Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

I'm missing something here. First, I thought Steve's point was that the carriage makers did not see "individual transportation" as their business, and they should have--if they had, they might have pivoted like Studebaker did.

So if "most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence", that could mean that they ought to be.

However, I draw a somewhat different conclusion: the business that companies ranging from Newsweek to accountants to universities to companies' HR departments should see themselves in is intelligence, regardless of whether that's artificial or otherwise. The question then becomes which supplies that intelligence better: humans or LLM-type AI (or some combination thereof)? I'm not at all sure that the answer at present is LLM-AI, but it is a different question, and the answer may well be different in the near future.

There are of course other kinds of AI, as you (jampa) mention. In other words, AI is not (for now) one thing; LLMs are just one kind of AI.

Im guessing for someone in laundry or restaurant business it might be hard to understand how AI could change their lives. And that is true, at least at this stage in the adoption and development of AI. But eventually it will find a way into their business in some form or the other.

There are stages to this. Pretty sure the first jobs to go will be the most easiest. This is the case with Software development too. When people say writing code has gotten easier, they really are talking about projects that were already easy to build getting even more easier. Harder parts of software development are still hard. Making changes to larger code bases with a huge user base comes with problems where writing code is kind of irrelevant. There are bigger issue to address like regression, testing, stability, quality, user adoption etc etc.

Second stage is of course once the easy stuff gets too easy to build. There is little incentive to build it. With modern building techniques we aren't building infinite huts, are we? We pivoted to building sky scrapers. I do believe most of AI's automation gains will be soaked up in the first wave and there will little incentive to build easy stuff and harder stuff will have more productivity demands from people than ever before.

The implication of the author here is that those providing services that continue using human resources rather than AI, are potentially acting like carriage manufacturers.

Of course that assumes improvements in technology, which is not guaranteed.

But all 400+ carriage maker had pivoted, would they have had a chance to survive very long? Would they have all made more money pivoting? The idea that all this is only a "lack of vision" rather than hard business choices is kind of annoying.

Of course the other part of this is distribution. If you had a large carriage factory in Ohio, could you have profitably shipped your product to Kansas? Or would a small Kansas carriage maker have undercut you? Seen in this way, part of the reason for the success of a few large auto makers might have been the more or less simultaneous rise of the means of transporting large products by railroad.

I believe the reason why carriage making was viable on low scale was that advantage of scale wasn't as valuable for them simply for being simpler.