No surprises. AI is not a technology solution. Its a people solution. It can do work faster, but requires so much more validation. The result is a shift down the funnel with no change in productivity. Since AI accounts cost money per head a 0 increase in productivity is a large net negative for business customers.
The main point I got from this article was the necessity to change "how wet do things" to make them compatible with AI.
Where I work, information is spread over a lot of different systems: Slack, Confluence, DevOps, SharePoint, a separate support/ticketing system. It's easier and less time consuming for me, following my current process, to write descriptions, acceptance criteria, and release notes from source material, and then just get AI to tweak the wording a bit, than it is to compile it all into a single "unit" for AI to then do each stage individually as a first pass.
If our documentation was more centralised / organised on a single system, then it would work much better. But that migration ain't never gonna happen in a reasonable time frame.
I'm working on an ideas or two to compile things temporarily, but that also takes additional time.
All these things take time and planning, which is rarely factored in. Just do it! Just use AI!
I should also point out that I know a teacher who uses it to greatly improve productivity in writing reports: Give it the main points that should be made about a child's learning, then let the AI write the words that join those bits together. The results have apparently been great, and has taken a fair bit of stress out of the report writing process.
It looks like the AI "boom" will be a net-negative for society. So much money spent, so much water and power wasted, so much real estate used... All for a solution in search of a problem. Sure, the president of the United States can create and post an image of his self-proclaimed messianic powers, but that's hardly a productive outcome worth the hullabaloo.
IMO this is just what capitalism looks like. We direct resources to whatever seems like it’ll yield the highest returns and force society to eat the externalities. This effect will continue to worsen over time without reform or revolution, until we transition to a more pure oligarchy.
Unfortunately the current admin is pro-oligarchy so expect things to worsen in the immediate future
People who participate in the stock market (which tends to be many people who may even be anti-capitalist) do so in the hope of generating excess returns.
Is this really a function of capitalism or just who humans really are in general? That is to say humans are self interested and desire to maximise their own wealth.
Sure, that’s an observed human behavior. You can also observe altruism, compassion, empathy, etc.
Capitalism is designed to force everyone to maximize personal wealth, because wealth determines resource allocation. Other societies did it or do it differently.
You do not have to 'maximize' your personal wealth and nobody is forced to do so. Many people choose to do so, voluntarily. That's the essence of free markets. It just so happens capitalism not only complements the notion of free markets, but enables more markets to exist than otherwise.
It would be great to give anti-capitalists a forced one year vacation in a paradisiac communist country at the end of the 80's in say Eastern Europe or USSR. To say nothing of life during the "revolution" years in the 20's USSR.
I do feel AI is an amazing technology. It has indeed lowered the bar in coding, learning and writing. But it's not the Terminator technology the CEOs want us to believe.
it may be hard to measure, but it's definitely helping everyone who uses it to be more productive in certain aspects of their work. that's clear to me.
but it might be, say, 20% more productive in 20% of your workday, or 1000% more productive 2 days per month (the days when that perfect dream spec hits your desk that you can just paste into claude and get a slick working system back), which works out to just 4% more productive overall, or whatever, which is hard to measure with all the noise.
in the end companies will pay for these tools because their employees will be demanding them, same as they demand other things that make their workday more pleasant - email, coffee, air conditioning, a conveniently located office, etc.
that said, I see the intelligence itself being rapidly commodified/free. the companies that extract rent in the sector will be the ones that effectively bundle and sell corporate-friendly features with the core intelligence - compliance, tracking, productivity, systems integration, authentication, etc. etc. etc. Which is a competency companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google already possess, so they are likely to win. Plus a weird Euro variant of course.
But growth stall, because competitors will capture future growth. You need to keep up.
Of course I acknowledge if Hersheys uses AI to make trillions of chocolates a second, there is an upper limit on consumption. And hence a limit on revenue.
> But growth stall, because competitors will capture future growth. You need to keep up.
You need to keep up if you follow Silicon Valley business model growth + funding = IPO. Every other business in the world needs revenue and profit to keep the business open, and growth does not necessarily translates into revenue and profit.
I mean, how much of this due to employees dicking around while their AI does the work for them. How many will report to their managers they opted to doom scroll rather than use the productivity gains from AI to do more?
It's interesting to me. I've been reading a lot about sycophancy, psychosis, cognitive surrender, epistemic drift/alienation, system 3 thinking etc. and the conclusion I have inevitably come to is AI is subtly mind fucking a LOT of people with NO exceptions.
