by stego-tech | 2025-04-19 02:50:40+00:00
The amount of AI boosters and defenders wading in here to bash anyone with a less-than-glowing perspective of the technology is...disappointing. If the technology is truly as revolutionary as you proclaim it to be, then why are you here defending it instead of changing the world with it, as you claim it can? Stop trying to convince detractors with empty arguments, and show us the actual results you claim to have.

> Hype is always bad.

As someone who actually has to implement stuff and support it thereafter, rather than just bolt it onto my resume and ride the hypetrain to equityville, I wholeheartedly agree with OP's core message here. After web2.0 devolved into walled gardens, closed APIs, and gargantuan surveillance apparatuses designed to serve advertisements in a more precise way than actual cruise missiles, I became soured on the very field I am also fiercely passionate about (IT).

The modern technology field is exclusively hype-oriented. There's something new every year you simply must adopt and become an expert in, or you'll lose your job. The ROI is irrelevant (namely because it rarely exists for most organizations in the early adopter phase, if ever), the functionality is irrelevant, the use case is especially irrelevant. It's "new", it's shiny, and you simply must have it to be a "modern" business.

Hype is meant to be a direct replacement for objectivity. It warps math and statistics to justify its necessity (like those cloud migration calculators every vendor likes to point to, in order to justify a wholesale migration off your present estate), the salesfolk strong-arm your leadership into adoption regardless of the advice of their internal architects and engineers, and C-Suites can recite dozens of brands in the Gartner "Leader" quadrant for any given technology while simultaneously having no clue what that technology actually does or is used for. It's all hype.

And an economy built on the hype-cycle has very real, immediate consequences for the average person. It raises energy rates (https://www.usatoday.com/story/business/energy-resource/2025...) and takes water from communities not provisioned for such large scale industrial use (https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/11alive-...), both of which harm locals while the companies skirt by without paying for their fair share of consumption (https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/extracting-profits-from-the-pub...). That doesn't even get into the grifts involved with IP, copyright, or elimination of well-paying jobs (https://green.spacedino.net/the-final-grift/), or the boom-bust cycles that often saddle consumers and taxpayers with the steep losses (both monetary and jobs) incurred once the early investors have sailed off into the sunset with their cartoonishly-large sacks of money and a new superyacht to show for their efforts.

The most immediate and pressing concern for the AI hype is the squandering of finite resources (fresh water, land, and energy chief among them) to train and operate these models on a highly speculative assumption that this revolution in AI will finally be the one that brings humanity into the future, cures all disease, and enables us all to live a life of leisure (rather than just the offensively rich) while waiting for immortality to arrive so we can explore the cosmos. To make this po-faced argument in the face of the present climate disaster demonstrates a complete lack of basic situational awareness, undermining any sort of credibility they may have with anyone who can consider the interactions of two separate systems; we can literally only pursue AI or ameliorate climate change right now with our current capacities in energy, water, and rare earths, and of those two only the latter is actually, demonstrably solved and merely requires global implementation. It demonstrates a selfish mindset of self-preservation (your career in AI) over the protection and support of the whole, and it's all just hype.

I'm not opposed to new technologies. Containers are a game changer, Kubernetes is improving its usability (in baby steps), composable infrastructure through code is a godsend, and the consumption-based models of public cloud providers have made hosting your own place on the internet cheaper than ever before. We've had some great innovations in these past ten years, almost all of which have been completely overshadowed by the perpetual hype train around get-rich investment schemes (crypto, blockchain, NFTs, AI). The hype is the problem, which is what the author was getting at.