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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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