from Do customers want AI on their e-readers? [LGT: GoodEReader]:
The use cases stated in the press release were AI features such as translation, transcription, and document summaries. However, this would just be the start; AI is coming for your e-readers whether you like it or not.
I think Michael Kozlowski’s line there at the end is perhaps the only truly pertinent one in the whole article, seeing how the AI space is growing so fast that a) hardware with AI “baked in” will be out of date on a much faster time-line that most e-ink/e-reader devices so these first sacrificial lambs will be in trash heaps within a year and b) the entire AI space is populated by a entire tessellation of pyramid schemes where certain people, once they achieve enough riches, might slow down enough to try and address the growing body of problems.
Since “when a rich asshole has enough money” is slightly less probable than “when pigs fly” or hell freezing over1, my personal assumption that generative AI will largely be fixed post some world-rending crash.
For now, the absolutely non-sense trillion-dollar valuations and projected growth worth more than most countries basically only works if folks keep rapidly adopting it. In a similar vein to how little people like myself (and yourself) were pulled into the stock market by sheer shitloads of late-90s, early-00s propaganda and now that action has propelled a few people into the spheres of worth where no international law seems to actually apply and every attempt to rein in said wealth leads to the billionaire equivalent of hissy-fits.
We have to feed at the Trough™ and…oh, look, just got another email saying my monthly Trough™ fee has been increased to €49.95 unless I allow advertisements on my Trough™ device.
Fucking wank.
The thing is I actually like the potential of the services this could offer. Things like being able to compare the linguistic choices between books, to see references to other books in a series (without wading to middling fan-wikis full of malware ads), get multiple translations, to look up historical events being referenced, to do deeper searches about concepts being discussed, to analyze charts and numbers, to check the veracity of claims… These could be good things.
But for now the folks who want you to want AI are not your friends.
You are the customer and the product. At the same goddamned time.
