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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

I particpated in the personal computer boom of the 1980's and remember mainframe guys who were the establishment saying the same thing about personal computers.

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AI is starting in a much easier business environment, where so much data is online and things can be done by APIs which would’ve required moving paper around in the 80s, but it seems like we’re still missing the clear wins PCs had almost immediately in the 80s. Tons of small businesses were eying spreadsheets or accounting apps, engineers not working in the PC space and scientists saw immediate productivity wins, authors and journalists were all over word processors, etc.

There are some wins from AI now but it’s kind of telling how companies like Microsoft have to trick customers into paying for it with changes to their plans because there just aren’t enough people seeing real value to the point where they’re jumping to pay more for it.

What are MS, Google, and today's other massive LLM-boosters if not "the establishment?"

Citibank and Merck exectives are the establishment. MS, Google are the providers. Microsoft became a trillion dollar company by selling software for personal computers, which establishment types at the time were skeptical of.

"People were wrong once and now everyone who says something vaguely similar about a related topic has to be wrong, forever"

I didn't say that so nice strawman. My point is C-suite executives are often wrong about new technology. They are inherently conservative.

It seems to me that the numbers don't lie. Either the tool is producing value (additional revenue, fewer costs) in excess of its cost, or it isn't. I don't think you need to be adept at technology to make that evaluation.

Numbers don't lie if your instrumentation is measuring the contributions of new technology accurately. The productivity gains of middle managers using personal computers, often at home bought out of personal funds, didn't show up at first either. Managers bought home computers to do spreadsheets to make their jobs easier. Those productivity gains were eventually measured.

This is a reductionist perspective that is unhelpful. Does buying a water cooler in the office increase profit margins? What about a coffee machine? Across a wide portfolio of decisions, a business does need to be profitable. However measuring the individual impact of single vendors is often a very difficult task.

How do you measure developer productivity? Code quality? Developer happiness? As far as I know, no one in the industry can put concrete numbers to these things. This makes it basically impossible to answer the question you pose.

The survey was about operational costs and revenue. Water cooler and coffee machine manufacturers don't market their products to be "smarter than people in many ways" and "able to significantly amplify the output of people using them"[1]. If these claims are true, then surely relying on this technology should bring both lower operational costs, since human labor is expensive, and an increase in revenue, since the superhuman intelligence and significantly amplified output of humans using these tools should produce higher quality products and benefits across the board.

There are of course many factors at play here, and a substantial percentage of CEOs report a positive RoI, but the fact that a majority don't shouldn't be dismissed on the basis of this being difficult to measure.

[1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

Ping me when coffee machines ceo ask for 7 trillion dollars

But… it’s the C-suite executives who are pushing this stuff…

One source: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/ceos-say-ai-is-makin...

Bush Jr. was president twice and it wasn't that bad, so having the same Republican president twice will not be a problem.

Just say you hate AI and hope it fails. It's cleaner.

I absolutely reject your premise here. I feel like Bush Jr. is very responsible for the state of the world we're in right now. You can track back a whole lot of policies and erosion of democratic norms in our system directly to his administrations.

Or the fact we are woefully unprepared for a peer conflict. We wasted how many trillions in the middle east? We cancelled how many modernization programs to fund counter insurgency programs instead?

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