Butlerian Jihad Now!
Majority of people that aren’t out of touch with reality are completely unsurprised.
Instead of looking for other avenues for growth, though, PwC found that executives are worried about falling behind by not leaning into AI enough.
“A small group of companies are already turning AI into measurable financial returns, whilst many others are still struggling to move beyond pilots,” said PwC global chairman Mohamed Kande in a statement. “That gap is starting to show up in confidence and competitiveness, and it will widen quickly for those that don’t act.”
PwC also pointed out that most companies were lacking the “AI foundations, such as clearly defined road maps and sufficient levels of investment” to realize a return.
And I imagine the only reason I’m drowning is that I didn’t bring enough gallons of their energy drink into the sea with me. Wow.
Wait. Wait wait wait. You’re telling me there’s no way to make money from AI Becky videos of huge women falling through unrealistic floors, or 1000kg humans hang-gliding?
Or of weirdly unphysical cats greeting their owners?
Come on. It’s the future bruh
Instead of looking for other avenues for growth, though, PwC found that executives are worried about falling behind by not leaning into AI enough.
These are the people in charge of the economy.
TIL the economy is driven by FOMO.
Always has been
Feels like it kicked into hyper-drive after Bitcoin blew up
It’s called futures. Do you even stonk?
It’s the “sunk cost fallacy”. They’ve already invested so much, that turning back now means a total loss…when success “might be” just around the corner, if they only invest a little more. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Not just sunk cost, they see all this apparent press, writers, business leaders saying they have fantastic results, so obviously they most be doing something wrong.
I have seen it over and over again in tech. People are told that everyone else in the world is doing great with some tech and everyone is so afraid they are “not getting” something they won’t say anything or else they will pretend they also “get it” and it is awesome.
Not even things that have marketing spend behind it, some programming paradigm or whatever. Marketing spend makes it worse, but all by ourselves everyone seems to be afraid to somehow be seen as a clueless Luddite at any second.
It’s really weird when you attend some talk where the guy talks up sonething or another and then in more casual private conversation basically admits straight up that he actually doesn’t see the benefit, but feels like he has to dance the dance.
The mentality of the gambler. There’s a lot of people out there who have this addiction and just aren’t fortunate enough to have lucked into becoming a CEO. That’s how you know it’s a lottery, and being born into riches is a. shortcut.
“Falling behind” is such a bullshit phrase.
In this context or period?
Specifically this context. Like “falling behind in school,” I get. There are grades. Some people do better while some fall behind. It’s a scaler value with a good end and a bad end.
But the AI bros are co-opting the phrase and presupposing that ALL OF TECHNOLOGY is on a linear scale where the good end is more AI shit and the bad end is less AI shit. They’re using a scaler when they should be using a vector.
I’ve mentioned it before on here, but my cousin is taking an AI class in college. He tried to convince my business-owner uncle to let him create an agent for his company’s website so he won’t “fall behind.”
My uncle owns a gas station.
While it’s felt so keenly now, it has always been a part of tech. Some amazing stuff comes out, and thus everything most be amazing and you can’t afford to miss out.
In practice, if the tech is truly that great, then you can catch up real quick after waiting to understand if it is great. But everyone FOMOs constantly.
Haha, alright — I totally understand what you mean. Yet another phrase co-opted by those that would rather spend their time seeming intelligent rather than being intelligent.
A common phrase of mine is, “the truth is, there is no bus driver at the wheel”.
I thought it was Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves driving this thing!
Truly the only group of people worthy of marching us into the sea.
And here is the umpteenth reason to think that C-suites run only on nepotism and empty promises: they’re filled with people who are actively bad at their jobs. But while the rest of us gain skills and hone them to try and make a handful of extra peanuts, the guys in the corner offices get handed jobs by family members or friends, simply because it is their destiny to have it.
And thus they never have to be good at it, and any competition for it is artificial, and you end up with people holding the reins of entire companies who have literally no idea the consequences of their decisions or the impact of their policies.
AI has never delivered a return – at all – and most of these people probably cannot even define how it works or what benefit it is meant to bring, outside of “replace people with machine, bring more $$$, why use more people when less people do trick?”.
Rich people: Debunking the idea that the rich are the smartest since about 10,000 BCE.
What they lack in smarts, they can make up for in selfishness.
And a granny state to bail them out if they lose all their money at the casino.
And caloric value.
Don’t forget psychopathy
Those who advocate for AI the most are the ones who understand it the least.
CEOs aren’t in the positions they hold because they’re qualified to lead corporations. They’re there solely to figure out the best way to exploit workers legally, and illegally without getting caught. Replacing the workforce with LLMs is all they care about. Makes that job a million times easier, even if it isn’t working.
Well a CEO sees something that just generates a wall of text without soul and a tenuous connection to facts, but overwhelmingly confident? As good as the typical CEO then so must be good at everything.
An anecdote in agreement:
The CEO of my company left in September 2025. For years leading up to that, there were 3-4 layoffs/riffs of approx. 5% reductions (edit: yearly reductions). Never hired more US employees except for VP and C-level until we became very top-heavy. What jobs they do replace are primarily India and some in Argentina, many are contractors. They “cook the books” by avoiding taxes and “creatively” avoiding reporting gains/losses due to having a large amount of contractors. 2025 ended up losing a ton of customers due to churn (i.e. leaving or not renewing contracts). Most of our customera are US or North America-based and the contractor teams have such high turnover that customers are sick of us not supporting them well anymore.
Know where that former CEO is now? An AI startup.
Oh geez no one could have known that.
Absolutely no one. At all.
So shocking.
Just stand by lowly worker and they’ll let you know what your next opinion should be.
They will blame workers for not figuring out how to extract the value that all their bank accounts demand is there.
We’ve gotten that at work, they are trying to figure out how to fix the metrics to figure out who may not be using AI enough. They bought all the AI stuff for everyone and their metrics even say most people are using it, but it’s not seeming any better.
So obviously they need to catch people that are doing only token LLM usage and get them to use it more…
Great and very welcome news. If enough companies stop using “AI” maybe it will go away.
They are just gonna double down in all likelihood.
And then they will ask us all to bail them out when it still doesn’t work.
Oh poor thing, here let me play you the world’s smallest violin so you can cry me a fucking river.
The hope still holds that this AI bubble will pop before anything truly terrible can come of it, then it can go back to serving the niches its actually helpful for, rather than being used to screw with everyday working people, and we can all live happily ever after.
Machine learning has niches it’s useful in (although it has sometimes been the hammer that makes everything look like a nail). Large language models on the other hand? I haven’t seen them be useful in anything. Any results they generate are questionable at best and a lot of the time just plain wrong. With all the costs and other downsides, I think we should classify them as a failed technology and stop using them. The only reason anybody uses them today is the huge amount of marketing behind it and the fact the technology is being given away for almost nothing. If the actual cost would be charged, I doubt there would be a lot of interest. We’ve seen all those AI companies struggling to generate any revenue, their costs are in the billions and their revenue from AI products is in the millions, it doesn’t add up.
The reason big tech is so into LLMs is so they can analyze YOUR data, to make it more appealing to sell to marketers and governments, and to make your rent the privilege from them. Look at every “AI shoved into product unnecessarily”, “app that could run locally being cloud based (especially storage)” and “replaces decision making with our enhanced workflow”; look at every “just one more data center bro please we need to out-bid the entire consumer market, both home and enterprise on-premises” with this in mind. The big picture starts to make sense.
The hope is in vain.
That’s a funny way to say “unsustainable losses”
They don’t care if it doesn’t work. They care that it costs them profits.
