I just saw a post on Reddit about how the jobs of CEOs could easily be replaced with AI. While I disagree, I found it interesting in that it if it were true, it would be a turning point in the adoption. It’s easy for a CEO right now to say we need AI and drop a bunch of jobs, replacing them with AI, but if the roles were reversed and their own jobs were at stake they would surely change their tunes. It made me think: it’s time for me to talk about AI.

I’m an engineer, so my experience so far is that it has been impacting our jobs. Hiring has been slow and layoffs are still taking place at large companies. This is all while they are making record profits; it’s pure greed. As an engineer, I’ve seen the result of using AI in day to day tasks – it’s been disastrous. I contracted with 2 companies recently that heavily relied on AI, because they could barely code. The first company’s code was… dog shit. It was messy, overly complex, and buggy as hell. The second company spent 6 months with about 8 engineers and they had to show was a few screens, that weren’t complete. The last one was funny because they were proud of their accomplishments. Both companies are about a year in, the first being part of YC (which blows my mind) and neither have anything to show or any customers.

AI as not accelerated their growth, but actually was responsible for a failure to launch.

Almost any MVP should be accomplishable in 3 month or so, I’ve rarely seen an exception.

AI is good for a few things. It can generate ideas, images, and some video. It can help recognize patterns. It can summarize and extra data. And I think that’s about it. But there’s some nuance. It’s not perfect at any of those things. If you watch the lectures at Stanford about AI (that are free for anyone) they clearly say we must accept it’s imperfect. Can we use it to generate some images for a Youtube thumbnail? Sure. Is that what we want to drive our cars? Maybe, if it is better than humans, who are also imperfect. Do we want it to determine who gets an interview? Probably not, that’s just a dick move. Do we want it to write our code that thousands rely on? Absolutely not, customers need stability in the tools they use. Do we want it to be our search engine? Hell no. Google has been telling people to eat rocks.

The last point is particularly concerning. People rely on their smart phones to be able to get them answers they need quickly. It’s doubtful that people will actually eat rocks, but how will it impact things like politics as it hallucinates and pulls points from theonion.com? Disastrous. Absolutely disastrous.

With all of the controversy as of late I think the cracks are starting to show themselves to the world. It will take some time for the hype die down. If I had to guess we will have 2 more years of this dystopian nightmare for things to start to return to normal. I’m not saying it will just die, it has it’s place. People will just have to learn what it is and is not good for. Whatever it is used for it has to be acceptable for a large margin of error, or there then has to be human oversight. It’s a tool, people. It doesn’t replace people, it should augment or automate ours tasks. If you find it useful for something then use it, but you’re going to be upset if you were an NFT bro and jumped onto the AI train after that scam’s bubble was burst, hoping this would be the next big thing. It is, but it cannot replace everything. My advice is don’t make it your identity, you will end up holding “millions of dollars worth” of NFTs all over again.