That’s not a typo. It was a Mad magazine cover – Mad having been the Onion or Babylon Bee of its day – and according to dpgreatlife, “Thimk” was a poke at Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who was once at NCR and later IBM. Watson’s simple mantra was “Think.”
The Atlantic recently ran a piece entitled THE RISE OF TECHNO-AUTHORITARIANISMSilicon Valley has its own ascendant political ideology. It’s past time we call it what it is.
In the relatively early days of Web 2, we wrote an editorial warning that the age of social was creating companies with greater populations than have most countries on the planet. In fact, we called them as nation-states, and warned back then that they could become more powerful than any government on the planet. It might have taken them 10+ years, but it seems at least the Atlantic seems to be catching on.Read More...
While LLMs such as ChatGPT are still very new and people do seem to forgive them for some of the ‘hallucinations’ qua fabricated information they may deliver, Amazon’s Echo and Alexa have been around for quite some time now and in case you missed it, Amazon Shuts Down Smart Home for a Week Over Racist Slur Claim.
Which begs the question: where does tech end and what belongs to you begin?
“If you bought a toaster, at the end of the day, you own the toaster. It’s your toaster…Alexa is not a subscription service. You buy the devices, and that’s supposed to be it,” said the Microsoft engineer who was shut out of all things in his connected home connected by Amazon-controlled devices, such as Echo and Alexa.Read More...
What is it with that name and the need to control? Or manipulate. We refer to the Mar(c)(k)s Andreessen and Zuckerberg, respectively.
Although the spellings may be different to deceive the clueless.
Marc Andreessen, who a while back explained Why Software Is Eating the World, is now instructing us on Why AI Will Save The World. Mind you, in his earlier a16Z blog post, while he was right about how technology would take over, he didn’t bother to mention what we’d have to surrender for the privilege: our privacy and all our personal information.Read More...
Heads up! Yet another tech billionaire now owns a media empire, and a notable one at that.
“Austin Russell became the youngest self-made billionaire in 2021; now he owns Forbes,” TechCrunch reported.
The problem is, no matter that tech wunderkinds might have made a fortune in their chosen fields and become vaunted in the media: that doesn’t translate into the ability to run a media property being in one’s wheelhouse. It’s terra incognita and always a good idea to stay in one’s lane, from what we can tell as a result of tech billionaire devouring media stalwarts so far.Read More...
From what we’ve witnessed about the tech space to date, tech is all about invention and reinvention.
Example: it’s a communications tool. How long has the telephone been around, meaning landlines? Instead of calling, we ping or email or Zoom. Nothing new, really: only the words and devices and delivery mechanisms have changed to deceive the clueless.
Tech is also about glorification and vilification – and sometimes both, in the same person. Everyone’s (former) hero Elon Musk bought Twitter and the tech media banded against him – no matter that Twitter had been a platform for propaganda and surveillance under Jack Dorsey’s tenure. Yet, no matter what, Dorsey, for some reason, can seemingly do no wrong.Read More...
We’ve been postponing covering ChatGPT as it is still relatively early days, although elements of it – re AI – have been there for quite some time. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a definite disruptor, even more than Facebook was in its day, when it heralded the Age of Social, but this time, sans Mark Zuckerberg’s ego and/or iron-fisted control. Yet, or as far as we know. But when was the last time we stopped and considered the dystopian side of the shiny new thing before we realized that, say, our privacy and personal data would be gone, perhaps forever, or worse, thanks to, say, a communications assist?
As a writer, we will tell you that, while AI may correct our typos, since we key so quickly, great. As for its grammatical suggestions or recommendations for completing a sentence or thought? AI is clearly not an original thinker and is wrong 90+% of the time – without exaggeration.Read More...
An issue that the mainstream tech seems bent on ignoring is whether or not AI is sentient. As Yahoo!Finance reported, “the issue of machine sentience – and what it means – hit the headlines…when Google placed senior software engineer Blake Lemoine on leave after he went public with his belief that the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot LaMDA was a self-aware person… Google and many leading scientists were quick to dismiss Lemoine’s views as misguided, saying LaMDA is simply a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.”
Now that the LUPA/PAUL stocks have (mostly) gone public – Lyft, Uber, Pinterest and Airbnb), these supposed category killers aren’t exactly killing it in the stock market. It’ll be interesting to see how the massively funded We Company (nee WeWork) does and despite all of this, we’re still witnessing massive funding rounds. Vice, for one, despite its stalled growth, recently raised $250M, a pittance compared to the $575M raised by Deliveroo. At some point, growth does stall; hockey stick growth is unsustainable or as Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human et al, said at the Techonomy conference in New York last week, “exponential growth is a problem. The only thing that can grow exponentially forever is cancer, and then it kills its host.”
We’ve known Rushkoff personally since the early days of Web 1.0, which, he reminded us, was when we all innocently believed that the web would distract us from the insular world of television and bring us together, which Mark Zuckerberg told Congress was the intention of Facebook. Well, that and world domination, although he did not share the latter with Congress.
Back in those early days, Wired Magazine told us that the internet was going to be the salvation of the NASDAQ stock exchange. This was the attention economy, and, said Wired, thanks to digital, the economy would grow exponentially, unstopped, forever. And Alan Greenspan agreed: New paradigm! Unlimited growth! Forever! What they didn’t realize was that this economic system was a very old, obsolete operating system invented by the monarchs in the 12th and 13th century to prevent the rise of the middle class, Rushkoff noted.Read More...
Don’t Look Now, But Tech Just Became Way More Dangerous (Actually, You Need to Look)
While we’re not big on conspiracy theories – we’re simply too busy to get sidetracked – we do love to follow trajectories to see where things may be going. Or to once again quote Wayne Gretzky, if you want to know where the puck is going, look to where it has been.
Forest through the trees time, and Big Tech has gotten the four Ds down to an art, and yes, four – Deny, Deflect, Defend, Delay. Important, considering what else has been going on in tech to which not many people have been paying much attention: the rise of the Fakes, or as we prefer to call them, PHAkEs, which is our acronym for Post Human-Acknowledged Entities.Read More...
