I think it was Cory Doctorow that described it as a feedback loop, so the people who aren’t “all in” on AI get pushed out of the C-suite, in favour of those that are until the whole show is being run by people who want AI to do everything but absolutely no idea how to achieve that. It’s bluster all the way up, driven by a psychotic devotion to shareholders. Sack everyone, raise prices, the line must go up.
And because it’s all fuelled by picosecond trading algorithms, a company who’s line goes up 2% more than another company’s line ends up valued to a hundred times as much.
It’s no longer about being a healthy trading company, you have to show you’re doing everything possible to make everyone’s lives a fucking misery…
Yeah, and it’s all made up money and value. Capitalism seems to have reached the runaway diesel engine stage, where it ain’t going to stop until we cut off its oxygen or it blows the fuck up.
Have you tried giving the engine more orphans?
The list of most valuable companies is highly concerning. It’s nearly all AI or AI-adjacent now.
The only ones that aren’t are oil and magic obesity pills.
The only way forward for many developers will be as indie devs. The corpos are going to shovel AI slop into our buckets and the quality games will be from indie devs.
Left my last job and they really pushed AI. Everything had to be AI and it has to be shoved in everywhere. It was mostly awful. Few places it helped was to complete bullshit HR tasks that we had been complaining about ever since they were introduced as a waste of time.
Network engineer here. My main use case for AI at the moment is for ticket management and as a glorified search engine.
Ohh yeah search and summary can be useful.
As long as it isn’t based on and continually trained on privacy violations, stolen property, and a continually growing list of ethical transgressions against humanity in a race to the bottom to fulfill greed and laziness in an irresponsible ethical laundering that I guess requires just a little too much brain power to make the leap to comprehend for certain types of people.
But, you know. It’s fine, I guess. Chase those dollar signs and defend those perfect infallible and unexamined systems, boss.
Lmao replacing people in creative industries with ai is like chef’s kiss of stupidity
“They’re trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game.” well technically that was already the case? Press the “send” button on Slack and an entire team of natural stupidity makes you a game for all of the profit. Sometimes multiple, even.
As long as the AAA studios are generating shareholder value this will be the future unless the workers push back collectively and hard AF because the average gaming isn’t going to do crap to push back on this.
Developers and workers in general are nothing more than a reoccurring cost account to most businesses, a faceless void where money goes to instead of shareholders and executive compensation.
“Dwarf Fortress” would be a great name for a band.
If you’re not familiar with the game, you should look into it, it’s incredible. There are tons of great documentaries about it on YouTube
The full name of the game is “Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress”
So would Elven Underwear and The Hobbit Belly Band
It’s the age of indie imo. We’re seeing the final chapter of studios with 100s of employees. Replacing with AI is the lazy, catastrophic way of doing through it.
Management is a cult.
No, seriously. You have to participate in large scale acts of groupthink and demonstrate performative conformity just to be accepted; and once in the group you better not stray too far from the messaging of executives.
Absolutely, if I can just chime in here and address the elephant in the room, we really have to focus on the low hanging fruit and leverage our KPIs to really drive home any wins. From a 30,000ft view it looks like we have synergy and alignment here, but if we zoom in we can see that there are nothing but roadblocks and pain points with our holistic approach. I propose we circle back and try to realign our core competencies and remember what really made us a rock star team in the first place.
And just make sure that you’ve got enough cycles to onboard the efficiency innovations recommended by Claude. I know you’re all excited to have a boost in productivity, but make sure to balance the infrastructure goals against the priority backlogs. Like Claude says, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. So get out there and have a great sprint, we’ll meet at tomorrow morning’s stand-up for updates.
Great points, we had a strong Q2 and our projections show a very strong Q3 as well, but we don’t want to split our focus too much with all the market uncertainty. Remember, there is no I in team, but there is an I in Key Performance Indicators. So make sure you are moving the needle and let’s keep our bandwidth high so we can finish strong. I sent everyone an email and a DM and a voicemail and a paper letter with a printed QR code. Don’t forget to use that to fill out the feedback survey by EOW.
You guys have really solid points and good thinking there. I’m just wondering if we have enough bandwidth to achieve the goals ?
I propose we book a meeting with ALL the relevant stakeholders and their mother to facilitate the project pre-kick-off.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
You don’t get to COD 49 with original creative ideas.
Nik Suresh said the same thing.
Nah, they’re not “getting psychosis”, AI is revealing their psychosis. We’re talking about people used to convincing themselves that infinite growth is possible in a finite world, that fascism is a solution, that they made themselves with no help, that they deserve to be paid hundreds of times more than their most basic employees, that being a billionaire is ethical, etc etc. And we used to accept all that for a contract and a salary. They’re breaking the socio-professional contract with AI, now.
