Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

It's an interesting story but a weird analogy and moral. What would have been better if the other 3,999 carriage companies had all tried to make automobiles? Probably about 3,990 shitty cars and a few more mild successes. I'm not sure that's any better.

That's what I see with AI. Every company wants to suddenly "be an AI company", although few are sure what that means. Companies that were legitimately very good at a specific thing are now more interested in being mediocre at the same thing as everyone else. Maybe this will work out in the long tun but right now it's a pain in the ass.

At my workplace, when managers are done reading their business books, they go on a bookshelf in the break room.

There's an entire shelf devoted to "disruption."

I don’t think you’re right about that. LLMs are very good for exploring half-formed ideas, (what materials could I look at for x project?), generating small amounts of code when it’s not your main job, and writing boring crap like grant applications.

That last one isn’t useful to society, but it is for the individual.

I know plenty of people using LLMs using for stuff like this, in all sorts of walks of life.

This kind of just-so story is easy to write after the fact. It's harder to see the future at the time.

How many people read a version of the same story and pivoted their company to focus on SecondLife, NFTs, blockchain or whatever else technology was hyped at the time and tanked? That's the other half of this story.

Right. The point is that in frothy market conditions and a general low-integrity regime in business and politics there is a ton of incentive to exploit FOMO far beyond it's already "that's a stiff sip there" potency and this leads to otherwise sane and honest people getting caught up into doing concrete things today based on total speculation about technology that isn't even proposed yet. A good way to really understand this intuitively is to take the present-day intellectual and emotional charge out of it without loss of generality: we can go back and look at Moore's Law for example, and the history of how the sausage got made on reconciling a prediction of exponential growth with the realities of technological advance. It's a fascinating history, there's at least one great book [1] and the Asionometry YouTube documentary series on it is great as always [2].

There is no point in doing business and politics and money motivated stuff based on the hypothetical that technology will become self-improving, if that happens we're through the looking glass, not in Kansas anymore, "Roads? Where we're going, we won't need roads." It won't matter or at least it won't be what you think it'll be some crazy thing.

Much, much, much, much more likely is that this is like all the other times we made some real progress, people got too excited, some shady people made some money, and we all sobered up and started working on the next milestone. This is by so far both A) The only scenario you can do anything about and B) The only scenario honest experts take seriously, so it's a double "plan for this one".

The quiet ways that Jetson Orin devices and shit will keep getting smarter and more trustworthy to not break shit and stuff, that's the bigger story, it will make a much bigger difference than snazzy Google that talks back, but it's taking time and appearing in the military first and comes in fits and starts and has all the other properties of ya know, reality.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Moores-Law-Silicon-Valleys-Revolution...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@Asianometry