Also, to say it changed nothing is humorous, tell that to all the people laid off.
Or in general economy that is not the stock market is starting to look more questionable and that it might be time to prepare for leaner times. Bonus for layoffs making stock market look better.
Ample sources confirm this to be the case. Basically the code quality is so poor the debugging and rework offset all gains into the negative. It's possible that improvements will eventually get those to net positive, but it's not even at net zero yet. https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-...
This is nonsense. I’m sorry. AI will completely upend the workplace and the economy. Whether that’s self evident today in the numbers in the way that we track those numbers, which is based on how things have historically worked, is not relevant. First principles thinking is enough.
C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.
> C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.
This is honestly how I feel about the opposite, it sure would be convenient for capital holders if everything changed and they no longer need to pay employees. They really, really want this to be true, and are pushing it as hard as they can despite reality.
in the first few years of any new technology only highly innovative companies (startups) use it.
people still were using punch cards when tape was invented, and still using tape when floppy’s were invented
and those were relatively small innovations not requiring substantial changes to the work. AI is another ballgame, this makes me more bullish on it than ever.
There are new technologies that don’t go anywhere and then there are new technologies that are useful. Built into your post is the assumption that AI is a new technology that is useful because of the comparison to innovative startups that have benefited from the early adoption of useful new technologies.
However, there are startups that have bet on the wrong technologies and perished, which is not addressed. This is survivorship bias. So if we’re going to have a serious discussion, we need to talk about both sides before anybody should get convinced about being bullish on it.
No surprises. AI is not a technology solution. Its a people solution. It can do work faster, but requires so much more validation. The result is a shift down the funnel with no change in productivity. Since AI accounts cost money per head a 0 increase in productivity is a large net negative for business customers.
The main point I got from this article was the necessity to change "how wet do things" to make them compatible with AI.
Where I work, information is spread over a lot of different systems: Slack, Confluence, DevOps, SharePoint, a separate support/ticketing system. It's easier and less time consuming for me, following my current process, to write descriptions, acceptance criteria, and release notes from source material, and then just get AI to tweak the wording a bit, than it is to compile it all into a single "unit" for AI to then do each stage individually as a first pass.
If our documentation was more centralised / organised on a single system, then it would work much better. But that migration ain't never gonna happen in a reasonable time frame.
I'm working on an ideas or two to compile things temporarily, but that also takes additional time.
All these things take time and planning, which is rarely factored in. Just do it! Just use AI!
I should also point out that I know a teacher who uses it to greatly improve productivity in writing reports: Give it the main points that should be made about a child's learning, then let the AI write the words that join those bits together. The results have apparently been great, and has taken a fair bit of stress out of the report writing process.
It looks like the AI "boom" will be a net-negative for society. So much money spent, so much water and power wasted, so much real estate used... All for a solution in search of a problem. Sure, the president of the United States can create and post an image of his self-proclaimed messianic powers, but that's hardly a productive outcome worth the hullabaloo.
If it increases renewable energy production, then it could still end up as a net-benefit for society, once it collapses.
IMO this is just what capitalism looks like. We direct resources to whatever seems like it’ll yield the highest returns and force society to eat the externalities. This effect will continue to worsen over time without reform or revolution, until we transition to a more pure oligarchy.
Unfortunately the current admin is pro-oligarchy so expect things to worsen in the immediate future
People who participate in the stock market (which tends to be many people who may even be anti-capitalist) do so in the hope of generating excess returns.
Is this really a function of capitalism or just who humans really are in general? That is to say humans are self interested and desire to maximise their own wealth.
Sure, that’s an observed human behavior. You can also observe altruism, compassion, empathy, etc.
Capitalism is designed to force everyone to maximize personal wealth, because wealth determines resource allocation. Other societies did it or do it differently.
That's nonsense.
You do not have to 'maximize' your personal wealth and nobody is forced to do so. Many people choose to do so, voluntarily. That's the essence of free markets. It just so happens capitalism not only complements the notion of free markets, but enables more markets to exist than otherwise.
You can't have it both ways.
It would be great to give anti-capitalists a forced one year vacation in a paradisiac communist country at the end of the 80's in say Eastern Europe or USSR. To say nothing of life during the "revolution" years in the 20's USSR.
It amuses me that capitalists are so uncreative. The Soviet approach didn’t work well, so you’re all out of ideas.
