Broad, vague bit of thinking: across the board people seem to be assuming tech is further along than it is, and confusing it with science. Tech has all this marketing making it look shiny and futuristic and people trust it because without significant science in their lives, how can they not - ThreadSky

ewacat.bsky.social • 19 days ago

Broad, vague bit of thinking: across the board people seem to be assuming tech is further along than it is, and confusing it with science. Tech has all this marketing making it look shiny and futuristic and people trust it because without significant science in their lives, how can they not

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badgermash.bsky.social•19 days ago

At present, you could say the same of pharmaceuticals, so, perhaps, any commercial derrivation of science with unscrupulous marketing behind it?

brickie78.bsky.social•19 days ago

Hence people treating LLMs as The Computer From Star Trek, rather than as spicy autocomplete.

paulhaine.bsky.social•19 days ago

I used to get annoyed a few years ago before LLM-bots were a thing by people routinely accusing other very obvious humans as bots if they didn't like their politics. Skip forward and now we have very obvious LLM-bots being treated as something like Tolkien's Maiar

noobul.bsky.social•19 days ago

1/ I've been interacting with tech since I was 4. I caught the beginnings of the internet in my country. I've been assembling PCs since I was 13 and I have almost 10 years of working experience in software. I believe that the direction of our tech solutions have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

noobul.bsky.social•19 days ago

With all the things happening everywhere, and with all the social media and AI BS that's floating around I just want to move to the country side and die in a garden full of tomatoes.

ewacat.bsky.social•19 days ago

i used to build PCs as a bonding thing with my dad so i feel this. what it was as a kid felt real and tangible, all of this is in the hands of 'investors' and 'stakeholders'

ewacat.bsky.social•19 days ago

I've just woken up annoyed at people thinking we can get to Mars soon and that AI is worth a damn on a social level and that people in the bookshop were amazed that we had to enter their handwritten-at-the-till loyalty card forms into the system ourselves because "don't computers do that"

jontyfairless.bsky.social•19 days ago

Side note on the Mars shit: yes - oops all marketing. Lots of boosters are unreflectively like "it's a nice red planet with cool rovers. It'll be like living in a desert; it's doable"

No dudes. The best analogue for living on Mars is: Antarctic base but extra cold, minus the air, water, and rescue.

ewacat.bsky.social•19 days ago

it's not *not* worth aiming for the outpost, right, but they think we can get CITIES up there. these guys read Kim Stanley Robinson like a blueprint instead of fiction

thebrainofchris.bsky.social•19 days ago

Doing a piece of the future of car showrooms at the moment and it is involving a lot of people saying "I don't know much about AI" before telling me all the wonderful things AI is going to do.

susanne.bsky.social•18 days ago

We had a speech today saying that the future of trade etc with the US will involve Crypto :(

ewacat.bsky.social•18 days ago

god i thought we were on the way out from under THAT cloud

susanne.bsky.social•18 days ago

So did I! But we're (obviously) having to give up on anything involving sustainability or net zero, so looking at tech as the alternative. My alternative would be to tell them to f off completely but apparently that's not an option for the UK :(

ewacat.bsky.social•19 days ago

I don't have a point, I'm just despairing

ewacat.bsky.social•19 days ago

And then maybe making the universities focus on STEM over the Humanities is some sort of hot house drive to get us to the point it feels we should be at. Chasing some fiction of advancement feels retro futuristic, like wanting us operating on a timescale laid down by SF writers in the 60s lol

durrellb.bsky.social•19 days ago

The focus on STEM is all about business. Engineers build stuff that businessmen can sell, which is why they value it over everything else. Because the jobs and the funding isn't there in STEM fields. Very few people with those degrees actually get to work in their field.

gavthorpe.bsky.social•19 days ago

And extending to STEAM is because they realised STEM skills don’t create much without imagination to guide them.

“I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

Albert Einstein.

kateweb.bsky.social•19 days ago

A lot of people with engineering degrees don't end up working in their field. All this push to get students into a STEM pipeline, but a lot leak out at graduation/first job.

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