173 - April Fool's

The tech industry has cultivated no shortage of bloated egos this century, and while much has changed in technology, the human tendency for those with nothing of real value to overcompensate hasn't. Many egos are further bloated by popularity, cults of charisma, tokens of "prestige", wealth, and being surrounded by "yes (men/women)". The end result is often human-sized and shaped jokes, with no remaining hint of awareness connecting them to reality.

Humans adapt at a much more glacial pace when it comes to their cognitive coping mechanisms, which sadly also makes social engineering far easier for adversarial automated systems deployed at scale. Marketers developed many methods of exploiting cognitive biases, and AI systems trained to parrot them take that several steps further through automation and attacks-by-volume.

Today is a day known as "April Fool's" in the US, where the AI industry's frauds will say something only slightly more absurd than the obvious lies they tell every other day, and they'll call it a joke. Since they supply every actual expert with a steady stream of bad jokes every other day of the year then I won't be participating in the celebration of fools.

Speaking from personal experience, the people who actually develop the cutting edge of technology, pushing it forward, are rarely egotistical, and are frequently soft-spoken (when given the option), though they also carry a big stick.

This becomes a serious problem under present societal dynamics, where cognitive bias rules with an iron fist, with technology investors expecting the most intelligent people to also be the loudest or the most hyper-social extroverts. The loudest hyper-social extrovert (with or without a cult of charisma) may make a decent evangelist for technology, but there is very nearly zero chance of them being the one who develops something substantial.

My team has stood here, alone on the cutting edge of technology without any competition in sight, for more than 4 years now. We'll still be standing here until the day when a competent and/or ethical investor is located, or until humanity goes extinct, because there is no point in doing anything else when all other roads lead promptly to extinction.

That gives me personally the prestigious role of "door stop", holding the door open for humanity to survive, for so long as the window of opportunity remains. It is an extremely irritating role, and I'd rather humanity make the choice already and be done with it.

Our lead architect is someone I consider to be one of the most intelligent people on the planet, and rather than guarding and inflating his ego, he requests exclusively negative (but constructive) feedback from the rest of the team on anything he does. He recognizes the value of collective intelligence and stays grounded in reality, as we all do, and within such dynamics all ego yields to cooperation.