Chery's Aimoga Humanoid Robot. (Photo from Chery.)
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AI is useful. Let me get that out of the way. What we are mostly referring to as AI at the moment (Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Pilot, etc.) can do useful things. The point of there being an AI bubble is not that it isn’t useful — it’s that the massive costs and investments of these LLMs (large language models) go far beyond their use or potential return on investment, especially in the short to medium term. See here, here, here, and here. Going through this series, I started thinking about how certain messaging skills have been a big reason the AI bubble has blown up to the degree that it has.
Personification
The biggest and most obvious one is personification. AI hype agents and those buying the hype like to think of these new tools as human-like brains — hence the name artificial intelligence in the first place. We are told to think of them as developing organisms. There’s even a whole other industry being hyped up around this personification — the humanoid robot industry! The idea is that we’re going to have what are essentially artificial brains that are like human brains (but better) and we should have human-like bodies to put them in. Then those robots will do all the work humans have to do and humans can enjoy the benefits of that.
