When it comes to the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), back in October Ted Gioia, based on his successful prediction that the metaverse would be as popular as a capsized dinghy, which are my words, not his, is now predicting that artificial intelligence is the next big flop:
Guess what? These same four companies—Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google—have a new dream technology built on fakery.
It’s called artificial intelligence.
What an amazing coincidence! Do these four CEOs coordinate their moves in secret? Or are they just obsessed with imitating each other in some kind of warped Girardian way?
But their AI plans aren’t much different than the virtual reality debacle.
- In VR, we go into a fake world to interact with real people.
- In AI, we remain in the real world but interact with fake people.
That’s not much of an improvement. By my measure, it’s actually a step backward.
Reality is not something to trifle with. It always gets the last laugh.
Given the companies named, he’s talking about generative AI, which I’ve mentioned seems like little more than a party trick to me. However, the starting post of this thread references claims that generative AI is now showing signs of artificial general intelligence, If this is a true claim then Gioia may not be right.
And other forms of artificial intelligence, or, more accurately, machine learning (ML), have already proven invaluable, from reading x-rays to spot cancer to weather forecasting.
Generative AI, since it’s basically a technology for digesting and summarizing a textual data source, may also have its place in the sun, as many academic disciplines experience such a volume of publications that researchers cannot keep up; some even have implemented their own agents for digesting the river coming at them.
The metaverse is, I think, a sponge for money that pretends to be a solution for ill-defined problems. AI? It’s already demonstrated some utility. I suspect it’ll be hanging around for a long while.
