The Overselling#

I distinctly remember a Washington Post story about the internet. It relegated the Web to computer people talking to other computer people about computers. It took the orgy of money in the very late 1990s to reverse that tone. English and journalism majors looked at their computers as glorified typewriters. A lot of them ate their words, or their editors forced them to eat their words, starting around 1998. And even then, they were disdainful of shifting center of influence. This was a departure from the 1980s when computer programming was not a glorious profession.

When social media came around, the latest example was MySpace and Geocities. They were both a hot, glorious mess. Not all, but a fair bit of the media felt it would be a fad. Who wants to sit on site all day, posting trash content? Who would read it? I mean, look at MySpace. It’s a dumpster fire. A few years later, there was another round of their own words for lunch.

What’s the expression? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. There was no way a Harvard educated writer at the NYT was going to be caught flat footed, again. Sure, they had no idea what they were talking about. Sure, it bored them stupid to read about it. But they were not going to get caught flat-footed again.

So everything is now breathless hype. Quantum computers will solve everything. No they won’t because they’re not good at basic programming. Like what this “classical” computer is doing for you right now. They will solve certain optimization and factoring problems. But a practical quantum computer has been about a decade away for the last 2 decades. There are huge engineering problems to solve. There are also huge questions of what it will practically achieve.

Then there was crypto. While the assets themselves are an open-argument, for a while block-chain was the future. Block chain will solve everything. It will even govern contracts between parties. Everyone has to put everything on the blockchain. The same j-school major who didn’t understand quantum also didn’t understand blockchain. But they were determined never ot have to eat their words of skepticism again.

Now there’s AI. There’s some evidence AI will automate out some jobs. Some companies are already claiming that AI is the reason they aren’t hiring. If they were firing folks for cost reduction and less business, that would seem basic. But if they’re replacing them with AI - that sounds smart. So the journalists eat it up. AI is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. It’s so important we should do everything necessary to “win the AI race.” Except, the growing evidence it’s limited in its ability not replacing many jobs.

In journalism we have tech journalists that don’t understand tech. Science journalists that don’t understand science. Writers on economics that barely seem to understand economics. And almost none are veterans, or seem to have held a gun, or run a business. We have plenty of law school and ivy league grauduates that opine freely on anything. The know nothing and comment on everything. So, excuse me if I can’t get too excited about an AI story in a major publication.

There are two occupations I think can effectively be replaced by AI. The first is the CEO. I’m sure we can create a virtual CEO that provides standard b-school solutions to problems. Such as, business is softening up, therefore fire people to reduce cost. The second is the journalist who can do little else but regurgitate press releases. If an AI CEO claims they’ll make 100 quadrillion trillion dollars by 2030, they’ll print it. No real questioning. Well, that’s what they said, so that’s what I’ll print. After all, the guy they replaced crapped all over Facebook when it came out. And look at where he is now.

As the cracks are appearing in AI, quantum is making a comeback. After all, quantum will fix AI and therefore fix everything. The articles about new quantum breakthroughs are starting. Maybe we should put them on the block-chain?