Some parts of the article makes me feel that it too, is AI generated. Just a smell.
"They’re reporting feelings, not findings." "That’s not measurement. That’s decoration."
I do feel AI is an amazing technology. It has indeed lowered the bar in coding, learning and writing. But it's not the Terminator technology the CEOs want us to believe.
it may be hard to measure, but it's definitely helping everyone who uses it to be more productive in certain aspects of their work. that's clear to me.
but it might be, say, 20% more productive in 20% of your workday, or 1000% more productive 2 days per month (the days when that perfect dream spec hits your desk that you can just paste into claude and get a slick working system back), which works out to just 4% more productive overall, or whatever, which is hard to measure with all the noise.
in the end companies will pay for these tools because their employees will be demanding them, same as they demand other things that make their workday more pleasant - email, coffee, air conditioning, a conveniently located office, etc.
that said, I see the intelligence itself being rapidly commodified/free. the companies that extract rent in the sector will be the ones that effectively bundle and sell corporate-friendly features with the core intelligence - compliance, tracking, productivity, systems integration, authentication, etc. etc. etc. Which is a competency companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google already possess, so they are likely to win. Plus a weird Euro variant of course.
Not true after Dec-Feb. Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.4 are real.
If you use AI to ship more features, even your competitors are going to use AI to ship more.
So is this how we increase productivity?
Who captures the value? For now looks like the chip makers and model makers.
But growth stall, because competitors will capture future growth. You need to keep up.
Of course I acknowledge if Hersheys uses AI to make trillions of chocolates a second, there is an upper limit on consumption. And hence a limit on revenue.
> But growth stall, because competitors will capture future growth. You need to keep up.
You need to keep up if you follow Silicon Valley business model growth + funding = IPO. Every other business in the world needs revenue and profit to keep the business open, and growth does not necessarily translates into revenue and profit.
[dead]
I mean, how much of this due to employees dicking around while their AI does the work for them. How many will report to their managers they opted to doom scroll rather than use the productivity gains from AI to do more?
It's interesting to me. I've been reading a lot about sycophancy, psychosis, cognitive surrender, epistemic drift/alienation, system 3 thinking etc. and the conclusion I have inevitably come to is AI is subtly mind fucking a LOT of people with NO exceptions.
Also, to say it changed nothing is humorous, tell that to all the people laid off.
Well, the job losses are blamed on "AI", but we all know that's just a convenient excuse to correct for over-hiring.
Or in general economy that is not the stock market is starting to look more questionable and that it might be time to prepare for leaner times. Bonus for layoffs making stock market look better.
Studies to date suggest an 18% productivity loss from AI use. I think we'are at the point where we can call it a scam.
For code that cannot be true or it somehow amplifies the fact that most programmers were/are terrible anyway and now they can be 10-50x as terrible?
Most software engineers are terrible, probably more than half are net negative in the grand scheme.
I would argue this extends to most white collar positions. It's not simple to solve.
Ample sources confirm this to be the case. Basically the code quality is so poor the debugging and rework offset all gains into the negative. It's possible that improvements will eventually get those to net positive, but it's not even at net zero yet. https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-...
Roughly the same was true for computers and internet for years and/or decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
This is nonsense. I’m sorry. AI will completely upend the workplace and the economy. Whether that’s self evident today in the numbers in the way that we track those numbers, which is based on how things have historically worked, is not relevant. First principles thinking is enough.
C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.
> C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.
This is honestly how I feel about the opposite, it sure would be convenient for capital holders if everything changed and they no longer need to pay employees. They really, really want this to be true, and are pushing it as hard as they can despite reality.
lol is that you Sam?
in the first few years of any new technology only highly innovative companies (startups) use it.
people still were using punch cards when tape was invented, and still using tape when floppy’s were invented
and those were relatively small innovations not requiring substantial changes to the work. AI is another ballgame, this makes me more bullish on it than ever.
There are new technologies that don’t go anywhere and then there are new technologies that are useful. Built into your post is the assumption that AI is a new technology that is useful because of the comparison to innovative startups that have benefited from the early adoption of useful new technologies.
However, there are startups that have bet on the wrong technologies and perished, which is not addressed. This is survivorship bias. So if we’re going to have a serious discussion, we need to talk about both sides before anybody should get convinced about being bullish on it.
Reasoning by analogy only works if the characteristics that comprise both things are shared in great magnitude.
If you really believe that then… lol.