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It’s an interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

This article doesn't capture the biggest issues that I hear and that's the multiple ways that the tech companies just flout the law and ignore society. Copyright theft and regulatory capture alongside huge energy demands and environmental impacts are the stories I hear. That's in the UK.

Agree

😮‍💨 "People aren’t computers, and they don’t live in automatable loops that can be neatly captured in databases... [but] the AI industry has fully lost sight of this, because AI thrives on data."

Yeah, this is why I'm skeptical by many dev's claims that commercial software will be completely replaced by everyone making personal apps. I certainly get excited about devising custom technical solutions to needs in my life but most people do not.

The consumer-facing AI stuff also creates all the backlash. ChatGPT should have been a short-lived public demonstration, but then it should have gone dark. The public would have wondered whatever became of it, while the business world went about buying API tokens from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Pushing this to the top of the stack! 🎉

This take (and many others like it) feels like people are fed up with Big Tech (co's) and AI is the perfect lightning rod. I've noticed people talking about AI often talk about either "AI as a product or service" and "AI as tech" - two wildly different things.

One could refer to the library or any of the academic journals for further examples of this idea. Software isn't just a binary on a server somewhere, there's an entire infrastructure layer behind it and most of that is still human

She definitely does not yearn for automation

It feels like we're back to that Enterprise Software hellhole from the early 2000s because we've invented tech which lets tryhards generate books worth of paper with very little affort. We've built feedback loops which validate every stupid idea and given them to the dummies.

Partially?

Yeah that's true. I listen to most decoder episodes, and the verge on occasion - I would say Nilay provides some significant, highly informed skepticism of AI and its promises - though he also admits when the technology is useful and disruptive He's got nuanced positions, which are rare these days.

This piece makes the fundamental mistake that they mistake "software" for "company". The problem isn't the data. The problem is that the data is getting used by other people who have no legitimization or authorization to do so, because companies pushed everything from personal devices to the cloud.

AI tools are being developed to promote PRODUCTIVITY, but productivity is, imo, a means to an end for humans, not an end in and of itself. Even for companies, productivity is a means for trying to increase profits/ “shareholder value.” Companies benefit from productivity, espfrom reduced labor costs

I was fascinated by the (frequently angry) insistence by some people that hostility to AI was simply a retread of hostility to the Internet way back. No matter how many people adults at the time explained www was welcomed much more (as polls from then show). A real refusal to accept the issue.

It's different but there are echoes