Man you didn't spend much time in academia. The number of psychopaths I encountered in academia quite easily exceeded those in Business, and I've been in business a lot longer. Maybe I was just unlucky/lucky; don't know.
Anyway, "AI" is an actual subject, but as used in the marketing and press releases, and at this point on HN, is a sort of grandiose malapropism meaning "statistics and machine learning."
The ideology spelled out by the author is ill presented, but fairly real.
1) "AI" as presented is a continuation of the program of the technocratic managerial "elite." The social class of people who more or less started in the time of Herbert Hoover, and while having some mild successes (the creation of the highway system, public health initiatives, WW-2 production), have mostly discredited themselves for decades (aka the shitty roads, a nation of fat diabetics, deindustrialization because muh free market reasons). Similar social classes also failed spectacularly in the Soviet Union.
2) Data collection is mostly useless. In intelligence work, in marketing, political work: most of it is completely useless, and collecting it and acting on it is a sort of cargo cult for technocratic managerial nerds, economists and other such human refuse. Oh, it pays off sometimes: it doesn't matter though; collecting it and performing actions based on it becomes is its own reward. There's an entire social class of "muh science" nerds who think it a sort of moral imperative to collect and act on data even if it is obviously useless. The very concept that their KPIs and databases might be filled with the sheerest gorp .... or that you might not be able to achieve marketing uplift no matter what you do... doesn't compute for some people. But it's real. I encounter bullshit like this every day.
3) "AI" as labor replacement is a wish, rather than a fact. They really mean your job will be replaced by an Alien or Immigrant, not a computer. As the article points out; the human proctored stuff on the web is the valuable stuff. They didn't point out that "AI" produces a ton of web (and email) spam content as well: and it's almost entirely shit. Something like a search engine is somewhat a somewhat valuable linear algebra way of organizing data in an automated fashion, which ding-dongs continue to conflate with "AI." Human proctored data is almost infinitely more valuable. I don't like Wikipedia, but if I had to pick between it and existing search engines; I'll take Wikipedia all day.
Anyway, "AI" is an actual subject, but as used in the marketing and press releases, and at this point on HN, is a sort of grandiose malapropism meaning "statistics and machine learning."
The ideology spelled out by the author is ill presented, but fairly real.
1) "AI" as presented is a continuation of the program of the technocratic managerial "elite." The social class of people who more or less started in the time of Herbert Hoover, and while having some mild successes (the creation of the highway system, public health initiatives, WW-2 production), have mostly discredited themselves for decades (aka the shitty roads, a nation of fat diabetics, deindustrialization because muh free market reasons). Similar social classes also failed spectacularly in the Soviet Union.
2) Data collection is mostly useless. In intelligence work, in marketing, political work: most of it is completely useless, and collecting it and acting on it is a sort of cargo cult for technocratic managerial nerds, economists and other such human refuse. Oh, it pays off sometimes: it doesn't matter though; collecting it and performing actions based on it becomes is its own reward. There's an entire social class of "muh science" nerds who think it a sort of moral imperative to collect and act on data even if it is obviously useless. The very concept that their KPIs and databases might be filled with the sheerest gorp .... or that you might not be able to achieve marketing uplift no matter what you do... doesn't compute for some people. But it's real. I encounter bullshit like this every day.
3) "AI" as labor replacement is a wish, rather than a fact. They really mean your job will be replaced by an Alien or Immigrant, not a computer. As the article points out; the human proctored stuff on the web is the valuable stuff. They didn't point out that "AI" produces a ton of web (and email) spam content as well: and it's almost entirely shit. Something like a search engine is somewhat a somewhat valuable linear algebra way of organizing data in an automated fashion, which ding-dongs continue to conflate with "AI." Human proctored data is almost infinitely more valuable. I don't like Wikipedia, but if I had to pick between it and existing search engines; I'll take Wikipedia all day.