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I think it's more than that. I have never seen a new technology so explicitly promoted -- even vastly oversold, in my opinion -- as "we're going to take every single white collar job". Replacing humans. That seems to be the all-encompassing vision of what execs are pushing for AI. Now, from my stance, this grab bag of machine learning technology that is thrown under the "AI" banner is not even remotely good enough for this. It is "slop"-y and "hallucination" prone. Attempts at "creative" efforts are monolithic, without a distinctive voice, often with bizarre errors. The technology can alternate between being extremely helpful to being maddingly a waste of time, in the later case given you 10 solutions for an issue that are all wrong. And yet, the C-suite types from Anthropic and Microsoft and others are preaching, again and again, their vision that all white collar jobs will be wiped out in 18 months and similar (just one example -- https://fortune.com/article/why-microsoft-ai-chief-mustafa-s...). Certainly, such banter has noticeably impacted entry level hires at the moment. But beyond that, one gets the impression that current tech execs are misanthropic and generally give two flips about humanity, all the better (at least, so they think) for their profits. It seems like, rather than promoting the use cases for machine learning which will improve and help advance society (I certainly can think of some things that have and might be done), the entire point of the giant amounts of capex being spent is to destroy jobs (the foundation of current capitalism) and make things worse off for everyone. I agree that institutional trust has declined over the last decades, and unfortunately current technology execs are playing a part. I am old enough to actually remember the Google "Don't Be Evil" days. What happened? |