AI is just marketing

In a few years it will be studied how effective Sam Altman’s company was at packaging technology, and communicating it well to a general audience. In the biz we call this “marketing,” a.k.a. “the ol’ razzle-dazzle,” or “the big show” (disclaimer: no one calls it that—I just gave you an example of how marketing can deceive you, even if for only a split second!).

It was OpenAI that was able to convince the general public that their product—whatever it was—was Artificial Intelligence incarnate, a slippery area of research and science fiction that has existed since the 1950s. It’s a capitalist’s wet dream to be able to claim a concept from your grandpa’s time as your intellectual property. But when you start to trace the thread from Dartmouth college to 2026, you start to see there’s a lot of hot air propping these companies up.

“AI” is just a (poorly-) branded woodshop

Just stick with me a second: imagine you are no longer a software developer, but a woodworker. You are planing wood by hand, chiseling, creating the fanciest wood joints to create your beautiful furniture. Your craftsmanship is immaculate, your work will be passed down as family heirlooms. You are paid top dollar for your work.

Along comes a fancy man in an impossibly-thick mustache and top hat in his traveling circus wagon, with a sign “The Amazing Automated Woodworker.” He talks fast and fancy, he taps his cane on his wagon. He must be from the city. He draws crowds, and they all gather to see him feeding raw wood into one end of the wagon, loud whirring and buzzing sounds can be heard, and out the other end comes fully-assembled furniture! “Only costs a few tokens,” the man says, which the audience can purchase for fluctuating amounts depending on the day.

The top hat man doesn’t let you get too close to the furniture, but from a distance, it appears to be functional craftsmanship. To prove it’s not a gimmick, he lets audience request any furniture, any wood, and it does get made—these truly are being made on-demand. The circus wagon whirs and buzzes all day and night, keeping nearby residents up, but what’s a small price to pay for the future?

Construction businessmen are salivating. They offer to pay anything to use this Automated Woodworker, looking to slash their costs. More Automated Woodworker circus wagons pop up in every major area. The more the furniture gets passed around, it becomes clear the quality is questionable, but it’s still technically furniture, and is just good enough for mass production. As long as it’s not trying to build skyscrapers, if a table or bookshelf falls over here and there, no big deal. It can bring more affordable furniture to the masses.

Eventually you are able to take a peek behind the curtain of this Automated Woodworker. You learn inside are fancier, powered tools than the ones you’ve been using. “Power tools,” you think to yourself. “This would be amazing to not have to do all this by hand.” Also, to your shock, there are a few people inside operating the “automated” process, since the technology still needs a little guidance, and the wood needs to pass between machines and be assembled somehow.

But all this begs the question—why would the fancy top hat man not simply sell the power tools? Why bother with the dog and pony show that all these power tools must be sold in the form of this tokens nonsense. Why not just sell the power tools themselves?

Why, indeed.

Power (tools) to the people

I’m so excited for the snake oil salesman bubble to pop, and for us to all stop pretending tokens aren’t monetary nonsense. When the companies collapse and we can sell it for parts, we realize that we were the artificial intelligence all along the technology is pretty good, when it’s commercially-affordable, and several companies are competing over price and quality so consumers can decide whether they want the red, orange, yellow, lime green, teal, or blue power tools (clearly teal is best).

The reason we’re not there yet is a little bit because of greed, a little bit because we don’t know how to break up these power tool fotoplayers that have buzzsaws, corkscrews, blades, and all manner of useless tomfoolery sticking out of every side (and there are many reports of people losing eyes, limbs, and lives to these dangerously-unsafe things). But the sooner we can just put names to the LLM equivalents of table saws, power sanders, CNC routers, and so on, we can start to use them more effectively, and we can stop the doomerism of “software engineering is dead,” “no one reads code anymore,” etc.

As a (metaphorical) woodworker who’s accomplished much by hand, yes there’s some part of me that will always be devoted to the craft of making things by hand. I don’t mind the idea of power tools, because in capable hands, the same quality can be output on a larger scale. But that’s only IF I can OWN my own power tools, and not shove fuckass tokens into some Dick Dastardly’s circus wagon.