Tag: technology

Will Greed Destroy AI?

by James Wallace Harris, 9/4/26

Companies are spending trillions to win the AI race. They believe they will make back their investments and go on to earn trillions. That assumes people are willing to pay for AI. Millions of people are already using AI, hoping to make their fortunes. However, in all cases, for AI to win money, humans have to become economic losers.

This is already causing a backlash. As internet-addicted doomscrollers spend more time and dollars, they are encountering more AI content. Most consider this content AI slop.

Whether you consume news, fiction, music, video, advice, education, philosophy, religion, or even porn, do you really want that content created by AIs?

Yesterday I found a wonderful video of a kitten running in slow motion through the grass. I liked it so much I shared it on Facebook. Then the algorithm showed me several more like it. I thought the first one was real. But after seeing the others, I figured they were AI-created. I was disappointed. Artificial kitten cuteness felt like a con.

I used to enjoy videos of two species of wild animals playing together. Thinking that animals don’t always eat one another was very uplifting. But then these videos became a trend. Now I don’t know if wild animals actually play together. The AI videos make me doubt all animal videos.

The new trend on Facebook and Instagram is AI-generated sexy women. I think real women began the trend on those sites, offering teasers to get guys to find them on OnlyFans. But then real women were replaced by AI women directing users to porn sites. I didn’t follow those links, but I wondered if porn is being replaced by AI too. Will greedy folks with AIs put real humans out of sex work?

My gut reaction is to quit social media. If it’s going to be overrun by greedy people trying to make a buck using AIs, I want to walk away.

I’m already seeing fans of music and books protest AI content. There are young protestors on YouTube advising people to return to the analog world. And one piece of advice is interesting. Buy old stuff. That’s because the only way to know if content was created by AI is to buy content created before AI.

There’s been a flood of websites, YouTube channels, games, novels, albums, software, and other creative content produced in the last year simply because AI lets almost anyone create impressive results.

And some of the AI-generated art is impressive. I love fiction and music. What if AI creates novels and songs I love more than the books and albums I loved over my lifetime?

Doesn’t The Catcher in the Rye move me because J. D. Salinger wrote it? I just read a biography of Salinger, and I love his stories even more. Isn’t On the Road great because Jack Kerouac lived it? Aren’t the songs on Highway 61 Revisited meaningful because Bob Dylan composed the music and lyrics?

What if ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini produced an album that impressed me more than Blonde on Blonde? Is it brilliant because of a machine’s insight?

People who want to make money using AI only want to make money. They aren’t struggling to be creative themselves. As everyone discovers this, I think their greed will destroy AI.

I’m reading How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker. It’s a fantastic book. Stanford is where kids who want to become billionaires go to college. In one of Baker’s classes, the students were asked to raise their hands if they were concerned with ethics when planning the inventions that could make them rich. Only Baker raised his hand.

The people and corporations spending trillions on AI don’t worry about ethics either. Baker’s book shows that so many of these tech bros who claim to love science and technology are really seeking money and power. I got into computers because I loved computers. I assumed a book about the brightest kids going to Stanford would be about kids who loved computers too. But what they really love is money.

This new generation of greed seems inspired not by technology but by billionaires. There are genuine reasons to create AIs, but greed isn’t one of them. It’s like the gold fever of 1849.

For the companies spending trillions on AI to make the money they desire, tens of millions of ordinary people have to become poor. AI might produce another 1,000 billionaires, but it will also create tens of millions of unemployed. Do we really want to back that kind of greed?

I assume most people will say no, and the AI industry will collapse.

But I could be wrong.

JWH

Will AI Grifters Push Everyone Back to the Analog World?

by James Wallace Harris, 7/12/26

Rebecca Jennings, writing for the Intelligencer at New York Magazine, tells about how Zuhair Lakhani has created an army of AI tech influencers to promote your online product. This really bums me out. I knew that companies paid people to promote their products through fake reviews, social media testimonials, and endless scams. But the idea of armies of AI-generated agents putting all those desperate humans dreaming of making a quick buck out of work is even more depressing.

Grifters are scummy, but AI grifters are enough to make me go analog.

Using AI to automate the worst of being online is a bridge too far for me. Humans should create AI buyers to pretend to buy from all the AI sellers.

