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Is it really a bad thing that people are trying crazy stuff? This is a new technology that people don't fully understand. Yeah, most of these AI features and co

Is it really a bad thing that people are trying crazy stuff? This is a new technology that people don't fully understand. Yeah, most of these AI features and companies will die, and I'm sure the investors know that, they're just gambling on being in the 1% that survives. In the end we will have learned some good lessons on how to apply this tech instead of having it waste away in Google or Microsoft's closet.

photonthug 2y ago
> Is it really a bad thing that people are trying crazy stuff? There's a major difference between different kinds of "crazy new stuff". One kind is things that are just beyond the current frontier, and things people obviously kind of want, like say self-driving cars. It's another thing if we're talking about haphazardly bolting the new hotness in a distracting, pointless, or detrimental manner onto every single tech stack in the entire world, regardless of whether people actually want it, and regardless of whether it hurts end-users. Lots of the current activity with AI is clearly more in the 2nd category than the 1st. In terms of end-users, things like job searches, home/apartment searches, loan applications, college admissions, etc are just a few of the most obvious examples where things are about to get muuuuuch worse for almost everyone (and it was already kind of awful). Businesses/institutions generally don't care about end-users of course, but I would argue that it won't really help them either. It will just become another very large cost of doing business in the modern world, something you have to do to even be involved, similar to marketing/advertising/legal-council and the rest of the boring-but-necessary overhead. A necessary evil but one with very ambiguous ROI.
- zeroCalories 2y ago
  I don't agree that there is a distinction in the types of innovation you describe. We don't know how AI will be applied 10 years from now, shis isn't even really a tech question, it's a product question.

photonthug 2y ago

> Is it really a bad thing that people are trying crazy stuff? There's a major difference between different kinds of "crazy new stuff". One kind is things that are just beyond the current frontier, and things people obviously kind of want, like say self-driving cars. It's another thing if we're talking about haphazardly bolting the new hotness in a distracting, pointless, or detrimental manner onto every single tech stack in the entire world, regardless of whether people actually want it, and regardless of whether it hurts end-users. Lots of the current activity with AI is clearly more in the 2nd category than the 1st. In terms of end-users, things like job searches, home/apartment searches, loan applications, college admissions, etc are just a few of the most obvious examples where things are about to get muuuuuch worse for almost everyone (and it was already kind of awful). Businesses/institutions generally don't care about end-users of course, but I would argue that it won't really help them either. It will just become another very large cost of doing business in the modern world, something you have to do to even be involved, similar to marketing/advertising/legal-council and the rest of the boring-but-necessary overhead. A necessary evil but one with very ambiguous ROI.

zeroCalories 2y ago
I don't agree that there is a distinction in the types of innovation you describe. We don't know how AI will be applied 10 years from now, shis isn't even really a tech question, it's a product question.