This comparison suffers from what I call “the scale fallacy”.
You can’t compare disrupting technologies like this as if the scale of their impact plays no role at all.
How many people’s livelihood depended on monks writing books by hand?
Arguably all the tens of millions of those whose lives depended on the hegemony of the Catholic church and the status quo it maintained. The disruption was relatively slow, but massive.
> What’s your opinion of Youtube? We were better off when just a few could create and distribute video at scale?
Yes, I think I would make that argument.
But also I think I’m making a different argument. The game market already seems to be pretty flooded. I think many people see it as “we get more great indie games”, but I wonder if we don’t get less. That it creates more of a bipolar distribution. Triple-A relatively unaffected, and more vaporware games but it hollows out the middle.
I also think that “we objected to earlier progress and it turned out ok, therefor all objections to progress are bad” is a logical fallacy.
Or maybe the music industry? I feel like there's more music than ever, but none of it seems to be of much value and/or lasting cultural impact. It doesn't seem like it's gotten better with easier accessibility to tools, just there's a lot more options for you if you are a fan of a certain genre.
I can see games being similar, maybe a few creative people invent new genres never seen before, or mix elements in creative ways with AI tools, but I'm guessing it will more likely mean a lot of slight variations of games that bring in money churned out quickly.
I think when it comes to music, it's really disheartening to hear people say it hasn't gotten better. There is a lot of good music coming out in so many genres, but it really requires actively seeking it out.
I've dug pretty deep in the genres I like...it's just all slight variations imo of the work the trendsetting artists did establishing the genre in the first place as far as I can tell.
The issue is that as music progresses and changes so too does distribution networks. Traditional, or even nontraditional to those from the pre spotify internet days, pipelines of music discovery have been largely co-opted by industry. Outlets of organic discovery are different now - and people typically don't continually keep changing their habits enough to keep up with it.
Pair this with the fact that most people settle their musical tastes to be in line with when they are experiencing the most emotionally significant time in their early lives (high school for some, college for others, etc) and the result is an assumption that
A) What they encounter forms an overall opinion of "all" new music despite being the tip of the iceberg and
Because algorithmic curation shifted from what's quality to what's "sellable". That's a part of why you get sentiments that "media got worse". Hardcore media fans will still scour and find proper curations themselves (or be he curator), but the default of just letting Spotify or Netflix tell what's "quality" is long over.
Another little cut on why people are trusting big tech less ad less.
> I feel like there's more music than ever, but none of it seems to be of much value and/or lasting cultural impact.
It's always been that way, especially before mass-produced recordings were available.
The "Beatles" period was partly because you had to choose wisely what you were going to spend your limited dollars on when you went to the record shop.
The difference today is that recording technology is cheap, and, with streaming, you don't have to "choose wisely" when you go to the record store. Now all of the mediocre artists, who were generally excluded from the "Beatles" period, can get on streaming platforms.
BTW: There's awesome music coming out today. It just takes time for word to spread.
> Or maybe the music industry? I feel like there's more music than ever, but none of it seems to be of much value and/or lasting cultural impact. It doesn't seem like it's gotten better with easier accessibility to tools, just there's a lot more options for you if you are a fan of a certain genre.
You both listen to so much music and have a palette that is so wide-ranging that you can somewhat objectively judge it as not having gotten better?
> I feel like there's more music than ever, but none of it seems to be of much value and/or lasting cultural impact.
I'm sorry, but this seems exactly like what every single generation says. I'm pretty sure that I read some similar quotes aimed at the Beatles back in the 60s.
A lot of what's happening is imo is just there's so much more competition for attention, and music has lost value as a cultural force beyond the music itself for younger people than it used to have, when young people would develop parasocial relationships or "crushes" or build their self-identity on pop stars and their fandom. A lot of this power culturally has been balkanized.
Speaking of the music itself, once the economic incentive is removed to create great songs (we are there already) we will get fewer great songs. That force is countering the fact that we have more tools and distribution channels than ever to create great songs, and those two forces are in opposition and to me, it seems like the fewer great songs force is winning (subjective).
Good points, but it is worth considering that in both of those scenarios you listed the content within the end product is fully created by a human and not generated by a machine.
The machine is "compiling" the video, not taking the creative helm.
That was the relationship we had for some 200 years. The machine automates and accelerates the predictable labor, and the creative heads composes and conducts the tasks.
As of late, we seem to want to flip the script under the guise that "we can make more content" without considering the impact on the creative process. Not how to drive the output, but just how to make more and more. Creativity be damned. That's the issue.
