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The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

(ceodinner.substack.com)
117 points LordAtlas | 3 comments | 07 Dec 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.019s | source
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ForHackernews ◴[07 Dec 25 17:42 UTC] No.46183481[source]▶
> Businesses aren’t asking “do we want AI capabilities?” They’re asking “how much can we get, and how soon?”

This is only because businesses are full of folks with short-sighted FOMO desperately trying to cram AI features into any product they can. AI is the new digital clock.

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throw310822 ◴[07 Dec 25 17:55 UTC] No.46183578[source]▶
The problem with current AI is that it's super easy to get half-decent results by hooking up a simple agent to a lot of office software- and when it works it looks like pure magic; but getting reliably good results is way harder. So half assed agents abound (I know, I've added three or four to our apps in the last few months) but they can get frustrating for the users really quickly.
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Spivak ◴[07 Dec 25 18:36 UTC] No.46183901[source]▶
I really don't know what this means about the state of the corporate world but companies just don't care if it's bad. Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't care at all if it's good or even if people actually use it. This isn't that uncommon but "integrate AI somewhere I don't care where" is such an obvious manifestation of this pattern.

We've put so many layers between the engineers and customers and diluted any accountability to demonstrate positive ROI—even if it's theoretical—that we do pointless work for nobody. I'm not going to complain too much personally because all those layers make it possible for me to just pull cards and collect a paycheck but I'm surprised nobody on the business side even somewhat cares if the work they're paying for is worthwhile.

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1. Eisenstein ◴[07 Dec 25 18:45 UTC] No.46183970[source]▶
Worker efficiency an order of magnitude greater than what it was 50 years ago. An office worker with excel and the internet can accomplish in an hour what would have taken days or weeks for their counterpart to do in 1975 with a calculator and a telephone.

Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the money.

I think it should be natural that jobs end up being mostly pointless. Why should we produce exponentially more value without getting a share of that value?

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2. throw310822 ◴[07 Dec 25 18:54 UTC] No.46184048[source]▶
> we haven't gotten more share of the money.

But your money buys stuff that 50 years ago would have been too expensive for the richest men in the world. A pocket supercomputer, advanced diagnostics and medicine, instant access to information anywhere in the world.

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3. WarOnPrivacy ◴[07 Dec 25 20:33 UTC] No.46184883[source]▶
Material gains (produced by more productive workers) don't offset the increases in

    the number of expenses required to minimally live
       (ex:utilities, transpo, insurance, comms) and
    the ever escalating costs of those added requirements
Nor does it offset the accelerating increases in complexity for basic living factors - complexity that consumes internal resources and time.

More to the point, a pocket supercomputer is an irrelevancy for a typical wage worker, who's earnings are far insufficient for even the barest self-sufficiency.