Tim Cook is leaving John Ternus with an AI imbroglio

John Ternus hasn’t taken over from Tim Cook yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start creating problems for him. One of Ternus’s biggest challenges is going to be navigating the perilous gap between how the AI industrial complex views its offering and how the rest of us do.

“Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone else”

…a majority (73%) of experts felt positive about AI’s impact on how people do their jobs, compared with just 23% of the public.

Well, that’s weird. Wonder what could account for tha-

“Anthropic warns fully AI employees are a year away”

That was a year ago, and, as John Gruber points out, that did not happen at all, but it wasn’t supposed to happen; it was just a free advertising campaign Anthropic scored for itself. Say something big and scary, get press. Mission accomplished.

But this is kind of the problem in a nutshell. Anthropic orchestrated free advertising for itself by saying, “AI is going to put people out of work!” That ad was obviously not for us; it was for CEOs looking to lay off ever more employees.

And now you wonder why people don’t love AI? Do you even hear yourselves?

Well, surely that article is an outlier and-

“Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want”

Why is it so hard for the Macalope to get through sentences in his own column? That doesn’t even make any sense!

Within recent memory…

No, no, fine, just go ahead with the pull quote. The Macalope will wait.

…people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customers. It was to identify a need and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.

The horny one isn’t going to blame Steve Jobs for saying, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” because the problem isn’t Steve Jobs; the problem is people who misinterpreted Jobs. Instead of finding out what people really want that they simply can’t articulate, the current crop of tech overlords believes you can force people to want what you want to sell them.

Or at least force them to pay for it. They don’t have to like it. They don’t care about that part. Clearly.

“The more young people use AI, the more they hate it”

Using AI to these young people seems increasingly like being asked to train the unpaid intern who is going to replace you.

The fear that chatbot tools will lead to a permanent loss of critical thinking skills ranks high among the worries held by young people about the technology. It’s also backed up by data: A recent study from the MIT Media Lab found that EEG scans of the brain showed decreased activity in people who have been writing essays using AI tools.

That may be well and good for college students into drooling troglodytes but what can we do to get the brains of grade schoolers running out of their ears?

Good news! Senator Adam Schiff (D – Venture Capital) glibly announced on Bluesky that he was reaching across the aisle in order to shove AI into K-12 classrooms because god knows that’s where public schools needed funding, not teachers’ salaries or reducing class sizes or just getting them pencils and paper or getting the rats out of the rest rooms.

Look, kids aren’t going to get addicted to AI on their own.

If it’s any consolation, Schiff’s post was ratioed into the Stone Age, which, ironically, is where kids’ IQs are about to go as well. (Yes, yes, the Macalope knows this is reductive about the collected intelligence of our stone age ancestors, just go with it.)

Scan through any technology news site, and most of the coverage is not going to be on new gadgets; it’s going to be on AI getting stuffed into yet another thing like a nutria being crammed into a turkey. This is not done because people have asked for it or secretly want it, but just don’t know that they want it. It’s done to increase the return on investment in AI (just like Schiff’s proposed legislation). Period.

Meanwhile, not only has AI made it hard for people to get anything else new by sucking up all the oxygen in the boardrooms, causing brain damage and drooling, zombie-like groupthink that can only process where to stuff AI next instead of making new features or gadgets, it’s made it hard for people to just buy new computers.

“Apple discontinues base Mac mini, now starts at $799 with 512GB storage”

Not only have memory costs increased because of AI, but now the cheapest desktop Macs have all been scooped up to run AI and agentic tools. You want to do some web surfing, send some emails, and maybe play a game? Sorry, some weirdo somewhere needs to remove the clothes from non-consenting adults.

While AI has many uses, the backlash to the ham-fisted efforts by companies to use the one hammer it has a huge financial interest in on screws, bolts, china cups, and, yes, the occasional nail is not dying down. It’s getting worse. Ternus enthusiastic comments about AI’s potential are pretty much what every technology executive feels they have to say in this environment, which is fine, but if his Apple doesn’t deliver things customers really want instead of are being told to buy, things might start getting awkward.