"You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype" by Lee Vincel is an essay I return to often. It was the first place I heard of the term "criti-hype".
Criti-hype breaks down as critics of a certain technology warning of the worst case scenario of its adoption end up advertising its features rather than looking at the real world problems happening today. As Lee Vincel puts it:
It’s as if they take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes.
You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype (Lee Vincel/Medium)
It's important to keep criti-hype in mind when extraordinary claims are being made by technology companies about how their new invention will disrupt an industry. Uber spoke of making transit cheaper and more efficient by allowing people to act as taxi drivers on their commute home or in their spare time. A few years later,
Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.
No, Uber's (still) not profitable (Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic)
AI has been the new technology in the hype machine for the past year. As Lee Vincel writes:
More recently, “AI” is the area of technology that has likely experienced the greatest amount of criti-hype. As Yarden Katz and others have argued, “AI” is really best thought of as a rebranding exercise: around 2017–2018, corporations using “AI” to describe things that had previously been known by other faddish terms, like “Big Data.”
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First, criti-hype helps create a lousy information environment and lends credibility to industry bullshit. In Bubbles and Crashes, Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch write about the role of narratives in creating speculative bubbles around new technologies. When academics engage in criti-hype, they lend more authority to these narratives.
Here is one example of how credibility-lending can work: McKinsey says 60 percent of occupations would have 1/3 of their activities automated by “AI.” Let’s be real. McKinsey says this because it sells consulting services to firms and wants executives in those firms to believe they will be soon be dealing with a radically transformed environment. In other words, McKinsey wants to scare the shit out of us.
You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype (Lee Vincel/Medium)
That is not to say that there is no utility from AI and large language models. I've tested out some AI assistants and there are some useful aspects to them. Sometimes they speed up my work process but I've found they have slowed me down more often.
That is also not to say there is no risk to employment from AI. As Cory Doctorow said:
I also think that out bosses have proved over and over again, indeed since the Industrial Revolution, they're happy to replace skilled labourers who make good things with machines that make substandard things.
IBM Predicts AI Job Disruption (Cory Doctorow on This Week in Tech)
The nature of the technology is hype and change. The next thing is the next "big" thing. Get in early so you don't get left behind. Look at the guys who got in early on the previous "big" thing. In times like these, I try to remember the Gartner hype cycle and wonder where we are on the chart before I get too excited about the next thing.