I think it was Cory Doctorow that described it as a feedback loop, so the people who aren’t “all in” on AI get pushed out of the C-suite, in favour of those that are until the whole show is being run by people who want AI to do everything but absolutely no idea how to achieve that. It’s bluster all the way up, driven by a psychotic devotion to shareholders. Sack everyone, raise prices, the line must go up.
And because it’s all fuelled by picosecond trading algorithms, a company who’s line goes up 2% more than another company’s line ends up valued to a hundred times as much.
It’s no longer about being a healthy trading company, you have to show you’re doing everything possible to make everyone’s lives a fucking misery…
The only way forward for many developers will be as indie devs. The corpos are going to shovel AI slop into our buckets and the quality games will be from indie devs.
“Dwarf Fortress” would be a great name for a band.
So would Elven Underwear and The Hobbit Belly Band
I just want to add, this is coming from someone who has completed a mathematics PhD, and so has a very very high bar for psychosis (seriously, math departments are fun, but also FUN).
“They’re trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. So I don’t see that going anywhere sustainable, and I feel like there will simply be a pop and a reckoning and then [it’s on repeat] unless people do something else.”
“Somebody else will pay the salaries of our customers”.
As far as I can tell the individual actors extracting more from a system that its capable to support if everybody does the same (the kind of situation Game Theory calls a Tragedy Of The Commons) always think in one of 3 ways:
- They simply don’t think about systemic consequences at all, be it simply that they don’t have the kind of intelligence for it or purposefully don’t dig down into it because they don’t want to think about consequences.
- They expect the “system” (i.e. somebody else, maybe everybody else) will make up for it so it’s fine if they take more from it than the put back in, as illustrated in my first paragraph.
- They’re aware of what the commulative impact of their actions can or even will have in the future, but they think they themselves and their families will be alright and screw everybody else - essentially that if they can get ahead enough they can ride the wave whilst it crashes.
The same kind of thinking also applies to Ponzi Schemes (like the current AI bubble) - Ignorance (willful or due to lack of knowledge/intelligence), The Many Will Make Up For The Over-Extraction Of The Few and/or I Myself Will Be Alright.
And you know what?
Those people have very good reasons to believe in the second one (that I illustrated at the start) - you look at Neoliberal Capitalism so far that’s what’s been happening as Money acummulates in fewer hands and sin ce with regulations neutralized and Corruption through the roof, those holding most of the wealth can do whatever the fuck they want so they are increasingly pillaging wealth from the rest, and the “system” - i.e. everybody else - just gets poorer and instead of Revolutions and Guillotines for the rich all we see is passive acceptance so the rest so have been making up for the depredations of the few for decades. Also just look at how Governments the world over sacrificed everybody else to make sure Finance and Asset owners in general came up better of after the 2008 Crash - these people have very good reason to believe that those in power, being very much in their pockets, will use said power to sacrificed the rest in order to deflect away from the Few the consequences of the actions of those very Few.
And if they’s CEOs they also have very good reasons to believe the third - just look at corporate governance in the last decades, with getting those jobs being far more abour Cronyism than Merit and incompetence being de facto rewarded with golden parachutes a even failing upwards. From all they’ve seen their whole lives there is no reason for them to expect to ever personally suffer the consequences of their own depredations and pillaging.
In summary, some don’t even realise the problem and as for those who do, given the experience of CEOs for at least the last 3 or 4 decades, it’s pretty rational for them to believe that their depredations wont destroy the Whole enough to come back to them and even if they do, they themselves personally will be alright even if the companies they manage are destroyed.
Like the video game crash of ‘83?
Like every time workers seem to be getting woke enough to maybe possibly do something on a scale that touches rich people’s yacht money some of us get some minor concessions that keep us working in the system and reproducing it for the next generation of workers.
Although the dream with ai is an economy without the need for workers (we wouldn’t be a part of it), or labour power pushed to such an insignificant little atomised role that withholding it is no longer a threat.
Nice to see something like this on a gaming site (but fuuuuuuck their popups):
Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don’t understand.
CEOs get rewarded for getting rid of staff so here we are. Who gets rewarded when the CEOs are let go? Oh right, they get golden parachutes.
Nah, they’re not “getting psychosis”, AI is revealing their psychosis. We’re talking about people used to convincing themselves that infinite growth is possible in a finite world, that fascism is a solution, that they made themselves with no help, that they deserve to be paid hundreds of times more than their most basic employees, that being a billionaire is ethical, etc etc. And we used to accept all that for a contract and a salary. They’re breaking the socio-professional contract with AI, now.
CEOs, HRs, the corporate world in general HAVE ALWAYS BEEN 100% PSYCHOTIC. Why do we think capitalism and the workplace are so alienating in the first place? Why do we think they need to invest millions, if not billions, in PR, medias and propaganda? The upper you go, the batshit crazier things get.
Respectfully: no.
Psychosis is something that builds over time with many factors and AI is one that can definitely be one of the contributing factors. It can be the one that pushes someone over the edge into psychosis and that may seem as “revealing” it but the psychosis could have been avoided without.
This line of thinking feels dangerous to me.
That “build-up” you are talking about, that’s called business school followed by entry level management or internship, where modern managers brush over learning their business, in favor of seeking efficiency purely in terms of dollars in/dollars out, in opposition to any other metric.
Idunno man, sounds like you’re trying to shift the blame from AI inducing psychosis in people towards the people affected by it
Its Cronus devouring his children. Feeding on the young for short term sustenance.
I’m always amazed at people who can’t understand that EVERY system is finite.
We’ve gotta be almost out of bullshit by now.
