We should stop talking about "innovative" or "impressive" or "revolutionary" technology. No thing is impressive, it can only be put to impressive ends. Or wasteful ends. Is a bigger LLM, faster car, or a quantum computer impressive? No. But you might do something impressive with it.
If you build a thing that is only good for killing people, or can only produce pale imitations of humanity, it isn't impressive, it's a poor tool that produces mostly negative outcomes for society.
Under no circumstances must you absolutely give it to an AR-15, for example. Is it a new technology that synthesized the previous ideas of predecessors effectively? Yes. Is it "impressive"? No.
ChatGPT and its like are functions of improvements in memory, processing power and storage. Is the capability of software & hardware combined to hold many many points in a multidimensional grid impressive? No more then any other set of lines in space. So what are we accomplishing with it?
Much of the last 30 years of tech reporting has failed us b/c it has caused us to confuse the object with outcome. "Look at this cool thing" is convincing because we learn to want things. But that's a failure of understanding. We want outcomes. Where are the cool outcomes accomplished with thing?
We don't want flying cars, we want to stop sitting in traffic. We don't want crypto currency, we want freedom from economics. We don't want 6G, we want to be able to effectively maintain connections with people we care about. We don't want a new machine gun, we want freedom.
This is fundamental to the question of why people are opposed to "AI". What are the outcomes that are trying to be accomplished with it and for whom. These are the only things that matter about a technology, these are what may or may not impress.
Big tech has leveraged science to found a cargo cult that has us worshipping at the feet of boxes and bolts, blind to what--if anything--is being accomplished with the stuff they keep pumping out.
No I don't have to admit ChatGPT is impressive. Things do not impress. They may be beautiful, elegant or ugly, but I'm not impressed by them. Impress me with what is accomplished by them. Thus far, I do not see outcomes that impress me. Mostly the outcomes I see are very negative. Not impressive.
No technology inherently deserves to exist. It must be justified. We absolutely can, and have, made the choice to put things mostly back in the box.
Always interrogate technology and the pronouncements about it with "to what ends?" and keep asking until you get an answer that makes clear what humans will do with it for, and to, other humans.
PS: money is also a kind of technology. "The technology makes more money" is not a legitimate answer to any of these questions.
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