This Year In Tech Felt Like A Simulation

So much has technically happened this year that it makes little sense. It's as if we're in control of a random number generator that dictates the needs of the tech industry and has resulted in several "big news of the year" within a month, all completely separate from each other.

I can't stop thinking that an amazing tweet I saw last month summed up this year's idiocy: "Meta kills 11,000 people and is only the 3rd biggest tech story of the week." Normally, a social media giant laying off 13 percent of its workforce would easily make headlines this week, but that's when FTX went nuts and everyone tweeted the company because Elon Musk somehow didn't think it was wrong. What if a bad guy can buy a blue check?

When I say it's like living in a simulation, sometimes I hear new tech news and it feels like someone put a few words in a hat, took a few, and tried to connect the dots. Of course that didn't really happen. But would you believe me if I told you that Twitter owner Elon Musk polled users in January to decide whether to lift Donald Trump's ban?

This absurd phenomenon has consequences in technology. Cryptocurrency crises like the FTX crash and the UST scandal have cost real people making huge sums of money in what they believed to be legitimate investments. It's funny to imagine the reaction 10 years ago if someone told you Meta (yes, that's what Facebook is now called) was going to lose out on virtual reality technologies that spend billions of dollars every quarter. But the management's decision was no joke for the workers, who lost their jobs because of the decision.

Where does that leave us? We are at a point in the history of technology where nothing is stupid to do. It is both exciting and terrifying. A group of workers at Amazon's Staten Island fulfillment center has won union elections and fended off overwhelming odds. Elon Musk may buy Twitter for $44,000 million.

AI technologies like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT strike a fine balance between innovation and fear. They can create beautiful works of art in seconds and endanger the lives of artists. You can ask an AI chatbot to teach you a story, but there's no way to know if the answers are actually correct (unless you do more research, you've probably done all the research from the start).

But perhaps one of the reasons AI generators are rising in the mainstream is because they feel so natural to us. This year's tech news sounds so weird it might as well have been created by ChatGPT.

Or maybe AI is stranger than anything real to come. I asked ChatGipt to write some tech headlines for me, and here's what I came up with (as well as some inaccurate headlines I left out for journalistic sake):

• "Apple's iOS 15 update brings big improvements to iPhone and iPad".
• "Amazon's New Line of Autonomous Robots Stirs Controversy".
• "Intel Announces New Series of Processors with Improved Security Features".

Bored! Here are some real things that happened in tech this year:

• Tony the Tiger makes his debut as a VTuber.
• A guy named Rahul Legma who says he was fired from Twitter and a bunch of journalists didn't get the joke, by the way, I had to explain the "Legma" joke on four different tech podcasts.
• Three people were arrested for allegedly using Club Penguin clones.
• One of the Justice Department's main suspects in a $3.6 billion cryptocurrency laundering scheme is rapper and businessman Razzlekhan.
• The new Pokemon game has a line of dialogue with the word "cheugy".
• Donald Trump leaves the NFT collection.
• Poor Twitter behavior update affects pharmaceutical company shares.
• Elon Musk's biggest rival is a sophomore at the University of Central Florida.
• FTC Chair Lena Khan says Taylor Swift has done more than she can to teach Generation Z about antitrust laws.
• Meta is selling a $1,499 VR headset for use when working remotely.
• The UK Treasury created a Discord account to share the official announcement, but it was soon flooded with people using emoji responses (and speaking of the UK, there have been three different prime ministers since September).

These are strange times. If the rules are in place and the points don't count, at least if the hype continues until 2023, let's hope the tech news is more interesting than damaging. I want more Chris Pratt to play live action Mario and a few more tech CEOs to be punished for cheating. Is it too much?

200 players simulate a barbarian civilization in Minecraft!