That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)ā¦ ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And Iāve had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).
Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.
But āAIāā¦ it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldnāt. Thereās nothing to learn from resulting failure, except ādonāt use AIā.
In this case, given shopifyās general behaviour, I wonāt be sad at all though if they crash and fail.
Yes, thatās true. Indirectly it costs them all dearly with ransomware. Likewise, I think the overall damage that AI will do to society as a whole will be much, much greater than just rotting some tech companies from the inside (most of which I wouldnāt be sad anyway if they went awayā¦).
What I meant is that with blockchain the big tech companies at least didnāt willingly destroy their products, their processes, their decision making etc. I.e. they didnāt put blockchain into absolutely everything, all the way to MS Notepad. What I find staggering about this hype is the depth of the delusion, the willingness to not just experiment with it but really go all-in.