It’s weird that high tech CEOs didn’t learn the most valuable lesson from the Metaverse: people are not stupid. If they don’t like something, selling it to them harder is not going to make them like it more. It’s simply not solving their life’s problems.
AI behaves much the same way. It’s not that it’s useless, it’s that faced with the actual cost, its usefulness shrinks to almost nothing. People dislike AI because they know better, not because they are too stupid to see.
Yeah, you make people depend on your product, lobby for a monopoly, and keep your captive audience just enough above starvation to not revolt. Like the healthcare system. Or gas companies. Or semiconductor companies. Or housing owners.
I honestly think a lot of the people pushing this stuff know very well that they don’t need it to succeed. They don’t really care if the general public hates it, and it flops. As long as they can convince investors, they’re pulling yearly paycheques and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. If it flops, some thousand employees (thralls) will be layed off. If it fails catastrophically, they might need to step down themselves, and move to a different company that “appreciates their ability to be a visionary”.
These people are only capable of failing upwards, and they know it. The name of the game for them is waving their arms and blabbering about something to draw in investor money.
Right now, they are sitting on social media platforms that can’t see meaningful growth and a messaging platform near the same. Nothing that Meta has tried to create after either defends their existing revenue streams from dying or creates a new revenue stream.
Without significant change, Meta is a decade away from being another AOL.
That’s definitely true, but the question is do the execs really care? I think that for a lot of these people, the only thing that matters is whether they can keep pulling those sweet sweet cash-outs. Just look at the absurd bonuses musk was promised from tesla recently. If he really cared about the success of the company, he wouldn’t take those, he would take a fair paycheque and allow the company to reinvest the rest of the money. Instead, he requires massive bonuses to keep working. We’re talking about the kind of money that could fund the entire educational sector in a small country for many years. He’s taking that out as a personal bonus, to the detriment of the company.
That kind of thing makes me believe that he doesn’t really care about the long-term success of the company. What he really cares about is squeezing out cash from the company for as long as possible. If the company fails, he has enough money to buy up something else that he can squeeze cash out of. The modus operandi is basically
Be rich
Buy some company
Wave your arms and wag your tung to get investor money into the company
Cash out bonuses
Go to step 3 until your cash-out has surpassed the investment cost
Either sell out of company (if it’s been run to the ground), or go to step 3 until it has been.
It’s weird that high tech CEOs didn’t learn the most valuable lesson from the Metaverse: people are not stupid. If they don’t like something, selling it to them harder is not going to make them like it more. It’s simply not solving their life’s problems.
AI behaves much the same way. It’s not that it’s useless, it’s that faced with the actual cost, its usefulness shrinks to almost nothing. People dislike AI because they know better, not because they are too stupid to see.
Yeah, you make people depend on your product, lobby for a monopoly, and keep your captive audience just enough above starvation to not revolt. Like the healthcare system. Or gas companies. Or semiconductor companies. Or housing owners.
Uh. Looks around at the state of the world
I honestly think a lot of the people pushing this stuff know very well that they don’t need it to succeed. They don’t really care if the general public hates it, and it flops. As long as they can convince investors, they’re pulling yearly paycheques and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. If it flops, some thousand employees (thralls) will be layed off. If it fails catastrophically, they might need to step down themselves, and move to a different company that “appreciates their ability to be a visionary”.
These people are only capable of failing upwards, and they know it. The name of the game for them is waving their arms and blabbering about something to draw in investor money.
Nah. Meta needs something to grow.
Right now, they are sitting on social media platforms that can’t see meaningful growth and a messaging platform near the same. Nothing that Meta has tried to create after either defends their existing revenue streams from dying or creates a new revenue stream.
Without significant change, Meta is a decade away from being another AOL.
That’s definitely true, but the question is do the execs really care? I think that for a lot of these people, the only thing that matters is whether they can keep pulling those sweet sweet cash-outs. Just look at the absurd bonuses musk was promised from tesla recently. If he really cared about the success of the company, he wouldn’t take those, he would take a fair paycheque and allow the company to reinvest the rest of the money. Instead, he requires massive bonuses to keep working. We’re talking about the kind of money that could fund the entire educational sector in a small country for many years. He’s taking that out as a personal bonus, to the detriment of the company.
That kind of thing makes me believe that he doesn’t really care about the long-term success of the company. What he really cares about is squeezing out cash from the company for as long as possible. If the company fails, he has enough money to buy up something else that he can squeeze cash out of. The modus operandi is basically
This article was written by ai and used an ai image.
This article was written by award-winning verifiably-human journalist James Ball.
The image is credited to Benny Douet, a human professional illustrator with a legit body of work which stylistically matches said image.
By all means call out slop when it appears, but this isn’t it.