AI is just another form of automation that replaces more of the manual labor. Humans still driving it. How do you feel about photography that replaced portrait paintings? Or photoshop filters? Or computer animation vs hand drawn? I don't see any difference with AI. You can indeed let the AI output stuff automatically but it's as interesting as stock photography. Do you disagree with Carmack's assessment?
"AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics"
Unlike a camera, these new automation still need require paintings. That why I don't consider generative AI as true iteration. It's literally stealing the town's paintingsand using it to mash together this collage that's called "art" . Why would I call that "progress"? You're making metaphorically uglier horses, but you're boasting about breeding them faster. We wee not worried about breeding more horses to begin with.
>You can indeed let the AI output stuff automatically but it's as interesting as stock photograp
Yes. And stock photography had agreements with the photographer. Much of the art scraped explicity said not to. It's not interesting and potentially illegal. The worst of both worlds.
>Do you disagree with Carmack's assessment?
I left a top level response somewhere, but overall, c. 2025 : not really. It feels like more hype generation, and this isn't the first time he's had to be a hype man. Maybe one day, maybe before or after we get convinent VR/AR hardware. It'll be a while.
And no small team is touching this stuff whike the courts battle about this. Come back to me in 5 years when the ethics is settled and the tech might be more ready. It's pretty hard to even look 5 weeks ahead in these times, let alone 5 years.
> There was similar criticism to yours when the printing press was invented.
A similar thing was discussed in the past, checkmate.
We have this commonsense whig-history where everything became a little bit better century by century. But one could argue that the printing press makes propaganda possible. From that you get thought control by the elite. Now you ironically get an elitist outcome, or an elite-benefiting outcome.
Was the printing press a net good? Maybe it’s more complicated than “more books good”.
Would you go back to a pre-youtube, pre-printing press, pre-internet, pre-pick-your—favorite-tecnology that democratized content creation and distribution? I know I wouldn’t.
I would not with the snap of a finger revert back to a time centuries ago when I have spent all my life up until now learning to live in the current one. No. Just like a tribal Papua New Guinean would not want to, with the snap of the finger, become one of the vice presidents in the American Psycho movie. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
Beyond that I don’t know what there is to say about our so-called democratizing technologies when the discussion gets reduced to—and never goes beyond—those very slogans about them being democratizing. Yes. We are now free to repeat the same slogans that everyone else repeats.
Yeah this is where my own internal conflict is too. May be this cheap flooding is required to bring down the cost of creation so the truly high quality games/content creates by the top 1% will be valued more (though finding would be much harder?)?
Yeah this was where I was getting to. Are the content enablers enabling flooding of content so now they can start selling the search tools/tactics. Wonder if this another way of creating a pandemic so you can sell a cure haha
The platform providers are enabling the flooding of content so that they get to become the curator and influence minds. Even general search is just an an ad pusher followed by whoever pays up to show up high, then followed by whoever games the system the best.
There's no incentive to fix it because they control the information and profit off the situation. The system is working as intended.
I think we're saying different things. In 1977 finding a good video game amongst the drek was difficult. It was a search problem in 1977, it's a search problem in 2025.
Sturgeon's law. 90% of everything is, and always will be, drek.
Interesting. But was the drek in 1977 because flooding the game market was "easy" (I meant to say game development was hard in 1977 - I think - so if there was really drel back then was there a high supply then that was the cause of it?
There's a valid argument to be made there though. We possibly were better off when tastemakers managed to filter out the lowest common denominator.
When you think of Youtube, you might think of pretty decent stuff but you have to remember the absolute slop like Spiderman/Elsa videos, crude ripoffs and near porn gets many, many more views than the good stuff.
I'm not saying strict gatekeeping is necessary, but open systems are an absolute minefield for humanity. That's clear to me after the last 10 years or so.
I don’t mind the slop. Filtering and discovery is a solvable issue. I care about tons of niche and educational content that I enjoy that would not exist if it had to be funded / approved by gatekeepers.
I believe it's more complicated than saying slop is required for niche and education content.
That said, we've already decided that truly open systems are not viable. That was settled years ago. Now even 4chan has rules.
Right now we have algorithms that promote terrible content based on automated metrics that don't make the good stuff any easier to find. Especially considering the consolidation of platforms into a few hegemonic sites.
In that sense we already have gatekeeping, it's just a terrible approach to it.
And for the record I mind the slop because of how easily it drowns out and eventually overtakes the good stuff. Even good, educational content feels the need to cater to the algorithm to survive.
