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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#141

Post by lp4v4n »

dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

It was the same thing with blockchain, who here remembers the peak delusion of IoT + smart contracts replacing human judicial systems and crypto making central banks useless?

LLMs are of course a form of progress, the same way blockchain was, but it has been baffling and cringy nonetheless to see people with a strong technical background pretending that at some point in the future the development of complex applications was going to be reduced to a few prompt lines written in English.

Once the AI fad dies and the next hype appears I told myself I'm going to jump on it to take financial advantage of it. At this point I believe that the technological cycle of hype is an almost entirely social/economic phenomenon and there is no reason not to make money from it given that people insist on this kind of irrational behavior.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#142

Post by quintushoratius »

prash20026 wrote: post #87
Aurornis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them. Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects. One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad? > For non-executive management who might…

Supposedly 70% of software projects failed even before AI. So are AI projects better or worse than that? Also like people have asked about the 70% failure rate, how do you define failure/success. https://medium.com/@trienpont/why-do-over-70-of-software-pro...

> Supposedly 70% of software projects failed even before AI.

Given the way LLMs are marketed, we should expect a vastly more favorable project success rate, not simply a close parity, and definitely not a decreased rate.

Even if we consider that the number of attempts will rise if development becomes faster, we're told to expect a greater number of projects should also succeed because they're easier. They're supposed to justify the higher costs.

It's reasonable to ask if that's the case.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#143

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

nfg wrote: post #122
hliyan wrote: post #65

This part toward the end of the article resonated with me: > If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and…

I don’t buy it - if you’re an engineering leader and this is happening it’s your responsibility to get out there and fix the problem through education, process improvements, improved automated quality checks, better planning. Sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “no!” is not a sustainable strategy. Figure out what would allow your throughput to double, triple etc and go organise it. Focus on bottlenecks an…

One of the key things I've needed to educate people on is that code contributions are no longer valuable in and of themselves. Someone who produces a large volume of bad code does not have high throughput that needs to be allowed, they have low throughput that needs to be corrected. High throughput in software is now almost entirely about having the right ideas and analysis.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#144

Post by inigyou »

jaggederest wrote: post #5
parpfish wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i feel like the useful applications of AI get silently integrated into workflows. the ill-conceived moonshots by and for a non-technical audience get labelled as "AI projects/initiatives" and they fail.

That has ever been the case. As soon as it works reliably, it's not "AI" any more. Take spellcheckers or collaborative filtering as examples, but there are lots more. Hofstadter in G.E.B. said it well: > There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is alwa…

Because AI meant "make computers smart like people".

We taught the computer to spell check, but the computer still didn't feel smart like a person, just smart like a machine so that obviously wasn't AI. We taught it to do algebra, same thing. With LLMs though, now it really does feel like an artificial human, so this time it really is AI.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#145

Post by tpmoney »

quintushoratius wrote: post #142
prash20026 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposedly 70% of software projects failed even before AI. So are AI projects better or worse than that? Also like people have asked about the 70% failure rate, how do you define failure/success. https://medium.com/@trienpont/why-do-over-70-of-software-pro...

> Supposedly 70% of software projects failed even before AI. Given the way LLMs are marketed, we should expect a vastly more favorable project success rate, not simply a close parity, and definitely not a decreased rate. Even if we consider that the number of attempts will rise if development becomes faster, we're told to expect a greater number of projects should also succeed because they're easier. They're supposed…

> Given the way LLMs are marketed, we should expect a vastly more favorable project success rate, not simply a close parity, and definitely not a decreased rate. > Even if we consider that the number of attempts will rise if development becomes faster, we're told to expect a greater number of projects should also succeed because they're easier.

I'm not sure I follow why you would think this. Prior to AI was the reason most projects failed because generating the code was too slow or too labor intensive? That would be surprising to me if it was true.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#146

Post by lioeters »

dgellow wrote: post #136
lioeters wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mania can also be called "herd behavior" or "crowd psychology". There was that book a while ago about the intelligence of crowds, but far more common is the stupidity and insanity of crowds. Business and politics are mainly driven by it, but the tech industry routinely falls to hype, trends, and decades-long mistakes that seem obvious in hindsight.

