Or do they just take what marketing people say about the tools at face value? Because they seem genuinely surprised that people don’t like the tools, when even the most ardent AI enthusiasts I’ve seen that use the tools are well aware of their limitations.
Yes they absolutely do. They love it because it takes away all of the excuses of “this is too difficult or time consuming” from all of their underlings, so they think. What do you mean it takes you a week to write this highly technical document, just ask Gemini I did and it did it in seconds. What do you mean it will take you 2 months to write that application, just use Claude I did and it took me an hour. What do you mean it will take you 4 weeks to talk to customers and gather requirements, just ask ChatGPT I did and it took minutes.
And they aren’t wrong you CAN do those things and you will get some output. What they fail to recognize is that output might be wrong, or missing important details, or missing functionality that they don’t realize is important, or won’t get you to an innovative solution, etc. They see an output and assume it must be the correct output so everyone saying to do it the right way must be sandbagging.
What will happen over time as more and more of the world is run off the back of stuff built mostly by AI is that those cracks will start growing and growing, the experts who catch them and fix them before they become real issues will become fewer and further between, and eventually it’s going to all come crashing down.
AI is speed running the collapse of capitalism. Ridiculous investment into something that is obviously completely unsustainable is capitalism’s MO and AI exemplifies this on an unprecedented scale. But execs don’t think about that or care about that, they want to slam AI into everything so they can cash out as fast as possible. They have no interest in “can this application still be valuable in 10 years” or “will this document be useful in 5 years” or whatever they care about “can I cash my company out into the AI investment bubble before it pops and I’m left holding the bag.”
I suspect many executives know this but you’ll never hear them say it because they are not incentivized to be honest. The sooner they can cash out of the bubble the better and they won’t do that if they don’t buy into it to begin with.
It’s the fundamental flaw of capitalism laid bare; capitalism is not interested in production, it is interested in profit. AI is largely an accelerator of profit, not production, and that’s why it is being so heavily pushed by the capital class.
I don’t know if this is fully the case - there are tons of people who are already sitting on a dragon’s hoard who are yeeting significant chunks of it into AI investments. They could’ve cashed out if they wanted, but like the story with the monkey and the coconut, they can’t let go of enough to get their paws back out. I think there are some who genuinely believe this is an opportunity to deal away with the proletariat and all of the headaches its existence causes and will spend mountains of cash in pursuit of the techno utopia where it’s just rich people and robots.