Have you opened X or a tech news site lately? Then you are probably familiar, even exhausted by, posts like these:
This is marketing.
The message is simple:
AI will beat the smelly humans. It is faster, cheaper, tireless, and anyone who doubts this (usually the experts in a field) is a dumb luddite who failed to adapt (and will end up in the permanent underclass).
Conveniently, adaptation means buying the $200/mo subscription and convincing your boss to spend $4000/mo on tokens so you can work faster/better/harder.
Compilers did not replace programmers. Spreadsheets did not replace accountants. CAD systems did not replace engineers. These tools changed what competent people, the experts, could do, how fast they could do it, and how much complexity they could manage.
A compiler can translate code, but does not understand software. A programmer does. A spreadsheet can calculate, but does not know what calculations are important for the next quarter. An accountant does. CAD can model a bridge, but it cannot decide whether to simply upgrade the one 200 meters downstream. An engineer can.
Visible output is just a small part of the actual job done. AI companies reduce work to the visible output, the artifact, completely ignoring the value in understanding that comes from the process of producing that artifact.
In programming, the bottleneck is understanding the business problem, designing the system architecture, and maintaining the codebase. Sure, you can write the perfect prompt to encapsulate your entire business problem. Ask any business that tried outsourcing in the last 30 years, they might have some tips if you want to go down that path… The hard thing is knowing if something is good, what tradeoffs it makes, and the consequences of a particular implementation or choice.
Code is designed to be deterministic. The idea that a probabilistic system will replace compilers is fundamentally silly.
The same thing is starting to happen with cybersecurity. Take the Mythos/Fable release from Anthropic. Among the serious security people I know, the reaction to Mythos was not awe. It was frustration: Anthropic took a genuinely interesting capability and wrapped it in reckless “cyberweapon” marketing. Also, no it did not hack the NSA. The damaging claims around AI “cyberweapons” devalues the meticulous work of actual security researchers and pentesters, and overshadows the actual capability of a model like this.
All of these AI companies are facing a massive problem. Currently, there is a huge amount of investor appetite for AI. The AI companies know it won’t last.
Selling “the future” for investment will soon give way to investors demanding something in “the present”. At some point numbers start mattering. Quarterly revenue, customer retention and margins. Customers asking: “did this really save us money?”
They are capitalising on the hype while it lasts, and convert hype into capital, customers and dependency before investors start caring more about margins than mythology.
I have a dream about the future of AI. A dream where AI complements human experts, rather than threatening to replace them.
Back when tools like Unity and Unreal were released, they drastically lowered the barrier of entry and more low-quality asset-flip games were made. They did however allow smaller teams of people and solo developers who genuinely had the skills to make games, to build their dream project without sacrificing on technical scope due to not having the resources to develop their own game engines from scratch.
This is an example of tools empowering creation and innovation, and yes there is a cost to it too (asset-flips).
Midjourney Medical is interesting because the underlying idea points in the right direction: better tools for people with expertise. A tool like this could give doctors and researchers better, less invasive insight into the human body. That does not “cure cancer” by itself, but it could make experts dramatically more effective at diagnosis, research, and treatment. But the bougie spa/wellness framing also shows how quickly even useful technical ideas get wrapped in consumer futurism.
With all that in mind.
Give smart people the tools to do smart things instead of threatening that you will replace them with a clanker.
Implementing labor protections and basic income is not seeing the forest for the trees. What we need is a more educated public that can contribute their ideas. All AI can do is lower the barrier to entry, but it does not replace the need for education.
Because most automations never capture the complete scope of the job/task ( not even close ). Just like neurons, if you don't use it you lose it and when the inevitable problems come, nobody knows the why, the how and the what. At that point someone smart would incorporate all those real costs and opportunity loses on the "automating everything" equation. But they usually don't.
Of course automating tasks is a must, but it's very far from being a black and white situation. These dynamics have been happening for centuries by now, nothing new.
Instead, you can and probably should see technology as augmenting you and your coworkers.
What? How does that follow?
Big companies are always doing bad things, but not because they use AI, because they have legal protections which prevents small companies (which could be anyone like you and me) to compete. The same small companies who could also benefit from using AI.
We are looking forward to bring the same productivity gains to logistics and manufacturing (look at the advancements done in the last few decades!).
Why not bring this to white collar work too? I get so much more shit done today than I did a few years ago. It's a great time to be alive!
Think about all the security clearances no longer required to aggregate big data into intelligence reports. The conditions and incentives for LLMs seem almost laser focused on replacing those particular jobs.
It wasn't but ~20 years ago that people were concerned about Google slurping up all the world's data into spying programs. Now that the hardest part to hide is happening, people have forgotten or assumed it already had. Many other smaller and far less capable businesses have come and gone and taken tiny bits of blame until the public was satisfied they knew who the "real" scapegoats were. What they really had were overcomplicated theories built on a nebulous cloud of debatable evidence that led nowhere. This is how it succeeds in plain sight every time.
Ask an AI to solve a problem and it may do that, but if you don't understand why or how it works, or what to do with the information in order to keep it useful for even the medium term, then all you've done is taken away the opportunity for someone else to be responsible for something you shouldn't be.
It's not necessarily a mystery how to make good food. You can ask an AI how to make good food, follow the instructions, and you're off to the races. The question then is whether you want to be in that race.
Would you have gone to chef school? Would you work in a kitchen? Are you willing to deal with customers, or risk RSI from so many repeated kitchen movements? Are you willing to practice and be tested?
If the answer to any of those is no, then get the hell out of that kitchen and let the people who have more grit than you do their job. Do what you can to make it easier for you to pay them consistently and well on the back-end.
Can you show us how it’s better to use an AI to ensure steadiness over a long period of time?
You're not one of the people who gets to benefit from the gains.