If you believe the hype, AIs are going to make humans obsolete in less than half a decade. Tick, tick, tick.
Or so they say.
If you scan the articles on LinkedIn these days, you might have noticed that most of them have been run through the LLM mill and are frankly crap, bereft of real-world context, for the most part, and lacking the depth and passion that only carbon-based beings can provide.
First, a bit of history. At the dawn of the Web 1.0 era, everyone felt the need to have a presence on this new information superhighway. Something. Anything. Businesses/corporations started putting up websites, which by today’s standards were placeholders, for which they paid millions to early web-focused ad agencies/web dev shops. But consultants to whom they paid thousands/hour advised them that this was what they needed to do, or their businesses/corporations would become irrelevant in this new tech age. For context, HTML coders were commanding salaries well into six figures. A lot of money was being thrown at a lot of youth and inexperience – web shops where the founders knew nothing about business, luckily, working with clients who knew nothing about the web. If the young founders walked into a client meeting with a palm pilot, they were clearly members of the digerati and you needed to go along with anything they said.
These young companies were renting way more office space than they needed, hiring way more employees than they needed, and were running out of money, so they’d throw a party, get some press, and get acquired by a large company/corporation. Who’d learn too late that they’d acquired little more than smoke and mirrors. But what they really bought was the hype.
Which is a large part of the reason why the Web 1.0 bubble burst.
First, a bit of history. At the dawn of the Web 1.0 era, everyone felt the need to have a presence on this new information superhighway. Something. Anything. Businesses/corporations started putting up websites, which by today’s standards were placeholders, for which they paid millions to early web-focused ad agencies/web dev shops. But consultants to whom they paid thousands/hour advised them that this was what they needed to do, or their businesses/corporations would become irrelevant in this new tech age. For context, HTML coders were commanding salaries well into six figures. A lot of money was being thrown at a lot of youth and inexperience – web shops where the founders knew nothing about business, luckily, working with clients who knew nothing about the web. If the young founders walked into a client meeting with a palm pilot, they were clearly members of the digerati and you needed to go along with anything they said.
These young companies were renting way more office space than they needed, hiring way more employees than they needed, and were running out of money, so they’d throw a party, get some press, and get acquired by a large company/corporation. Who’d learn too late that they’d acquired little more than smoke and mirrors. But what they really bought was the hype.
Which is a large part of the reason why the Web 1.0 bubble burst.