the doctor used to love AI. He spent a decade and half actively promoting it (and wrote two extensive series on The Complete AI in Procurement, Sourcing, and Supplier Management), until Gen-AI and all the false promises bundled with it came along. (Neither it, nor its successor, will be your saviour. It’s not intelligent, not general purpose, and unless your problem ultimately reduces to large document summarization and query, will not solve your problem. Any claims to the contrary are, and, for the foreseeable future will continue to be, false.)
Recently, THE REVELATOR, who is also becoming a little jaded, decided to ask Why does everyone believe the AI hype? (Source)
Of course, the doctor needed to answer.
Why did the American public believe the administration would be any different this time?
(For that matter, why does any first world nation believe their newly elected administration will be any different this time?)
Why does the public at large still believe in the lies that have been fed to them since they were born?
(Primarily American, but Canadians are doing their best to learn from their neighbours!)
Because there is no better producer, packager, and purveyor of Bullsh!t than American Media!
(Although we try, we Canadians can only dream of producing BS that good!)
That’s what the Big AI players use to their advantage
(with their hundreds of millions to billions of dollars and their huge marketing budgets)!
The Procurement Dynamo put it best in a recent comment when he said that we are wired as humans to be lazy and it’s easier to just believe what is being pumped out to us on all the digital channels we consume everyday than do our research, understand the half truths being fed to us, and draw our own conclusions (especially when Math, where the US is now 35th in the OECD PISA rankings, is concerned).
But it doesn’t stop there, not only are we plagued with:
Laziness: Overworked workers being tasked with the nigh-impossible on a daily basis with limited TQ don’t want to design systems, especially when that’s what the vendor is being paid for.
We also have to deal with greed and stupidity making matters worse.
Greed: Investors and rich big company CEOs don’t want workers who want to be paid fair wages, as then they have to deal with worker’s rights (for now at least, but maybe not for much longer in the USA at the rate the government is being dismantled), maternity and sick leave, paid overtime, etc. when they are being promised a software robot that will work 24/7/365 without complaint for a “small” annual fee.
Stupidity: The zealots at many vendors have adopted tech as their religion and messiah and refuse to learn the domain and how to solve a problem with a human centric point of view, believing that, with just a little more development, the tech will magically get there.
And this is why we have so many people blinded by the hype and so many people buying into it.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t real vendors with real AI-backed technology that actually works (because there are, such as ForeStreet that we just covered), it just means that unless you find one of these vendors (which are now in the minority, but SI WILL cover these vendors as it identifies them), and hire intelligent, hard working people who WANT to solve problems and give them the necessary resources to identify these vendors and properly implement ad configure these solutions, you’re not going to get results. Just false promises.
Now that you have the unfiltered answer, do you need to keep asking the question? 😉