Blueskyer Kenny Logins quotes Internet Hippo on the Tulip mania AI craze taking over the corporate world:

They taught Al how to talk like a corporate middle manager and thought this meant the Al was conscious instead of realizing that corporate middle managers aren’t.

Hippo seems to be channeling Nikhil Suresh here:

There have been several occasions where I have seen someone, apropos of nothing, blurt out almost word-for-word “AI is changing everything”, only to concede moments later that their organisation does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT (frequently the free-tier). In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI.

Why is this happening? Ed Zitron blames neoliberalism:

The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company–an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money–has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter….

When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance — not to have happy customers, not to make your company “a good place to work,” not to make a good product, not to make a difference or contribute to anything other than further growth.

Because they can rapidly generate text that can be plausibly passed off as actual work, LLMs amplify the perverse incentives inherent in the neoliberal business world. AI is indeed “changing everything”, but more in the sense that it is turning the runaway train into a missile.