Although I have recently ventured back into YouTube, video is not my native environment. Video will always be secondary to writing for me, and always exist primarily as a signal booster for my writing, both in bookstores and here on this website.
Adam Conover is more of a YouTube native than I am, and he recently took down the AI hype machine in a video entitled “A.I. is B.S.”.
Adam’s salient point is the true nature of the danger we face: Not that some super-smart techno-intelligence will take over, but that tech companies will manipulate us into using worse versions of what we already have, simply because they bear the trendy label of “A.I.”
In yesterday’s essay, I explored this in the context of those unusable chatbots that now routinely answer phones at large companies. Adam Conover has many similar examples.
The bottom line is that most commercial, overhyped applications of “A.I.” are problems in search of solutions.
