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Most people who actually have technical roles within the tech industry, like engineers, product managers, and others who actually make the technologies we all use, are fluent in the latest technologies like LLMs. They aren’t the big, loud billionaires that usually get treated as the spokespeople for all of tech.

Perhaps the biggest cost of ignoring the voices of the reasonable majority of those in tech is how it has grossly limited the universe of possibilities for the future. If we were to simply listen to the smart voices of those who aren’t lost in the hype cycle, we might see that it is not inevitable that AI systems use content without the consent of creators, and it is not impossible to build AI systems that respect commitments to environmental sustainability. We can build AI that isn’t centralized under the control of a handful of giant companies. Or any other definition of “good AI” that people might aspire to. But instead, we end up with the worst, most anti-social approaches because the platforms that have introduced “AI” to the public imagination are run by authoritarian extremists with deeply destructive agendas.

This is all exacerbated by the awareness that hundreds of thousands of technical staff like engineers have been laid off in recent times, often in an ongoing drip of never-ending layoffs, and very frequently in an unnecessarily dehumanizing and brutal process intended to instill fear in those who remain at the companies afterward.

Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.