I was thinking today about cryptocurrency. I don’t feel that I can offer any insight; it seems like most people have a very negative impression of cryptocurrency, and that’s ultimately for the best. As I walked to breakfast though, something about the way I was thinking changed. Crypto could be a good idea. This epiphany was not sourced from a sudden grave head injury–not wholly at least–but from a recent policy change in some credit card companies. As has happened before, (see: Patreon, OnlyFans, Tumblr, PayPal, usw.) a payment company has taken issue with Adult Content, and moved to oust providers of such content from their service. The actual implementation of this policy is not super important. Sometimes these bans stick around (Patreon, Tumblr) and sometimes they don’t (OnlyFans), but the issue is that they keep happening. There is an obvious market here, and even when companies correctly identify this market, they still get pressured out of supporting it. Even if another provider appears, ‘Meta:tm:Seggs:tm:’ there’s no guarantee the company won’t be sold, shunned by their providers, fined, targeted by regulators, or worse.
Indeed, if you’re a capitalist, there’s an issue to be solved here, and a profit to be made. But for providers, or consumers, (anybody who will actually USE the system), the incentive is just for a simple solution that will work. If only, if ONLY, there were some sort of decentralized, anonymous, especially easy to transfer currency that–well wait just a minute. Surely that is cryptocurrency, no? These are the exact values that CryptoNuts will espouse infinitely, if you allow them. Perfect! Solution identified, problem solved, profit made (?)
Except that much like myself, proponents of cryptocurrency LIE CONSTANTLY! Let’s imagine, if you will, a very basic payment system which uses cryptocurrency in this thought experiment, you paid $15 in BTC 20 minutes ago. Maybe you bought a porn video, or even something non-adult, like a bag of artisan chips, or one (1) gasoline. At $70417.94/btc at 9:20 today (apr 9, 2024), that’s about 0.000213 BTC. Now, at 9:45, that’s worth (ugh, about) $14.75. So in 20 minutes, you ended up paying a quarter less. In a month, the value of your exchange medium fluctuates by 11 thousand dollars (~73k max - ~62k min).
In just an hour, in just a day, what you paid and what the creator received changes a LOT. Bitcoin, and crypto in general is far too unstable to be a reasonable medium of exchange. I would not accept payment for something, if–just by chance–the price I charge can increase or decrease by the better part of a dollar every day. If prices are tied to BTC (i.e. a set fraction of a coin) or USD (a variable fraction of a coin always worth X dollars) is irrelevant, both the seller and the buyer can be screwed by the market on the other’s behalf.
If cryptocurrency were a currency at all, it would have seen massive adoption and regulation by the financial world, and that’s completely fine! As it stands, crypto is, and can only be, an unregulated stock market for gamblers to lose and grifters to win on.
But I’m not done yet! What about other bad tech? What about
I am vehemently anti-AI. AI stands to do a great deal of damage, and even despite knowing this, companies charge on enshittifying their products, or worse, creating tools for others to quickly and efficiently enshittify their products. I have yet to see a use for AI I like, but I will spare you a lecture of the opposite. The question I pose then, following from a hypothetical useful cryptocurrency (call it GoodCoin:tm:), is the following: is there a good use for AI?
Yes!
I’m kidding of course. Remember when I said how much I lie? Good times.
In actuality, I’m going to take the cheap answer: maybe. Cue the groans, I know, I know. It’s not a real answer. I won’t pretend it is.
This was inspired, in part by Kagi. Cory Doctorow (who’s blog you should read) recently promoted it, and after seeing it elsewhere, I decided to take another look at it. For the uninitiated, Kagi is the hip, cool search engine all the kids are paying for. It also, and this is what turned me off of it initially, offers AI tools with its higher tier subscriptions.
Kagi offers two AI tools: One ‘FastGPT’, and a summarizing program called ‘Universal Summarizer’ (wow!). I am of the opinion that generative AI (see anything /[\S]*GPT\d*/ matches) Sucks Mad Donkey Balls. I’m not an AI Expert but for the purposes of this text, generative AI refers to AI which serves to create output such as text, audio, or video. A chatbot? Generative. A cancer diagnosis AI which creates circles over suspicious spots on an x-ray? Not generative.
“Hey that’s not the proper definition of generative!” Can it.
I digress. FastGPT is generative AI. ChatGPT Sucks Mad Donkey Balls not because it’s ChatGPT, but because it’s an AI chatbot. I’m gonna go ahead and say FastGPT Sucks Mad Donkey Balls too, simply on the basis that it’s an AI chatbot. But the other offer, Universal Summarizer, is a little more interesting to me. In fact, I’d be willing to say… oh jeez… this might even be… a good use of generative AI. Aggh! The thing about a summarizer is that it’s relatively low impact, pretty useful, and easy to fact check. If you can train an AI to not just summarize, but also show proof of its words, that would work well to minimize the drawbacks of AI (especially it Making Shit Up) while also providing an actual use for it.
The purpose of a summary like this is purely to help a human do their job. Nothing depends on the AI, so it’s fine if the text contains some mistakes, because the human can read the summary, and say, “well hang on a minute, that doesn’t sound right.” Then the human reads the part of the source that the AI claims supports it, and makes their decision based on that.
Therein lies, in my most impactful of opinions, the real use for AI: to help people do their job. AI shouldn’t replace people, it should help them do their job. AI should be given the hard, menial tasks that humans are bad at, and turn those tasks into something humans are more suited for.
Why are we creating a world we have to live AROUND, live IN SPITE OF, rather than one that FITS US?
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