(I just needed to vent somewhere and LinkedIn is full of hope, or hype, I’m not sure which exactly)
AI dream has many faces, but generally speaking it’s a new way to automate stuff, to replace those expensive, slow, ever complaining humans with cheap machines to maximize profits. You can also say it’s the next phase in never ending cycle of internalize/externalize your workforce that we all know. Companies were full of employees before AI came, and notice how many people were lay off in hope they can externalize the work to AI.
Why is the dream that, though?
It’s not about how expensive AI is to run, if the models are good or bad, or if they have somewhere to grow.
It’s simply about how human brain, society and business work.
Few simple rules:
- you cannot learn karate by watching Karate Kid, or even worse let LLM tell you what that movie is about, in nutshell and paraphrased
- just because you are a doorman in a hospital, and know all doctors and where to send someone with their needs, it doesn’t make you a doctor yourself, without the real doctors you cannot do anything
- like every empire, if you start delegating your hard work to someone else, because it’s cheaper and easier, eventually you became the vassal and they become the new empire
Just imagine a company, where everyone starts using Claude for everything, programming, accounting, marketing, business planning and so on. At first, all is great, people have less work, they are socializing more and the work is fun.. Then CEO notices that the programmers are really just prompting AI and juniors have nothing to do, so he let them go and keeps just seniors, seniors become overloaded with dealing with stuff junior would use to learn programming and he starts slipping into approving everything AI generates. Meanwhile, an accountant stopped worrying about the new laws, why would she, she can always ask Claude. CAD people are now just prompting Claude to generate the CAD files, since they don’t use CAD themselves anymore, they don’t notice small errors in the file and CNC machines often break. CEO fired all engineers because Claude was much more effective then them, or so it seemed..
We are five years later, your company is just a shell, because CEO gradually fired almost everyone, they were just typing prompts anyway, so why pay them so much. The meetings are full of “I dont know, I will ask Claude what he thinks, let’s wait what he comes up with”, no one knows anything anymore, not how CAD works, who programmed what, when, why, not even where the code is, all of that was externalized to Claude. The senior developer left the company after a collapse, there are no new programmers to replace him, the company is effectively dead, it has no added value for their customers, it just hangs on one single nail, the AI must be cheap and available.
If you can delegate your work to something else, then I can delegate it as well, I dont need you as a middle man. If I can get rid off you then my customer can get rid off me, so what’s the point of doing any business. We can, of course, start building stone walls, or do carpentry, but then we don’t need AI so AI is dead.
In spring of this year, I was a huge sceptic because I was under influence of tech bros from San Francisco, but now I’m absolutely calm, just waiting this out, getting ready for the post AI era.
