Stop Talking to Technology Executives Like They Have Anything to Say

Summary

I do not enjoy writing about technology. Aside from the shiny, birdlike emotion I get from opening a new Apple product every three years, I do not enjoy using much of modern technology. I view my phone with mistrust and resentment, even as I allow it to eat my time with distractions to recover from a day of ostensibly engineering software in a career I also view with mistrust and resentment.Unfortunately, sometimes somebody says something so ontologically fucking stupid the usual defenders of intellectual dignity are overwhelmed by the blitzkrieg of obvious affronts to the human condition and can miss the depth of the rot. This time it’s Sam Altman’s response to the question “How do we figure out what’s real and what’s not real?”: I mean, I can give all sorts of literal answers to that question. We could be cryptographically signing stuff and we could decide who we trust their signature if they actually filmed something or not. But but my sense is what’s going to happen is it’s just going to, like, gradually converge. You know, even like a photo you take out of your iPhone today, it’s like mostly real, but it’s a little not. There’s, like, some AI thing running there in a way you don’t understand and making it look like a little bit better and sometimes you see these weird things … But there’s like a lot of processing power between the photons captured by that camera sensor and the image you eventually see. And you’ve decided it’s real enough or most people decided it’s real enough. But we’ve accepted some gradual move from when it was like photons hitting the film in a camera. And you know, if you go look at some video on TikTok, there’s probably all sorts of video editing tools being used to make it better than [reality]. Or it’s just like, you know, whole scenes are completely generated or some of the whole videos are generated like those bunnies on that trampoline. And I think that the the sort of like the threshold for how real does it have to be to consider to...