Innovation is more complex than that

I've seen a number of news articles and LinkedIn posts recently about how European innovation is "lagging" due to "overbearing legislation", while innovation in the USA and Asia is advancing apace. Now, obviously everything posted on LinkedIn is nonsense; anyone who posts on LinkedIn is probably fundamentally unserious and only trying to make themselves seem important and/or intelligent (though anyone with any real intelligence knows better than to post drivel on there). However, the number of publications parroting this same line is reminiscent of the Jimmy Kimmel bit about every single news host being surprised that it's October.

Newscasters Shocked it's October

It's pretty obvious that this is just another push to relax tech legislation in the bloc. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool, a liar, or both. When it comes to people in the tech industry I tend to assume dishonesty and malice these days; the tech industry hasn't exactly done anything to endear itself to me of late. These charlatans are pushing for unbridled generative AI (hereafter genAI) tech usage to bolster the failing US economy and to increase the dependence on non-renewable energy. It's a web of bullshit pedaled by the worst of us (and let's face it, the tech industry is quite frankly already full of the worst of us). This recent chorus of "the EU can't innovate due to legislation" is being sung in harmony by greedy capitalists and supporters of fascist regimes the world round to push a narrative that any place that restricts the tech sector or protects workers' rights is fundamentally behind, and that this sort of behavior must be stomped out for make way for our tech overlords to rule with no obstruction. The worst thing is that it's working. Tech leaders and politicians in the EU are just as greedy and/or stupid as anywhere else.

I may be naïve in my belief that software can be used for good, but it is a belief I still hold. I do not, however, believe that this is possible in a tech industry with no oversight and legislation. As someone who writes software and has worked in the open source industry for over a decade now, I believe all software should be treated with healthy suspicion. Software is complex and multifaceted, and should be crafted with the same care as a bridge or skyscraper. Without stringent rules that set sensible boundaries about how to build software, enthusiastic and even well-meaning developers will often charge in and write without adequate care. It's true that many problems can be reduced to data structures and mathematics, and it's exciting when you start to think about how it can be done. I have recently been talking with my mother about turning her PhD research into a queryable API and we both got quite animated when we started discussing how the data could be structured and linked. But this kind of project is building off of many years of research, and so benefits from all of the hard work being done already.

As a web developer, I work in an industry which embodies the worst instincts of programmers. The entire ecosystem is littered with ill-conceived ideas, abandoned libraries, and swathes of non-performant and/or insecure code. The web is a nightmarish platform to program for, in many ways. We are saved only by having standards bodies made up of people who actually care about code quality and accessibility, and who have done extensive research into whether the use case actually needs to be addressed. It's not perfect, and some of the worse actors in the space still push for adoption of ideas that aren't actually useful outside of a single sponsoring company's desired goals, but these regulatory bodies are the only thing that prevent the web from being a nightmareish hellhole.

If anything, I want even stricter requirements and legislation around tech. I would prefer to work in a space where there are clear requirements and expectations around acceptable quality, and where ideas must actually demonstrate a provable benefit before they can be worked upon. In engineering, you cannot simply throw up a building to suit the needs of a single client. You have to follow codes, seek approval from oversight boards, and commit to maintenance. Bridges must be rated for specific purposes and have to be independently audited to ensure they aren't dangerous. In software development, the equivalent certifications (e.g. ISO27001) are essentially meaningless, and companies can easily blinker auditors into looking only where they want them to while hiding the real skeletons (believe me, I've seen it done firsthand). Many companies who are supposedly qualified and audited have introduced comically simple vulnerabilities that put their users in jeopardy, only to shrug it off and say "lol oh well". No repurcusions beyond a token fine, and no withdrawal of certification. It's farcical. Stricter oversight is entirely necessary given how essential software is in our day-to-day life, and while I'm sure there are stronger requirements for organizations such as banks they need to go much further across the industry.

