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Comment by ryaniscool | Hacker News Reader

Yes, people can be bad at their jobs. Yes, they can work in an industry and not know anything about the market but I refuse to believe that most people in most companies are just stumbling around faking it. I've never worked in a place like that. People like this exist but there are only a handful of people like this at every job.

The hyperbole feels like it's been contrived to fit into the classic AI counterpoint: But humans do this too!

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It's more nuanced than that - I never said faking it, people usually believe what they write in those documents/ppts. And they do actually sound clever. Next time you see a decision of any magnitude, especially something which sounds "strategic" - trace the decision back as far as you can, consider the question from several angles, and really question it. You will see gaping holes, decisions made using "frameworks", anecdotes, hopes and dreams.

I can't argue that people don't always consider every possible angle and nth-order consequence to a decision before making it. AI doesn't do this either. Also, this seems different than your original position.

It still sounds like what you're saying is people are bad at decision making so AI isn't doing that much worse than people. That's very bizarre thinking because it opens the door to AI making decisions for us.

I'm saying something even worse - humans are bad at decision making, we usually don't even most of the context required to make good decisions so we use heuristics to make decisions, and proxies for "good decision making".

If the above appears to be bizarre thinking, take a couple extra laps around the block.

Now I'm not saying AI is better, in fact above I mention that it's worse - but don't hold onto some nostalgic idea that decisions were made by people with lots of context thinking rationally and incentivized properly.

It's not counterpoint, it's a fact. Can you say with your hand on your heart that the typical user experience was acceptable before AI arrived?

The reply was always "It's hard, and there are always going to be bugs."

But it's not just about bugs. It's about systems that are hard to use, poorly designed, and opaque. And sometimes the opacity is deliberate. There are dark patterns, outright lies about what happens to data, and more or less obvious grifts.

Was any of this truly great before AI arrived?

Is it an accident that you can't kill an MS365 subscription if you have more than X amount of GB on OneDrive, but the actual usage includes all your spam and email attachments, and it doesn't show up unless you know where to find it, and the location is very non-obvious, and so is the cleanup and deletion process?

Or that the eBay fee structure for international sales is utterly incomprehensible without automated help?

Or that if you select Subscribe and Save on Amazon your cancellation date is something like two weeks before the next delivery?

Or that if you sign up to Discord you need a mobile and an email for activation, but the site doesn't tell you this, and nor do tech support, who insist that a mobile is optional?

And software quality - services down, records lost, records stolen, photos and documents deleted - is a whole other layer on top of that.

AI is a moderately good solution to the first set of problems, because it can search and assemble information far more quickly than you can. So IME it's pretty damn good at tech support - not perfect, but better than DIY in many cases.

Software quality? We'll see what happens. If tech stacks collapse over the next couple of years we'll know AI was terrible thing.

I'm in the 'Too early to tell' camp. There's a fair chance they might. But if so it will be because of poor testing and design, not because of code review or lack of hand-rolled code. And it's not completely clear that quality levels wouldn't have dropped anyway.

> Can you say with your hand on your heart that the typical user experience was acceptable before AI arrived?

I remember using Windows XP (SP3) and Windows 7, Photoshop 7 and CS3, Office 2007, Blender, Winamp, Linuxmint and my computer was a joy to use (with HDD and slow ram)

The internet was mostly a repository of knowledge and communication. I was online maybe 30 minutes every few days. This was around 2010.

AI is here and things don't seem like they are getting any better any faster than they were before. Some people get it wrong and some people get it right...just like before.

Also, you're completely missing my point. The author is talking about his company inadvertantly offloading decision-making to AI. The comment I was responding to was like "Well, it won't do that much worse than people". That type of thinking is a little dangerous to the future of our species.

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