My tech friends and I cannot wait for this agentic bubble to pop. Much like the dotcom bubble, there's absolutely value in AI but the hype is absurd and is actively hurting investments into reasonable things (like just good UX).
The hype and zealotry remind me of a cult. And as I go higher up the chain at my big tech company, the more culty they are in their beliefs. And the less they believe AI can do their specific jobs, and the less they have actually tried to use AI beyond badly summarizing documents they barely read before.
AI, as far as I can tell, has been a net negative for humans. It's made labor cheaper, answers less reliable, reduced the value we placed on creativity and professionals in general, allows mass disinformation, and mostly results in people being lazier and not learning the basics of anything. There are of course spots of brightness, but the hype bubble needs to burst so we can move on.
My belief that's kind of settling in after a few years of observation is that I absolutely believe the "hype" claim that AI is a force multiplier. However, lots of things out there are terrible and shouldn't be force multiplied (spam, phishing, scams, etc) or say like, people that are very bad at their jobs. If people like this's output is multiplied, it clearly can and will be very bad. I have seen this play out at a small scale already on some teams I've worked with.
For the maybe ~1-5% of people out there that have something valuable to contribute (that's my number, and I fully believe it) then I think it can be good, but those types also seem to be the most wary of it.
What depresses me is all these people that are leading us with these stupid decisions re: AI will get bonuses and promotions after the bubble pops. All the useless effort getting AI everywhere will be forgotten, no one will care or remember the idiotic decisions and we will all be chasing the new new thing.
Sincerity will not win in the end. VC money and the quest for insurmountable tech driven cash flows is what drives everything. The age of software being driven by sincere engineers trying to build is dead outside niche projects.
The hype and zealotry remind me of a cult. And as I go higher up the chain at my big tech company, the more culty they are in their beliefs. And the less they believe AI can do their specific jobs, and the less they have actually tried to use AI beyond badly summarizing documents they barely read before.
AI, as far as I can tell, has been a net negative for humans. It's made labor cheaper, answers less reliable, reduced the value we placed on creativity and professionals in general, allows mass disinformation, and mostly results in people being lazier and not learning the basics of anything. There are of course spots of brightness, but the hype bubble needs to burst so we can move on.