Society going through AI psychosis
I feel like in some bizare dystopian nightmare right now.
Im working in IT and i feel like the management are suffering is some serious AI psychosis and the whole society is broken.
Im regularly creating different automations for my team. These are focused on automating repetitive tasks. This was usally celebrated but lately, all management wants to hear is AI.
If i dont go to office and hear AI at least 500 times a day, it wasnt a day worth mentioning.
I have a task that saves about an hour of work every week that i can automate. I could do it and the cost of that task would be just the computation energy on the server. But guess what, its not good enough, it should be managed by an AI agent instead. I say, its possible to build agent that will manage this but it makes no financial sense because you will have to pay flat rate of 250 euro or more for the api each month. But business says its ok, we need to push the AI adoptation and innovate.
So now i will be creating AI enabled workflow that will cost more than the time a person would cost, on task that can be automated traditionally and its output will be completly non deterministic. But management will pat themselves on the back for how of a great job they are doing.
I will be probably also invited to some nice corporate demo that will be presented as some incredible efficiency and innovation. At the same call they will also report record profits this quarter, rising stock and higher management bonuses and how much cost they saved this year. Then on next slide they will say they are planning further cost cutting, restructuring (teams getting fired), rerurn to office because apparently they have statistics about productivity not being high enough from remote workers despite all economc metrics being at all times high, and at the end, they will increse our KPIs for next year citing "difficult economc environment".
Meanwhile in other team. Task that would save real time is not getting funded because "no budget". While the product owner is getting bombared every day about where AI could be implemented.
Menawhile nobody has any real AI product to shwcase that actually work.
Meanwhile prices are rising in every doman, there is housing crysis and even if you have good education and experience, your prospects look worse and worse.
Meanwhile you are getting more and more work to do.
Meanwhile everything is getting optimized endlessly. People and companies themselves are squeezed dry from the services and vendor lock in. Stocks are rising but there is absolutely no benefit to the average person. Everything goes to the 1% of the 1%. At least in the past, companies provided accomodation to their workers, they created public infrastructure that common people could use.
Now? They donate some money that dont even touch their CEO pay to random charity suported by their employees on unpaid weekend charity event, and pat themselves on the back how much they are benefiting the public. But of course its just a performative act aimed to please stakeholders.
There is no sense of benefiting the common people at the core anymore. Its either pulling people out of starvation with charity because it looks good or buying a slightly larger yacht for your tech bilionaire. Nothing in between.
Hell, last week i was in a grocery store that had a charity event to build a food bank for those in need. The deal? You go and buy the groceries to be put into the food bank. Not the company. You the CUSTOMER. With YOUR money. There was not even any deal asociated with it. No discount, nothing. Why the F should that be my responsibility? YOU the company should create food bank from YOUR profits.
And im not talking about America here. Im in Europe. This is happeneing everywhere.
Where did we go so horrribly wrong? How is this at all sustainable and how do we change this?
Sorry for the typos, I have officially burned out