Frank Zappa offers a possible mission statement for Microsoft back in 1976, a few months after the company is founded.

Feels like an opportunity for a Linux advertisement: Linux is awesome. Rarely force-feeds you stuff. And while at it, change email providers as well. The big (cloud) services like Microsoft and Google aren't great. Never have been, and AI is just the most recent top of the iceberg.

unfortunately, there are champions for the widespread adoption of ai amongst the general public--amongst folk who won't gain a red nickel from all the hype and marketing around these half-baked services.

their willingness to stuff more and more ai slop down their gullets means there is greater incentive for techbros to ram ai down everybody's throats.

ah well. thank god for being childfree. i'll be dead long before the shit really hits the fan and none of mine will be around to suffer from it.

Well, drop Microsoft Office and use LibreOffice instead. No AI, and it's free, too.

It’s like a restaurant selling granite rocks for dessert. Nobody will buy them or eat them—so the product fails miserably. But if a popular restaurant adds a dollar to the meal price, and gives every customer a rock with their bill—well, then they can say that:

Every customer gets rocks for dessert.

Every customer pays for it.

Their business is more profitable because of the tasty granite rocks.

I just wanted to spotlight this excellent metaphor tbh.

I disagree with the last part of this post, though (the idea that lawyers, doctors, firefighters etc. are inevitably going to be replaced with AI as well, whether we want it or not). I think this is precisely what AI grifters would want us to believe, because if they could somehow force everyone in every part of society to pay for their slop, this would keep stock prices up. So far, however, AI has mainly been shoved into our lives by a few oligopolistic tech companies (and some VC-funded startups), and I think the main purpose here is to create the illusion (!) of inevitability because that is what investors want.

Here's the WSJ article on Archive: https://archive.ph/kS9Dx

Useful as a mainstream source for people in general hating AI.

it's tyranny when your schema.org/WebSite doesn't declare itself a schema.org/WebSite (nor any of the other semantic web stuff we were promised) and it doesn't work without javascript. "a.i." has become a distraction generator from the death by a thousand cuts that started with jeff bezos' API Mandate.