No surprises. AI is not a technology solution. Its a people solution. It can do work faster, but requires so much more validation. The result is a shift down the funnel with no change in productivity. Since AI accounts cost money per head a 0 increase in productivity is a large net negative for business customers.
The main point I got from this article was the necessity to change "how wet do things" to make them compatible with AI.
Where I work, information is spread over a lot of different systems: Slack, Confluence, DevOps, SharePoint, a separate support/ticketing system. It's easier and less time consuming for me, following my current process, to write descriptions, acceptance criteria, and release notes from source material, and then just get AI to tweak the wording a bit, than it is to compile it all into a single "unit" for AI to then do each stage individually as a first pass.
If our documentation was more centralised / organised on a single system, then it would work much better. But that migration ain't never gonna happen in a reasonable time frame.
I'm working on an ideas or two to compile things temporarily, but that also takes additional time.
All these things take time and planning, which is rarely factored in. Just do it! Just use AI!
I should also point out that I know a teacher who uses it to greatly improve productivity in writing reports: Give it the main points that should be made about a child's learning, then let the AI write the words that join those bits together. The results have apparently been great, and has taken a fair bit of stress out of the report writing process.
It looks like the AI "boom" will be a net-negative for society. So much money spent, so much water and power wasted, so much real estate used... All for a solution in search of a problem. Sure, the president of the United States can create and post an image of his self-proclaimed messianic powers, but that's hardly a productive outcome worth the hullabaloo.
IMO this is just what capitalism looks like. We direct resources to whatever seems like it’ll yield the highest returns and force society to eat the externalities. This effect will continue to worsen over time without reform or revolution, until we transition to a more pure oligarchy.
Unfortunately the current admin is pro-oligarchy so expect things to worsen in the immediate future
People who participate in the stock market (which tends to be many people who may even be anti-capitalist) do so in the hope of generating excess returns.
Is this really a function of capitalism or just who humans really are in general? That is to say humans are self interested and desire to maximise their own wealth.
It would be great to give anti-capitalists a forced one year vacation in a paradisiac communist country at the end of the 80's in say Eastern Europe or USSR. To say nothing of life during the "revolution" years in the 20's USSR.
I echo similar feelings from the comments. AI is trying to fit into workflows executed by people. and it isnt mature enough for people to trust it blindly yet. so people need to validate it and that is just extra work for some. Till we come to a point AI is good enough to run untethered? or we shift people's mindeset to understand review is essential and makes you more productive anyways. but it cant work the way it is. Also we need to udnerstand just because AI cna be general purposed means it should. the best AI implementations are quite niched and targetted. MS Copilot is shit because it doesnt serve the right purpose at times and thats what most companies think AI is because they have marketted this way
I'm not surprised if this is true to a wide degree (not fully).
What the people that predicted that AI will change productivity drastically in just a year or two imho underestimate: Just because a technology is capable of this in theory (and I think it is, even today) - it doesn't mean we are willing or able to deploy it to its full potential at scale. There will be a few individuals and very few companies which will do so or come close.
For most of the companies, they're still doing a lot of processes manually that could have been automated with 80s technology. Why should a change in the technology suddenly make everyone change their mindset, culture, way of thinking? This may take 1-2 generations to more fully form. Maybe that's also better: Slower change is less destablizing for society / individuals, I think of it more like a defensive mechanism of the system to keep it stable.
I do feel AI is an amazing technology. It has indeed lowered the bar in coding, learning and writing. But it's not the Terminator technology the CEOs want us to believe.
It's interesting to me. I've been reading a lot about sycophancy, psychosis, cognitive surrender, epistemic drift/alienation, system 3 thinking etc. and the conclusion I have inevitably come to is AI is subtly mind fucking a LOT of people with NO exceptions.
