Siri and AI is the Venture Capital Behind Tech Stealing Culture

Overnight I let my iPhone upgrade, from iOS 18.1 to 18.2, and I was sweating it. I'd checked, when upgrading from 17 to 18, if Apple Intelligence was going to be forced on me. Couldn't get a clear answer, but it seemed not, and turned out to not yet work on my very basic iPhone SE gen 3. Last night, Apple snuck inbox filtering into mail but gave me an elipsis menu switch back to my uninterfered with inbox. Fortunately, as I'd hoped, Apple Intelligence is setup to respect my Siri settings, so GPT was completely turned off.

I've been messing around with tech since the mid 1970s, using tech for learning since the dawn of the internet in Australia in 1995 and making my own tech in the mid 70s and since 2007, when I gained more financial freedom after leaving a loveless marriage. I don't need AI and I can find knowledge and learn stuff better than it can. This is not greyhaired Mr. Grumpy-Curmugeon, I have done extensive experiments with a number of AIs. I embrace tech to at least see what it can do for me. I've tried Github CoPilot, GPT, Midjourney and run local instances of GPT4All, along with Ollama2 with a general query model and the CodeLlama model. None of them answer queries of any kind with guaranteed reliability. With a search engine, I can find answers and learning faster and more reliably than any queries to AI can advance my knowledge. No, don't argue, this is my experience, it is my reality, I'm not using it wrong, I've used it the same way everybody has, with great interest and excitement, framed my queries simply and in stages, and received answers with a usefulness ranging from a "meh" to "tripping balls like Archer on a family trauma related bender." I have no place in my workflow for generative AI, it is a dead end.

I used Siri for about 3 weeks when it first rolled out, useless, intrusive and it interupted my workflows and thinking patterns. I tried it again a few years later because I've always trusted Apple to provide good new tech eventually. Nope, still useless and intrusive. So I have Siri turned off. The only thing Siri could ever do right for me was, after noisily intruding into a conversation I was having with a friend, causing me to exclaim, "Fuck OFF, Siri!" it replied, "How rude!" I'm so glad my friend witnessed this, I have a witness! Later, when I opened my phone to turn Siri off, she'd "left," all Siri settings were off. One reason I still like Apple, coder's easter eggs.

AI looks useful, but dig deeper. It trains on what you can already find using a web search. It's the mass of this data that limits what responses generative AI can give. You can't make it smarter by throwing more hardware at it. That did work to improve the user experience for a while, but the gains were way less than the cost, and now, as the AI players double down on this lost bet ("OK, it's a hardware threshold, more GPUs!"), the global carbon emmissions of data centres rise, causing brownouts on local grids and AI continues to trip balls. Because the training data is running out! Remember, you can run an AI on your laptop, with network turned off, and get just as "good" result

Again, doubling down, the "Tech Bros" are using AI generated training data. Data science literally calls this "Hapsburg AI," after the 19th Century Austrian royal family. It's data science's anser to inbreeding. I come from Tasmania, Australia's Newfoundland. We grow up learning jokes about inbreeding, because it has been an awful, awful thing in that state's history and the isolated and isolating normative culture, there, also proves that information inbreeds, too. And the data scientists speaking out against training AI on AI are not avoiding the stereotypes because the results are bearing out the analogy.

I'm not a luddite. I built a kit microcontroller at 15, the "Baby 2650" running a Signetics 2650 chip. It cost more "back then dollars" than a RaspberryPi 5 costs today, had 256 bytes of RAM and I had to solder the parts on the board. A "Pi" comes assembled. I had a succession of plastic computational toys in my early 20s. A TRS-80 "CoCo", a Micro B, access to my college's BBC B+ and Mac labs, I used these machines for many things. I taught myself basic coding on the B+, learned 2D CAD on MacDraw. I settled on Apple, even before Mac OS got a command line interface. I've had a succession of improving tech ever since. I had a personal web page in 1995 and ran Bicycle Tasmania's first web site for 4 of my 5 years actively on committee. I established local forums for my interest groups. At work I pitched iPhone and, as it improved, Android as the only field recorder my journalist colleagues would ever need. I am as big a fan of computational tech as I am of woodworking tools that help luthiers at Fender build the guitars I play.

So, when I say, "AI doesn't work." I mean it doesn't work to a point beyond uselessness beyond safety. It is a tool for the hyperwealthy to extract money from us, using our general, unquestioning fascination for new tech. Put you hand up if you have an AI subscription. Come on, own up.

Use an open source search engine to search these talking points, read the Reddits, etc. On Youtube, the best summary of what AI is useful for was a comment, on a physicist's teardown of how "Meh" AI is, reads, "CoPilot has made my coding very productive, I do my coding, it does my emails." The only replies comments that ring that true comments like that ever get are laugh emojis or none. Because they tear open the truth, and the truth is Generative Artificial Intelligence is a "Money Heist." The rish are stealing from us, faster and more often than ever. This trend to AI is a tool of Accelerationism. The philosophy that espouses those with money and power should hasten civilisation's collapse so they can build a better world. Ask yourself why OpenAI's Sam Altman is a self-confessed doomsday prepper.

So, where you can, stop using AI, especially for trivial stuff. Evolution gave you a brain. Use it! Don't be so lazy. Read books! Make things and learn stuff by using projects on the web - I don't care what, what a woordworking video on the toobs, learn how to 3D print, smelt aluminium cans into useful or beautiful things. Do what sets us apart from earlier evolutionary branches, think, design, create and be smug! Turn off Apple Intelligence and CoPilot. Don't use GPT, Llama or others. Use your brain to figure things out! I know so many people, people with more education than me, falling down the AI rabbithole, taking the bollocks as truth, and I google their query they're telling me about, go to authoritive sites like Wikipedia, and the answer they're given is 50 percent of the time wrong, the other 50 percent, they had to reframe their query at least 3 times for an answer they could have got in the first line of a pre AI google search.

AI is a hype machine, at best. Don't believe the hype.