Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than they do now about implementing AI, especially in the front end.

This AI hype cycle is missing the mark by building ChatGPT-like bots and buttons with sparkles that perform single OpenAI API calls. AI applications are not a new thing, they have always been here, now they are just more accessible.

The best AI applications are beneath the surface to empower users, Jeff Bezos says that (in 2016!)[1]. You don't see AI as a chatbot in Amazon, you see it for "demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations."

[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to...

If we laboriously create software shops in the classical way, and suddenly a new shop appears that is buggy, noisy, etc but eventually outperforms all other shops, then the progenitors of those new shops are going to succeed while the progenitors of these old shops are not going to make it.

It's a strain. The problem is AI is a new tech that replaces an entire process, not a product. Only when the process is the product (eg the process of moving people) does the analogy even come close to working.

I'd like to see analysis of what happened to the employees, blacksmiths, machinists, etc. Surely there are transferrable skills and many went on to work on automobiles?

This SE q implies there was some transition rather than chaos.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46866/did-any-ca...

Stretching just a bit further, there might be a grain of truth to the "craftsman to assembly line worker" when AI becomes a much more mechanical way to produce, vs employing opinionated experts.