It helps to think of AI as analogous to previous game changers like electricity, computers, internet. If your business is bad or you have no game plan beyond "use internet" your are fucked. But at the same time almost every business has some angle in which these technologies are valuable and necessary and ignoring them is also death.
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
161–170 of 320 posts
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil sal…
Manias go back a long way. The history of the UK's railway mania in the 1840s is worth researching, because it's uncannily similar, with a stock bubble, fraudsters and chancers, huge hype, cutthroat competition, boardroom intrigue and drama, miles and miles of unnecessary infrastructure in the wrong places, and eventually a technology that became useful, but could have been developed more intelligently.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#163Most 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…
I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "A…
And that’s assuming you really need to do these type of tasks using an LLM. As GP said, and as you’ve proven, most people are trying to use LLM as an hammer for everything that looks like a nail, without verifying first if it’s a screw or something else.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#164Most 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…
I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "A…
That's not the problem, the problem is that for every hour of dev saved society will lose 10 hours on fake data, fake bug reports, automated scams, needlessly convoluted email, etc.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the bell curve meme every time - very, very often stupid people end up being "wiser" than moderately intelligent people. Meanwhile the really intelligent people end up with beliefs surprisingly close directionally to the stupid people who've barely thought about an issue, just fleshed out with 100x the detail. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
I've seen both variants of this where the midwit is enthusiastic about the impending singularity and where the midwit is saying it's all a bubble. Everyone's just portraying a strawman of the other side with new formats.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#166Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#167The range of ai approaches ranges from inappropriately betting on it to wholly ignoring it both of which are dumb. It helps to think of AI as analogous to previous game changers like electricity, computers, internet. If your business is bad or you have no game plan beyond "use internet" your are fucked. But at the same time almost every business has some angle in which these technologies are valuable and necessary an…
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expec…
> It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. When we were 3 to 4 years into mobile phone revolution it was already abundantly clear that it's changing the way people leave. Ditto when mobile phones became smartphones, and for many other tech items we got in the past decades. As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you cou…
And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. Fads that would pass. While the younger generations lived an entirely different lifestyle.
I’m personally seeing the same. I resisted AI being a “thing” for a long while, but since I’m around a lot of teens and young adults it was a choice of burying my head in the sand or deciding to take a look.
They are going to change society on a scale far beyond smart phones. In ways many will not see as positives, but change never goes the way one may expect.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#169This is excellent. > Employees don’t use internal chatbots because companies tend to have low-quality documentation and an LLM is not psychic – it can only know things that have been written down and made accessible. Then later: > In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisatio…
For some reason this comment was shadowbanned.
I don't see any hints of LLM writing in this article though.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#170Most 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…
I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "A…