Books About Bubbles
Yesterday on a long journey down south I read the first 70 pages or so of a book that the publicist of Bruce Schneier had chosen to send me without any obligations or anything. They just wanted me to read it.
It would be unfair to write any kind of review without or before reading the whole thing, and moreover somewhat rude to criticise a gift that had no strings attached to it.
I wanted to just say that calling things "AI" and "AIs" can mislead the reader. Now, to be fair, the authors do not try to claim chatbots have real intelligence, so they're not misleading people. It's just that, if I was to write something similar (and about 300 pages of it), I'd adopt different terminology.
Schneier and Sandler aren't "Stallmans", so they follow conventional terminology and go along with it.
The first few chapters are quite OK. The first one is fair, but over time it feels more like "let's write some text to fill" this heading/headline about "AI" and [something else]. That leads to more skimming, less in-depth reading.
To be clear, this is the first time I read a Schneier book, so I cannot compare it to prior one. I'll keep reading it when I'm offline and eventually give thoughts about the entire lot.
"AI" is basically a collective term for a lot of nonsense, so writing a long book about nonsense is bound to seem weak.
I spent many hours speaking to an NVIDIA employee who said they were compelled to use "AI" at work (slop for code; he explained the shortcomings of this and he's security-conscious; there are CVEs under his name). He said he found his job very stressful and prior roles in other companies had vastly better "work-life balance" (his words). It was a "corporate culture" thing. It would not just "resolve itself". So he said he would likely not stay there long; he also fully accepted that NVIDIA was channel-stuffing and engaging in "circular financing" to inflate its sales numbers, i.e. this was likely a bubble waiting to pop because slop is not improving, it is just wasting a lot of energy while debt soars.
Maybe "AI" is really just another bubble or hype like "metaverse", "IoT", "blockchains" and so on (except far bigger; he compared this one to "NFTs" - a prior and short-lived gold rush).█