Anything that promises anti-aging, better looks, making money, finding your soulmate, total safety and security, etc., is going to lend itself to outrageous marketing. Because these are some of the chief desires of humanity.
You're wrong from your very premise. The world isn't going to shit. It's better than it's been at pretty much any time in human history, in almost every facet.
I mean if you focus on the negative and ignore the positive (which is what many people + the media do), you could say it's overall a regressive period. But you could do that (and people have) literally every year for the past 80 years.
Yet, in the grand scheme of things, the world has gotten better in that time. Which is how you know these people are wrong, at least most of the time.
The challenge with positive news is that you have to go seek it out. It will rarely come to you. And then you have to greet it without cynicism, which many are incapable of.
There have always been bumps on the path upward. It's never been smooth. Doesn't change the fact that we're not going to shit, and that we haven't been going to shit for hundreds of years. Quite the opposite.
On average Steven Pinker is at best a fake hyperoptimist-by-aggregate who puts billionaires on pedestals and rewrites history to entrench shitty systems. Sometimes he says smart stuff but he ignores or actively disregards massive problems with a painfully self-serving neutrality.
Yeah I get the pretty much, the car was near the mountain top in the 80s and 90s and "pretty much" flew off a cliff more recently. Sure, we're still alive but everyone is going to die in about 5 seconds.
Drugs are out of control. Homeless are everywhere. No one has interests in anything. No one is having kids. All jobs are going to be gone soon. Colleges can't teach (it's all AI cheating now). People are Gang Robbing stores. Cartels are killing hundreds daily. Fraud is out of control. We have 2 maybe 3 world wars going on simultaneously now. Prices are skyrocketing.
Yeah I get why you say "pretty much". lol PS good luck buying a house
Having read all of the above, I think it is fair to say that this is a study about what these people "thought." Just because their thought involves some homegrown, personally-favored metrics, doesn't change the fact that this is a qualitative survey report.
I'm sure that Google internally is well aware of the negative press that comes with product shutdowns, and is doing them regardless as a deliberate strategic tradeoff where they believe the benefits outweigh the costs.
But it's very difficult to measure the costs, bc the #1 cost is lost trust, and how do you measure that? Many people simply won't sign up for a Google product bc they don't trust it'll be around long enough to justify the investment. These people don't show up in any metrics that you can reason about, and they're the least likely to take any surveys you might send out. At best, Google can guess what the impact is, and they might be wildly underestimating.
I think a different strategic decision they could've made (and still could make!) would be to the do the opposite, and prioritize the benefits of keep projects alive over the costs of ruthlessly sunsetting then.
They could say, "You know what, we have considerable resources. When we release something new, we're going to dedicate ourselves to keeping it running indefinitely." They wouldn't have to market them, or advertise them, or connect them to every new part of the evolving Google ecosystem, or make them particularly easy to find, or even keep them open to new signups. But just keeping them running as-is, indefinitely, and having customers tell each other, "It's Google, you can trust it, it's not going away," would be such a great PR win.
It’s not just the price of keeping the servers humming. You have to pay people to maintain the software. So now you’re paying hundreds or thousands of people to maintain zombie software.
Yeah, there are costs for sure. But this is "zombie software" with millions, probably tens of millions of users. And Google has ~80,000 engineers? And the company prints an incredible amount of money.
I think the real cost/risk here is not financial, but strategic, i.e. preventing a loss of focus.
The common critique of Googles actions - the organization has profits, therefore there is no problem engaging in less profitable activities — strikes me as superficial.
It’s not about investing any given portion of revenues, it’s investing optimally. There are opportunity costs that must be considered in investments (and that means Net Present Value calculations).
Google’s revenue and profits are for the shareholders. When revenue is directed back into the business the question simply isn’t if the whole business will make money, it’s if this investment is optimally profitable considering all the alternatives. If a support engineer on Google+ generates $X over 5 years, but that same resource would generate $3X working on Gemini then dictating eternal Google+ support is robbing future Google of revenue.
Investments need to be individually justified, but also better than the alternatives to make fiscal sense. Even though that sucks for pleased consumers.
Yes, but this is exactly my point. You can't perfectly calculate exactly how much revenue is lost due to breaking trust with users because you repeatedly sunset projects that they've relied on.
Maybe if Google had those support engineers on Google+ for 5 years generating $X, that would've created enough trust that Gemini could now generate $4X.
I'm sure Anthropic wants him to have as much reach as possible, not abandon his primary distribution channel just to please an extreme minority of the population.
My mom uses to take and create pictures of things: identifying birds, identifying trees, and showing her house with different decor. I didn't teach her any of this, she just figured it out on her own.
A non-tech friend of mine who's writing a book uses it to get feedback on his writing. He's gotten pretty good at crafting prompts to get it to be fairly objective.
Another non-tech friend used it to do a lot of journaling and processing after a recent breakup.
A non-techy friend who happens to work in tech uses it to make presentations at work.
Another non-techy friend of mine who works at a tech startup uses it to browse LinkedIn and find people she's searching for.
My point is that I just don't think the value-add for any of these are worth the existential dread most people have about losing their career.
Then there's the scams, misinformation, trying to find a job when every recruiter is using AI to filter job listings, etc.
Elon and Bezos aren't more powerful than Kuwait. Kuwait is a sovereign government, with authority to write laws, raise an army, and do whatever it wants with its 5M+ citizens (draft them, imprison people, execute people, etc.) with pretty much no consequence unless they're absurdly reckless. There is more to power than money.
I think the argument being made is that they don't have any meaningful power over Meta's corporate decision-makers, even if they do have power over some other people.
Right, but if you control access to a market of millions of people, a lot of companies will do what you say (i.e. follow your laws) in order to retain access to that market, as well as protect their local employees from jail. I would say that counts as meaningful power.
They also shipped 0 barrels of oil last month, the basis for 90% of gov revenue, 50% of its GDP. Clearly their faux workforce of subsidized "natives" and "indentured servants" is heading for a fulminant blowup, with no one in charge with the faintest clue towards mitigation.
So now there's no power, no money. Hence the attempts at message control. I don't think it's for Meta to soften their fall.
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