On point article, and I'm sure it represents a common sentiment, even if it's an undercurrent to the hype machine ideology.<p>It is quite hard to find a place which works on AI solutions where a sincere, sober gaze would find anything resembling the benefits promised to users and society more broadly.<p>On the "top level" the underlying hope is that a paradigm shift for the good will happen in society, if we only let collective greed churn for X more years. It's like watering weeds hoping that one day you'll wake up in a beautiful flower garden.<p>On the "low level", the pitch is more sincere: we'll boost process X, optimize process Y, shave off %s of your expenses (while we all wait for the flower garden to appear). "AI" is latching on like a parasitic vine on existing, often parasitic workflows.<p>The incentives are often quite pragmatic, coated in whatever lofty story one ends up telling themselves (nowadays, you can just outsource it anyway).<p>It's not all that bleak, I do think there's space for good to be done, and the world is still a place one can do well for oneself and others (even using AI, why not). We should cherish that.<p>But one really ought to not worry about disregarding the sales pitch. It's fine to think the popular world is crazy, and who cares if you are a luddite in "their" eyes. And imo, we should avoid the two delusional extremes:
1. The flower garden extreme
2. The AI doomer extreme<p>In a way, both of these are similar in that they demote personal and collective agency from the throne, and enthrone an impersonal "force of progress". And they restrict one's attention to this supposedly innate teleology in technological development, to the detriment of the actual conditions we are in and how we deal with them. It's either a delusional intoxication or a way of coping: since things are already set in motion, all I can do is do... whatever, I guess.<p>I'm not sure how far one can take AI in principle, but I really don't think whatever power it could have will be able to come to expression in the world we live in, in the way people think of it. We have people out there actively planning war, thinking they are doing good. The well-off countries are facing housing, immigration and general welfare problems. To speak nothing of the climate.<p>Before the outbreak of WWI, we had invented the Haber-Bosch process, which greadly improved our food production capabilities. A couple years later, WWI broke out, and the same person who worked on fertilizers also ended up working on chemical warfware development.<p>Assuming that "AI" can somehow work outside of the societal context it exists in, causing significant phase shifts, is like being in 1910, thinking all wars will be ended because we will have gotten <i>that</i> much more efficient at producing food. There will be enough for everyone! This is especially ironic when the output of AI systems has been far more abstract and ephemeral.