alt Hacker NewsOne argument I have heard in favour of this is that management knew this would be a side effect, but that it's more important to have people engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible. You are effectively knowingly wasting money in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.
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If companies are suddenly willing to spend money on letting their staff experiment, why not let them experiment with what they want to? They probably know more about technology than you do, otherwise you wouldn't need them.
in this instance - it seems like Amazon employees are wasting money exploring ways to waste money.
All so that they can lose this accumulated knowledge during the next round of layoffs.
My questions for that approach are: Why treat AI as a special technology that needs enterprise-scale exploration to come up with a useful application? And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around?
The top-down approach to encouraging (mandating?) AI usage strikes me as infantilizing to the workers, who are perfectly capable of choosing which tools they use and when.
> engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible
"Research" isn't part of my job title. If you don't know what's possible then why are you deploying it? You should be telling _me_ what's possible. I mean, you _paid_ for it, how can you possibly not know what you were getting?
> in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.
"I'll take `what even are profits?' for $200, Alex."
Are the people engaging though, or are they telling the AI "go do some busywork" and then minimizing that window and getting on with their job?
No, it's literally because some dumb manager read a blog where an influencer said that you ain't a real AI native and ain't worth shit unless your developers are spending $XXXX on tokens each day.
It's that simple.
(Never mind that these bloggers are just writing ad copy for cloud providers.)
That still sounds like a dumb strategy. Or, more likely, post hoc rationalization.
You reward me for wasting tokens and punish me for not wasting them, I will maximally waste them and wont "explore hownto make them useful". The latter wastes less tokens and that is punished.
Exactly. That's the problem ICs don't want to admit.
Managing a lot of people at scale is messy and you have to use crude solutions. It's impossible to know everything that's going on.
If you were a manager you wouldn't do any better. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.