[throw310822]

The problem with current AI is that it's super easy to get half-decent results by hooking up a simple agent to a lot of office software- and when it works it looks like pure magic; but getting reliably good results is way harder. So half assed agents abound (I know, I've added three or four to our apps in the last few months) but they can get frustrating for the users really quickly.

[Spivak]

I really don't know what this means about the state of the corporate world but companies just don't care if it's bad. Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't care at all if it's good or even if people actually use it. This isn't that uncommon but "integrate AI somewhere I don't care where" is such an obvious manifestation of this pattern.

We've put so many layers between the engineers and customers and diluted any accountability to demonstrate positive ROI—even if it's theoretical—that we do pointless work for nobody. I'm not going to complain too much personally because all those layers make it possible for me to just pull cards and collect a paycheck but I'm surprised nobody on the business side even somewhat cares if the work they're paying for is worthwhile.

[Eisenstein]

Worker efficiency an order of magnitude greater than what it was 50 years ago. An office worker with excel and the internet can accomplish in an hour what would have taken days or weeks for their counterpart to do in 1975 with a calculator and a telephone.

Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the money.

I think it should be natural that jobs end up being mostly pointless. Why should we produce exponentially more value without getting a share of that value?

[throw310822]

> we haven't gotten more share of the money.

But your money buys stuff that 50 years ago would have been too expensive for the richest men in the world. A pocket supercomputer, advanced diagnostics and medicine, instant access to information anywhere in the world.

[WarOnPrivacy]

Material gains (produced by more productive workers) don't offset the increases in

    the number of expenses required to minimally live
       (ex:utilities, transpo, insurance, comms) and
    the ever escalating costs of those added requirements

Nor does it offset the accelerating increases in complexity for basic living factors - complexity that consumes internal resources and time.

More to the point, a pocket supercomputer is an irrelevancy for a typical wage worker, who's earnings are far insufficient for even the barest self-sufficiency.

[throw310822]

> Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't care at all if it's good or even if people actually use it

Frankly I've added some of the features of my own initiative. They were low hanging fruits and really helpful in some cases, and in others they are placeholders waiting to be better integrated or expanded depending on the users requests. Nobody forces anyone to use them or even notice them, so why not?

As I said: these features look like magic in demos, it's not because of the hype that managers want them integrated but because of genuine enthusiasm. But they require more development and maintenance effort than was apparent from the demo. Also, there's a clear discoverability problem due to the fact that an agent has basically no UI.