Das Silicon Valley hat vergessen, was normale Menschen wollen | Was uns NFTs, KI und das Metaverse über „Thought Leadership“ sagen
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/nft-metaverse-ai-weirdos
Das Silicon Valley hat vergessen, was normale Menschen wollen | Was uns NFTs, KI und das Metaverse über „Thought Leadership“ sagen
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/nft-metaverse-ai-weirdos
13 Kommentare
Notable points from this opinion piece:
>One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made.
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>Not every discovery that’s new to you is actually new. For instance, there’s Elon Musk marvelling at the complexity of hands; I could point to a variety of disciplines for which this is 101-level stuff: artists, who have to figure out how to draw them; surgeons, who have to figure out how to operate on them; musicians and magicians, who rely on extremely fine motor skill to produce their work; neuroscientists and psychologists, who doubtless encountered the cortical homunculus early in their careers. Or Palmer Luckey claiming that “no one has done a postmortem” on the One Laptop Per Child computing project — because he didn’t know there’s a whole book about it called The Charisma Machine.
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>There is a certain amount of hubris required to throw oneself at an unsolved problem — you have to believe you can solve it. But elsewhere, that hubris is a liability. It leads you to do weird things, like announce that Freud invented introspection and that it is a bonus that you simply do not engage in it.
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>While this particular kind of hubris makes people crashing bores, it’s not just an annoying personal trait. It seems to have seeped into the professional side of Silicon Valley as well.
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>Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.
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>In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich. NFTs, like crypto, let VCs quickly unload investments with abbreviated lockup periods. The metaverse promised to enrich companies like Facebook by having people move all their socializing online, where it could be surveilled and monetized. In addition, Facebook’s metaverse required the purchase of hardware, which would then need regular upgrades.
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>At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it. That’s why NFTs, the metaverse, and the Oculus and Vision Pro never really found their customer base. AI is, admittedly, more useful — it’s good for organizing large swaths of data, for instance. LLMs have had widespread consumer adoption, at least as long as they remain free. But there is only really one customer for LLMs that can justify the massive cash incineration process that was required to build them: the US government.
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>There can only be a few winners on government contracts, though. So we are now treated to the spectacle of watching AI companies scramble. OpenAI is perhaps the funniest, because it is attempting to position itself as a consumer product.
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>The people who tell us that AI will dominate our future and take our jobs are the people who are hoping that will be true. They may be hoping this because it makes them feel important, or because they want to be billionaires, or because they simply do not understand other people. I think that final point is underestimated. If you are going to provide me with a robot servant, I have a very clear bar: It’s gotta be at least as much bang for my buck as my dishwasher.
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>How is it that all these wunderkinds trying to build the next product to take over the world haven’t thought about this? I think the answer is simple. They do not have much in common with normal people, and haven’t thought much about what normal people’s lives are like, or what normal people value. What they have been doing instead is getting high on their own supply — listening to VC podcasts, freaking themselves out about whether they’ll be able to keep up with AI agents, and otherwise getting increasingly more detached from reality.
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>I suspect this is how we wound up with NFTs, the metaverse, and the clunky VR/AR headsets. These are things that appeal to a very narrow set of people who are overrepresented in the VC and wannabe-tech-entrepreneur spaces. The Silicon Valley hype cycle worked overtime for those things, and I think we all know how this turned out. When was the last time you heard about a Bored Ape, or a Crypto Kitty, or any of the other novelties that briefly swept the nation? Did those novelties translate into a real, durable income stream for artists, musicians, and other creators, as we were promised? When was the last time you saw someone wearing Apple’s headset? Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta utopia ever develop legs?
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>Look, we all had a bit of fun at Marc Andreessen’s expense about his lack of introspection — but this is precisely the reason Silicon Valley keeps trying to force futures on consumers that they emphatically don’t want. A VC who is incapable of self-reflection will never notice that his bets on the future of consumerism are failing in exactly the same way every time. That VC hasn’t noticed, and indeed can’t notice, that his experience isn’t representative of what the ordinary person wants or needs.
