Yet men like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman continue to be elevated because they are “building the future,” even if they don’t seem to have built it yet, or have the ability to clearly articulate what that future actually looks like.
Anthropic has
now put out multiple stories suggesting that its generative AI will “blackmail” people as a means of stopping a user from turning off the system,
something which is so obviously the company prompting its models to do so. Every member of the media covering this uncritically should feel ashamed of themselves.
Sadly, this is all a result of the halo effect of being a Guy Who Raised Money or Guy Who Runs Big Company. We must, as human beings, assume that these people are smart, and that they’d never mislead us, because if we accept that they aren’t smart and that they
willingly mislead us, we’d have to accept that the powerful are, well,
bad and possibly unremarkable.
And if they’re untrustworthy people that don’t seem that smart, we have to accept that the world is deeply unfair, and caters to people like them far more than it caters to people like us.
We do not owe Satya Nadella any respect because he’s the CEO of Microsoft. If anything, we should show him outright scorn for the state of Microsoft products. Microsoft Teams is an insulting mess that only sometimes works,
leaving workers spending 57% of their time either in Teams Chat, Teams Meetings or sending emails according to a Microsoft study.
MSN.com is an abomination read by hundreds of millions of people a month, bloated with intrusive advertisements, attempts to trick you into downloading an app,
and quasi-content that may or may not be AI generated. There are few products on the modern internet that show more contempt for the user -- other than, of course, Skype, a product that Microsoft let languish for more than a decade, the product so thoroughly engorged with spam that leaving it unattended for more than a month left you with a hundred unread messages from Eastern European romance scammers.
Microsoft finally killed it in May.
Products like Word and Excel don’t need improving, but that doesn’t stop Microsoft from trying, bloating them with
odd user interface choices and forcing users to fight with popups to
use an AI-powered Copilot that most of them hate.
Why, exactly, are we meant to show these people respect? Because they run a company that provides a continually-disintegrating service? Because that service has such a powerful monopoly that it’s difficult to leave it if you’re interacting with other people or businesses?
I think it’s because we
live in Hell. The modern tech ecosystem is so utterly vile. Every single day our tech breaks in new and inventive ways, our iPhones resetting at random, random apps not accepting button presses, our Bluetooth disconnecting, our word processors harassing us to “try and use AI”
while no longer offering us suggestions for typos, and our useful products replaced with useless shit, like how
Google’s previously-functional assistants were replaced with generative AI that makes them tangibly worse so that Google can claim it has 350 million monthly active Gemini users.
Yet the tech and business media acts as if everything is
fine.
It isn’t fine! It’s all really fucked! You can call me a cynic or a pessimist or every name under the sun, but the stakes have never been higher, and the damage never more wide-spread.
Everything feels broken, and covering these companies as if it isn’t is insulting to your readers and your own intelligence.
