The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.
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5 daysThis is to say that we’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.
I think it’s interesting to notice that this is not AI-specific. He kinda alludes to that in a different context but I think it’s important for people in the industry (and any industry really) to understand. This is driven by the incentives built into the system. Specifically the competition for profit. Whenever there’s a thing (technology, process, method) that promises significant profit, everyone and their mother jumps on it. For the simple reason that if they don’t, they’re getting replaced by someone who would. For the simple reason that if they don’t jump in, capital is going to leave their company and enter another one that promises to jump in, and therefore has higher expected profit. This can look as simple as large investors dumping your shares for the shares of a different company, sending your stock price in steep decline. Everyone competes for capital which requires competition for growing profits. Capital goes where the expected profits are higher. Without capital, firms can’t hire people and buy what they need to conduct business and create new products. This incentive makes it very difficult to avoid a situation like the one above. We’ve seen this in corporations with the move to the cloud, with outsourcing development to CHWTIA and so on.
- AlteredEgo@lemmy.mlEnglish4 days
Whenever there’s a thing (technology, process, method) that promises significant profit, everyone and their mother jumps on it.
Chaos is a ladder lol. I suspect AI struck at an especially bad time. With smartphones, cloud, blockchain and other hype bullshit it didn’t matter that much. But currently economy is illusionary, supported by printing money, overheating, and massive amounts of money seek ROI. All this since 2008. The billions of economic power slammed into AI is being spend on people going around preaching the gospel of AI to businesses. And this was before the technbros backing Trump have moved to trying to purposefully wreck and scam the US and global economy to usher in a new world order from the ashes.
So in some ways technology hype is normal, but the current environment might influence the mental state of people drastically.
I quite like LLMs for what they are. I wish we could see this amount of investment in technological development and hardware breakthroughs without the AI psychosis and insane race to adopt it immediately.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish6 days
On several occasions, we’ve been exposed to folks that have been sort of lukewarm on our main offerings, but they really, really wanted to use AI to perform a natural language query on their data. And we thought “Okay, if you really want to see it, maybe we can caveat this appropriately and show you what it might look like.”
This was a terrible mistake. It backfired in the most predictable way imaginable – every lukewarm client that saw the chatbot in action, even with us telling them that it was not going to accomplish what they wanted, wanted to buy it immediately. Every other consideration, including millions of dollars that we could plausibly help them achieve by non-AI means, was swept aside. It was like a dark and terrible force seized control of their limbs, plunged their hands into their own chests, and presented their still-beating credit cards to us in grim supplication.
The writing here (and everywhere) is phenomenal, and this section echoes something I’ve seen Cal Newport say before, something along the lines that somebody with no technical knowledge sees one neat trick and suddenly assumes AI will turn into a superintelligence deity.
- HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.orgEnglish6 days
This matches all too well with what Baldur Bjarnason writes in “The Intelligence Illusion”.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish6 days
Warnings about it being “early days” and “hallucinations” both anthropomorphise the bot and provide ready-made excuses for when one of its constant failures are noticed.
Three years later and the “early days” routine is still going strong. Who would have thought?
- MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish6 days
What AI “decision making” does in our processes is: write the reports exactly like the procedure says they should be written, and fills them with whatever you want to hear - looking up convenient references to back up your opinions. You probably should double check the references yourself to be sure they actually exist (though I think AI is getting better at checking its own work for things like this lately) - but… yeah. Ask it once and it will give you “an opinion” that doesn’t take into account all of the factors that matter to you. So, as you explain all the factors, it also becomes obvious what you want to hear, so after several rounds the obliging AI eventually not only “sees things your way” but can pile on the BS as deep as you ask it to to back up those opinions. What would have taken days to research and write can be done in an hour or so.
- Elting@piefed.socialEnglish6 days
It is the ultimate corporate yes-man that they could never quite get in a human. They have built it for C-suites who have control of the money but not their own faculties.
OK
- More than 10 billion tons of concrete are manufactured annually
- The 185 meter high and 2310 meter long Three Gorges Dam is made from concrete
- Thomas Edison had 49 concrete-related patents
- The Romans built the Pantheon using concrete
- 6 days
These facts have really cemented my respect for the material.
- sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish6 days
Woah woah woah. Writers are supposed to support their assertions now? But what about the vibes?!
- FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish6 days
Exactly!
Anyone who has spent any time on social media could tell you that this is more of a ‘feelings’ topic than a ‘facts’ topic.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish6 days
Yes, because AI boosters don’t themselves deal in facts. It’s a religiosity.
If you want statistics about how AI only is losing companies money, or how the finances don’t add up, there are articles for that too.
