The talk went well. I feel happy about it, and even happier about the feedback and follow-on effects I have got for it.
(It was recorded and will be out in video form relatively soon, but it is not yet. I will probably post the link all over the place once it happens.)
What I talked about was the current AI bubble, its many bad sides, and why I choose to believe in all the regular developers out there when the emperors so clearly lack any clothes whatsoever. I felt and feel that perspective is vastly under-represented, over shadowed by the breathless hype, and that I could add something by trying to spread it a bit further.
Building a talk about an ongoing hype can be kind of tiring, in that there is always more material drifting by. So many links and thoughts all the time which could be added for more context, or which provided another idea for me, or added polish to an existing idea. Especially validating was a couple of times when I read things which put things in the same way as I had in my talk. Not only am I not mad, others see this in the exact same way!
I kept finding things and polishing almost up to the last minute, and I felt nicely exhausted afterward. I got multiple comments from people showing they had latched on to various ideas, and I had some great longer conversations about several of the topics with people. One of those is out as the latest episode of the podcast Developers!, and there may be more to come in the future.
I have not put the topic of the AI bubble away nearly as much as I thought I would. At this point my Mastodon flow is naturally aligned for bubble coverage, so the topic stays fresh in my mind and I keep thinking about ways I might adjust the presentation if I gave it again, both to similar and different audiences.
Talking about the bubble to a whole different audience would be very interesting - not least if it could be more of a dialogue. How would executives react to the content? Or students? What about people from different industries?
Like I said, the thoughts keep swirling, nudging me in various interesting ways.