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Why is AI so slow to spread?

economist.com

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Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#131

Post by 627467 »

The bottle neck for AI adoption - particularly in the type of companies the Economist is surveying - is the management structure, the "chain of command".

As a manager you have to strike a balance between absolute productivity/efficiency and accountability diffusion: lose enough people to spread accountability and it ends up on your plate when things go wrong. "AI f*cK it up" does not sound like as good an argument for why your chain of command messed things up as "joe doe made a mistake".

Also, AI agents don't make for great office politics partner.

As much as AI is being portrayed as a human replacement there are many social aspects of organizations that AI cannot replace. AI don't vote, AI don't get promotions for siding with different parties in office politics. AI can't get fired

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#132

Post by ciconia »

Because it's (mostly) useless bullshit. I mean, apart from generating fake images/videos, and cheating in high-school/college, what's the value proposition? It doesn't really remove humans from the equation, because you still need a "prompt engineer" to get any result that is sort of correct most of the time. So you pay for a superstar AI magician, you pay for the ridiculous amount of compute this needs, and you still need to babysit it in case it starts hallucinating, so what's the point?

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#133

Post by csa »

crinkly wrote: post #70
csa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people. > Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). > which is t…

Anything that is realistically a force multiplier is a person divider. At that point I would expect people to resist it. That is assuming that it is really a force multiplier which is not totally evident at this point.

> That is assuming that it is really a force multiplier which is not totally evident at this point.

I really think that this is a lack of imagination at this point for people who actually think this way.

There are two easy wins for almost anyone:

1. Optional tasks that add value but never reach the top of the priority list.

2. Writing routine communication and documentation.

> Anything that is realistically a force multiplier is a person divider. At that point I would expect people to resist it.

The CEOs who are using AI as an excuse to reduce head count are not helping this narrative.

AI will not solve their problems for large staff cuts. It’s just an unrelated excuse to walk back from over hiring in the past (esp. during Covid).

That said, I think that framing AI as a “person divider” is baseless fear-mongering for most job categories.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#134

Post by acdha »

csa wrote: post #66
crinkly wrote: post #33

Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology which is then a tangible threat to their existence. That leads to not just lack of adoption but active sabotage. And then there’s the large body of people who just haven’t noticed it at all because they don’t give a shit. Stu…

> Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people. > Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). > which is t…

I wouldn’t be so dismissive: “force multiplier” means job loss unless there’s a large amount of work which isn’t currently being done. As you live in a society, it really is important to think about what happens if we get the mass layoffs almost all of the executive-class are promising. There are some new jobs around the tech itself, but that doesn’t help those people unless they can land one of the new jobs – and even the most excited proponents should ask themselves who is buying their product in a world with, say, 50% fewer white collar jobs.

It’s also worth noting that while our modern use of Luddite is simply “anti-technology”, there was a lot more going on there. The Napoleonic wars were savaging the economy and Luddism wasn’t just a reaction to the emergence of a new technology but even more the successful class warfare being waged by the upper class who were holding the line against weavers attempts to negotiate better terms and willing to deploy the army against the working class. High inflation and unemployment created a lot of discontent, and the machines bore the brunt of it because they were a way to strike back at the industrialists being both more exposed and a more acceptable target for anyone who wasn’t at the point of being willing to harm or kill a person.

Perhaps most relevant to HN is that the weavers had previously not joined together to bargain collectively. I can’t help but think that almost everyone who said “I’m too smart to need a union” during the longest run of high-paying jobs for nerds in history is going to regret that decision, especially after seeing how little loyalty the C-suite has after years of pretending otherwise.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#135

Post by bootsmann »

tornikeo wrote: post #126
rwmj wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your underlying assumption is that AI could allow workers to complete their jobs more efficiently if only they could be persuaded to use it. I'm not convinced this assumption is true right now (unless your job involves producing content-free marketing bullshit, in which case yes you ought to be worried).

Unfortunately, i don't have the cold hard data on what job complexity distribution looks like right now. But I don't think it's far fetched to assume that most days, most tasks people do are route and boring. Possibly a fraction of those tasks are amenable to AI-base acceleration. Who knows? But we do know (from that article) that people are hesitant to even try using AI.

Considering the amount of users chatGPT already has, presumably everyone who has boring/rote tasks that they want to automate has already tried this.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#136

Post by acdha »

surgical_fire wrote: post #118
specproc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't underestimate the anxiety it's causing. Most of my social circle are non-technicial. A lot of people have had a difficult time with work recently, for various reasons. The global economic climate feels very precarious, politics is ugly, people feel powerless and afraid. AI tends to come up in the "state of the world" conversation. It's destroying friends' decade old businesses in translation, copywriting a…

> Corporate enthusiasm for AI is seen for what it actually is, a chance to cut head count I mean, it is the reason why the usual suspects push it so aggressively. The underclasses much always be pushed down. It's mostly bullshit, on most areas LLMs cannot reliably replace humans. But they embrace it because the chance that it might undermine labor is very seductive.

Even if it doesn’t replace humans, simply having the prospect looming allows them to lower pay and deter people from asking for better working conditions.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#138

Post by acdha »

rwmj wrote: post #61
somenameforme wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue, one that you alluded to, is imagine AI actually was reliable. And a company does lay off e.g. 30% of their employees to replace them with AI systems. How long before they get a letter from AI Inc 'Hi, we're increasing prices 500x in order to enhance our offerings and and improve customer satisfaction. Enjoy.' The entire MO of big tech is trying to create a monopoly by the software equivalent of dumping…

You can run a reasonable LLM on a gaming machine (cost under $5000), and that's only going to get better and better with time. The irony here is that VCs are pouring money into businesses with almost no moat at all.

I think the most is small but it’s not gone yet: in these discussions I almost never see the people reporting productivity wins say they’re running local models, and there’s a standard response to problems that you should switch to a different vendor, which suggests that there are enough differences in the training and tooling to make switching non-trivial. This will especially be true for all of the non-tech specialist companies adopting things – if you bought an AI tool to optimize your logistics and the vendor pulls a Broadcom on your contract renewal, they’re probably going to do so only after you’ve designed your business around their architecture and price it below where it’d make sense to hire a team and spend years building something in house. Having laid off a lot of in-house knowledge directly helps them, too.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#139

Post by acdha »

wordofx wrote: post #109
wordofx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven’t found anyone who AI wouldn’t be helpful or that isn’t trustworthy enough. People make the /claim/ it’s not useful or they are better without it. When you sit down with them it often turns out they just don’t know how to use AI effectively.

Once again. Replies only proving me right. Desperately trying to justify “ai bad I’m superior” mentality.

This is pure trolling when you are unable to engage with the comments or provide evidence supporting your position.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#140

Post by thunky »

yvdriess wrote: post #123
the_duke wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree with that, if given enough compute LLMs can have impressive capabilities in finding bugs and implementing new logic, if guided right. It's hit or miss at the moment, but it's definitely way more than "UML code generators".

It's not the same, but boy it sure does rhyme. Typical prose in late 90's early 00s: Designing the right UML meta-schema and UML diagram will generate a bug-free source code of the program, enabling even non-programmers to create applications and business logic. Programs can check the UML diagram beforehand for logic errors, prove security and more.

I never used those so correct me if I'm wrong but those UML tools were more of a one way street: diagram -> code.

You couldn't point it at an existing codebase and get anything of value from it, or get it to review pull requests, or generate docs.

And even for what it was meant for, it didn't help you with the design and architecture. You still had to be the architect and tell the tool what to do vs the opposite with LLMs, where you tell it what you want but not how to shape it (in theory).

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