AI isn’t replacing people, its just making skilled workers somewhat faster and better at their jobs. I use AI pretty heavily in my work these days. I work in cybersecurity and if you go into the vendor room at any conference and throw a lawn dart in the air, it will almost certainly impale some vendor talking about their “AI Enabled” tool. Thing is though, some of those tools are actually really useful. When you are trying to dig the three malicious events out of tens of thousands of routine events which look very similar, an LLM trained on that sort of data can be really good at surfacing the bad stuff. Get yourself a few million log events per day, with attackers trying new stuff all the time, and you start to need something better than static algorithms and heuristics to find evil. Actually getting in front of attackers and stopping their attacks, before data walks out the door, gets even harder.
The problem arises when you have inexperienced folks using those tools and management is not willing to put the money into training and having more skilled workers to back the less trained workers. Part of that is just not knowing how things work and part of it is the AI lying very convincingly. Someone who knows systems reasonably well might look at one of those hallucinations and immediately call bullshit. Someone without that knowledge might assume the AI is right and kick off a pretty disastrous series of events. But this means that the company might just be spending more on workers plus AI tokens than they did on just workers.
And that’s really the crux of the problem for businesses. AI isn’t a magical worker replacement program. Its a tool to enhance workers. And it won’t magically make marginal workers less marginal. It’s like handing a wet behind the ears kid a chainsaw. He’s not going to suddenly become Paul Bunyan and be the worlds most efficient lumberjack. He may not even be OK at the end of the day. On the other hand, get that chainsaw into the hands of an experienced lumberjack, and he might just be cause for better environmental regulations. The problem is, eventually every business will be using AI tools and any competitive advantage they offered will disappear. AI will just be a tool everyone uses and not using it will be like that lumberjack showing up to work without an axe and dressed in high heels.
Tech companies? Maybe Nvidia. But all the companies buying their hardware (on loans) are they actually making any money?
Did businesses think the AI companies were going to share any benefits lol
No capitalist company is going to share any benefit they produce.
Come on, bubble! Burst!
No shit? Breed dependence, then squeeze. That has always been the playbook and business idiots keep falling for it.
Now instead of squeezing your workers you get fucked by Silicon Valley. If you bent over for that, all I can say is enjoy that 6 foot cock of consequences, assholes.
And longer term learn all about those companies as every secret ends up in AI to make a cheap agent run competitors that undercuts the original company.
The AI revolution has achieved its first miracle: turning everyone else’s operating budget into Big Tech revenue. Corporate America gets an expensive chatbot, executives get a slide deck about ‘transformation,’ and Nvidia gets actual money. Turns out the only reliably productive AI workflow is billing the customer.
I think it’s simpler than that. I think the AI snake oil sales people realized that corporate executives want to give themselves bonuses. And if you propose this magical technology, that’s going to change everything, they can pretend for several years but it’s actually going to change everything, and pay themselves a lot of money in the meantime.
It’s greedy people relying on other greedy people so that some of them can get richer.
No, making the customer think they’ve got the magic bullet doing all they need is a valid one too. The only problem is that it’s repeating a job already done in areas where you need to do jobs not previously done, ideally. It’s very useful for all wrong applications of tech where it was honestly not needed (things easily repeatable done by people who are honestly not that much smarter than haircutters). It’s useless for the skeleton applications.
It’s a very smart Ponzi scheme, one where much of the funds collected gets spent on maintaining real usefulness, at least visible one. Unlike most Ponzi schemes, it’s able to achieve unimaginable scale due to that.
Like, say, plague has low survivability rates, and doesn’t spread too easily, meaning that it’s not very dangerous in the modern world. While a disease with very high survivability rates and easy spread has far bigger reach. Or a very slow incubation period with carriers being infectious long before detection.
OK, I suppose everyone likes Plague Inc.
IRL it’s no good as something everyone uses, because current token costs are subsidized and because what’s solvable with it for most people is what’s been done many times before.
When things balance out, I’d expect token costs to be like 4 times what they are now. And people using these things to be mostly engineers.
Same as it ever was.
And the billionaires take in another billion or twenty.
Giant traded companies desperate to not be left behind by share holders didn’t see gains. To anyone not being a moron and replace devs and using it to make them faster, it’s blatantly obvious there is an increase in net work.
We’re getting more done than ever and everyone on my team works a lot less. We’re only on $50 a month copilot and it’s a no brainer. The real question is where x and y cross. A $200/mo worth it? 400?
