You’re totally right – I actually wanted to talk more about the top-down AI mandates, but didn’t manage to squeeze it in. It’s deeply problematic on multiple fronts, not the least of which being the artificial demand for it – it’s clear that there is investor and executive pressure to adopt it to prove out the significant financial bet they’ve placed on the technology. This creates a lot of really messed up incentives within organizations, and rather than letting it grow at an organic and (comparatively) sustainable rate, there’s this pressure to shoehorn it into every aspect of your work, including in places it absolutely should not be. It also causes this “gold rush” mentality across the board, where everyone is scrambling to build more data centers, buy more proverbial shovels, and everyone and their brother trying to come up with a somewhat novel use for the AI platforms (which frequently end up just being a tweaked or reskinned wrapper around an existing tool). So, you have folks flooding the market space with hustles, you’ve got hoarders trying to scoop up all the prime (data center) real estate, and you’ve got folks selling shovels (the actual compute, like Nvidia, or the models, like Anthropic). But it’s all basically a game of hot potato, and seeing what money you can scoop up before the music stops.

My hope is that the forced AI push will just lead to people getting sick of it faster – I’d rather get on to the part of picking up the rubble and seeing what parts of all the nonsense were actually worthwhile.

Thanks for the comments and kind words!