How you think technology works:
Some smart guy figures out how to put things together, wraps it in a nice package, and manufactures it within high precision. When you buy the piece of technology, it does exactly what the box says it does, nothing more or less, and it will work forever, provided you keep the batteries fresh or keep it plugged in.
How technology actually works:
Some smart guy is hired to try and make a piece of tech as cheaply as possible. It need not be 100% perfect, nothing ever is, but "good enough." Other smart guys figure out how to manufacture the dang thing and get like an 80% success rate, high five each other and go home. Someone else needs to figure out which ones work and which ones don't, and more often than you realize, they pass of stuff that doesn't work. Then you get the product shipped to you, and it arrives in an unknown state, probably having been dropped several times from an ungodly height no less. Some poor stocker boy takes it out of the big box and puts it on the shelf, where it is manhandled by the unwashed masses before you decided to buy it. Another trip but this time you leave it in your car while you do grocery shopping, and it gets over 120 F inside the packaging. When you do plug it in, there are power surges and spikes and all sorts of issues that you don't really understand and it's a miracle if it works at all.
The point is this: The way media presents technology is as if some lab-coat wearing scientists applied their theoretical knowledge to create the pinnacle of human innovation and are more than happy to sell it to you, the consumer, in a pristine and perfect state for pennies on the dollar. A lot of you have very unrealistic expectations about how things work and you probably know, through experience, that your expectations are regularly ruined.
Those of us who work on the "other side" (think Morlocks vs. Eloi -- we're the morlocks, you're the eloi) know the reality of the situation. Nothing works, ever. It's a miracle if it does work. The trick is to take two things that don't work and are incompatible and somehow make them work better together. Then we put error bars as wide as the solar system around everything, and then our bosses remind us that we have to use physical matter to create our machines, and that time and space costs money, and so we have to scale it back until it is reasonable.
The best engineers can figure out how to provide something that actually works at the prescribed price in a reasonable amount of time. That's why we all look up to people who build bridges. Anyone can build a bridge that works and lasts a 1,000 years. It takes someone special to build a bridge that costs a fraction of that ideal bridge and only lasts 100 years, which is about as long as we need bridges to work for before they are torn down due to becoming obsolete.
If someone is telling you their tech works, they are selling you something that doesn't exist. That's how you could've known AI was a scam from the beginning: They kept saying it really, really works over and over again.
Some smart guy figures out how to put things together, wraps it in a nice package, and manufactures it within high precision. When you buy the piece of technology, it does exactly what the box says it does, nothing more or less, and it will work forever, provided you keep the batteries fresh or keep it plugged in.
How technology actually works:
Some smart guy is hired to try and make a piece of tech as cheaply as possible. It need not be 100% perfect, nothing ever is, but "good enough." Other smart guys figure out how to manufacture the dang thing and get like an 80% success rate, high five each other and go home. Someone else needs to figure out which ones work and which ones don't, and more often than you realize, they pass of stuff that doesn't work. Then you get the product shipped to you, and it arrives in an unknown state, probably having been dropped several times from an ungodly height no less. Some poor stocker boy takes it out of the big box and puts it on the shelf, where it is manhandled by the unwashed masses before you decided to buy it. Another trip but this time you leave it in your car while you do grocery shopping, and it gets over 120 F inside the packaging. When you do plug it in, there are power surges and spikes and all sorts of issues that you don't really understand and it's a miracle if it works at all.
The point is this: The way media presents technology is as if some lab-coat wearing scientists applied their theoretical knowledge to create the pinnacle of human innovation and are more than happy to sell it to you, the consumer, in a pristine and perfect state for pennies on the dollar. A lot of you have very unrealistic expectations about how things work and you probably know, through experience, that your expectations are regularly ruined.
Those of us who work on the "other side" (think Morlocks vs. Eloi -- we're the morlocks, you're the eloi) know the reality of the situation. Nothing works, ever. It's a miracle if it does work. The trick is to take two things that don't work and are incompatible and somehow make them work better together. Then we put error bars as wide as the solar system around everything, and then our bosses remind us that we have to use physical matter to create our machines, and that time and space costs money, and so we have to scale it back until it is reasonable.
The best engineers can figure out how to provide something that actually works at the prescribed price in a reasonable amount of time. That's why we all look up to people who build bridges. Anyone can build a bridge that works and lasts a 1,000 years. It takes someone special to build a bridge that costs a fraction of that ideal bridge and only lasts 100 years, which is about as long as we need bridges to work for before they are torn down due to becoming obsolete.
If someone is telling you their tech works, they are selling you something that doesn't exist. That's how you could've known AI was a scam from the beginning: They kept saying it really, really works over and over again.
Too bad it actually requires talent to implement properly
Indians and Chinese suck at quality control.