Can we stay a high-tech society? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Rick Law
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 06, 2024, 04:00:50 am
content: This being a technology forum, I suppose "issues the biggest tech firm has" is of interest to most of us in the forum. The biggest tech firm beingGoogle, the problem is big enough to loose > 4% of it's market cap in one day.I stumbled into this (rather long and in depth) article. It describes a rather dysfunctionalGoogle totally incapable of producing or even maintaining it's prominent position.It is totally dragged down by non-business related issues making the organization impossible to operate. This is my first encounter of this on-line magazine. I am not sure about the credibility nor the quality of the writing.These bullet points are at start of the article:- Following interviews with concerned employees throughout the company, a portrait of a leaderless Google in total disarray, making it “impossible to ship good products at Google”-Revealing the complicated diversity architecture underpinning Gemini’s tool for generating art, which led to its disastrous results- Google knew their Gemini model’s DEI worldview compromised its performance ahead of launch- Pervasive and clownish DEI culture, from micromanagement of benign language (“ninja”) and bizarre pronoun expectations to forcing the Greyglers, an affinity group for Googlers over 40, to change their name on account of not all people over 40 have grey hairThis is the first paragraph:Last week, followingGoogle’s Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problemsthan its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history.. ... ...andterrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion offthe kraken’s market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?I suppose there is some degree of truth to what the article described because that would match my personal estimation of how large tech firms operates today. My personal conclusion lead me to believe that unless we shape up and change direction, we wont be able to maintain a high-tech society at all.What do you think? May be they will all wake up and we continue to develop or we regress to horses being the fastest mean of transportation?Link to the article:https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fearEdit: Corrected wrongly applied BOLD in text, and added a missing "the" in "the article"

author: Andy Chee
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 06, 2024, 05:52:59 am
content: Quote from: Rick Law on March 06, 2024, 04:00:50 amTechnological progress is not dependent on the wealth of corporations.Technological progress is dependent on the level of education of society.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 06, 2024, 08:29:22 am
content: Education and/or wealth might help, but I think the most stimulant for technological progress is to have a necessity, followed close by serendipity and/or curiosity.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 06, 2024, 07:45:45 pm
content: Optimising human community sizesby Dunbar and Sosis (at ScienceDirect), might be informative. It deals with the fact that in small scale agricultural societies, 50, 150, and 500 (humans) are disproportionately more common than other sizes, and how"a religious ideology seems to play an important role in allowing larger communities to maintain greater cohesion for longer than a strictly secular ideology does."I'm tempted to exaggerate and claim that when a group of people gets large enough, a religious elite will take control of it throughout, but that's not what the above article or similar research indicates; it's just what it looks like to me. Nowadays (say, last two centuries), often the religion is not about divinity per se, but more about moral self-righteousness and being better than others, and thus justified in their control, rule, and manipulation of others. Exceptionalism is a typical example.