Paul Cantrell
You know how young children will see some toy or shiny object on a store shelf, and somehow — by design! Marketers know what they’re doing! — they instantly •have• to have it, and are obsessed, and all sense and proportion go out they window and they need it now now NOW, but if they get it they abandon it within a week because it’s junk that only looked good on the shelf?
It’s like that with CEOs and AI right now.
Keith Ammann @ PAX Unplugged
@inthehands If only we could abandon the CEOs when the shine wears off.
Paul Cantrell
It’s really a perfect storm right now for gen AI to create this “shiny object” effect:
• Companies increasingly investor-driven, pressure shifts from growth to cash extraction
• Salary for knowledge-based jobs increasingly drives cost structure
• Pandemic took 1-2 million people out of the workforce; labor has increased leverage
• But wealth & power ever more concentrated with executives & investors
Paul Cantrell
So picture it: you hold the reins of the company, you just neeeeed to get more cash out of it faster, but that’s hart because you’re paying all these people all this money for all these things that you don’t quite understand but seem like they •should• be a lot easier…
…and suddenly somebody says you can just replace them all with machines?! Prayers answered!
It’s pretty hard not to switch off the thinking part of your brain at that point. Shiny toy on the store shelf.
Paul Cantrell
Special props to those shiny object marketers for pumping their AI hype through MBA programs for •years• now. Folks have been graduating that world for years hearing that AI is going to replace all sorts of skilled — costly! — jobs, so when the sales pitches finally landed on their doorstop, they were primed to believe it. Product placement in professional programs: it works!
Like I said, those marketers know what they’re doing. They are right inside the kids’ brains.
Paul Cantrell
Anyway, this whole thread stems from a conversation I was having with my parents about some comically unhelpful AI assistant tech they’d encountered, and I said, “You’d think that we’d have learned these lessons from Clippy 20 years ago….”
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)
@inthehands Or the lessons from Microsoft's Tay about how terrible things can get, how quickly.
Paul Cantrell
@Itty53
Aw, thanks! For me they are sort of a form of primal scream therapy in complete sentence, so I’m puzzled but pleased that people seem to enjoy them.
Theodore Painsworth
Just wanted to pause this morning and express how much I love reading your posts.
Paul Cantrell
@jmeowmeow bUt THiS tiME iT’s DifFeREnT
McNulla
@thecorodon @inthehands
CEOs are compensated for making wrong decisions too. Maybe we should have AI CEOs?
The Corodon
@inthehands
It can be hard but you could think--one well might!--that difficult calls like that are why CEOs receive above-average compensation.
Paul Cantrell
@mcnulla @thecorodon
Honestly their jobs as performed in reality seem a whole lot more suitable for replacement with LLMs than programmers, lawyers, or folks taking support calls
Paul Cantrell
@KeithAmmann @mcnulla @thecorodon
By “jobs as performed,” I meant that training them on the decisions made by human CEOs might at least produce results of similar quality.
Keith Ammann @ PAX Unplugged
@mcnulla @thecorodon @inthehands Not if they're trained on the choices made by human CEOs.
Paul Cantrell
@thecorodon @mcnulla
Yeah…unlike, say, blockchain, there really is a “there” there with the current generation of AI. Your detection / generation distinction is a helpful heuristic, as is “Is it OK if the output is kinda bullshit?” But AI in its current state is new, it's going to spending a long time thwarting our intuitions before we get competent at figuring out what it’s good for.
The Corodon
@inthehands @mcnulla
I mean snark aside, AIs seem to show genuine promise in *identifying* patterns rather than *generating* then (e.g. reading mammograms). I assume it could have useful potential as a diagnostic tool in business as well.
But CEOs will have to adapt to this new normal by finding ways to differentiate their offerings from an algorithmic application of MBA principles and oh darn there's that snark again.
Tormod Halvorsen
"Over-estimate me at your own peril" - AI
Paul Cantrell
Obviously the investment horizons companies are looking at are far longer, even in their happy imaginations, but I’m still feeling unreasonably smug about my entire thread above reading this from @maxkennerly (whose comment is spot on):
https://mstdn.social/@maxkennerly/111217003025012436
Paul Cantrell
@BTowersCoding Yeah, that was a careless shorthand on my part. If only.
Bobbi Towers
@inthehands I really wish it were only CEOs.
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