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This year in tech, too much happened and very little of it made sense. It was like we were being controlled by a random number generator that would dictate the whims of the tech industry, leading to multiple \u201cbiggest news stories of the year\u201d happening over the course of a month, all completely disconnected from one another.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t stop thinking about a very good tweet I saw last month, which encapsulated the absurdity of the year \u2014 it was something along the lines of, \u201cMeta laid off 11,000 people and it\u2019s only the third biggest tech story of the week.\u201d Normally, a social media giant laying off 13% of its workforce<\/a> would easily be the week\u2019s top story, but this was the moment when FTX went bankrupt<\/a> and everyone was impersonating corporations<\/a> on Twitter because somehow Elon Musk didn\u2019t think through how things would go horribly wrong if anyone could buy a blue check. Oh, good times.<\/p>\n When I say it feels like we\u2019re living in a simulation, what I mean is that sometimes, I hear about the latest tech news and feel like someone threw some words in a hat, picked a few, and tried to connect the dots. Of course, that\u2019s not what\u2019s really happening. But in January, would you have believed me if I told you that Twitter owner Elon Musk polled users to decide that he would unban Donald Trump<\/a>?<\/p>\n These absurd events in tech have consequences. Crypto collapses like FTX\u2019s bankruptcy and the UST scandal<\/a> have harmed actual people who invested significant sums of money into something that they believed to be a good investment. It\u2019s funny to think about how you\u2019d react ten years ago if someone told you that Meta (oh yeah, that\u2019s what Facebook is called now) is losing billions of dollars every quarter<\/a> to build virtual reality technology that no one seems to want. But those management decisions are not a joke for the employees who lost their jobs because of those choices.<\/p>\n Where does this leave us? We\u2019re in a moment in tech history where nothing is too absurd to be possible. That\u2019s both inspiring and horrifying. It\u2019s possible for a team of Amazon fulfillment center workers in Staten Island to win a union election<\/a>, successfully advocating for themselves in the face of tremendous adversity. It\u2019s also possible for Elon Musk to buy Twitter<\/a> for $44 billion.<\/p>\n AI technology like Stable Diffusion<\/a> and ChatGPT<\/a> encapsulate this fragile balance between innovation and horror. You can make beautiful artworks in seconds, and you can also endanger the livelihoods of working artists. You can ask an AI chatbot to teach you about history, but there\u2019s no way to know if its response is factually accurate (unless you do further research, in which case, you could\u2019ve just done your own research to begin with).<\/p>\n But perhaps part of the reason why AI generators have garnered such mainstream appeal is that they almost feel natural to us. This year\u2019s tech news feels so bizarre that they might as well have been generated by ChatGPT.<\/p>\n Or maybe reality is actually stranger than anything an AI could come up with. I asked ChatGPT to write some headlines about tech news for me, and it came up with these snoozers (in addition to some factually inaccurate headlines, which I omitted for the sake of journalism):<\/p>\n Pretty boring! Here are some actual real things that happened in tech this year:<\/p>\n These are strange times. If the rules are made up and the points don\u2019t matter, let\u2019s at least hope that if the absurdity continues into 2023, the tech news is more amusing than harmful. I want more Chris Pratt voicing live action Mario<\/a>, and fewer tech CEOs being sentenced for fraud<\/a>. Is that too much to ask?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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