In October, Lakhani announced Doublespeed and claimed it was the only venture-capital-backed bot farm in America when he received an investment from Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. “Because why let Russia and China have all the fun?” Lakhani asks in his launch video, in which he peels a digital mask off a pretty young woman’s face to reveal his own, sitting in front of a green-lit stack of phones, a cyberpunk set for an explicitly bleak vision. “Never pay a human again,” reads Doublespeed’s website, which advertises the ability to create AI personas on TikTok like a 62-year-old mother in Phoenix or a Gen-Z skater in Atlanta who will then post about your product. The investment was part of a16z’s three-month Speedrun accelerator program, in which young founders with start-up ideas can receive investments up to $1 million from the firm. Peers included “the world’s first AI-powered credit card,” the “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” and a “Bible-based AI buddy,” which together formed what the tech publication 404 Media called an “AI-generated hell on earth.”

There is so much about the internet I love, but enshitafication is happening faster than I can try to stay cheerful and positive.

I also love watching YouTube, but AI is ruining it, too. I love learning from little documentaries, but it drives me bonkers when supposedly historical “facts” are illustrated with obviously fake photos. I know much of YouTube is created by lone creators, who don’t have the resources of professional documentary makers. But if you don’t have actual photos or videos that match your subject, please don’t generate AI slop. It just makes me cringe.

And I’m so tired of all the natural healthcare testimonials on Facebook and Instagram. If there were easy cures for all those ills, those ills wouldn’t exist.

This is one area where AI is helpful. I’ve found that if you take any claim for a natural remedy and give it to an AI, it will debunk it or explain why the claim has limited positive effects.

The internet is being ruined by greed, hate, delusion, lies, and people trying to validate their personal beliefs by brainwashing others to believe the way they do. It’s all grifting.

AI makes it much too easy for people to become grifters.

Is there any way to fix the internet? I’ve wondered if we should start over with another internet where every user has to be validated with something like a RealID. Leave the old internet in place for people who like to hang out on the dark web and be anonymous, but create another web where every packet has a validated user.

What would the Internet be like if every IP address had a validated user ID attached to it?

For now, I’m just going to start avoiding anything that smells fake, even if it looks fun. If the Internet continues to enshitify, then I’ll go back to the analog world.

JWH

Replacing a Bluesound PowerNode 2i with a WiiM Amp Ultra

by James Wallace Harris, 7/6/26

I was quite happy with the Bluesound PowerNode 2i, which I bought years ago. I used it in my bedroom with Klipsch RP-5000F floorstanding speakers. I’d retreat to the bedroom to play music loud and not bother my wife in the front of the house. However, it never sounded as good as my Audiolab 6000A and Polk R600 floorstanding speakers in the den.

The bedroom setup sounded very good, but didn’t produce the big, airy soundstage that I had in the den. Of course, the den is much bigger. I liked its sound so much that I ended up playing my music there more often. My wife said it was okay, but I still worried about annoying her.

Then, when the PowerNode 2i started acting flaky, I thought here was my chance to upgrade the bedroom. The PowerNode 2i still worked, but if I turned it off and then on, it often wouldn’t play music through the speakers, only the subwoofer. I’d have to turn it off and on several times before it would work right. The 2i doesn’t have an on/off switch. Normally, I just leave it on. However, sometimes I wouldn’t use it for days. It would stay warm. And with the subwoofer, I worried about wasting electricity. So I start turning it off at the surge protector. I don’t know if this damaged the 2i.

I thought about buying an Audiolab 6000A for the bedroom, but I’ve seen so many glowing reviews of WiiM products that I wanted to try them. I wondered if what I really liked was the sound of a class A-B amp. The 6000A is twice the price of the WiiM Amp Ultra. I wondered if class D amps had improved in the four years since the 2i came out.

Normally, the WiiM Amp Ultra is $529 at Amazon, but during Prime Day, it was $449. I took that as a sign.

At first, I just swapped speaker cables with the 2i when I set up the WiiM. I also set the crossover for the bass and ran the room correction software. Then I played my first test song. The sound was somewhat better than the 2i, but the soundstage was still small. This disappointed me. I thought of sending it back.

Then I got an idea. I moved the speakers out into the room and further apart. This made a huge improvement. One I was happy with. I had them on six-foot cables. I ordered a set of ten-foot cables and spread them out further. It sounded even better.

Of course, the speakers are in the way. I decided to live with that. I’m the only one who uses this bedroom, and so far, my wife hasn’t seen the setup. I bought some cable covers to protect the speaker cables.

I really like the sound now. It is different from the 6000A. The best way I can describe it is to compare it to working with a photo in Photoshop. The sound from the WiiM feels a tad oversaturated, like oversaturating the colors in a photo. I can change that with EQ, but it’s never as airy as the music from the 6000A. I don’t know if that’s because of the room size or not.

