I see a lot of similarities between "AI", as understood by business people, and the pursuit of alchemy and the philosophers stone. It seems like a hustle to separate rich dupes from their money by promising them the keys to infinite wealth, immortality, mars colonys, etc. In that respect it is mostly harmless but it can be quite dangerous to the people who take it seriously.
I don't understand why people so seldomly go straight for the knowledge. It seems pretty obvious by now that knowledge is the key itself. Though subjective sciences like Kabbalah help.
This is a tired trope, that “business people” are brainless and gullible. Almost as tired as the “VCs are so dumb they’ll throw money at anything-AI” idea repeated in the article.
Maybe, just maybe, the people running multi-billion-dollar companies, and multi-billion-dollar investment funds, are not stupid?
It would be much more interesting and productive to discuss what they see in AI and why they feel so much urgency, rather than dismissing them as fools falling for magic.
I can only speak for managers I have met: what they “see” is a promise of cost cutting and an opportunity to tell higher managers that they are ahead of the hype. But never, ever, have I seen one of these people say anything that suggests they have even a vague idea of what AI or ML is or what it can realistically achieve. And I’m not sure they are interested. Because as you say - they aren’t stupid - I just think they are part of a game of BS I don’t understand, involving higher managers, investors etc.
I don’t think it’s so much about about producing anything using AI, it’s AI for the sake of saying you are using it.
So perhaps not all fools but somewhere between con artist, willfully ignorant and fool.
(Note: this is all from “traditional” industry, I.e the manager at the hammer factory proudly launching initiatives to “use more AI” in the factory. Not tech industry. Not plausible or concrete use of AI)
You are repeating the trope, just substituting “stupid” with other deriding terms: BS, con artist, willfully ignorant, fool...
Does it really have to be those things just because you don’t understand it? Is it possible those people running multi-billion-dollar organizations just know something you don’t, or have a perspective that you don’t?
> Is it possible those people running multi-billion-dollar organizations just know something you don’t, or have a perspective that you don’t?
While it is possible, I'm kind of tired of hearing people defending the strong and powerful. And I'm kind of tired of hearing the perspective of CEOs. It's pretty much all we hear in fact.
People 'running multi-billion-dollar organizations' are like the greek gods to us: capricious, arbitrary, and powerful, but also subject to the same flaws as normal people.
However, they do have one great privilege: that of being completely above the effects of their actions.
They don't need people to defend them. The whole damn system is designed to adulate them. We 'pray' to these people very day without realizing it.
Updated my answer: these are middle managers such as division or site managers not the top managers of the billion dollar corporations (who might well have great visions but it’s not on them to implement it.). As I clarified, these projcects are always vague initiatives such as “use more ai in our process” or downright marketing stupidity such as “joe, I need you to work AI into the description of our latest hammer model”. Again this is old, traditional industry.
Sounds like a great opportunity to provide value and charge accordingly.
Baking off-the-shelf anomaly detection into the hammer QA process might seem easy and “not true AI” to us, but it solves their problem. Maybe you can even educate them in the process, and explain the differences between AI, ML, DL, different use cases and methods, libraries, etc. I suspect, though, they won’t care because they just want to hit their business goals.
You are right that successful business people are on the whole pretty intelligent. This isn’t always true of investors as individuals, but investment management tends to be reasonable smart too; some very much so.
I think FOMO is a real part of the cycle that causes a lot of bets to be made on untried technologies. Technologists might well reflect on how many of those bets are hedges, and what the true cost of failures are.
It’s also worth noting that a significant chunk of the most egregious bullshit I see flung around in the area is coming from technologist driven startups in the space...
