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Ask HN: My company wants to move towards AI and blockchain. Should I stop them?

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Ask HN: My company wants to move towards AI and blockchain. Should I stop them?

#1
My company is planning to make investments into AI and blockchain solutions. I am very confident in saying, that the people who plan this, do not understand how these technologies work or when they can be useful.

All the while a big chunk of our operations is under heavy load and if it wasn't for dedicated colleagues, things would start to fall apart.

Should I make an effort educating my managers or can moving towards new technologies fix old problems?

Re: Ask HN: My company wants to move towards AI and blockchain. Should I stop them?

#2
In my opinion, bad or troublesome processes cannot be fixed by new technology. Especially not by hyped technology like AI or Blockchain.

Now, whether or not you should make an effort to educate managers, is hard to tell. i would say it depends a lot on your relatioship with said manager, and how you think he will react to critisism. If your manager is a driving force behind th epush towards AI and blockchai you already lost.

I usually did not keep my mouth shut in such instances. And long-term, I was more often right than not. In the short term, I was also more often looking for a new job than not. I would be cautious about open critisism and wait for the right moment. But I would expect that question to be very political.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants to move towards AI and blockchain. Should I stop them?

#3
It is not your job managing the managers, is it? As an employee, you will gain nothing from speaking sense against the tide. It may also be that the entrepreneur in chief or the CEO is seeing something you can’t or aren’t allowed to, and want to have a go?

Re: Ask HN: My company wants to move towards AI and blockchain. Should I stop them?

#8
post #6
post #5

What is your role in the company? Can you "stop them"?

I'm a security analyst. I could possibly educate them about common use cases and misunderstandings.

Education is probabbly the best route, don't tell them you're there to dissuade them, just show them what it can and what it can't do ;)

I've only been in a few situations where "Oh man this is a terrible idea." and education works.... sometimes even if to direct all that energy into something more benign. Sometimes "Ok now they're going to waste a bunch of energy on X ... but at least X isn't going to hurt Y." is a win ;)

Re: Ask HN: My company wants to move towards AI and blockchain. Should I stop them?

#9
Moving towards new processes can fix old problems. technology only helps if it slots into a process bottleneck and 10x it.

But changing processes is way more about the human capital than it is about any technology solution. People have vested interests to do what they're doing, or to keep doing what they've always done, or to angle for this position or another.

Frankly, if they're already at the staging of planning to make the investment, I wouldn't bother. People are telling a story, about who they are and who they will be, and they're buying out of that story. If they're already bought into that story, they don't want education.

Sorry, I know it sounds defeatist, but it'll save you aggro by just shrugging and accepting that's where they're at.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants to move towards AI and blockchain. Should I stop them?

#10
Nope.

Anything less than rapturous enthusiasm will get you branded as a pariah and spike your tenure at that company.

I've never been able to convince anyone to not blow their own foot off. And when things do go south, as they always do, the truth sayer becomes the scape goat.

Advice I got from Luke Hohmann in the 90s: You have to let people fail on their own. Meanwhile, prepare plan B, if you want to pick up the pieces afterwards.

My advice: Take notes, play amateur ethnographer, anthropologist, socialist. Learn how these fads, cults, groupthinks play out.

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