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Half of companies planning to replace customer service with AI are reversing course
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.
/s
This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.
There's awesome AI out there too. AlphaFold completely revolutionized research on proteins, and the medical innovations it will lead to are astounding.
Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.
Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It's one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we're still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.
That's part of the problem isn't it? "AI" is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation). An algorithm isn't AI, even if it was written by another algorithm.
And at the end of the day none of it is artificial intelligence. Not to the original meaning of the word. Now we have had to rebrand AI as AGI to avoid the association with this new trend.
Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This ~~computer program~~ , er we mean "AI" can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."
Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There's lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that's not what we're complaining about.
We're complaining about all the people who are asking, "Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don't have to think?" and "Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don't have to think?" and "Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?"
You realize that's because the gigantic server farms powering all of this "AI" are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC's, right?
Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.
My current conspiracy theory is that the people at the top are just as intelligent as everyday people we see in public.
Not that everyone is dumb but more like the George Carlin joke "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
That applies to politicians, CEOs, etc. Just cuz they got the job, doesn't mean they're good at it and most of them probably aren't.
Agreed. Unfortunately, one half of our population thinks that anyone in power is a genius, is always right and shouldn't have to pay taxes or follow laws.
Absolutely. Wealth isn't competence, and too much of it fundamentally leads to a physical and psychological disconnect with other humans. Generational wealth creates sheltered, twisted perspectives in youth who have enough money and influence to just fail upward their entire lives.
"New" wealth creates egocentric narcissists who believe they "earned" their position. "If everyone else just does what I did, they'd be wealthy like me. If they don't do what I did, they must not be as smart or hard-working as me."
Really all of meritocracy is just survivorship bias, and countless people are smarter and more hard-working, just significantly less lucky. Once someone has enough capital that it starts generating more wealth on its own - in excess of their living expenses even without a salary - life just becomes a game to them, and they start trying to figure out how to "earn" more points.
Almost like those stupid monkey drawings that were "worth money." Lmao.