Well, the amount of bullshit is limited by the number of sources producing it (whether occasionally or frequently, accidentally or intentionally) and their respective capacities. Between human fallibility and the invention of machines to automate bullshit production, I fear that this limit may be much higher than either of us would like.
You’ve hit the nail on the head with the Infinite Growth statement. Most companies see AI as the next way to cut bottom line costs and hit those annual goals. It’s an ouroboros that most companies haven’t seen the end of yet. Eventually they’ll be left with no talent (arguably the most valuable thing a company can acquire) and uninteresting products nobody is interested in.
How do you train newbies into useful employees when you let AI handle the easy stuff. Where’s your pipeline of promotions so you’re developing your next generation of developers? Once the shit starts to hit the fan, you’ll see them crumble and ask how we got here. Human talent takes YEARS to cultivate and is extremely hard to buy, especially when competition builds from reducing the supply when people stop going into these fields for lack of entry-level jobs.
Its Cronus devouring his children. Feeding on the young for short term sustenance
It’s near the bottom but Tarn Adams notes the same thing, that it has been happening far longer than just starting when LLMs became popular.
“It’s been going on forever. That was before AI—or this form of AI,” Adams says, before lamenting: “They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can’t even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn’t exist. It’s dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes.”
It’s become particularly nasty with generative AI, however, because now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don’t understand
CEO looks at AI quake: “it’s literally the same thing!”
(for those who don’t know what AI quake is: https://youtu.be/iBmjTXOK9xw)That looks suuuper fun to play!
Kinda like “I had a dream I was playing Quake 2”
a fever dream
“They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can’t even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn’t exist. It’s dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes.”
An under-appreciated AI gripe: professionals can’t discuss it anymore.
At least the cryptographers could fall back on the full name!
Anyone working with AI-other-than-llm is now constantly getting weird looks and stupid comments from LLM bros
Similar problem, I had to remind my daughter that I work.in a data center when she was complaining about data centers the other day, and that data centers are pretty coon, her beef (and frankly mine), is with wasteful hyperscaler data centers for AI use.
Our city sent out a map of all the existing data centers in town claiming it’s proof that they dont cause problems.
I don’t think our healthcare facilities data center even remotely compares to Colossus. That’s like comparing a regional grocery store to fuckin Walmart
Well, we could start to power them with diesel to somewhat level the field!
We run ours on diesel, but only when the power goes out.
that data centers are pretty coon,
Pretty Coon:
I have no idea why it did that, I think it was supposd to be “pretty much everywhere”.
Typing on mobile? I assumed you were going for “common” but hit the backspace key by accident, since it’s right there, and ended up with c-o-m-backspace-o-n.
Your subconscious just needed everyone to know how pretty Carrie Coon is. Simple as
Well, “AI” in games was always behavior, rather than having anything to do with AI. It was just marketing.
And even then, artificial stupidity is usually more accurate than AI. FPS bots could easily headshot you immediately on sight but like, what good is that. It’s literally more work to make them worse at the game.
True thought there were some exceptions, like Black & White.
Lol I just call it IA (interaction algorithm)
Sx one way, Xs the other.
Management is a cult.
No, seriously. You have to participate in large scale acts of groupthink and demonstrate performative conformity just to be accepted; and once in the group you better not stray too far from the messaging of executives.
Absolutely, if I can just chime in here and address the elephant in the room, we really have to focus on the low hanging fruit and leverage our KPIs to really drive home any wins. From a 30,000ft view it looks like we have synergy and alignment here, but if we zoom in we can see that there are nothing but roadblocks and pain points with our holistic approach. I propose we circle back and try to realign our core competencies and remember what really made us a rock star team in the first place.
And just make sure that you’ve got enough cycles to onboard the efficiency innovations recommended by Claude. I know you’re all excited to have a boost in productivity, but make sure to balance the infrastructure goals against the priority backlogs. Like Claude says, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So get out there and have a great sprint, we’ll meet at tomorrow morning’s stand-up for updates.
Great points, we had a strong Q2 and our projections show a very strong Q3 as well, but we don’t want to split our focus too much with all the market uncertainty. Remember, there is no I in team, but there is an I in Key Performance Indicators. So make sure you are moving the needle and let’s keep our bandwidth high so we can finish strong. I sent everyone an email and a DM and a voicemail and a paper letter with a printed QR code. Don’t forget to use that to fill out the feedback survey by EOW.
You guys have really solid points and good thinking there. I’m just wondering if we have enough bandwidth to achieve the goals ?
I propose we book a meeting with ALL the relevant stakeholders and their mother to facilitate the project pre-kick-off.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
You don’t get to COD 49 with original creative ideas.
Nik Suresh said the same thing.
“Slowly”
Let’s get something straight. The people at the top are all hired by the CEO and want money. They tell the CEO what a special smart boy he is, the biggest dickus around.
This has been the way of things for decades.
CEOs and higher ups give themselves their own “yes man” psychosis and the higher you go, the more prevalent it is, and it flows down from there.
AI is just socializing the yes man sycophancy psychosis our “corporate leaders” have been experiencing by isolating themselves from society and only surrounding themselves with an echo chamber of paid sycophants.
Just look at our current president. He is the ultimate byproduct of this mentality.
the real trickle down economics was the psychosis we gained along the way
When Tarn makes big statements, people ought to listen.
Don’t know if I can trust him, since the photo shows he’s playing the graphical version of the game.
Money has been giving management psychosis for generations. AI is just another iteration of that
I think my manager has broken out of the psychosis. He was really into it but has seen it’s limits real quickly