The hubris noted in this op-ed is certainly well represented in the valley and especially in VCs and VC-chasing ventures. It seems like they’re min-maxing for funding rather than to solve bona fide problems, and from that lens these trends seem to make more sense. The insular nature of those in these sectors, not just in the workplace but also in their personal lives also pretty much ensures that more likely than not there will be some kind of echo chamber in effect that can distort people’s understanding of what it is they’re creating.
They haven’t “forgotten”, they are still providing the stuff everyone wants(even if it is enshittified), their “problem” is that those needs are mostly saturated at this point, little increase in organic demand plus a stagnating population means just providing stuff people want can’t be sold as “growth” anymore. To see what happens in that case look at PayPal. Relatively stable revenue and profit over the past 5 years, stock has fallen 80% because they don’t have a “growth” story anymore. Other tech companies, whose executives are largely paid in stock, are worried the same fate will befall them unless they keep on coming up with new “hyper growth” ideas. The result has been crap like the metaverse and NFTs. They are just throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks at this point.
That was an excellent, refreshing read!
„If you ask people what they want they will say faster horses.“
Reality is almost nothing revolutionary you are using today is ever from someone asking „what would normal people want“. Would people have wanted facebooks, instagrams, iPhones, Uber? It’s almost always a niche group of users that adopt the new stuff. If new innovations prove themselves, they eventually becomes widespread products everyone actually wants. Whereas innovations that don’t survive, like NFTs, become a page of history.
Just name me something that was built as something that „normal people would want“ that ended up successful. It’s always how silicon valley innovates. What normal people want was never important.
> In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich. NFTs, like crypto, let VCs quickly unload investments with abbreviated lockup periods.
Likening AI to NFTs or the „Metaverse“ and being good for no more than stock hype is an extremely reductive take on the leaps in technology we’ve seen in the past few years and what real professionals and real organizations are using them for.
Most people today (even those that are self-described technology enthusiasts on a sub all about technological enthusiasm) are woefully behind the times on how AI actually works and what it can do and what real organizations are using it for at scale. For example, most people think it’s all just marketing hype and AI is nothing more than glorified auto-complete and for chat bots and generating funny images. These people simply don’t know what they don’t know (ironic, as that was one of the critiques of the OP’s blog post), and are unaware of an entire paradigm playing out across the world. If they were engineers, they would know.
I’m a Staff SWE at Google who used to be an AI skeptic but has since seen the paradigm shift it’s caused in how we work, and it boggles my mind how many technologically-minded people are putting their heads in the sand declaring AI technology to be dumb and incapable, and ignorant about how even with the agent technology we have now is still in its infant stage, and yet has already completely upended how we work in the engineering (SWE, SRE, MLE) disciplines, and it’s clear the way we work isn’t going back.
I’ve been around the block a few times, I’m at a level and place in industry where I can see the trends at a strategic level, and it’s clear as day agent technology is here to stay, and today’s AI models and agents are the dumbest they’ll ever be again, they’re only getting better. There’s obviously no putting this genie back in the bottle, and a lot of our world is in for a rude awakening.
They take no interest in „normal“ people. Without this interest, they will never build love for other „normal“ people. Without this love they cannot do anything good for them. Their fall in the eyes of history will be tremendous.
Silicon Valley knew what normal people want at some point? News to me.
I’m intrigued to read it- my kneejerk reaction is to think “frankly, it’s naive to assume they ever cared what we want in the first place”. That’s a pretty cynical take, and I hope to get more nuance and expand my take after reading. Will report back!!
Lopatto is 98% of the reason I subscribe to The Verge. Every piece she writes is 🔥, and this one is no exception.
The other 2% is reading/listening along as Victoria Song drives herself insane with wearable overload.
This is why I love Zuck’s plan for an AI clone to do his work. He’s so dumb he’s actually putting AI to good use as a replacement CEO and making himself obsolete. When all you can do is „produce ideas“ you are not exactly doing anything.
They don’t care. They consider themselves deity’s. They want the regular people gone.
Well that was a fun read. Will say the disconnect these guys have with your regular joe schmo is more apparent though.
When you’re in a sub-bubble of a bubble’s bubble, it’s tough to not be an insane dick, I guess.