TechTakes

I remember back in 2017 I was commuting somewhere via a tram in Warsaw and I got out near the city center. In front of me there was a gigantic ad on a building, I'm talking like full 6 stories high, and wider still. It was for some brand new smartphone, with 1/3 of the space being taken by the picture of its back, and the rest displaying in large, proud letters "AI POWERED CAMERA".

It was at this point a shiver down my spine told me it was the end. We were all doomed. Nothing meant anything anymore. Has anything felt real since then? Maybe all the weirdness, all the uncanniness, traces back to that time. Maybe I fell asleep at the tram and never woke up. Maybe someone put me into an Inception-style dream sequence. If you can write that, if you can spend money on having that written and shown to thousands of innocent people, as if it meant anything, fucking anything at all, as if the word "AI" there had any value or, indeed, strict meaning for everyone reading it. Do you think the marketing people that came up with it knew what it meant? Do you think the graphic designer, forced to type those letters with his bare hands, knew what they meant? Do you think the people hired to put it up knew what it meant? Such a long chain of people, starting from some insane exec shitting out "AI GOOD SELL", and then everyone dutifully rolling that turd along the way until it fell right through my pupils. Such a waste of time, resources, dignity. And for what? And for what.