with Sundar.
Google is >20 years old and lacks history of diverse innovation and generational buy in of a company like IBM (I don’t feel IBM is relevant to tech anymore, but for many nostalgia seems to lead them to believe it is central to big tech economics).
Google may very well be entering a protracted death spiral. Without diversifying I doubt it will ever endear itself on people for 80+ more years the way IBM was able to[1].
IMO generational churn and new technologies are going to wipe out a whole lot of 2000s technology software-dev specific companies. Facebook and Google are my picks for biggest brands whose success is coupled to 2000s tech fetish explosion that may not exist in 10-15 years. Everything about tech corp is just straitjacketed “line go up” memes.
[1] (given the lack of competition IBM faced; government up and donated transistor technology to IBM to move them off vacuum tubes; IBMs history of success is a propaganda fueled mirage. It’s been propped up many times to serve the state)
Weird as I have been noticing all my HomePods (older and newer models) are also less responsive to “Hey Siri”. Used to be I could walk through a room and turn lights on as I went. Now they do nothing. I have to talk directly to them.
I have gotten the feeling they tweaked it to ignore voice if audio fidelity does not hit thresholds that suggest the speaker is being talked to directly. Perhaps it limits false positives, reduces poor translation.
To make users speak directly at it with clear diction would make for “smaller model” to translate which seems en vogue with AI now.
I say old a new because it makes me doubt mic degradation (a couple in the house were brand new Xmas gifts).