Looking Up

I avoid doomscrolling. I think. I'm not sure that I'm clear enough on the definition of the term to be able to confidently say that I don't do it. I don't spend much time on news sites these days, because most of them require subscriptions, and I don't find most of them valuable enough to trade date, let alone money, for. And other than Linkedin, I don't have much of a social media presence. I enjoyed Google+, but that's long dead at this point. I could never get a straight answer as to the proposed business models of the would-be alternatives, and so never moved over to any of them. I haunt Reddit once in a while, but don't spend much time reading the news there.

So I don't think that I indulge in a lot of doomscrolling. But even without it, it's hard to find positive news about what's going on in the would, since positive items neither sell subscriptions nor drive attention to advertisers. So my media diet tends to have a fairly negative bent to it... which I dislike, and so I'm less likely to spend a lot of time reading the news.

But why do that, when the positive news is out there... it's just a matter of going out and finding it. Part of it, I suspect, is an aversion to the treacly "rainbows and puppies" sort of good news. It's easy to sort, and easy to report, but it comes across as being pretty trivial. There are only so many rousingly successful grade school bake sales I can be bothered to read about. Perhaps it's due to the stories being mainly human interest. And of course there are always people out there doing good things... the population of the United States is in the hundreds of millions, we can't all be jackasses all the time.

I think that what I'm actually looking for is accessible technology news; something I can read to learn how people are getting out there and solving problem, with enough technical detail that it's not all about the personal stories involved, but in language that I can actually make heads or tails of, given that I don't have a technical education.

That's likely to be a rare beast, and unlikely to be free. But, given the length and breadth of the World Wide Web, it's out there somewhere, I just have to find it. I expect that it will be a worthwhile project. 

Enlightening

Why not?

I stopped in a local bookstore and found this display. I'd never heard of celebrity prayer candles before, but it turns out that there's a decent-sized cottage industry for this sort of thing. I already have a few too many things that I don't have an immediate use for, otherwise, I might have purchased one, just for the novelty factor.

I'm a bit surprised that this hasn't made anyone angry enough that it's become newsworthy, but I suppose I shouldn't complain when people take things in stride for a change.
 

Hidden

A low-effort fake profile from LinkedIn.

So I received a connection request on LinkedIn from a person I'd never heard of, and wasn't even a second-level contact. Curious, I looked at their profile. And was greeted by a raft of red flags.

This sort of thing is common with fraudulent LinkedIn profiles: the lack of connections, prior roles without details and only a handful of connection despite a seemingly long career. And all that before I did a reverse image search on the profile picture.

And that commonality can be part of the problem. Because while not all bogus profiles are so obviously bogus, it can be easy to come to the conclusion that they are. And thus, anyone with an ounce of sense should be able to spot them. But someone with a decent amount of time and some resources can avoid many of the obvious pitfalls; existing profiles can be "rented" or compromised, work histories can align with stated timeframes and locations, and a fabricated résumé can be constructed. That may be more effort than a stereotypical third-world fraudster can bring to the project, but not everyone conforms to the stereotype.
 

Can't Buy Me Love

Given the fact that part of the reason why SpaceX wants to build data centers in space is that they understand that many communities find living near ones on Earth sucks, the idea that opposition is the result of a foreign influence campaign by Chinese interests seems to be a bit misguided.

Look, I get it, there's the promise of money to be made from ubiquitous automation, and boosters of technology have long held that the general public is simply too ignorant for their concerns to be allowed to slow progress.

But there's a reason why there are individuals who aren't going for: "This will be great for everyone; just trust us," and that's because time and again, promised benefits haven't arrived (or, perhaps more accurately, haven't been shared), and rather than supporters of technology taking the responsibility to make those who bore the costs whole, fingers were pointed until the whole thing blew over.

If LLMs were going to be such moneymakers, why did Meta and Anthropic feel the need to pirate books to train their systems, rather than just paying for them? I think that there are more causes to be suspicious of generative automation firms than their supporters may be willing to cop to.

The fact of the matter is that "Big Business" are not considered trustworthy by many members of the general public, and "Big Business" hasn't done a whole lot over the years to change that. Generally speaking, it's rare that someone supports something where they bear the costs, but the benefits go to someone else.

All of that said, I think that it's more than "the rich" and "tech moguls" who think (or want to think) they smell a rat. There's a reason why the term "Luddite," is more of a pejorative today than it was originally. When groups of people are pitted against one another, it's common for one or both sides to not only believe they deserve to win, but to see the opposition to them as illegitimate. And a lot of people have hitched their wagons to the generative automation star. It's not only the well-off among them who might resent pushback.

Consolation

 Microsoft's Brad Smith made a blog post today about responding to concerns, especially from young people, about generative automation and the possible impacts on employment.

It's a very cromulent bit of corporation-speak, designed to convey to readers that Microsoft isn't so wealthy, powerful or distant that it doesn't care about people's worries concerning technology. And Mr. Smith is willing to say some things that other corporate executives have been less willing to; he notes that there has been "corporate pressure to reduce headcount to help pay for AI’s enormous capital expenditures," rather than pretending that job cuts were the result of generative automation being able to do the work better. I think I still fault him for making this admission only after that reality had become public knowledge, but honesty is honesty.

But as I read it, I kept being drawn back to the Copilot Super Bowl ad (since removed from YouTube) that aired in 2024. For all that Mr. Smith says that the goal of generative automation is to help people do better work, rather than replace them, the promise of that initial advertisement was that people could be "soloprenuers" by letting Copilot do the things they would hire other people to do. And I said at the time: "If one's fear is that technology will drive isolation, or that AI will render one's skills obsolete, the message of this commercial is not reassuring." I would liked to have seen Mr. Smith acknowledge that there are people who are afraid because Microsoft's messaging gave them reason to be afraid.

Mr. Smith notes that in their book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, Ryan Roslansky and Aneesh Raman note five "soft skills that are uniquely human," namely: curiosity, creativity, compassion, communications, and courage. Which is all fine and good. But these are not traits that are in short supply. If the majority of people thought that the demand for these skills were high enough to keep the job market afloat, there wouldn't be so much worry about a jobpocalypse on the horizon.

If widespread adoption of generative automation by businesses is inevitable, and the jobs shed to free up budget for capital expenditures aren't coming back, the technology is going to have to create demand for human labor somewhere else. And "human observation and insight" aren't going to be that demand unless, somehow, the percentage of returns going to labor increases markedly, such that demand for automation-produced goods and services really skyrockets. And that's not a prediction that technology industry analysts seem to be making at this point.

To the degree that progress can be described as a process of creative destruction, I suspect that the public at large is better off when creativity drives destruction, rather than destruction demanding sudden creativity. But the public at large isn't calling the shots. It's the investor class, in search of returns on their investments. And as a high-ranking executive at a publicly-traded company, it's not difficult to tell which of those groups Mr. Smith is more immediately answerable to. And so I wonder about the motivation of this post, from a public relations standpoint. Is this honestly what the leadership of the company is thinking, or is it being conciliatory in an attempt to head off anger that may impact profitability and investor confidence?