The topic of innovation in tech is one that I’ve touched upon multiple times on this blog throughout the years. However I’ve never actually sat down and written a blog post explicitly dedicated to extolling my thoughts on this particular front. That trend ends today.
There are many examples of this that you can dig up by searching this blog for words like innovate or innovation however my favorite example of this is from a post I made in 2018 called Veni, Vidi… not so much Vici:
My core belief is that as part of this transition, we are losing the ability to innovate effectively. As technologies and concepts find themselves elevated to what can only be compared to a form of scripture, we are codifying a new class of developers who are incapable of pushing back, unwilling to radically alter their approach and content to be shells of what we told them they could be.
When I consider the experiences I’ve had over the last 20 years, I can only conclude that our attempt to evolve our trade craft has failed miserably. If one is not versed in how to think logically, one cannot instruct a computer on how to act on inputs to produce a desired set of outputs in a logical manner. There is no red herring or technical solution, short of artificial intelligence, that can combat this problem.
I haven’t read that post for many years and rereading it now while researching this one has inspired some words, most of which you are about to either read or hear depending on your preference. Perhaps even both if you are a true glutton for punishment. For starters the most immediate takeaway is that I was largely right when it came to my core point: The tech industry has clearly lost its ability to innovate. While this appeared to be true over 8 years ago when I wrote the post, it is undeniably true now.
Part of me wonders whether or not I even have to argue this point, but I’ll go ahead and put forth a token effort regardless because that’s the baseline expectation. Needless to say, I can’t recall a single innovation from the tech industry since the advent of the iPhone (aka portable touch computing) that actually represented a gargantuan shift in our industry. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the iPhone was released in 2007, almost two decades ago.
What have we done since then? Well we made the phones foldable, less durable and more expensive. Now to be fair that benefits our tech oligarchs and goodness knows that they deserve to continue to reap the rewards of inventions created by people who almost certainly aren’t associated with them anymore. Somewhere along the way they convinced enough of us that we need to upgrade every so often for reasons that are largely or entirely fueled by decisions they make around supporting older yet seemingly still quite capable hardware. In today’s security climate, it pays to ensure you have access to a constant flow of updates, even moreso when it comes to devices that are mostly useless unless connected to a network, including the global one called the Internet.
Note: If you disagree with my use of “moreso” rather than “more so”, I feel your pain. I actually looked it up when the cspell powered spell checker extension I use in VSCodium flagged it as not being a real word. Feel free to relay your opinions to me on this.
What else has the tech industry done lately? Well we made software worse, at least mostly. Among aged out tech dinos like myself, Windows 7 is widely regarded as the best version of Windows to ever grace the planet despite four major versions having been released since then, each more disappointing than the last for various reasons. And yes I am still qualified to make such statements even though none of the hardware I own runs Windows anymore because my work machine does run Windows 11 and to be frank: It sucks the sweat off a dead man’s balls, to quote the late great Robin Williams in “Good Morning Vietnam”.
As if that wasn’t enough, hardware is now worse, largely due to the AI driven supply “constraints” (aka wanton greed on the part of both greater and lessor tech oligarchs). While processors and GPUs are still getting more efficient and performance per watt is pretty goddamn amazing nowadays, the cost of all of this hardware is now skyrocketing. Sure I still run my whole house on three Raspberry Pi 5 boxes, but I sure as shit don’t recommend anybody else go down that road, at least not at today’s prices.
Okay so software has gotten worse (at least the proprietary variants of it) and hardware has gotten way less accessible in terms of pricing. I was right about the death of innovation. So what was I wrong about? Well that’s a pretty big glaring error in that bit that I quoted above, but I’m going to specifically quote it again below for emphasis:
There is no red herring or technical solution, short of artificial intelligence, that can combat this problem.
Ummm yeah. So this is awkward. According to the tech oligarchs we are living in the age of Artificial Intelligence and it’s going to take over all of our jobs but hey we shouldn’t worry because this group of exceedingly wealthy and greedy people are going to suddenly abandon all of that and make sure that we are taken care of on the back end, right? Well that’s a big bag of shit and I’m pretty sure that anybody who has made it this far into whatever form of this they chose to ingest is going to agree with that.
