AI is different

I think there is an unspoken implication built into the assumption that AI will be able to replace a wide variety of existing jobs, and that is that those current jobs are not being done efficiently. This is sometimes articulated as bullshit jobs, etc. and if AI takes over those the immediate next thing that will happen is that AI will look around ask why _anyone_ was doing that job in the first place. The answer was articulated 70 years ago in [0].

The only question is how much fat there is to trim as the middle management is wiped out because the algorithms have determined that they are completely useless and mostly only increase cost over time.

Now, all the AI companies think that they are going to be deriving revenue from that fat, but those revenue streams are going to disappear entirely because a huge number of purely politic positions inside corporations will vanish, because if they do not the corporation will go bankrupt competing with other companies that have already cut the fat. There won't be additional revenue streams that get spent on the bullshit. The good news is that labor can go somewhere else, and we will need it due to a shrinking global population, but the cushy bullshit management job is likely disappear.

At some point AI agents will cease to be sycophantic and when fed the priors for the current situation that a company is in will simply tell it like it is, and might even be smart enough to get the executives to achieve the goal they actually stated instead of simply puffing up their internal political position, which might include a rather surprising set of actions that could even lead to the executive being fired if the AI determines that they are getting in the way of the goal [1].

Fun times ahead.

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20180705215319/https://www.econo... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict

> “… as a voting… as a weighing…” I’m sure I remember that as a graham, munger, or buffet quote.

> “not even wrong” - nice, one of my favorites from Pauli.

I think AI is still in the weird twilight zone that it was when it first came out in that it's great sometimes and also terrible. I still get hallucinations when I check a response I get with ChatGPT on Google.

On the one hand, what it says can't be trusted, on the other, I have debugged code I have written where I was unable to find the bug myself, and ChatGPT found it.

I also think a reason AI's are popular and the companies haven't gone under is that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are getting responses that have hallucinations, but the user doesn't know it. I fell into this trap myself after ChatGPT first came out. I became addicted to asking anything and it seemed like it was right. It wasn't until later I started realizing that it was hallucinating information. How prevalent this phenomena is is hard to say but I still think it's pernicious.

But as I said before, there are still use cases for AI and that's what makes judging it so difficult.

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