AI Is the (Short Term) Future
2026-10-01 20:29 - Opinion
Much, much, much has been said about "AI" lately. Largely to mean LLMs (or Large Language Models). I've been a mostly late adopter and am still getting to grips with what it means, from a user's perspective.
I just watched the "Our Own Devices" (wonderful YouTube channel) video Metronomes: The Mechanical Maestro. At some point it started to cover the general theory of pendulums. But then explained that a pendulum as a time keeper for music would need an impractically long pivot arm to be useful, moved on to the invention of the modern metronome whose secret was a second weight on the opposite side of the pivot as the main weight, and moved on again more quickly than my brain could keep up with the new interesting facts. Put a pin in that.
I'm of the particular generation that really got to grow up alongside computers. Home computers were born roughly at the same time as me, and started to become common just as I was growing up. I used them extensively through late childhood, teenage-hood, and into adulthood. And even more, lived and grew with the online revolution. I can clearly remember the optimism of the early internet, and I felt it at the time. These days, it's long gone.
It's tough to pin down exactly why. I've thought about this before and never come up with a truly compelling explanation. Part of it is definitely that the early internet was still a rough place. To be there, you had to want to be there, it took effort and there was little if any return besides the intrinsic value. As a result the early internet was full of people that shared information because they wanted to, because they were passionate. This lasted for a while, but as their combined effort gathered more and more value, more people showed up to extract that value. The infinite and dirt cheap reproducibility of digital data is a wonderful thing, at its best. But eventually more participants meant a more and more diffuse landscape, and more value to be extracted from the audience itself. Commercial concerns crept in. And really took over.
Things passed a zenith. When is a matter of opinion, but certainly it's happened. The dark side of digital data's easy spread came into view: if attention is valuable (by way of advertisements), the incentive is to beg, borrow, and steal that attention any way you can get it. And if the internet enables instant global communication, then it's the scummiest actors who will fill it up, in that pursuit of monetized attention.
Which leads us to the internet of today. Aside even from the outsized effect that tiny slab-of-glass computer replacements have had, even the "classic internet" is a scarred husk of its former self. It's oft said that Google (Search) isn't what it once was, but I honestly believe that is mostly due to the fact that the "ten blue links" don't work anymore, when the majority of targets for those links are low value. The internet's success was its own demise. Some of us remember how mind blowing "Google" was when it was new. But "when it was new" is the key phrase. Back then quality content abounded. Google felt magical because it was standing on the shoulders of a giant internet-sized pile of knowledge. These days it's more a pile of slop.
Which gets me back to the metronomes. The video left me curious yet I didn't turn to a search engine, I turned to "an AI". (These days I regularly rotate around which one, specifically, I go to. Usually for no reason besides variety.) And I asked it about things. And I got an answer. Quickly. With no flashing or blinking colorful attention grabbers, right there right then. Just the answer I wanted, and again very quickly the first answer I found got me to the next question to ask, and soon to the crux of the issue.
That's very much what the early internet felt like.
