a rude awakening

“It might be down to the time of year; it’s always quieter in the summer months but it feels a bit different right now.

Firstly, it feels like there has been a BIG pause because of ChatGPT and other LLMs. It feels like people are still getting their heads round what they can do, their effectiveness, quality, etc. And when they do look at it, they don’t ‘get’ how they’ll use it.” —Andrew Jacobs 2024-08-09

I have witnessed this same malaise in the business world for the past year. If it’s not an AI initiative, it does not get any attention. The bad and the ugly aspects of this new flavour of machine learning are dominating the IT sector and all it touches. Here are some recent examples shared in our community of practice.

From Burnout to Balance: AI-Enhanced Work Models

However, this new technology [generative AI] has not yet fully delivered on this productivity promise: Nearly half (47%) of employees using AI say they have no idea how to achieve the productivity gains their employers expect, and 77% say these tools have actually decreased their productivity and added to their workload.

AI models are being blocked from fresh data — except the trash

As AI crawlers are increasingly blocked from high-quality news sites, they’ll turn to low-quality sites and fill up on garbage and misinformation — and that’s what they’ll be spitting out.

AI-obsessed bosses are about to get a rude awakening

The railway mania of the 1840s left behind new infrastructure. The fibre boom of the 1990s connected the world. There was barely a blip before those assets were being used again.

But spending $1 trillion on data centres will look very foolish in a few year’s time when chips are four generations more powerful. This is capital incineration on a vast scale. Fear of losing out has driven the industry insane.

The rude awakening cannot come soon enough, so we can address the many complex challenges facing all organizations today. The reversal described in the image below may be just around the corner.

I looked at Gen AI using McLuhan’s media tetrad, which states that every medium:

extends a human property,

obsolesces the previous medium (& often makes it a luxury good),

retrieves a much older medium, &

reverses its properties when pushed to its limits

Generative Al

EXTENDS each voice & thought — mimics creativity

OBSOLESCES human thinking & writing — bullshit by design

RETRIEVES 19th century imperialism — Neo-feudalism

REVERSES into one more bubble burst — collapsed data-centres