AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
Oh, how I laughed reading this! This was one of the best articles I have read in years on this topic. No one I have talked with has accurately captured the skepticism and excitement around AI the way Cory Doctorow has. The preface is just perfectly said.
I have consumed so much "Artificial Intelligence X The Job Market" content. And this article goes step by step and breaks it down accurately in an easily digestible way. I have harped on this idea of the AI hype cycle vs. actual "AI" tech. I have said it time and again that the CEOs are just projecting false expectations for revenue. Particularly this idea of an "accountability sink" from Dan Davies. The famous IBM slide deck of 1979 said, "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." Dr. Micheal Kirkpatrick has been so important in this area in my personal education. He pointed me to the ACM code of ethics (no one in a computation career really engages enough with ACM or even know they exist but I digress). Straight from the preamble:
The entire computing profession benefits when the ethical decision-making process is accountable to and transparent to all stakeholders. Open discussions about ethical issues promote this accountability and transparency.
I read yesterday someone saying "Replacing workers with AI is like replacing a carpenter with a hammer." But I like this reverse-centaur idea a little more because the tool cannot define the job. It might be reasonable to require someone to be proficient, but it is rediculous to take away basic natural rights like agency and privacy. Even worse, there was a recent study by CAST software recently found that the world's tech debt will take 61 billion workdays to fix. Although much of this is outdated, monolithic, legacy code there is a large concern for using llms to push development faster will bloat this number.
Moving away from development, AI "art" is another topic worth mentioning. And I think that Doctorow is spot on again. The narative of AI "art" being an advertisement for the capabilities is quite interesting. My opinion is a bit different in the fact that machines cannot and will never be capable of emotion. It is synthesizing other ideas, and not capable of original thought. Art exists to convey humanity; the goal of art is to capture and communicate emotion and ideas. The machines are not capable of having emotions and ideas, so it is impossible to communicate them.