Technology

What has AI changed so far?

• Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
• we have AI child porn now, awesome
• we have AI undressing apps, cool
• we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
• we have AI, the great misinformation tool
• we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
• there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay

And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis...

I'm not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I'm definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering

It's not lying if they have no idea what they're talking about and constantly swoon over it.

I see a lot of useless people creating a ton of busy work that just becomes an unbearable workload for the people under them. Working in manufacturing environments which (you aren't gonna believe this) are all horrifically understaffed is bad enough. Now i get to watch good workers get buried under Solvace/Fabriq/etc checklists and Leading2Lean/PerformOEE/etc task lists and spreadsheets and meetings to discuss kpis and metrics.

I need a new line of work

Well, he hasn't been describing our future for at least two decades. /sarcasm

In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.

Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.

AI is changing everything... Mostly to bad, that's the part they keep.

But it IS changing everything, and not in a good way

If AI data centers drastically accelerate us towards a point of no return for climate change, then they will in fact have “changed everything”.

This moment in history is a lot like when power tools were first invented. The bad news is corporate leaders seem to view AI as a means to downsize people. The good news is that AI lets many people who formerly lacked the ability to do anything on their own to move on the "I wish I could do ____. but _____" ideas in their head. It could be anything. You can run a competent local AI model in LM Studio with a $1000 gaming PC or you can pay $20 a month to run a frontier-quality open weights model without the usage limits of the big names. The free AIs can help you get started on doing that. Big companies are using AI for a lot of stupid crap that they try to make sound very profound. They assume customer service and quality assurance are no longer "a thing". This era reminds me of the 1970s when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had their opening. Sometimes the big guys get sloppy. We're at that point right now. Enshittification is everywhere.

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful.

This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.

It's also notable that MBAs tend to be people who are into the networking versus the work and they will follow the trends wherever they leave because that's what good monkeys do.