The lesson here is speaker placement and room dynamics. Probably, the PowerNode 2i would have had a larger soundstage if I had moved the speakers out for it. If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d swap the 6000A and WiiM Amp Ultra to see how they sounded in the other room.

The screen on the WiiM Amp Ultra is too small to matter. And I don’t need the phono input or other inputs. I do like the subwoofer support. For the bedroom, all I care about is streaming. I see reviewers on YouTube who claim that if I spend a lot more money, I could get equipment that sounds better than the WiiM. I could test that hypothesis if I tried the 6000A in the bedroom. However, I’m happy enough.

However, I still wonder if those reviewers are right. If I spent $10,000, would I experience music way better than the WiiM? Unless I win the lottery, I’m not going to try to find out.

JWH

Are We Witnessing a New Age of Computing?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/2/26

When I first took computer classes in 1971, the school’s main computer was an IBM 360. That represented The Age of the Mainframe. At the time, The Age of the Minicomputer was coming into being. But what I fondly remember is The Age of the Personal Computer developing at the end of the 1970s. Back then, they were called Microcomputers, but that’s a weird term to use now, considering how small computers have gotten with smartphones and smartwatches.

I remember the Internet coming to my university in the 1980s and the World Wide Web in the 1990s. Each new technology ushered in a new age for society. Sometimes it’s not new technology, but how it’s used, such as social media and cloud computing. The web has been transformed several times by new coding languages and techniques.

We’re now a few years into The Age of Artificial Intelligence, but I’d say it’s only at the stage of 8-bit computers back in the late 1970s. Yesterday, Nvidia announced a new line of laptops using the RTX Spark chips. They will run Windows. In some ways, this is just Microsoft catching up to Apple when it dropped Intel and switched to the M1 chips.

Windows and all its apps will have to be rewritten and recompiled for the new Nvidia chips. Apple and its app developers had to do the same thing. But how many people will buy these machines? Apple transformed itself and the industry by moving to RISC chips. Is this what Microsoft plans to do, too?

How many people will buy these new Nvidia machines? The current DGX Spark machines run $3,600 – $5,000. That kind of money is reasonable if you’re trying to set up local AI compared to custom-building a PC with high-end graphics cards. And configuring a Mac with 128 GB of memory runs as much.

Are we looking at a new age of personal computers with 128 GB to 1 TB of memory? How many people will spend $5,000 to $10,000 or more on such machines? Especially now that Apple has created a growing market for $599 computers?

Is computer technology evolving past personal computing? I’m typing this on a Mac Mini M4, which I paid $549 at Amazon. It does everything I want. It’s completely quiet and so fast that I no longer worry about speed.

How many individuals are willing to spend $5,000 to have a private AI? Currently, most people use the online frontier model AIs for free or $20 a month. At $20 a month, you can use the latest frontier model AI for 250 months for $5,000. Open source AI models that can run on 128 GB are getting pretty damn good, but still not as good as the frontier models.

I can understand businesses wanting to keep their data private and using local AI. But what do individuals have that they need to keep secret? Generating porn? Running internet scams? Does that great American novel you’re writing need to be hidden from AIs?

When Apple came out with the MacBook Neo, I wondered if they were killing their own market for MacBook Airs? I’d say 90% of their users would be happy enough with the $600 machine instead of springing for the $1200 machine. Hell, there are a lot of people buying the more expensive MacBooks that don’t need anything more powerful than the Neo.

I have an M1 MacBook Air and feel no need to upgrade.

Computers became fast enough years ago for the average user. Most families gave up desktops, and unless you’re a student or need a computer for work, you don’t even need a laptop. Many of my friends do all their computing on a phone or tablet. And most of my friends who do use AI use it from their phones.

Many economic pundits talk about an AI bubble. Already, corporations are pulling back from building all those billion-dollar data centers they had planned last year. There are countless scientific, medical, and business tasks for those new RTX Spark chip computers. But do we need that power for personal computing? Especially when the average Joe is better off spending $20 a month for Gemini.

No one needs an Nvidia computer to run Microsoft Office. And only a small percentage of users subscribing to Adobe’s Creative Suite will need one. There are high-end applications for such computers, but how many are used in people’s homes?

How many Apple users really need the Pro, Max, and Ultra versions of the M chips? How many M4 users really need to upgrade to the M5?

There might be two new ages of computing dawning. The Age of Its Fast Enough Computing, and The Age of Its Never Fast Enough Computing.

