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Enterprise Philosophy and The First Wave of AI – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Benioff isn’t talking about making employees more productive, but rather companies; the verb that applies to employees is “augmented”, which sounds much nicer than “replaced”; the ultimate goal is stated as well: business results.
Reading this article will definitely spike your blood pressure. But it’s key to understanding why the AI Bubble is likely to last a long while. Analysts and investors truly believe:
- That “AI” agents will reach human performance
- That they’ll be able to displace the workforce en masse
- Huge profits will follow, despite all the mass unemployment and unrest
Each of these is implausible on its own. Together they’re a fantasy. But it shows why they’re willing to lose billions upon billions in the short run: it’ll let them get rid of the rest of us from the economy.
The rest
- “Y Combinator is being criticized after it backed an AI startup that admits it basically cloned another AI startup | TechCrunch”. “PearAI originally slapped its own made-up closed license on it, called the Pear Enterprise License, which Pan admitted was written by ChatGPT.”
- “US Court Rules: Marvel and DC Lose Their ‘Superhero’ Trademark - Play A Sci Fi”. If you ever wondered why a lot of movies, series, and comics use terms like “meta” or something even more awkward, this trademark was part of the reason. That they lose it now, largely due to their own legal missteps, just as the public seems to be losing interest in the genre, is kinda funny.
- “Don’t believe the hype: AGI is far from inevitable | Radboud University”
- “Web components are okay | Read the Tea Leaves”. “So obviously I’m going to be interested when I see a post from Ryan Carniato on web components. And it’s a thought-provoking post! But I also think he misses the mark on a few things.” This is the counterargument I’ve been waiting for
- “Two-Sigma Tutoring: Separating Science Fiction from Science Fact - Education Next”. “It’s a little odd, isn’t it? If these three individuals—two of them just starting their research careers—really discovered a way to raise students’ test scores by two standard deviations, why didn’t they do more with it?”
- ““It’s not too late to save the planet” - Catholic news – La Croix International”. ‘Our planet is in a deplorable state, facing an unprecedented crisis. I want to provoke a real sense of panic in my readers because, to my great regret, the vast majority of the world’s population is not panicking at all while “our house is on fire.”’
- “Rare Photographs of a Shirtless Christopher Reeve Working Out for His Role of “Superman” in 1977 ~ Vintage Everyday”
- “Google Online Security Blog: Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities at the Source”. “The problem is overwhelmingly with new code, necessitating a fundamental change in how we develop code.”
- “The Human Cost Of Our AI-Driven Future”. “Many moderators report symptoms of post-traumatic stress and vicarious trauma: nightmares, flashbacks and severe anxiety are common.”
- “Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants | CIO”. “Many developers say AI coding assistants make them more productive, but a recent study set forth to measure their output and found no significant gains. Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study from Uplevel, a company providing insights from coding and collaboration data.” Like I’ve been saying for a while, feeling productive is not the same as being productive.
- “The Other Bubble”. “The reason I’ve spent so much energy explaining this is because I want you to know why so much business software fucking sucks.” Ed writes about what has been my obsession for many years: software quality and business outcomes are increasingly disconnected.
- “How Capitalism Incentivizes the Destruction of Art”. “Now what is considered popular cinema has narrowed so much that Austin Butler got called pretentious for calling The Good, The Bad and The Ugly his favorite movie when he was a kid.”
- “Adactio: Journal—The datalist element on iOS”. Working around Apple Safari bugs is annoying. It’s one thing to deal with unsupported standards. Feature detection and progressive enhancement works fine for that. But this sort of bullshit is… well, bullshit.
- “279904 – Upon upgrading to iOS 18, on-screen keyboard does not show up for installed web apps (PWAs) when focusing a text input of any kind”. Judging from bugs like this one and many of the reports on bugs in iOS and macOS over the past couple of years, it really does sound like software dev at Apple has become really dysfunctional and that quality is in a deep deep hole.
- “OpenAI’s slow-motion train wreck - by Gary Marcus”. “Investors shouldn’t be pouring more money at higher valuations, they should be asking what is going on.”
- “The Internet’s AI Slop Problem Is Only Going to Get Worse”
- “Introducing TODS – a typographic and OpenType default stylesheet | Clagnut by Richard Rutter”
- “Thoughts on Debugging”. “Debugging skills are not difficult to practice, but they are counter intuitive to learn and easy to be relegated.”
- “A radical idea”. “In the tech discourse we need to stop thinking and talking about things that do not exist.”