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Top-level
 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 20 comments
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. |
Gregory's Server
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.