Not just not accurate but wrong.

That's like saying the price of the battery in an electric car is that car's price minus the price of a comparable ICE car. No, it isn't. There are more differences than just the battery.

And yes, of course they recoup their development costs. But that doesn't mean that the OP is right in this context.

errr... Apple doesn't charge for its operating system. macOS literally doesn't have a price.

Based on my analysis of their needs and what AI can deliver. I agree that it's management's job to increase efficiency and output, but change for change's sake is never good. For instance, in the examples above I *knew* what AI would deliver. I told them, in no uncertain terms, what product they'd receive. They still made the decision to push ahead ( and I'm more than willing to cash that check ). I can see, objectively and by any metric, that what was delivered is a worse customer experience than what they had before.

However, because it's "AI", that makes it acceptable. The buzzword has effectively disabled the rational and critical thinking parts of this management's teams brains. Of course I have seen this before ( First rule of IT: Vendors lie, Second rule of IT: Managers believe them ), but to this extent? Especially in smaller businesses, where margins are tighter. For what they're paying for this AI solution ( ha, "solution" ), they could afford to hire another staff member; another person on the phones, and far more capable than AI in delivering the ultimate product ( caring for the patient ).

Mind you; I pointed all this out to them. They know the math, but they are so...enamored with AI that it doesn't mean anything to them. Meanwhile, patients and staff hate it.

I'm sure there's AI use cases out there which deliver a decent ROI. What I'm seeing in the field, however, is management hysteria for the latest thing at a scale I've never before experienced.

I shouldn't complain, it's paying extremely well, but I know this will all come crashing down at some point.

I've been through more than a few technology cycles, so while I don't necessary disagree with you, the scale of the disconnect between the worker bees and management is more significant than I ever remember.

It's becoming exceedingly difficult to dissuade management from AI courses of action, even when they make no sense or will end up delivering a substandard product for significantly higher cost.

For instance, I just had a client implement an AI auto-attendant for a medical office. Were they having difficulties answer the phone in a timely manner? No. Do they anticipate a staffing shortage that would cause such an issue? No. Will the auto-attendant be able to accomplish what a regular worker can? No. In fact, it can pretty much only answer the phone and find someone for the caller to talk to.

But by god, management had to have it. So, for an extra 2000 a month they get a middle man that delays delivering service to patients. Management loves it. Folks answering the calls hate it because the patients hate it.

Different office asked about AI curated music. Another client asked about replacing our network monitoring software with AI so their IT staff can stop working after hours. They both will end up getting their wish, and at least in the case of the network monitoring solution it's going to cause so many issues I'm having them sign a waiver before I implement; I won't be held responsible when the AI agent is rebooting servers randomly because it thinks they're offline.

More than any other IT fad over the past 2 decades, I've noticed AI has really divided "decision makers" and "makers/workers". Those of us in the trenches making things work are highly skeptical of AI and treat it much as we have any other "flash in the pan" technology; weary, willing to test/play with it, but disbelieving of the hype.

The decision makers though...whoooboy, they've bought into the tech hook, line and sinker. They want AI everything, even in places it makes no sense. They can't define what they want AI to do, or how it's supposed to do it, but by god they will sign away millions of dollars in pursuit of their golden cow.

The only time I really saw anything like this was with "Teh Cloudz!", but even then it was tempered by practicality. AI? It's magic beans, all the way down.

Yes, but now you have it too complicated for 95% of the vibe coders. So they simply won't do it. Because skipping all of those steps still results in something that compiles.

They fuck up spreadsheets as well. A truckload of business-critical spreadsheets have errors in them that often go undetected for years.

It's hard enough to get actual developers to properly consider security. Not surprised at all that vibe coders don't.

Plus, of course, most of the training data is insecure to begin with.

But let them learn by fire that there's a reason actual programmers take time to ship a product, and it's not that the AI can type faster.

Problem is: We don't even know what consciousness is.

So the best we can say is if something creates the impression of having one, based on whom we attribute consciousness to, i.e. other humans. Well, big surprise that a model explicitly trained on human language and texts creates that impression. It does show just how good the models are. At pretending to be human because they have a shitload of examples on what humans would say.

For all we know, the gas clouds on Jupiter could be conscious, just in a way that is completely baffling to us. We can't rule it out because we don't know what consciousness is, so we can't test for it.

Not true.

An attacker may have a limited window. He might exploit some other vulnerability to do some operation with privileged access rights, but not have an admin shell.

You're not saying?

But they take security so seriously. They said. They promised. This time for real. No, this time. Ok, next time.

Can't wait until AI makes a security hole and a billion dollars' worth of cryptocurrency disappears overnight.

"Shot themselves in the foot" is relative; it was never about sustainability. It's about extracting the most they can as fast as they can, then selling the dregs at a discount.

That includes pursuing legal action against other vendors once their cash cow starts drying up.

This.

Whenever a politician claims that something is "to protect the children", you can be 100%, absolutely certain that it is not about the children.