We're not at a tipping point yet, but it certainly feels we're headed in that direction.
Algorithmically promoting tastemakers might be a solution. Pushing the good content to the top and burying the slop.
My desire for tastemakers and gatekeepers and the majority of people consuming the lowest common denominator of content when left to their own devices aren't at odds. In fact, it's part of the equation.
I think it's ok to add selective pressure whenever spammy, unethical, low-quality content starts flooding the system. Books has copyright laws and resistive book distribution channels, YouTube has Likes and moderation systems, etc.
With hindsight, one of silent assumptions very common of both pro- and anti-AI arguments up to this point was as follows: because AI is potentially superhuman in arts, the existing selective pressures could inversely punish desired creativity if AI outputs were not unfairly treated. Pro-AI arguments assumed that warping the system is wrong, anti-AI assumed allowing the system go down is worse. IMO, superhuman AI didn't happen anyway, and so now AI slop problem is just spam control problem.
No one was ever against punishing spams and unethical actors. It's fine and safe. We're at a postmortem phase during which we'd patch the bugs in laws and law enforcement that allowed AI companies do outlandish hacks like torrenting books and redistributing it as lossy compressed 500GB GGUF.
I agree. Wokeness has a very precise meaning: World is divided between oppressors and oppressed. Oppressors are white heterosexual men (white supremacy / heteropatriarchy) everyone else subjugated to them. Institutions, laws are created to perpetuate that power and must be dismantled / subverted via revolution.
Most understand it even if they can’t articulate a definition. Easy to point out when a movie or corporate initiative, behavior is woke.
Well done! Love to see innovation in Web games. Biz model also interesting. I didn’t see a login button. how do you identify paying users and store progress?
“VR will become something everyone wants before it becomes something everyone can afford” Palmer Luckey
People that bought Vision Pro at $3,500 they are not using it all that much. A lower price will just result in more headsets gathering dust.
VR has no product-market fit except for a couple of game niches. Far from the “next computing platform” that justified investment of tens of billions of dollars a year.
Headsets and platforms need fundamental rethinking before optimizing for price.
You have data to back up your claim that “Vision Pro owners are using it often multiple hours a day? That’s a shrinking tiny fraction of AVP buyers based on my experience. I’ve been in the industry for a decade. I have an AVP, know many other owners and devs with published apps. I’m myself the dev of moonrider: most popular WebXR application so see the industry numbers.
Also sales /= usage and retention. Engagement is what you need to grow a platform.
Your numbers about XBox sales might be true for a brief period of time between Quest2 and Quest3 releases. Still what matters is engagement and retention.
As mentioned only product-market (albeit niche) fit for VR has been some games subgenres. Can you point to any other applications with significant numbers?
> You have data to back up your claim that “Vision Pro owners are using it often multiple hours a day? That’s a shrinking tiny fraction of AVP buyers based on my experience. I’ve been in the industry for a decade. I have an AVP, know many other owners and devs with published apps. I’m myself the dev of moonrider: most popular WebXR application so see the industry numbers.
I have no more data than you do when you say a "shrinking tiny fraction" of AVP buyers. I've been in the industry for 30 years. We both have our anecdata.
Do you currently have any published content on any platform? Burden of proof is on the one making a claim. One of the signs of product-market fit is word of mouth organic growth. I’m a dev with published content and know a plethora of other devs. None seeing significant growth or improved retention. If you’re right the evidence is really hidden. Any forum or community where I can talk to the users that are using AVP a ton?
Not all speculative assets are neccesarily securities. Bitcoin's value fluctuates in a way that makes it's store of value absolutely resemble a stock, albeit with fewer legal protections and guarantees.
BTC is volatile but one can argue has more guarantees than stocks. There's no counterparty risk. No company that can go bankrupt or entity that can fail. BTC is property.
Definitely. Value of life is estimated and changes all the time across cultures, in wars, life insurances, technological tradeoffs like cars that kill people but we accept the cost…
There’s no universal, intrinsic value to life. It’s us that give it value.
Thanks.
I agree with you, although question the usefulness of going into what I perceive as a more metaphysical direction. In this sense it is trivial that nothing has intrinsic value. But putting on my more pragmatist hat, I would say that there is a sense in which basic survival is very much universal and unquestionable value. "I don't want to die", "I want to be happy", are pretty much safe assumptions to make across cultures and history (yeah, people commit suicide, hence it is not universal, but still a pretty safe bet and worth to consider 'universal' for all practical purposes).
There was similar criticism to yours when the printing press was invented.