[cejast]

I went through the process of buying a car recently, and the dealer, before we even begun to negotiate on price, was describing how their pricing system has all 'moved to AI'. I was suspicious, and after querying him about it for a while what he described essentially just boiled down to something a spreadsheet could do.

Now I don't dispute that AI has and will continue to automate jobs away like this. But I do think we are in an era where the lines between 'classic' automation and AI automation are blurred for quite a lot of people and without any concrete details I suspect this case leans more towards the former.

[fy20]

A lot of the "AI automation" videos you see on YouTube are just people creating Zapier or Make workflows connecting different services. Most of it was possible 10 or more years ago, using APIs and a few hundred lines of code.

The difference between 10 years ago and today is now it's cheap to do that. Somehow that makes a lot more people aware of it - even though it could have been done 10 years ago and the ROI would still be positive.

[znpy]

“AI” is often a term used to avoid taking responsibility.

A few years ago it was “the algorithm”. I was literally told it was “the algorithm” at fault in a physical grocery store.

I was speechless at the time, now i’m just angry.