New Tech, Eyes Open: Stay Critical of Tech's Shiny New Toys
Pasifika: Stop Falling For AI, Crypto, NFTs and Blockchain Marketing.
New tech has always brought the promise of a better life, a better "me", a better world, etc.
So, it's definitely enticing.
Who doesn't want to only work 20 minutes a week and have an automated email campaign, “drop shipping” business automation AI, make them 48 million dollars a week in "passive income"?
But when you're in the tech game, you learn to be cynical, especially if you have any experience building practical, real-world solutions with the so-called second-coming programming language, or API, or cloud service.
Because when the rubber meets the road, and you meet the rubber, it's usually not as shiny as the tech marketing makes it out to be.
We know this from experience (plus, it's our area of interest, so we tend to stay informed).
This is all fun and games for geeks and tech nerds alike; we'll give each other sh!t for our taste in Operating Systems or hardware (iPhone vs. Android will never die), and so the fun is pretty harmless.
Where it starts getting (dare I say it) "dangerous" is when the tech we're either frothing over or memeing gets out into the normal world, and those folks take it seriously.
It's like they're not in on the joke.
And the jokes stops being funny when the grifters
start influencing people who don't know any better about that tech - not usually in their best interests.
And it stops being funny altogether when folks in the industry, touted as "tech leaders", who look like us, end up being the people leading us astray.
AI Got You Wide Open
Last week, I saw someone who is touted as a tech leader in the Māori community post on LinkedIn about how quickly he created an AI-powered app (34 seconds, apparently?) to read PDFs to get "deep insights" into Māori and Pasifika culture1
This may seem harmless to people, and I'm definitely not one to say "don't use AI," because that would make me a hypocrite.
What’s being implied here is AI has the ability to understand therefore derive “deep insights” by reading Māori and Pasifika information.
We know this isn’t true in general about LLMS because LLMS don’t actually understand what they’re saying:
That’s Yann LeCun, the Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
And then to forget this piece of reality, which I thought would be obvious to indigenous people, but obviously not so I’m going to spell it out in a 3-step process:
LLMs need vast amounts of data to be able to train it well.
There is not a lot of indigenous data available.
LLMs won’t know sh!t about indigenous knowledge.
Recent studies have tried to tackle indigenous languages for NLP like this paper from The University of British Colombia on a “Text-to-Text Transformer for 10 Indigenous Languages”, and guess what they learned in the process
A gap in the availability of comprehensive and diverse training data for these languages.
Indigenous languages often have complex morphological systems and lack a standard orthography for writing.
A lack of digital textual data for Indigenous languages. This scarcity of data is a major impediment to the development of NLP systems, including language models, as it limits the ability to train these models effectively.
and so on…
Do the math!
In my previous newsletter, I was calling out the absolute lack of high-level technical expertise; the kind that's able to mitigate harm; to be a trusted adviser that delivers the most good possible, given all requirements.
In it, I called out how the absence of this layer of expertise, consultation, and knowledge leaves our community open to exploitation.
A lot of even technical folks allow their ideology or disguised greed to blind them to the realities of the tech.
Or they’re just grifters.
So, let’s go through a few of these grifts and where they’ve impacted Pasifika communities.
Crypto Currencies
Crypto- the evergreen digital fraud system that can scale unparalleled corruption to dizzying heights, has everyone chasing the grifters lottery every week.
Look, I get it, everyone wants to be rich.
Who wouldn't in this economy, amirite?! 😁
But when you have an industry that’s largely unregulated2 you’re pretty much going to get exactly what you’re already seeing:
Corruption, fraud, and some more fraud.
From your garden variety pump and dumps, organised in private Telegram groups, full-on crypto exchanges committing fraud - from Sam Bankman-Friends well-documented fall in a $32B FTX Fraud and Conspiracy, to as recently as just this month (Nov), Binance getting a $4B Fine and CEO stepping down due to money laundering.
The levels of fraud in crypto are insane.
Crypto had my Dad asking me to check on a thing on his Facebook he sent money to buy and hold crypto for him.
My Dad, a retired Samoan Minister in his 70s, knows the Bible, Samoan culture, and is a great cook.
He's no investor and definitely isn't up on this tech.
My Dad lost some money, but he'll be okay.
Disclaimer: I've Used Cryptocurrency
I'm not against cryptocurrencies.
I've used them in the past to buy things online and invested in them myself—with a very boring strategy of buying low, holding until it made enough to get my money back plus fees, then leaving the profit in there to play until it did the same.
Repeat until I either withdrew it all, or it tanked.
BTC and ETH only.
Blockchain & Web3
And with crypto it ushered in a new era of techno buzzwords.
Blockchain.
“We can trust Blockchain, it was crypto that was the scam, right?”
If crypto was the Ponzi scheme, then blockchain’s alright because it’s just the neutral underlying technology that's there to serve the altruistic purposes crypto was meant to, but got taken over by the grifters.
Right?
Sure, this conversation was amongst more technical people. But I think this is the reason it's even more insidious.
Tech people are not gods.
We're not all inherently smart and we are by no means the authority on everything.
I’m sure that much we can all agree on.
So, when the conversation includes topics about "what makes for a better society" or "how to make things more fair in the world", please take what tech people say with a lot of scepticism.
Because "how to make things better for society" is a question that we can answer, in our well-informed opinion, with technology.
And unless suitably qualified, nothing else.
The issue with blockchain is ideological, especially with people who have identified mostly and historically with the "have nots" category.
They believe blockchain will make everything fair.
That it will take out the meddling corruption of banks, and governments etc, and I get that.
