Member-only story
The Age of Sh*tification
Why tech costs more but works worse
With AI, the amount of tech that comes out to the public that isn’t ready hit an all-time high. Products like Humane or Rabbit, which promise to be your best physical daily AI assistant, were preordered by tens of thousands of people eager to get their hands on their new tech, only to realize that it wasn’t working as advertised. Not only that, but in the case of Humane, you needed a $25/month membership on top of the $700 you already forked out for the gadget.
One of the reasons this is being seen increasingly is quite simple. AI makes it very easy for companies to implement clumsy features without worrying about the deep backend developement necessary to make a good product. In simpler terms, you don’t have to code software anymore, you just have to hook up your buttons to ChatGPT prompts.
How are companies allowed to sell something, only to then tell the consumers they actually have to wait for it to work once they bought it?
Companies like Apple hold huge launch events telling us what the product is going to be, and it’s not.
They advertise on billboards everywhere about features that end up not coming out.
Yet people paid hundreds of dollars specifically because they were excited about all those features.