Also, to say it changed nothing is humorous, tell that to all the people laid off.
it may be hard to measure, but it's definitely helping everyone who uses it to be more productive in certain aspects of their work. that's clear to me.
but it might be, say, 20% more productive in 20% of your workday, or 1000% more productive 2 days per month (the days when that perfect dream spec hits your desk that you can just paste into claude and get a slick working system back), which works out to just 4% more productive overall, or whatever, which is hard to measure with all the noise.
in the end companies will pay for these tools because their employees will be demanding them, same as they demand other things that make their workday more pleasant - email, coffee, air conditioning, a conveniently located office, etc.
that said, I see the intelligence itself being rapidly commodified/free. the companies that extract rent in the sector will be the ones that effectively bundle and sell corporate-friendly features with the core intelligence - compliance, tracking, productivity, systems integration, authentication, etc. etc. etc. Which is a competency companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google already possess, so they are likely to win. Plus a weird Euro variant of course.
I mean, how much of this due to employees dicking around while their AI does the work for them. How many will report to their managers they opted to doom scroll rather than use the productivity gains from AI to do more?
This is nonsense. I’m sorry. AI will completely upend the workplace and the economy. Whether that’s self evident today in the numbers in the way that we track those numbers, which is based on how things have historically worked, is not relevant. First principles thinking is enough.
C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.
in the first few years of any new technology only highly innovative companies (startups) use it.
people still were using punch cards when tape was invented, and still using tape when floppy’s were invented
and those were relatively small innovations not requiring substantial changes to the work. AI is another ballgame, this makes me more bullish on it than ever.
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Where I work, information is spread over a lot of different systems: Slack, Confluence, DevOps, SharePoint, a separate support/ticketing system. It's easier and less time consuming for me, following my current process, to write descriptions, acceptance criteria, and release notes from source material, and then just get AI to tweak the wording a bit, than it is to compile it all into a single "unit" for AI to then do each stage individually as a first pass.
If our documentation was more centralised / organised on a single system, then it would work much better. But that migration ain't never gonna happen in a reasonable time frame.
I'm working on an ideas or two to compile things temporarily, but that also takes additional time.
All these things take time and planning, which is rarely factored in. Just do it! Just use AI!
I should also point out that I know a teacher who uses it to greatly improve productivity in writing reports: Give it the main points that should be made about a child's learning, then let the AI write the words that join those bits together. The results have apparently been great, and has taken a fair bit of stress out of the report writing process.
Unfortunately the current admin is pro-oligarchy so expect things to worsen in the immediate future
Is this really a function of capitalism or just who humans really are in general? That is to say humans are self interested and desire to maximise their own wealth.
"They’re reporting feelings, not findings." "That’s not measurement. That’s decoration."
What the people that predicted that AI will change productivity drastically in just a year or two imho underestimate: Just because a technology is capable of this in theory (and I think it is, even today) - it doesn't mean we are willing or able to deploy it to its full potential at scale. There will be a few individuals and very few companies which will do so or come close.
For most of the companies, they're still doing a lot of processes manually that could have been automated with 80s technology. Why should a change in the technology suddenly make everyone change their mindset, culture, way of thinking? This may take 1-2 generations to more fully form. Maybe that's also better: Slower change is less destablizing for society / individuals, I think of it more like a defensive mechanism of the system to keep it stable.
Also, to say it changed nothing is humorous, tell that to all the people laid off.
Just curious, i've been thinking about this a lot.
but it might be, say, 20% more productive in 20% of your workday, or 1000% more productive 2 days per month (the days when that perfect dream spec hits your desk that you can just paste into claude and get a slick working system back), which works out to just 4% more productive overall, or whatever, which is hard to measure with all the noise.
in the end companies will pay for these tools because their employees will be demanding them, same as they demand other things that make their workday more pleasant - email, coffee, air conditioning, a conveniently located office, etc.
that said, I see the intelligence itself being rapidly commodified/free. the companies that extract rent in the sector will be the ones that effectively bundle and sell corporate-friendly features with the core intelligence - compliance, tracking, productivity, systems integration, authentication, etc. etc. etc. Which is a competency companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google already possess, so they are likely to win. Plus a weird Euro variant of course.
If you use AI to ship more features, even your competitors are going to use AI to ship more.
So is this how we increase productivity?
Who captures the value? For now looks like the chip makers and model makers.
C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.
people still were using punch cards when tape was invented, and still using tape when floppy’s were invented
and those were relatively small innovations not requiring substantial changes to the work. AI is another ballgame, this makes me more bullish on it than ever.