It’s like what crypto is to “get rich quick” folks, blockchain is to “make things fair” people.
And while I empathise with this, nothing I see in the Blockchain space is a solution to these societal and human problems.
If you think it’s going to replace banks and financial institutions you may run into some hurdles in thinking like this Web3 investor struggling to explain a blockchain use case for mortgages.
To summarise the video:
The investor struggles to explain how “putting your house for sale on the blockchain” would handle disputes in taking over the house and how these disputes would be enforced.
This dilemma suggests that unless you essentially recreate every system that exists in the real world, but now configured for the blockchain, the concept falls apart.
Why would we go to all that trouble?
Exactly.
A "blockchain" is not addressing the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order effects of the processes they’re trying to digitise.
It get’s hand waved away somewhere… like that’s how the world works?
And like crypto, I’m not against the technology, I think they’re fine, fun even.
What I’m against is misunderstanding the technology, and ending up in “a solution in search of a problem” zone.
And what I’m more against is people who would use people’s dreams for a better, fairer society- because they’re experiencing it- as a way to manipulate them for financial or ideological3 gain.
And while that blockchain and web3 blast radius is mainly tech or tech-adjacent folks, the next tech has been pretty widely accepted as an outright scam:
The dreaded NFT.
NFT
NFTs took the world by storm.
Every man and their basketball team was promoting NFTs.
Celebrities, musicians, artists – you name it, they were all touting NFTs as the next big thing.
Not to sound like a tech elitist4, but how the hell would these people know NFTs are the next big thing?
Social media was going crazy.
Artists, as far as I could tell, seemed to be leading the charge, saying it had changed the game.
And like all early-crypto-scams, the early bird pretty much sets up the pyramid i.e. they get paid.
The reason I knew it was just going to be another pump & dump extravaganza was this was still tied to crypto.
And with crypto, come the cryptobros along with the whole HODL community of grifters and marks.
I saw widespread adoption of NFTs in the Pasifika community. There was definitely a buzz.
NFT collection names like "Trillionaire Thugs (TT)" headed up by a successful Pasifika person stood out in the local news.
A lot of people flocked to the private Discords and Telegrams to get in on this new "get rich quick" scheme.
Trillionaire Thugs OpenSea collection was created in Jan 2022.
A video with Sam talking about the new venture can be found on YouTube, with comments concerned about the "floor price" for the TT NFT going well below the 0.3ETH floor price.
The floor price5, as of writing this in Nov 2023, is currently 0.069ETH.
I'm not a financial adviser, but I'm assuming if you bought into the 2022 hype of NFTs with TT, you're probably down on profit at the moment, right?
Look, as far as I'm concerned, this NFT thing was a fun, gimmicky "neopet for adults" type thing – nothing more.
The saddest thing I saw during the NFT hype was Māori artists on Instagram getting into, and promoting NFTs to their people. Not because they were taking an interest in a new technology and having some fun with the artwork, but because they were citing "breaking the cycle of generational wealth" as their reason for investing.
Money's money, whatever.
These folks were seeing a saviour6 in this tech, sure, partly their longing for being saved, but in no small part because of the grift hype that led them there – that's what was the saddest part to me.
The Road to Nowhere
When I’m thinking of the question "how do we tackle these grifters and scam artists?" I’m reminded of something pretty obvious: these scammers, these con artists, are nothing new.
They've been around a long time, and our responses to them have been varied and evolving. Historically, it's been a game of cat and mouse, with law enforcement playing catch-up, leading to investigations, prosecutions, and incarcerations.
But it's pretty much an endless game of whack-a-mole in the scam world.
So, the emphasis shifts to "educating the end user" as a key strategy in minimising damage.
I was going to talk about how to mitigate harms in the tech, with technical solutions like authentication and authorisation- and we all know I could go on forever about technological things.
But this piece is really about the human side of the equation when faced with techs shiny new toys (admittedly, probably more the marketing hype).
The human element includes those who are either outright grifters or narcissists, attracted to the tech scene but lacking the commitment to truly understand the technology, its benefits, and its drawbacks.
Then there are the well-intentioned but uninformed individuals, who end up being agents of chaos preaching crypto and blockchain at the wrong audience.
This brings us to an essential point: we need Pasifika Tech Role models- like Kelsey Hightower, and Angie Jones are for the black community, or Micheal Running Wolf is for Native Americans.
Technical, Compassionate, Experienced, and diverse.
Conclusion
I don’t really have a definitive conclusion.
I know this was a lot of ranting, mixed with anecdotes and some specific points.
If “awareness” and a call to wake the f*** up was my intended conclusion, I’d be happy with that.
More Tech Role Models, though?
Sure, it's not a silver bullet, single-threaded solution type problem, but in my humble opinion, the more Hightowers, Joneses, and Running Wolves there are in our community, the richer the discourse will be.
Even in disagreements, these figures will absolutely drop gems left and right, enriching our communities with high-level knowledge.
That's a sight better than the fast, gimmicky, slick-talking language of grift.
Thanks for reading, see you in the next one.
ia manuia,
Ron.
I had to recall the exact words from memory because the post has been updated since I replied to it, calling out the 34 seconds to get "deep insights" from an AI service??.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have taken steps to regulate, but federal legislation specifically addressing crypto is lacking.
Saving the “Techno Optimist” rant for another post.
Sounds like something a tech elitist would say 😂
I had AI, Effective-Altruism & Effective-Acceleration lined up to rant about in this newsletter as well, but I'll leave well enough alone and save it for another one.