alt Hacker NewsI increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing work”. Meanwhile, none of this is actually productive. It’s goddamn peacock feathers.
It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.
Replies
I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree?
I've often had the sense that most of what is done inside companies is a kind of performance of work rather than work itself. Mostly all a big status game between various different factions. All actual value provided by just a few engineers here and there who are able to shut out the noise and build things.
It does have real benefits, but also, of course, all of the downsides you mentioned.
The best analogy is the outsourcing / offshoring fad of the last decade.
Managers hated that senior developers were getting highly compensated (often higher than the management class!) and pounced on every opportunity to replace expensive people with (much!) cheaper options, quality be damned.
For the few companies that paid attention to the quality, this worked out swimmingly. Apple is probably the best example, they've outsourced almost all of their manufacturing to China and other similar countries.
So yes, my mental picture is that every manager is drooling right now because they think they can replace someone getting paid six figures with an AI that costs six dollars a day, if that. A virtual employee that doesn't talk back, doesn't argue, doesn't question, doesn't go off on "unproductive tangents" like refactoring (whatever that's even supposed to mean), and just pumps out code 24/7 like a good little slav... employee.
The very rare smart managers out there are looking at this more like the transition that happened to architect firms when CAD became available. They used to have a dozen draftsmen for every architect. Now there are virtually none, I haven't even heard that job title being used in decades! We still have architects, and if anything, they're paid even more.
This is very apt
AI has made my work about 5-8x quicker, just because I'm able to have it cover a lot of the grunt work (update 42 if statements in 32 different files) that took time, but no particular skill.
I think the use cases where AI makes an economic improvement to the status quo for a business are rare, but they do exist, and they can be a significant improvement.
It's like the early days of the dotcom boom and bust - people thought the internet was good for every use case under the sun, including shipping people a single candy bar at a loss. After the dotcom bust, a lot of that went by the wayside, but there was a tremendous economic advantage to the businesses that were more useful when available on the internet.