Nikhil Suresh on Lucidity:
Executives and directors from around the world have called me to say that they can’t fund any projects if they don’t pretend there is AI in them. Non-profits have asked me if we could pretend to do AI because it’s the only way to fund infrastructure in the developing world. Readers keep emailing me to say that their contracts are getting cancelled because someone smooth-talked their CEO into believing that they don’t need developers. I was miraculously allowed onto some mandated “Professional Development for Board Members on AI” panel hosted by the Financial Times, alongside people like Yahoo’s former CDO, and the preparation consisted of being informed repeatedly that the audience has no idea what AI does but is scared they’ll be fired or sued if they don’t buy it.
I talk with programmers that are worth their salt on a weekly basis, and one of the most frequently expressed “I got a bad feeling about this drop” forebodings revolves around the concern that all this AI hyperflation will balloon our technical debt and make vital infrastructures even more vulnerable than they already are, and will do so soon. The claim that AI coding assistant tools can be helpful when the stars are right is true; there are people close to me who work with it for their personal or academic projects. But I’m getting tired mentioning that, as it amounts to maintaining that fertilizers do spur growth so everybody should eat shit three times a day.
Suresh again:
I wish, oh how I wish that it was like other hype cycles, but presumably not many people were walking around saying that smartphones are going to solve physics and usher in the end of all human labor, real things Sam Altman has said.
And of course the price will be paid by us, you and me, not by the hard-boiled grifters, and not by the titanically overpaid extraction class CEOs as the ancien régime of our time.