Today’s AI isn’t actually Artificial Intelligence. I can’t of course prove that to you logically or empirically because despite decades of work in the field, none of the geniuses in it ever took the time to define what that term actually means, so now its become fair game for the marketeers, the schemers and the oligarchs. In fact the most famous definition of what constitutes AI was put forth by the great Alan Turing in 1950 in the form of the so-called Turing test:
The Turing test was designed by Alan Turing to assess a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human by imitating interactive dialogue. In the modern version, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the original (verbal) version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, including nonverbal
Well shit, that’s pretty accurate, at least to a degree. Today’s AI is and continues to be full of shit in a lot of situations and frankly that’s not likely to change anytime soon, if ever. However given the number of people who have now decided to form para-social relationships with chat bots like good ole ChatGPT or Claude, by that definition, the industry has actually managed to create “Artificial Intelligence”. The problem of course is that we aren’t treating it as a facsimile of a flawed human conversationalist. We are instead treating it like it was the second coming of Christ. We are treating it as if it was an oracle of sorts. I have seen this first hand in so many situations now that I can only summarize my reaction as one of utter and complete dark and ever deepening despair.
So what was I wrong about? Well I originally stipulated that “artificial intelligence” could solve the problem I described in my 2018 post. Perhaps a true form of artificial intelligence could still accomplish that, but that’s not the tech that is being foisted on us today. What we have instead received is a Turing test capable apparatus that in a lot of respects is no more or no less reliable than some random stranger you might bump into at the grocery store who also recently decided that snorting lines of glue was a solid life choice. Sure it can be right and it can accomplish seemingly amazing feats in the right conditions, but how can you tell the difference between the moments of greatness and the sea of mediocrity that comprises the foundation of those moments?
Well as it stands now, if you are a corporate executive, you can’t. I have yet to meet or talk to a single executive who wasn’t completely enamored with this tech and convinced that it was unequivocally going to change the world for the better. I know a large number of technical people who have also been consumed by the glamour of this tech and words alone cannot express the level of disappointment I feel over that.
The real concern and the source of my error though is that artificial intelligence, in this form, isn’t capable of innovation. It can only regurgitate mutations of previous ideas and concepts that it has already been exposed to. Which means that by making this tech the centerpiece of our future, we are officially discarding the concept of actual innovation and replacing it instead with what I like to call pseudo-innovation. The truth is that we have lost our ability to be skeptical. Without that we have effectively become incapable of distinguishing between real shit and bullshit. That is the situation the tech executives, and to some extent my fellow tech professionals, now find themselves in.
Much like in 2018, today I lament the loss of adversarial thinking that has time and time again led to the greatest innovations our industry has produced. The cold harsh reality is that we cannot truly innovate unless we are willing to challenge conventional thinking. Imagine a world in which somebody at Apple decided, “Oh well who needs a touch driven UI on a portable device when we already have Windows and MacOS on these laptops and desktops!”
Instead we now live in an era where Google’s biggest idea is to replace cost-conscious Chromebooks with ultra-expensive Googlebooks which are basically just laptops with Android installed on them. Or a world in which Nvidia releases Spark processor powered laptops that are slower and less capable than nearly everything that came before them while also being way more expensive. Or even a world in which Microsoft and Sony are now testing the waters on releasing new consoles in the next few years that are more expensive than reasonably capable gaming PCs were just a couple of years ago. Or even better, a world in which Apple is due to release a Macbook with a touchscreen next week.
Will the wonders ever cease? Will the endless waves of innovation grant us a reprieve from these endless sources of disruption? Or to put a finer less sarcastic point on it: Is there an escape from this hell of non-innovation driven by technically bereft MBAs who have mistaken profit margins, market share and lock-in for innovation, success and user satisfaction?
I sure as fuck hope so.
P.S. Because I didn’t explicitly address the title as part of this post, I’ve decided to do so here. The simile that is the title of this post was crafted by yours truly and for those of you not in the know: Cryptids refer to a class of mythological creatures such as Yetis, Loch Ness (aka Nessie) and Chupacabra which don’t in fact actually exist and despite this: A sect of believers among us insist otherwise. Much like the sect of believers in the tech industry who insist that it is still innovative.
Both groups are wrong. Damn shame, that.