Tech CEOs and Investors Are Just Saying Stuff ⇥ businessinsider.com

Jacob Silverman, Business Insider:

The growing bloat of popular tech rhetoric could serve as evidence for how the tech industry, having conquered so much of daily life, work, and entertainment, has begun to exhaust its imaginative capacities. Industry leaders promised that the mammoth capital for AI outlay would lead to the creation of a smarter-than-human intelligence that would serve as a universal solvent, fixing climate change, poverty, and even the problem of death itself. But that horizon — which we are supposed to reach by pumping out more fossil-fuel emissions and destabilizing labor and education — remains impossibly far away.

Gallup’s polling on views of different business sectors has, frustratingly, no ability to permalink to a particular industry and its historical rankings; so, you will need to go down to “Industry and Business Sector Ratings, B Through E” and then click the pagination arrow to get to “Computer Industry” on the second page. Once there, you will find what seem at first glance to be some remarkably stable figures.

Look a little closer, though, and the numbers tell a different story. Summing the “very” and “somewhat” figures for each type of response shows a marked decline in positive reception since a high in 2017, and a steady climb in negative reception. There are lots of reasons for this; many of them I have written about. But I do not think these loudmouth executives are doing the industry any favours by bullshitting their way through interviews and promising nonsense.

That is the data-driven answer. These guys also just sound really stupid when they say stuff like “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human” or “the long-term vision is to […] create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion” or “I bought Twitter […] to try to help humanity, whom I love”. I know I am writing this on a website called Pixel Envy and I am, well, me, but these barons sound comical and dorky.