The author discusses how AI technology is increasingly taking over daily tasks, but often falls short in delivering real utility. At tech conventions, companies promote futuristic ideas while offering products that lack quality and practicality. Overall, the push for AI feels more like a way for wealthy companies to profit from technology rather than genuinely improving people's lives.
They're selling, of course, but also this grandiose and mystified mixture of awe and dread—something amazing is happening very quickly just out of sight, and will be here soon despite always being exactly 18-36 months away, and you will need to be protected from it, but also it will improve your life—is as much the product as anything else. It is pitched less at the general public, to whom it might reasonably sound like The Jigsaw Killer explaining why he had placed a bear trap on their head, than at the investors and politicians whose faith keeps the industry afloat. Those dire promises will stand in for the product until such time as there is a product worth selling; the speculative stuff will continue either way.
The industry's leading powers say ridiculous things, the people whose job it is to report on the industry repeat them, and everyone downstream is left to reconcile the distance and rationalize the difference between those soaring possibilities and the reliably shabby fact of the thing.