Technology

"am I out of touch? no, it's the customers who are wrong"

talking to a friend recently about the push to put "AI" into everything, something they said stuck with me.

oversimplified view of the org chart at a large company - you have the people actually doing the work at the bottom, and then as you move upwards you get more and more disconnected from the actual work.

one level up, you're managing the actual workers, and a lot of your job is writing status reports and other documents, reading other status reports, having meetings about them, etc. as you go further up in the hierarchy, your job becomes consuming status reports, summarizing them to pass them up the chain, and so on.

being enthusiastic about "AI" seems to be heavily correlated with position in that org chart. which makes sense, because one of the few things that chatbots are decent at is stuff like "here's a status report that's longer than I want to read, summarize it for me" or "here's N status reports from my underlings, summarize them into 1 status report I can pass along to my boss".

in my field (software engineering) the people most gung-ho about using LLMs have been essentially turning themselves into managers, with a "team" of chatbots acting like very-junior engineers.

and I think that explains very well why we see so many executives, including this guy, who think LLMs are a bigger invention than sliced bread, and can't understand the more widespread dislike of them.