Post AI World- Rant Clark Reid Tech Report Commentary

A subscriber commented that I do a lot about AI and much is— or seems repetitive. I replied to him…’no kidding’  I have touched on this here, but will elaborate a bit more now. My son in IT and I have had many conversations about AI. Both of us think it is an enormously hyped bubble. 

I have read a number of other folks who report on AI who think the same. There is a serious dot com bubble vibe to all this. Billions…maybe into the trillions…have been pumped into generative AI, and so far the returns have been puny. This may be the year…or maybe next year…that the big money people decide to pull the plug. We just reported a few days ago how some large PC makers are really disappointed about sales of AI capable PCs. The public just doesn’t see all that much value in it.

Can it be useful? Certainly. I have a granddaughter that is halfway through engineering school who uses it. She built a resume with ChatGPT, then had it do mock interviews with her. She got a good summer internship that will probably lead to a good job when she graduates. Her Mom uses it in her work a bit, but it’s just a tool that can do some things more quickly so far. Those are good uses, indeed. Some lawyers are finding it useful in drafting pleadings quickly. Most use Anthropic’s Claude. A few early on found out the hard way that the generative AI sometimes makes up cases or statutes, so even if it drafts a petition or response in 2 to 5 minutes…you will need to spend an hour or two double-checking the citations. It still saves a ton of time in this case. Now, Lexis has introduced an AI product for attorneys…I just got a snipe ad from them.

Super intelligence? One of the creators of Large Language Models left OpenAI to start his own startup. He has been joined by Jeff Bezos as Co-CEO. We reported on this here recently. He said upon leaving that generative AI is a dead end and he is going to try to figure out another way to get to super intelligence. The head of Meta’s AI has just left, too…and he also said AI isn’t going to become super intelligent and is a dead end. 

So the net is, in my view, generative AI will be a good tool and can be a time saver for people…but as for it being embedded in robots that will displace millions of jobs…nope. It isn’t going to have that capability, no matter how much Big Tech tries to will it to do so. Perhaps the next big thing will do those things…time will tell. Meanwhile, citizens, workers, bosses, and politicians had better be figuring out a way to pay a good living to all the people in the country after the next big thing and robotics displace much of the workforce. The folks in power love having more money and power, and are fine with regular people having next to nothing…BUT…a number of them understand that they don’t want to be on the receiving end of modern day mobs with pitchforks and torches coming for them. The time is now to figure out how to make this work. Even Elon Musk…who is no genius, except at buying up companies that are going somewhere and convincing the masses that he is a rocket scientist…when actually he just employs them…understands that people can’t just be displaced. He has said that in the future, no one will have to worry about money to live on…but has offered no specifics. Again…time to get thinking about this, billionaires and politicians.

I’m Clark Reid, and you aren’t ‘Technified’ now, but perhaps stimulated to ponder our post AI and robotic inhabited world.