And with every year, the percentage of Its Fast Enough users will grow ever closer to 100%.

If data centers weren’t jacking up the price of memory and storage, we’d be seeing fantastic $300 computers for sale everywhere. Ones that were more than good enough for most people.

JWH

STEVE JOBS IN EXILE by Geoffrey Cain

by James Wallace Harris, 6/1/26

When I first saw Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary by Geoffrey Cain, advertised on Facebook, I thought, “Geez, is there anything left unsaid about Steve Jobs?” After all the biographies and biopics, is there anything new to be revealed about the man? I decided to take a chance because the book focuses on the twelve years of the NeXT Computer. Besides, I had not read The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman in 2000, which covered the same period.

If I were to pitch this book to the average reader, I’d say: “Steve Jobs in Exile is about a world-class asshole who finds humility.” And for folks who dream of becoming entrepreneurs, I’d say, “Steve Jobs in Exile is a detailed checklist of what not to do.” This book really is about the man, and not the technology.

Interestingly, Walter Isaacson has written extensive biographies of both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Do people read them because they are fascinated with invention or with billionaires? Both men are known for their egotism, arrogance, and cruelty toward the workers they managed. Steve Jobs in Exile is about a young man who achieved two historic successes in his twenties but then fell from grace, only to achieve a third success. Will we ever read about Elon Musk falling from grace and finding humility?

By the way, why does Jobs get so much credit when he wasn’t a programmer or electrical engineer? I give Steve Wozniak credit for the Apple computer. And credit for the Macintosh to the pirate team Jobs assembled. Was NeXT’s eventual redemption due to Jobs? Or despite him? I hoped Steve Jobs in Exile would have been more about the real inventors of NeXT computers and NeXTSTEP.

I had hoped Steve Jobs in Exile would be another Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder – it wasn’t, but I still found it an engrossing read. The first part of the book made me despise Steve Jobs, but eventually Cain convinced me to admire the man a great deal. This nonfiction book was like a novel with a protagonist who grows and ultimately overcomes their faults. The book reignited my addiction to reading about the history of personal computers. I’ll probably go read David Pogue’s new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, soon, even though I’ve read plenty of histories on Apple Computers, too.

I was always a PC guy, and not a Mac guy, until last year. Although I used Macs at work. From 1978 until 2013, my job involved ordering computers, setting them up, and training their users. I worked at a college of education with about 150 faculty and staff, and just under 3,000 students. I’ve probably used every model computer Apple made during those years. I also set up PCs, starting with the first IBM PC with diskette drives. I guess I’ve unboxed and set up over a thousand computers.

Also, back in 1978, I became addicted to computer magazines. I’d go all over town, checking computer stores, newsstands, and bookstores two or three times a week for the latest issues of magazines devoted to computers. That’s when I first learned about Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. I wanted an Apple II, but could only afford an Atari 400.

Back in the 1990s, sales reps from NeXT came to our PC user group and demoed the NeXT Cube. Damn, I wanted one of them, but at $10,000, it could only be a fantasy. I guess that’s why I read Steve Jobs in Exile. I remembered that desire for a NeXT computer.

Several years ago, I got the hankering to buy a classic computer like an Apple II or Commodore 64, or even a NeXT Cube. NeXT machines do show up on eBay, such as this one for $5,817.54.

However, after playing with operating system emulators online, I realized that the futuristic NeXT Computer from the 1990s is now horribly primative. Just watch how painful it is to watch NeXTSTEP 1.0 boot up. From time to time, I still hanker for a classic computer. But then I visualize using one, recalling its limitations and why I was always upgrading to a newer computer.

I take consolation in that I’m using Tahoe 26.5 on my Mac Mini M4 right now, which is a descendant of NeXTSTEP. That didn’t stop me from going to Archive.org and reading old issues of NeXTWORLD magazine.

Reading about Steve Jobs again reminded me of how a few men back in the 20th century changed all of our lives. If we filmed It’s A Wonderful Life today, and imagined removing Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, just how different would our society be? Sure, similar devices and operating systems would develop, but would society unfold again like it did? Was the GUI and smartphone inevitable? Aren’t most tech billionaires rich because they got to an idea first, and if they hadn’t, many others would have?

Why are there so many books written about the men who sold us computers, and not about the computers and technology? Did Steve Jobs change society, or did the iPhone?

I’d love to read a detailed history of the graphical user interface (GUI). Was NeXTSTEP really superior to Sun OS, Windows NT, or OS/2? Who really invented the various elements of these operating systems?

JWH