Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

I think you’re over-estimating the capabilities of these tech leaders, especially when the whole industry is repeating the same thing. At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics: if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever.

If, however, AI ended up delivering and they missed the boat, they’re going to be held accountable.

It’s much less risky to just follow industry trends. It takes a lot of technical knowledge, gut, and confidence in your own judgement to push back against an industry-wide trend at that level.

I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos, but will fail pretty badly when deployed.

If it works 99% of the time, then a demo of 10 runs is 90% likely to succeed. Even if it fails, as long as it's not spectacular, you can just say "yeah, but it's getting better every day!", and "you'll still have the best 10% of your human workers in the loop".

When you go to deploy it, 99% is just not good enough. The actual users will be much more noisy than the demo executives and internal testers.

When you have a call center with 100 people taking 100 calls per day, replacing those 10,000 calls with 99% accurate AI means you have to clean up after 100 bad calls per day. Some percentage of those are going to be really terrible, like the AI did reputational damage or made expensive legally binding promises. Humans will make mistakes, but they aren't going to give away the farm or say that InsuranceCo believes it's cheaper if you die. And your 99% accurate-in-a-lab AI isn't 99% accurate in the field with someone with a heavy accent on a bad connection.

So I think that the parties all "want to believe", and to an untrained eye, AI seems "good enough" or especially "good enough for the first tier".

> if AI fails to deliver, it fails to deliver for everyone and the people that bought into the hype can blame the consultants / whatever.

Understatement of the year. At this point, if AI fails to deliver, the US economy is going to crash. That would not be the case if executives hadn't bought in so hard earlier on.

> Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

At this point I think it might actually be both rather than just one or the other.

“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” - Keynes.

Convention here is that AI is the next sliced bread. And big-tech managers care about their reputation.

> Don’t attribute to malice that which can equally be contributed to incompetence.

This discourse needs to die. Incompetence + lack of empathy is malice. Even competence in the scenario they want to create is malice. It's time to stop sugar-coating it.

> At that point, it takes a lot of guts to say “No, we’re not going to buy into the hype, we’re going to wait and see” because it’s simply a matter of corporate politics

Isn't that the whole mythos of these corporate leaders though? They are the ones with the vision and guts to cut against the fold and stand out among the crowd?

I mean it's obviously bullshit, but you would think at least a couple of them actually would do something to distinguish themselves. They all want to be Steve Jobs but none of them have the guts to even try to be visionary. It is honestly pathetic

Ultimately it's a distinction without a difference. Maliciously stupid or stupidly malicious invariably leads to the same place.

The discussion we should be having is how we can come together to remove people from power and minimize the influence they have on society.

We don't have the carbon budget to let billionaires who conspires from island fortresses in Hawaii do this kind of reckless stuff.

It's so dismaying to see these industries muster the capital and political resources to make these kinds of infrastructure projects a reality when they've done nothing comparable w.r.t to climate change.

It tells me that the issue around the climate has always been a lack of will not ability.

It's mass delusion