Here are a couple of our favorite episodes of Ed Zitron's Better Offline podcast series. Man Who Killed Google Search Sam Altman Is Dangerous to Society Rot Society Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Ed Zitron's Better Offline podcast?
Chapter 2: Who is the man responsible for the decline of Google Search?
Chapter 3: What controversies surround Sam Altman and OpenAI?
Isn't that Silicon Valley, though? I'm afraid of dealing with them, but they were so nice to me.
And yeah, of course, you know, that person has not elaborated more publicly about what they meant.
But I think, you know, I think this is why people are asking themselves these questions, which is like, you know, the more that we hear about what the board was thinking before they decided to fire Sam, I think the more people are wondering about what are the patterns of behavior that he shows that, you know, that led to the board trying to make this drastic move.
Yeah, that's actually an interesting point. So when Sam Alton was fired from OpenAI, there was this very strange reaction from Silicon Valley, including some in the media, where it was almost like Hunger Games, everyone doing the symbol thing where everyone was like, oh, we got to put Sam Alton back in. Isn't it kind of strange we still don't know why he was actually fired, though?
I mean, Helen Toner has elaborated. Have you seen anything like this in your career?
I think that it has been surprising that there has not been more of a clear answer. I think... you know, as time has gone on, like, we have heard a little bit more. Like, I think Helen Toner has, you know, to her credit, tried to give more information in recent weeks about what happened. I think, you know, people were obviously asking this question six months ago.
And so I think, like, there's been a little bit of a delay in trying to get this answer. And I wonder if maybe there just isn't, like, a very neat answer to it. And so and then in that absence, we get this kind of more of a like murky, multifaceted, multivoiced answer.
But yes, I agree that it is sort of surprising that there hasn't been more clarification on what exactly happened or a little bit more granular detail about what led up to it.
So on to the AI hype in general. Said that a bit weird, but I'll keep going. Why do you think there's such a gulf between what Sam Altman says and what ChatGPT can actually do?
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Chapter 4: How did management changes at Google affect its search quality?
Similarly, governments have entirely failed to push through any legislation that might stop the rot, both in terms of dominance and opaqueness of algorithmic manipulation, and the ways in which tech products exist with few real quality standards.
We may have, at least for now, consumer standards for the majority of consumer goods, but software is left effectively untouched, which is why so much of our digital lives are such unfettered dogshit. And if you're hearing this and saying I'm being a hater or a pessimist, shut the fuck up. I'm tired of you. I'm so fucking tired of being told to calm down about this.
As we stare down the barrel of four years of authoritarianism built on top of the decay of our lives, both physical and digital, with a media ecosystem that doesn't do a great job explaining what's being done to the people in an ideologically consistent way.
There's this extremely common assumption in the tech media, based on what I'm really not sure, that these companies are all doing a good job, and that good job means having lots of users and making lots of money, and it drives tons of editorial decision-making.
If three-quarters of the biggest car manufacturers were making record profits by making half of their cars at a break that sometimes didn't work, that'd be international news. Government inquiries would happen. People would go to prison. And this isn't even conjecture. It actually happened.
After Volkswagen was caught deliberately programming its engines to only meet emission standards during laboratory testing, they were left to spew excessive pollution into the real world. But once lawmakers found out, they responded with civil and criminal action. The executives and engineers responsible were indicted. One received seven years in jail.
And their former CEO is currently being tried in Germany and being indicted in the U.S. too. And here we are in the tech industry. Facebook barely works, used to genocides and bully people and harass teen girls. Pedophiles run rampant on there. There was a Wall Street Journal story about it. They're fine.
So much of the tech industry, consumer software like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even chat GPT, and business software from companies like Microsoft and Slack, It sucks. It sucks. It's bad. You use it every day. You've been listening to me ramble for 50 episodes now. You know what I'm talking about. It's everywhere. Yet the media covers it just like, eh, you know, it's just how things are, mate.
Now, Meta, by the admission of its own internal documents, makes products that are ruinous to the mental health of teenage girls. And it hasn't made any substantial changes as a result, nor has it received any significant pushback for failing to do so. Little bit of a side note here. Big shout out to Jeff Horwitz and the rest of the Wall Street Journal people who did the Facebook files.
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