For what it’s worth „Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds“, while entertaining, isn’t considered a reliable source as it bases most of its story telling on satirical descriptions and reporting of past events and doesn’t do a good job of digging into the actual historical context and dynamics

[dead]

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#147

Post by inigyou »

chung8123 wrote: post #140
neuronic wrote: post #133

My hunch is that AI tools are probabilistically good enough to deceive most casual users in the beginning, so beliefs are built on these foundations. LLMs handle simple tasks reasonably well so their perceived 'intelligence' is easily convincing for many users (often managers and executives). However, this illusion immediately falls apart during actual stress-testing like writing code for a complex, battle-tested pro…

There are a lot of simple web apps out there that haven't been built because of the cost and many more that have been built but cost a lot to maintain. AI seems to work on those and fill in a pretty large space.

Probably true. But isn't this a failure of software engineering? We should have plenty of simple ways to build simple apps by now.

Maybe you should be able to go down to your local web app shop, give a couple simple requirements, and get back an app in a week. So why can't you? Well there's actually a good reason for that - the customer would never be satisfied by the result, and building a satisfactory result requires many iterations back and forth. Rapid feedback is essential to software development.

Okay, an alternative is to give the customer an app builder so they can make their own app. We've done this many times in history, it always takes the customer time to make the app, the results are always mediocre, but it does work, why do we keep doing this and then stopping it? I'm not really sure. Why isn't there a visual basic today (apart from Roblox) or even a Frontpage (apart from Squarespace)? My best guess is the customer tires of working on the app or never had time for it in the first place. Why won't AI suffer the same fate? Really no idea.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#148

Post by ryanackley »

LOCNE55 wrote: post #13

This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90…

Don't agree with the hyperbole in the article but I think the broad strokes are there. I'm the same as you, AI has excelled at small tasks and daily chores. Like writing a complex query in seconds that used to take an hour to work out.

Doing feature development seems to take just as long or productivity gains are modest (where I work at least) and I think the reason is touched on in the article. Most orgs are just terminally bad at building software.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#149

Post by inigyou »

slopinthebag wrote: post #7

The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archet…

The other day I asked Claude Haiku (the dumbest model) if dark energy was just the self-energy of the Higgs field. I know barely anything about quantum physics. I just wanted some example of AI writing style - something like "You're absolutely right! That's a key insight into a load-bearing ..."

Instead it spat back a bunch of physics related stuff, alleged problems with the idea ("there are 30 orders of magnitude difference between that and dark energy, and why the Higgs field and not any of the other fields, and did you know about axions which are somehow relevant, and ..."). I humored it by saying "well the Higgs field is the only one with a nonzero vacuum expectation value" and it told me I'm absolutely right, that's a key insight, etc etc etc. Then I asked it to tell me more about axions and it said some stuff about CP violation, instantons, but then it made some connections to dark energy and to the Higgs field and said I was clever to bring that up.

Now from my point of view I had to deliberately keep in mind that I was talking to a Markov chain and that I was myself acting as a Markov chain, and it's likely that none of these statements actually meant anything in physics. I can very easily see how someone who didn't realize that would be captured and then write a blog post proclaiming themselves to have made a discovery in physics.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#150

Post by oytis »

nfg wrote: post #134
hliyan wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully it's not happening in my organization because we happen to have a sane, incremental strategy. But it's telling that you perceive any criticism of AI code reviewer burnout as "sticking your fingers in your ears". Perhaps you might benefit from a closer read of the article.

« it's telling that you perceive any criticism of AI code reviewer burnout as "sticking your fingers in your ears" » Go back and re-read the quote from your comment - which I responded to: “ You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired.” I’m not overreacting to some nuanced take here. I’m not sure how to characterise quitting as…

I think the author means if it happens regularly, and asking people to stop doesn't work or marks you as a dangerous dissident. Obviously, it is wrong to quit in response to one person doing something stupid
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