“That surveillance capitalism is a logic in action and not a technology is a vital point because surveillance capitalists want us to think that their practices are inevitable expressions of the technologies they employ. For example, in 2009 the public first became aware that Google maintains our search histories indefinitely: data that are available as raw-material supplies are also available to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. When questioned about these practices, the corporation’s former CEO Eric Schmidt mused, ‘The reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time.’ In truth, search engines do not retain, but surveillance capitalism does. Schmidt’s statement is a classic of misdirection that bewilders the public by conflating commercial imperatives and technological necessity.”

Shoshanna Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

Ironically, this might be the first time I wished an article was written by AI.

I read "The level of social opprobrium directed at LLM use and at people attempting to pass off generated slop as work is immense" and immediately checked for the author's Bluesky link. This person is living in a bubble. Most people in tech are now using LLMs at work and there is no social opprobrium discouraging them.

The rest of the analysis seems to take it for granted that we have hit a wall and LLMs will improve no further. OK. We'll see how that prediction plays out.

The first part of the article is a thoughtful framework. The conclusion that LLMs are not inevitable because they aren't useful or that their utility can be substituted by humans is an extraordinarily flimsy claim.

It helps if the author does not confuse what LLMs actually do with the general misunderstanding that "LLMs do work". They do not "do work" and have never "done work", and this misunderstanding is all over tech.

What do LLMs to? You know this: they are sentence completion engines, that through this process of sentence completion can be used to create software than then "does work". This indirection is critical, it is "how this works" and is the true power of LLMs that is STILL not being recognized. The power of LLMs is their communications capacity, their ability to complete sentences, which is so subtle the entire world of software engineers and artificial intelligence everybody has not identified that simple "variable expansion" as the true power of LLMs. LLMs do not do work, they enable the creation of software that then does work.

With a technology so subtle, want to know what is inevitable? A bifurcation of the population into those that believe in magic and those that understand it well enough to make magic nobody considered possible. Why did I say "magic"? Because people are giving up understanding, and that makes what we do magic.

One thing I've seen with LLMs that I've not seen with any other emergent technology is the level of backlash against it. I think we're seeing a point of polarization in society where there will be two truly opposing sides that are against each other and no reconciliation will be possible between them (pro and anti-AI), and that it has a good chance of fundamentally destabilizing society.

"The first point is the question of whether an LLM can do work not markedly inferior to that of a human doing the same task or not. This one is debatable. An LLM absolutely cannot produce work to the highest human standards, or even a good human standard at the moment, and it's unlikely that it ever will."

This could have been fine maybe two years ago, but saying that in the era when LLMs are solving Millenium Prize Problems is incredibly obnoxious. All those opinionated "AI articles" feel like ragebait at this point.

The author's absurd fantasy of how an LLM has to be used in order to fit their imagined adversary's idea of inevitable is absolute drivel. This article doesn't even build a straw man. It's just a pile of straw and manure.