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the average tech exec and venture capitalist and honestly an alarming amount of bay area software engineers have close to zero interaction or connection with regular people, and the richer they are, the more isolated they've become. They have built rationalizations for everything.

To make matters worse, there're an alarming amount of tech/biz reporters that are similarly-isolated, at least in how they learn about and experience tech. "The truth" is what's said by the companies, "the future" is defined by who gets the venture investment and captures people's minds on Twitter.

One of the problems is that very little about what Silicon Valley is doing is actually about tech anymore, including in how it's covered. It's personalities and funding rounds and whatever's "going viral" that week. Little practical discussion of the "stuff" or indeed financial analysis

The AI bubble exploited everything about the valley, especially the media: tons of funding rounds and personnel changes, with the thinnest-possible analysis of what the tools can do outside of (I shit you not) asking the people making them. It's frustrating, and ultimately harmful.

It's scary to accept this, but know that the vast majority of people believe that AI is the next big thing because a bunch of rich/powerful people spent a lot of money, and the media repeated their plans as if they were already complete because spent so much money.

they were talking about replacing labor and reshaping society from day one, which makes every "valid use case" people come up with just feel like ad hoc justification.

Oh, another note: whenever you hear someone say the "really smart people working on this stuff are saying X Y Z" know that they have never, for a second, considered A) if they're wrong or B) whether the person is actually smart or C) whether there might be an agenda of some sort.

It's also credentialism. "AI scientist" can mean everything from a guy with a masters of philosophy to a PHD in Mathematics with multiple published papers. Guess which one wrote AI 2027? bsky.app/profile/dyas...

I trust the Masters of Philosophy more (they are massively more in touch with the human condition and capable of comprehending something that sounds like a human but isn't)

The number of Silicon Valley "data scientists" who never took calculus or took any science beyond high school is much higher than many people realize.

gonna go with neither