I’ve recently been rereading “The Trail of Gold and Silver: Mining in Colorado, 1859-2009”. I feel like I should remember this, but I’m struck by how much fraud went into the early Colorado Gold Rush. We talk a lot about fake news and propaganda in the media today, but this has existed for a long time. All it really took, too, was someone who had visited the region to write home gross exaggerations of how much gold they found, and people back East lapped it up. To be fair, there was something of a bad recession around that time, so a lot of people (especially young men) felt they had nothing to lose.
I’m only about 50 pages in, but it keeps reminding me of the recent “AI boom”. We’ve been promised the dystopian sci-fi “AGI” for a few years now, but it has yet to emerge in any remotely meaningful way. We were also told, quite cleverly, that it would replace everybody’s jobs – so you’d better get on board! – but the results have been meager and limited, and some companies have sworn it off because it was so destructive. More than a few CEOs thought they were futurist geniuses and fired large swathes of their staff because they believed the boosters, and are now regretting it.
I don’t pretend to know the future, but I’ve been an AI skeptic from day one, not because I understand the technology, but because I understand people. And people always do this: they try to get a jump on the future, because there’s tremendous prestige in doing so, and everybody wants to be the guy who “got it right”. Bollocks.
My generation has this deep fear inside of it: we are afraid we will be the boomers who said the internet was a passing fad, who look like the absolute losers of history to us now. The problem is, those people were working with the best information they had at the time, and it probably wasn’t an unrealistic prediction. The best anybody can ever do is work with the best information they have.
Several months ago, I read this awful book called “Think Again”. It had promise as an “enlightening, self-psychology” book, but I found it tremendously lacking in critical thinking. It would say stuff, backed up by a decent amount of research, akin to, “Well, 56% [or whatever] of people on this test got a better score when they changed their mind on a test question, so changing your mind is good!” But I was thinking, “That doesn’t mean anything! Selecting a different multiple choice option isn’t something you should do simply because a study told you that changing your mind offered a tiny statistical advantage. The whole point is to accurately assess the question and its answer, not change your mind for the sake of changing your mind!” Stay with me, this is relevant. There was another bit which drove me insane, where the author talked about large corporations (because of course he did) and how Blackberry failed in the smart phone market because the CEO didn’t change his mind, whereas Steve Jobs succeeded in the smart phone market because he did. This is pure selection bias, and the author did absolutely nothing to address probably millions of businesses that have failed specifically because somebody changed their mind, buying into some new hype and chasing it. Somebody, somewhere, changed their mind, and happened to get it right, despite no evidence to suggest it was, and no actual proof they had any idea what the outcome would be. Be amazed! Change your mind! Now buy my services so I can coach you and your business can thrive!
I stay farther and farther away from the ‘business’ aisle at the bookstore. Most of it is slop, written by 28 year old “consultants” who find a catchy pitch that appeals to the masses, which allows them to get a 15 minute morning interview promising to skyrocket corporate productivity. None of these books is really for you and me (they are for garnering attention as a marketing ploy), but they are written to make you feel good about yourself, and they are deeply plugged in to the message that you can be more “productive” if only you follow their little “system”.
(I also hated “Essentialism”, which I didn’t finish reading. It was a cleverly-disguised productivity book masquerading as a lifestyle book; it mostly just argued that focusing on one subject allows you to make more progress than focusing on multiple subjects. Not exactly ground-breaking stuff. What I read seemed to indicate it was much more about the workplace than life, though it threw a few bones in that direction every now and then)
That recent generations largely failed to predict the popularity of the internet and the smart phone (but for a few), I think haunts the psyche of millennials. We don’t want to be “those guys”, and so I’ve seen, all my adult life, people jumping on board with one thing or another, convinced it’s the next big thing, whether that’s crypto currency or, now, AI (shh! don’t talk about the Metaverse!). The sad part is, those who get things right always want to think they are geniuses, until the next time, when they get something horribly wrong. My brothers…there are ways to succeed in life that do not require the chasing of illusions.
As a brief interlude, “test driven development” dominated software developer job listings between 2010 and 2020. It was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, promising huge gains in efficiency and reliability, but many companies figured out the hard way that “100% code coverage” was wasteful and stupid, since it essentially meant maintaining two codes bases constantly: your code, and the tests for your code. Around 2015 we saw “microservices architecture” take off and dominate the industry, just for people to rebound and realize this created a nightmare for maintenance, too. There can be value to ideas and technologies, but for some reason, there seems to always be a portion of humans who go all-in on these things, which sways the industry in one direction, only for sanity to slowly settle in and demonstrate, “Yeah, this probably wasn’t the best idea”. The ideas don’t necessarily go away, they just mellow out. It seems to be a common bias of human nature to believe that one thing and one thing alone will solve all of the problems, but it’s never true in the end. (It could be related to our risk/reward circuitry, too. If you get lucky, jumping on the Next Big Thing sometimes works out; the problem is, nobody wants to attribute this to luck in the very rare cases when it does work out)
(Side note: you may have to pay the piper in order to “stay relevant” in your industry, but there are always cracks to slip through, too, because not all businesses follow the latest trends. This leads me back to my post Specialization and the Exploitation of Skills . Paying the piper is fine if you have to, but never outsource your brain in this regard, because doing so only benefits employers. Even if AI really took off tomorrow – and we’ve seen nothing but a leveling-out over the past year – I would keep studying cybersecurity because it personally benefits me, and I don’t believe developing a deep understanding of computers will ever be a worthless endeavor. Keep this in mind when developing skills. If all you can do is vibe-code your programming projects, to use one tech-based example, you will always be a slave to your job, which will teach you nothing meaningful beyond the scope of employment)
There’s an old saying that those who made the most money in the Gold Rush weren’t the miners but those who sold mining equipment. I don’t like to bandy these phrases around too flippantly, but I think there is some truth to this. Eli the Computer Guy likes to rag on the AI industry frequently, but he offers Python AI integration classes and they apparently sell out all the time. He will say on his YouTube channel that there are better things to do with your time (my paraphrase), but everybody wants AI, so he sells it. Every other training company out there has had an absolute field day selling people AI training because so many people bought this idea that they were going to be made obsolete if they didn’t learn. I don’t always know how to explain to people that using AI tools is not the same as being an actual Data Scientist, and while ‘prompt writing’ certainly has nuance and a learning curve, I’m hard-pressed to find it an urgent skill, myself. A sickening number of new technology books are tossing “AI” into their titles because so many of us plebes are on the hype train. That’s nothing against you if you simply enjoy AI tools, but I struggle to understand how many sites even remotely benefit from AI integration. But hey, here’s this software library, we’ll sell you 400 pages about it so you can slap it on your resume or otherwise pretend that learning the integration is meaningful!
Boosterism. Trust me, bro, there’s tons of gold in them there hills, just risk your life to come out West, and buy a few pickaxes and supplies while you’re here! Gold for everyone! You’re missing out if you don’t take the journey, not every man has the courage to do it!, but the industrious will surely prosper!
Uh-huh.
Some people definitely got rich, and it was rarely ever the miners.