Not just this, but workers' rights are paramount to making good software. If companies are allowed to treat their workers poorly then they will inevitably make mistakes or act maliciously. Why wouldn't they? The investor class is made up of people who have never done a days' work in their life, and just expect the "underclass" to behave themselves and generate money for them. However, if the underclass is exhausted, overworked, and seeing their quality of life stagnate or fail they will eventually either give up or crack under pressure. Many mistakes in software are made by exhausted workers, of that I am sure. Americans often mock Europeans as lazy because they are afforded so many more vacation days, but all the while they are caffeinating themselves into disastrous mistakes and flailing due to overwork. Humans simply cannot be as productive as these business owners demand without making mistakes.

This is why capitalists are so insistent that genAI is inevitable and must succeed. They want machines that never tire, and that never make mistakes. However, they are either purposefully ignorant of or too uniformed to understand the fact that this is not possible with the technology they're backing. GenAI is impressive, to be sure, but it's impossible for it to not make mistakes; the mistakes are built in to genAI due to what it is. GenAI will always "hallucinate" (although this term isn't accurate, since genAI has no concept of reality and therefore is just spouting Frankfurtian bullshit as opposed to being genuinely mistaken in its conception of the world), and it will always need to be handled by knowledgeable people. If anything, the ubiquity of genAI in the tech industry is an argument for stricter oversight and improved worker conditions due to the additional strain these bullshit machines are putting on every single part of the economy.

ChatGPT is bullshit

LLMs Will Always Hallucinate, and We Need to Live With This

The push for limited accountability, oversight, and legislation in the tech industry along with the implicit demand to reduce worker rights is a fundamentally wrongheaded and evil take that could be taken seriously only by the wicked and the ignorant. Anyone who echoes this should be treated as a clown and told to retreat to the circus in their overstuffed miniature car. The European Union is not failing to innovate (after all, it's a trading bloc of many countries and not a single homogenous company), rather it has legislation that requires companies to be more careful. Innovation without care has a name: chaos. The US tech industry is advocating chaos, and as such is demanding that we simply abandon reason in the name of profits. Personally, I don't give a single shit if investors make money. If they actually contribute to the world and earn a living as a result, I'll happily work with them. But if a venture capitalist vulture moans that they're not making enough money fast enough I can only laugh at them. I've seen these people up close and know them to be talentless and unserious people whose role in society is only to bitch and moan that it's unfair that their lack of actual input isn't paying off NOW.

This blog post may seem overbearingly negative and ranty (and it is), but my central point is that innovation is a complex thing that can't be decided-upon by rich people who think that just because they come from a lineage of "prestige" and went to a fancy school like TUM their opinion matters worth a damn. Innovation only means something when it benefits society as a whole. Software creation should be held to such a standard as this. The reason for creating software or associated technology should be that it benefits society in some way, and we should have strict regulations in place that ensure any tool or platform is crafted carefully, securely, and with a sensible and manageable material impact upon the world. I see many "software startups" coming up these days with genAI-generated crap at their core. The people making it have no idea how it works, what material impact creating it has, nor what impact its inevitable failures will have on the people who use it. As a software developer myself, I react with horror at the idea of people creating codebases entirely with genAI because I've used genAI to make software before and have had to use twice as many hours to fix its output as I probably would have spend writing it from scratch. The laziness is going to cause problems, and in fact it already has. Legislation should be in place to stop this.

I believe something can only be classed as an innovation if it's provably "good" not just in quality but in impact. If a product exists only to make some rich idiots richer, it's not innovative; we've been making idiots rich for our entire existence. If you make something that genuinely benefits society in a secure, accessible, and well-tested manner – as a bridge facilitates free movement, lubricated commerce, and access to essential resources with care not to collapse and kill its users – then you can call that innovation.

Anyhow, I do so wish these people would stop showing up in my RSS/social feeds and get in the sea. If I never see another LinkedIn post again it will be a millennium too soon. These people have a disease and need to be treated swiftly.

Tell me what you think.