Kill the killer app (and don't say VR)

Why breaking away from the hype cycle and not having a killer app are the best things that ever happened to virtual reality

So sorry about this, I meant — spatial computing (Apple tells developers not to call their AR or VR apps AR or VR apps).

Ex Nihilo, Archer’s Mark, ARTE, Notes on Blindness, 2016

You’ve probably seen many similar posts and comments expressing disappointment and anger at some of the most recent AI developments:

“The generative AI boom is in full swing now. Some people are thrilled. Others, not so much. A growing community of writers, programmers, artists, musicians, lawyers, researchers, policymakers, and regular concerned citizens is coalescing to look at this moment critically, to ask tough questions, and to advocate for guardrails to make sure that technological progress doesn’t destroy creative industries. Is scraping the web for training data ethical? Who gets to decide whether AI art is any good? How should copyright law apply to AI-generated work?” — Kate Knibbs, Pocket/ WIRED

“More and more evidence will emerge that generative AI and large language models provide false information and are prone to hallucination—where an AI simply makes stuff up, and gets it wrong. Hopes of a quick fix to the hallucination problem via supervised learning, where these models are taught to stay away from questionable sources or statements, will prove optimistic at best. Because the architecture of these models is based on predicting the next word or words in a sequence, it will prove exceedingly difficult to have the predictions be anchored to known truths.” — WIRED, Daron Acemoglu​​, Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT

As critical voices on AI emerge in the midst of the mass machine learning hype, I want to challenge, per analogiam, the myth of VR/AR as a breakthrough technology.