We might just be the ones holding our tech back
...and we shouldn't complain.
This AI rave has just made me so much more observant of the fact that we truly haven't figured so much out, and we probably never will.
I don't know if anyone resonates with this feeling.
I recently watched F1 (one of the best movies I've ever watched, by the way) and realized that those F1 vehicles are feats of engineering. Like everything surrounding the sport—the engineering and tech that goes into it—is just marvelous. Yet, the technology was made for people to watch these marvelous cars go round a circuit, and the crowd shouts, and winners win money, and this repeats many times a year for many years.
So much of humanity’s "engineering and innovation budget" is spent on building stuff just to entertaining ourselves. Look at smartphones. Now look at the backlash OpenAI received just because GPT 5 wasn't as sycophantic as 4o. And, because the economy flows in the direction of the majority—because capitalism exists and stakeholder value is a thing—OpenAI decided to tone down the already-superb answering voice of GPT 5 to appeal to people "who lost their friend, fiancé,... god" in 4o—yes, I'm not kidding, there are literal religions around AI at the moment.
Isn't that just crappy?
Our biggest strength—and I've talked about this here before—is our humanity. But in this scenario, more specifically, it is our longing for pleasure, and the aversion to things that takes that pleasure away—like fear, hatred, anxiety, cultural differences, preferences—that holds us back the most. How much we want things to please us and entertain us, how we prefer that the pace of innovation slows as long as we're pacified.
Humans are "only" scared of AGI—"only" is doing heavy duty labor here so please forgive the exaggeration—because of the potential for it to extinguish us. If these companies were given free rein, we would have AGI by now.
P.S. Not saying that this limitation is a bad thing; I'm driving a point.
These big companies will only move in the direction we tell them to. That's why the primary interface of LLMs is text. We engineered a system to think with language and regurgitate with words so that humans can chat with it, even though that's literally not how humans actually think. We could literally have just made thinking machines that didn't need to talk to us, but nooooooo, "We need mass adoption first".
Why the hell do you need mass adoption for truly ground-breaking technology when it will surely be ground-breaking? Why not technology for technology's sake?
Our innovation is so driven by emotion and it kind of pisses me off. Stuff that will genuinely change the world is held back just because people "won't like it". LOL!
I'm sorry for my ranting but until stakeholder value moves beyond pacification of the masses, we will never reach the peak of technological innovation we say we want but don't actually.