Tech sector’s relationship with ‘innovation’ just got more complicated
I read an interesting column in The Irish Times this week by Karlin Lillington, headlined Interconnected tech sector paying the price for lack of real innovation, which began with the following statement: “The technology industry is hitting some serious turbulence after a decade and a half of intense growth during which the top companies in the sector have amassed staggering wealth and power.”
Nothing much for anyone to quibble with there, I thought although how serious that turbulence is might be up for debate. Lillington drew attention to the current woes of Intel and also to concerns in some quarters that a lot of the hype and potential for artificial intelligence might turn out to be, well, for want of a better word, artificial.
Perhaps AI isn’t worth all the money that so many companies and investors have chosen to devote to it after all.
This particular sentiment coincides with a report from website The Dawn Project accusing major tech companies currently hyping AI of selling snake oil, by exaggerating the progress of AI systems, pointing to the failure of chatbots to answer basic questions, for example.
It accused them of being “modern-day itinerant preachers selling patent medicine”.
Lillington’s column ended by arguing technology was suffering from interconnected issues that pointed to “more fundamental industry problems, a myopic sector that’s fallen for its megahype and become too dependent on manipulative partnerships, lazy semi-competition and customer lock-in rather than the quality it most professes to idolise: innovation”.
I must admit that some part of me wondered if perhaps those accusations against the tech industry were only noticeable now because of the current difficulties facing certain high profile companies even though they may well be fundamental issues that have affected the industry for as long as it’s been in existence.
While it’s fair to say that ‘innovation’ is an article of faith for tech companies it may, like so many tenets of faith, be more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Understandably so, to a certain extent. If everyone was innovating all the time, no one would ever have time to get the best out of any product or service because they’d be too busy swapping them for others. So it’s no surprise that companies tend to coalesce around certain innovations and developments.
Equally, it shouldn’t come as a shock that the industry can be guilty of falling for its own megahype. We’ve all seen that particular movie quite a few times over the years. It’s not that the industry is always wrong about these things, it’s just that it keeps trying to rush them into widescale adoption well before many of them are ready. Hence the headlong charge by so many companies to crowbar this year’s trend into the descriptions of their products and services.
Does it matter? Well, to return to The Dawn Project’s criticism, it does when you try to apply that hype model to systems where failure can have potentially deadly consequences. On a positive note, if market sentiment shifts to a more sceptical stance on AI then perhaps we can avoid some of the pitfalls we would come to expect from rushed adoption based on the tech sector’s consistently flawed hype machine.
If the tech sector truly is interconnected, it should be possible to be connected in getting something right. Perhaps, for a change, the ‘innovation’ could be nothing more complex than adopting the Goldilocks principle of getting something just right.
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