[corvus-cornix]

I'm looking at engineering job specs at the moment and it's very wearisome that every company seems to have pivoted from highlighting the unique value they provide to customers to putting AI front and centre in their employer branding. My eyes immediately glaze over at what may have been the result of "Claude, take this HR/marketing/whatever copy and inject some AI".

I've adopted the tools because they're useful, but businesses need to chill. AI seems to amplify existing bottlenecks within organisations, so we should probably tread carefully when it comes to pushing the tech. Fix the organisational problems first and hedge our bets.

I wonder if anyone reading this was around during the dot-com bubble because maybe it felt the same...

[acdha]

I was around then. This feels similar from the perspective of stock prices just going up for absolutely absurd reasons—Allbirds would have fit right in—but AI in some ways seems even worse because much of what was being hawked in the dotcom era was at least something that real people would want to buy: usually poorly executed and unsustainably priced but e.g. Kozmo.com wasn't wrong that a ton of people would love to order stuff and have it brought to your home or office. I had some business meetings with pets.com and they were unbelievably bloated—think a room full of people openly admitting that they were just killing time waiting for the IPO so they could cash out their options—but tons of people buy pet food, toys, and medicine online today.

In contrast, a lot of companies are just wedging AI into things where ordinary people don't want or benefit from it anywhere near the level needed to actually pay for it, especially with unreliability being an unsolved problem—the amount you'd pay for something to, say, summarize boring business documents goes down considerably when you have to closely read the original looking for errors and omissions and scrutinize any response to make sure it's not critically flawed.

There's also a weird difference in enthusiasm based on the societal impacts: the web let you do things you couldn't do before, but a lot of AI tools and services are really oriented at your boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss saying they can layoff half of your department and still get more work out of the survivors. There's some cool stuff, yes, but unlike the mood during the dotcom era we now have a prominent tone of dread about deprofessionalization and larger concerns about how businesses will even work if a significant chunk of customers are pushed out of stable employment.

[tcholewik]

I’m sorry but can you elaborate on how Allbirds fit in here? Thats just seems like a random reference that I do not understand.

[acdha]

Allbirds was a shoe company which was failing due to poor management but saw their stock spike when they said they were pivoting to AI.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BIRD/

This felt a lot like the various companies which got a lot of attention for taking an existing business concept, adding “on the internet”, and cratering when it became obvious they lacked a viable business.

[chorkpop]

Allbirds recently decided to pivot to AI. Yes, the shoe company.

[drob518]

Yes, I was around then. It felt exactly the same. That’s how you know it’s a bubble. Because everyone starts acting stupid and conjuring up all these ridiculous explanations for why it makes sense when it plainly doesn’t. In 1999, everything was about the Internet, even when it didn’t make sense. Every company was saying that to be left out of the “Internet revolution” was a fast path to bankruptcy. It’s the same with AI today. Yes, the Internet was important and some companies did get displaced, but most didn’t. So too for AI.

[bink-lynch]

I was around during the dot-com bubble. When it popped it popped pretty quickly. It wasn't a slow leak. Everything needed to be a dot-com and everything was centered around being a dot-com no matter what the business actually did. Money was pouring and almost anything dot-com was getting funding.

I moved to a dot-com right at the tail end of it. We built a pretty decent startup from scratch within the first two months and debuted at one of the largest trade shows in the world. We had our own private label factoring credit card and we did credit card transactions over the internet and with handheld cellular devices. It was built to scale, colocated, and we were getting customers. When the floor dropped out it was done in less than two months. dot-com was a very negative thing for a while after that.

[danaris]

It's definitely looking like we've passed the peak of the S-curve here.

But there is one difference between now and the dot-bomb that could make the shape of what's next different (note, only "could"; it might very well be very similar): with the massively increased financialization of everything, the link between reality and stocks/private equity investment has become much more tenuous. Speculative investors, as a group, know to some extent that they can keep the bubble going just by continuing to buy.

For a time.

But eventually they will have exhausted all they can squeeze from the "greater fools", and someone's risk analysis department will say "if we don't sell it all now, we'll be stuck holding the bag." And that will start a cascade. Because the other big difference between 2000 and today is the degree of automation in trading....

[skyberrys]

I was a teenager around the dot-com and to this day I feel an idealized sense of longing for participation in the exciting times of the dot-coms. You guys got to enjoy the blazing innovation of the new internet, so full of endless possibilities. Tough luck on your bubble popping moment though.

[MattPalmer1086]

Well, it was exciting I guess. I even knew someone who worked for pets.com!

On the other hand, I worked for a startup selling product information management software to large retailers, and was about as non dot-com as you could get. When the bubble burst, all the funding disappeared for all tech companies, not just the dot-com ones, so we were also all out of a job. Which was not fun.

[mech422]

The sad part wasn't the bubble bursting...

It was watching all the potential being squandered and the internet basically being relegated to click farming and selling people crap they don't need.

All the really cool stuff seems to have died with the bubble...

[wallst07]

I think the sad part was the people entering the IT workforce for only money. Don't get me wrong, I understand why and not gatekeeping. But it was the first time I know that people with computer skills were highly in demand, so anyone who had turned on a computer was able to get a job even if they knew nothing of how a computer actually worked, or networking.

[CSSer]

You're still around :)

[ruicraveiro]

If only the Internet were much more frequently as nice as your reply. :-)

[IndySun]

>You're still around :)

You sound like my doctor! : )

[mech422]

LOL - True Dat !! Thanks!

[drumdance]

The spam results dominating Google, runaway popups... ugh

[skyberrys]

Ah man, you are too right there. Now cool stuff requires wading through trash to find it.

[jlaternman]

I was also around then, and actually it did feel exactly the same now that you say. Sense of sailing towards an unknown destination that seemed very exciting, but was clear we didn't quite get what it was yet and were working out the destination mid-flight.

[pojzon]

Fixing organisational issues is hard and expensive.

Slapping AI on everything is easy in comparison. And mentioning AI to investors makes them drop pants.