So, I follow a lot of techtubers relevant to my own interests, and many of them were covering CES, aka, the "Consumer Electronics Show." However, many of them have noted that there's barely any coverage of actual stuff consumers want this year. The entire thing is a big AI hugbox. Barely anyone really innovated, they just pushed the AI stuff trying to make their stockholders happy. because everything is a hugbox about AI now. It's our entire economy just about. It's held up by like 5 companies all shifting money back and forth because everyone thinks everyone wants AI.
But here's the thing, no one really wants AI. At least not "normal" people. Normal people are starting to hate the idea of it. I mean, it's driving up the costs of computing substantially. RAM is quadruple the price it used to be. GPUs have been increasingly expensive for years. Some say we're witnessing the death of traditional computer, and you'd think at a consumer oriented electronics show, we'd see consumer oriented electronics. But no, most of CES is just AI AI AI AI AI!
It's been like this for a few years now. I remember right after I bought my i9 12900k two years ago, I was reading about how they wanted to shoehorn "NPUs" into CPUs to have on board AI. And how this was the next biggest thing. And despite having little interest in it, I was like "oh great, planned obsolescence!" Like, fearing that these NPUs would obsolete me where games in 5 years are gonna start wanting onboard AI chips to do things. Well...as it turns out, NPUs were mostly a bust, and no one actually cares. They just want more powerful CPUs.
And then there's stuff like microsoft copilot, which is being shoehorned into everything, and no one cares. Gemini, no one cares. The fact is, for the most part, NO ONE FRICKING CARES!
Like really, these rich people need a reality check. AI is this trendy 2020s era buzzword, but I really know next to no one who genuinely cares about it or who uses it to make their life better. I mean, I admit I use it to bounce ideas off of once in a while, but that's about it. I dont talk to it every day. Quite frankly, the more I learn of its limitations the less I want to. It just isn't a revolution in a positive way. Most breakthroughs are negative. Like grok undressing people including minors, which is a big story this week. Or people having AI write papers for them in college. Or people going insane as AI tends to exacerbate peoples' mental illnesses. AI kinda reminds me of guilty spark from halo at times with that. Like, yeah, helpful computer thing, until it goes absolutely insane for some reason.
Of course, again, I'm not entirely against the tech. I'm just against how forcefully it's being rammed down our throats and the negative societal consequences. It isn't making life better for the normal person. If anything it's making things worse. People are losing their jobs to it. Normally, the argument is when corporations do well so do people because trickle down economics and "job creators", but when people are literally losing their jobs over this stuff and no one is hiring except for the gestapo (ICE), yeah, again, I can see why people become luddites. I dont agree with the logic, as for me it's just a call for a UBI instead, but that's who AI is truly benefitting. It's corporations, professionals. They can replace human workers with it. They can do more with less. It has positive value for industry. But it does F all for normal people. \
And you know what? I wish this AI bubble would just pop and that this whole obsession with it would die so I can afford actual...consumer electronics again. I dont want 32 GB of DDR5 RAM to cost $300-400. I dont want to be stuck with 8 GB GPUs forever. And I dont wanna rent computers from Jeff Bezos or Nvidia or something and connect to the cloud for gaming.
Like that's the thing. Given how this was originally about consumer electronics, let's discuss what consumers want. We want cheaper computers again. Cheaper game consoles. Affordable computing. We want to be able to build a computer for under $1000 that isn't entry level (hello, gabe cube pricing). We want to be able to buy that stuff for like $500-600. We want GPUs that are $200 and actually play games well. We want ones that are $300 to have more than 8 GB VRAM. We want 32GB DDR5 to go back to being like $100. We want cool new tech that can play games better. We want more powerful smartphones for less money. We want the switch 2 to be like $300, not $450. We want the other consoles to be around $500, or maybe less on sale. We dont want to pay more than $600 for a next gen console at launch and we want the cost of that to go down. We want our current hardware which we paid good money for to have reasonable longevity and not be obsoleted because tech bros decided to chase trends we don't care about and then ram them down our throats.
I'm not saying AI has to go. Again, I'm not anti AI, but let's be frank about AI in the 2020s. The tech is in its infancy, its power inefficient, and while I can see why the US government has use for it as the race to invest in AI is the 2020s version of the space race. It has a lot of important, say, DOD style applications. Corporations can use it to do things more efficiently, it's not all bad. But let's get rid of this idea of having AI in every PC for now. Maybe it'll be relevant in say, 10-20 years, but not now. Again, trying to push it now is like pushing for people to have PCs in like, 1960 or something. We'll eventually get there, but PCs didn't become a thing until 1980s at the earliest, and I'd argue they didn't go mainstream until the 90s or even the 2000s. But yeah. Imagine trying to shoehorn 1990s tech in like 1960....it's the same problem AI has now. Sure, that stuff had DOD style use cases....like....calculating physics for the literal space race. And it arguably had industrial uses too. But back at the time most people were like "yeah normal people will never need this" and now it's in everything. So yeah, I'm not gonna say it'll never get to that point for the rest of us, but again, we're talking a time scale of decades here. It's not there yet, and trying to force it is as disruptive to the economy now, as trying to force everyone to adopt PCs in the 1960s would've been. The tech just needs more time to cook before it's ready for widespread adoption. And trying to force it now is just disrupting the entire economy and making a lot of normal people very unhappy.
Even as far as like DOD applications go...we need to be careful with this stuff. I mean, properly regulated, it could be useful. However, we current got a fascist government consolidating power, going around normal protections to build corporate databases like Palantir with data on every American. And that crap is 1984. And who else knows wtf these people are doing with AI behind the scenes. Plotting authoritarian takeovers, predicting and preparing for citizen resistance to said authoritarian takeovers. This AI stuff is being associated with the baddies. It's being used for evil. I mean, there's a lot of grim talk recently about how Palantir was founded to help kill left wingers, which....is rather forboding. And given how Peter Thiel and Elon Musk seem to be quite frankly anti democracy itself, yeah, there's a lot of concern there.
Again, this is why a lot of people are just anti AI in general. I recognize it's not the tech so much that it's how it's used, but when a bunch of out of touch billionaires with fascist sympathies are using it at the expense of normal people, can anyone be surprised when normal people grow to hate it?
But yeah. I'm tired of this AI crap. I kinda wish this bubble would just pop so we can move on with our lives. I know it'll cause a recession, but we all know it's coming anyway. The bubble is already there. It's just a matter of when it pops already.
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