It's funny- I had the e-bike thought a few days ago-but less charitably. In my neck of the woods a particular breed of especially fat-tired, awfully fast, never-actually-seen-it-pedaled e-bike has been surging in popularity, and functionally has turned into a way to get away with driving a small motorcycle on the bike and walking paths- a weird netherworld device that mostly just serve to muck things up. It's less old people being enabled and dads towing a pack of kids through nature and more almost being run over by disaffected teenagers.
I dunno- the longer this hype cycle goes on the more that chatbots really just seem like a bad tool, regardless of their technical sophistication. More amputation than augmentation. They do too much if you are trying to improve yourself (synthesized homework text is one of their major markets) and do too little if you have actual work to do (not enough knobs to turn for creatives trying to express themselves, and fake law citations will never do). Just like with the metaverse and crypto and all the rest, the giant pool of money is doing its best to drive uptake through sheer noise with a product that might just be kind of bad in a durable way, or at least kind of niche (given how much coding is boilerplate in something besides your native language, sure, maybe the boilerplate generator is a nice thing to have).
It's funny- I had the e-bike thought a few days ago-but less charitably. In my neck of the woods a particular breed of especially fat-tired, awfully fast, never-actually-seen-it-pedaled e-bike has been surging in popularity, and functionally has turned into a way to get away with driving a small motorcycle on the bike and walking paths- a weird netherworld device that mostly just serve to muck things up. It's less old people being enabled and dads towing a pack of kids through nature and more almost being run over by disaffected teenagers.
I dunno- the longer this hype cycle goes on the more that chatbots really just seem like a bad tool, regardless of their technical sophistication. More amputation than augmentation. They do too much if you are trying to improve yourself (synthesized homework text is one of their major markets) and do too little if you have actual work to do (not enough knobs to turn for creatives trying to express themselves, and fake law citations will never do). Just like with the metaverse and crypto and all the rest, the giant pool of money is doing its best to drive uptake through sheer noise with a product that might just be kind of bad in a durable way, or at least kind of niche (given how much coding is boilerplate in something besides your native language, sure, maybe the boilerplate generator is a nice thing to have).
Your thoughts reminded me of a good Nicholas Carr essay on good and bad tools that's been rolling around my head of late- on the off chance you haven't read it yet, you might enjoy it: https://www.newcartographies.com/p/the-love-that-lays-the-swale-in-rows