The majority of U.S. adults don't believe the benefits of artificial intelligence outweigh the risks, according to a new Mitre-Harris Poll released Tuesday.
The past decade has done an excellent job of making people cynical about any new technology. I find looking at what crypto bros are currently interested in as a good canary for what I should be suspicious of.
Shit, there were people killing doctors over getting sick since there were doctors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera_riots
(Thankfully most people do take the cholera vaccine when there's an outbreak).
It doesn't help that big corporations promoted 100% hydrogenated Crisco as a healthy alternative to lard or the drug Thalidomide that caused horrible birth defects.
People need to be informed but many are swamped with the task of making a living and constant social "guidance".
It's also worth noting that the same VCs who backed cryptocurrency have pivoted to generative AI. It's all part of the same grift, just with different clothes.
Most major companies didn't touch crypto with a 10ft pole, but they've leapt at the chance to use AI tech. I don't think it's the same grift at all personally.
A lot of companies investigated cryptocurrency obliquely; "blockchain" was the hype word for several years in tech. And several of those companies had a serious sunk-cost fallacy going when they perpetuated their blockchain projects, despite blockchain only at best being a case of Worse Is Better, where a solution that sucks, but exists can be better than a perfect option that doesn't.
I agree with you that blockchain and cryptocurrency is a scam and has no uses, and I know that several tech companies sprung up to try to make a profit/scam people with "blockchain" tech. But Google/Microsoft/etc never went for those, whereas they are using AI tech. I don't think LLM's/AI's are a fad or a scam, I think there's genuine use cases for them.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were also serious internal discussions from some cryptocurrency booster within the ranks at Google as well.
And this is an example of the "AI as a continuation of the same grift as blockchain" pipeline, with exactly the same vague business wank with no substance behind it: https://www.aiunleashedglobalsummit.com/summit
I am really dissapointed that crypto became synonymous with speculative "investing." The core blockchain technology seems like it could be useful for enhancing privacy online. However, the majority of groups loudly advertising that they use crypto are exploitative money grabs.