Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying

It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful.

This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.

I’m not necessarily suggesting Doctorow is correct with this assertion, but on a macro scale what productivity gains will generate AI provide?

Yes there’s a few skills it’s good at coding, medical research, and image recognition being a few.

The genuine question is: has this improved everyone’s quality of life?

I work at a sales-first (read: no accountability) software company, ran by inept nepo-babies and a hostile VC. I frequently have to completely re-do all of the sales engineering work when a new project starts, because they refuse to standardize or talk to each other.

After enough time doing this shit by hand, I took my best examples from previous projects and had an agent “fix the errors based on the conventions I established over here”. Instead of going line by line on these big serialized data formats now, I do about 10min of checking the results and editing down the change log.

It’s wack that I have to re-do someone else’s job still, but at least I can force some version of standardization without killing myself on the tedious bits.

That doesn’t really answer my question. It’s changed your job, but has it improved your customers quality of life?