 You know how young children will see some toy or shiny object on a store shelf, and somehow — by design! Marketers know what they’re doing! — they instantly •have• to have it, and are obsessed, and all sense and proportion go out they window and they need it now now NOW, but if they get it they soon abandon it because it’s junk that only looked good on the shelf? It’s like that with CEOs and AI right now. 32 comments
@KeithAmmann It’s really a perfect storm right now for gen AI to create this “shiny object” effect: • Companies increasingly investor-driven, pressure shifts from growth to cash extraction • Salary for knowledge-based jobs increasingly drives cost structure • Pandemic took 1-2 million people out of the workforce; labor has increased leverage • But wealth & power ever more concentrated with executives & investors So picture it: you hold the reins of the company, you just neeeeed to get more cash out of it faster, but that’s hard because you’re paying all these people all this money for all these things that you don’t quite understand but seem like they •should• be a lot easier… …and suddenly somebody says you can just replace them all with machines?! Prayers answered! It’s pretty hard not to switch off the thinking part of your brain at that point. Shiny toy on the store shelf. Special props to those shiny object marketers for pumping their AI hype through MBA programs for •years• now. Folks have been graduating that world for years hearing that AI is going to replace all sorts of skilled — costly! — jobs, so when the sales pitches finally landed on their doorstop, they were primed to believe it. Product placement in professional programs: it works! Like I said, those marketers know what they’re doing. They are right inside the kids’ brains. Anyway, this whole thread stems from a conversation I was having with my parents about some comically unhelpful AI assistant tech they’d encountered, and I said, “You’d think that we’d have learned these lessons from Clippy 20 years ago….” @Itty53 I feel that. It's why I'm here too. Keep on doing your thing, and good luck to you out there. @inthehands Or the lessons from Microsoft's Tay about how terrible things can get, how quickly. Obviously the investment horizons companies are looking at are far longer, even in their happy imaginations, but I’m still feeling unreasonably smug about my entire thread above reading this from @maxkennerly (whose comment is spot on): @inthehands @thecorodon @inthehands @mcnulla @thecorodon @inthehands @mcnulla @thecorodon @mcnulla @mcnulla @thecorodon @inthehands Not if they're trained on the choices made by human CEOs. @KeithAmmann @mcnulla @inthehands @KeithAmmann @mcnulla @thecorodon @mcnulla @thecorodon @inthehands How about “Board as a Service” Have a collection of AI’s for corporate governance to oversee corporations, and set executive CEO pay. Get them to outsource corporate boards to save money as a good governance function. It’s a win-win-win! /s  @inthehands No suggestion on how. Just press a button and money comes out. Never the case.   @inthehands the funny thing is that the job most likely to be replaced by an AI is that of CEO @inthehands To counteract the shiney object syndrome with the kid we implicitly have the rule that whenever we go to the bookstore they can get one or two as well! Limits the SOD to legos and books 😎  @inthehands  @inthehands @wlonk My sister and I learned this lesson with Domino Rally. Had seen on TV, looked great on shelf! Had a Toys R Us gift card, got it home, broken and missing parts. Replaced; quickly realized it took forever to setup for like 30 seconds of fun and even then it barely worked. Ending up exchanging for a nice reliable combo box of Risk + Castles Risk (which my parents only got rid of in the last year). |
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@inthehands If only we could abandon the CEOs when the shine wears off.