Creep Creep

Can we all just agree that marketers are overwhelmingly creeps? It seems the lot are driven to exaggerations and hyperbole in the effort to sell us anything at all. Today I’d like to talk about the exaggerations in “technical” fields. Marketers offend me here as a science fiction author.

Let’s get right to the “hoverboard” that does not hover and is prone to explode or at least burn. This wheeled contraption is obviously not a hovering vehicle of any kind. It has wheels like almost all modes of transport. How dare they make the standard so low just because the year has come and gone when the movie Back to the Future said hoverboards would be on the market.

Next the marketing creeps have been calling remote control battles, robot battles for more than a decade. The whole point of robots is that they are supposed to do what you tell them to do and figure out how best to do that all on its own. Half the battle of building a robot is the brain. If it’s an RC fight you want then call it that.

The third big lie and overstated technology is artificial intelligence or AI. I know some of it is like a black box that the programmers can’t see inside. And it can learn. It may be artificial but it’s not intelligent just yet. AIs still suck at understanding human speech, something even the least intelligent humans can get. Until it can handle an intelligent conversation with me, I don’t believe artificial intelligences exist and the singularity is just around the corner.

Quit overstating technology. The bounds are changing every day. Just because the creeps of marketing stole some terms from science fiction doesn’t mean we’re living in an advanced future. Today seems like such an unsatisfying future when they have to lie about it for you.

Maybe we can get the marketers on false advertising claims. Maybe then science fiction could reclaim its words.