🔗 Anti Trust in Tech – Pixel Envy:
These product introductions all look like hubris. Arrogance, really — recognition of the significant power these corporations wield and the lack of competition they face. Google can poison its search engine because where else are most people going to go? How many people would turn off Recall, something which requires foreknowledge of its existence, under Microsoft’s original rollout strategy?
I don’t know, man… they look more like flop sweat moves to me.
That is not to say these product releases are good or safe; they are certainly neither. Everyone who is up in arms about this stuff is right to be, and I wish even more people were concerned about the dangerous, rickety, poorly thought-through junk these companies are foisting upon the general public.
That said, none of this stuff reads to me like the moves of confident companies with clear and compelling strategies for the future.
What it reads like is a bunch of companies desperate to roll out anything to please investors—very few of whom care or even know what “AI” is and is not capable of—who are only interested in never-ending growth at all costs. Google, Microsoft, Apple… they’re throwing whatever they can at the wall because they have to maintain the fiction that the line will always keep going up. Once anyone lets on that it’s not sustainable, that we can’t just grow eternally, then the whole game is up.
So, sure—they’re going to keep cranking out this junk regardless of whether it works as promised or even whether it is safe because that is what The Market (not the customers buying the products, but rather that investors buying the stocks) is demanding.