CEOs, HRs, the corporate world in general HAVE ALWAYS BEEN 100% PSYCHOTIC. Why do we think capitalism and the workplace are so alienating in the first place? Why do we think they need to invest millions, if not billions, in PR, medias and propaganda? The upper you go, the batshit crazier things get.
You’ve hit the nail on the head with the Infinite Growth statement. Most companies see AI as the next way to cut bottom line costs and hit those annual goals. It’s an ouroboros that most companies haven’t seen the end of yet. Eventually they’ll be left with no talent (arguably the most valuable thing a company can acquire) and uninteresting products nobody is interested in.
How do you train newbies into useful employees when you let AI handle the easy stuff. Where’s your pipeline of promotions so you’re developing your next generation of developers? Once the shit starts to hit the fan, you’ll see them crumble and ask how we got here. Human talent takes YEARS to cultivate and is extremely hard to buy, especially when competition builds from reducing the supply when people stop going into these fields for lack of entry-level jobs.
Its Cronus devouring his children. Feeding on the young for short term sustenance
It really is an ouroboros pretending there is no problem nibbling on the back of its own head after consuming everything else
It’s near the bottom but Tarn Adams notes the same thing, that it has been happening far longer than just starting when LLMs became popular.
“It’s been going on forever. That was before AI—or this form of AI,” Adams says, before lamenting: “They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can’t even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn’t exist. It’s dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes.”
I’m always amazed at people who can’t understand that EVERY system is finite.
We’ve gotta be almost out of bullshit by now.
Well, the amount of bullshit is limited by the number of sources producing it (whether occasionally or frequently, accidentally or intentionally) and their respective capacities. Between human fallibility and the invention of machines to automate bullshit production, I fear that this limit may be much higher than either of us would like.
Eventually the sewer pipes become clogged and can’t carry any more.
Respectfully: no.
Psychosis is something that builds over time with many factors and AI is one that can definitely be one of the contributing factors. It can be the one that pushes someone over the edge into psychosis and that may seem as “revealing” it but the psychosis could have been avoided without.
This line of thinking feels dangerous to me.
That “build-up” you are talking about, that’s called business school followed by entry level management or internship, where modern managers brush over learning their business, in favor of seeking efficiency purely in terms of dollars in/dollars out, in opposition to any other metric.
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Idunno man, sounds like you’re trying to shift the blame from AI inducing psychosis in people towards the people affected by it
No, like the article said: “it’s not as if the current industry problems are unprecedented, or came out of nowhere. Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don’t understand.”
This and a tendency to abuse workers have always existed. Management isn’t the victim here, the AI has just removed the limiter, such as it was.
Did AI remove the limiter? Or is it actively pushing people towards delusion by agreeing with whats being said and validating the persons delusionary thoughts as how reality works?
Are you suggesting the ‘line must go up’ mentality only emerged after the advent of AI?
No.
I’m mad about the misrepresentation of psychosis
Ah, ok. So for my next question, why is seeking infinite growth not a psychotic delusion?
You’re making the assumption that all “bosses” mentioned in the article are people seeking infinite growth.
You’re making an assumption about a group of people you know nothing about and trying to link them with people suffering from psychosis. Essentially grouping “people suffering from psychosis” together with “greedy CEO’s”. Whereas greedy CEO’s could also simply be narcissistic, evil or simply lying to others to get more money.
By grouping them with psychosis sufferers you’re denying the sufferers their lived experience in favor of assumptions.
a state of distorted reality, marked by disturbances in perception and thought, disorganized behavior, and negative symptoms
Ticks those boxes
Or they’re lying for money rather than suffering from a mental condition.
“They’re trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. So I don’t see that going anywhere sustainable, and I feel like there will simply be a pop and a reckoning and then [it’s on repeat] unless people do something else.”
If AI ever reaches the point that it can produce a creative, fun game that feels worth playing - which I doubt, because you gotta have a soul to make art - then anyone can press that button. Why would people buy their game when they can get AI to make their own?
He’s right, these people have shit the corporate bed.
It’s unfortunately sustainable because people buy things they like before things they need.
For all of us, for everyone 1 person we know who has a decent job and loves to play games they buy with disposable income, we probably know 5 who shouldn’t buy the game they’re buying because they’re already behind on their sewer bill.
Congratulations!!!1 You are the lucky 10000 who discovered copy pasting today!
A service for people who don’t read articles.
Like the video game crash of ‘83?
Like every time workers seem to be getting woke enough to maybe possibly do something on a scale that touches rich people’s yacht money some of us get some minor concessions that keep us working in the system and reproducing it for the next generation of workers.
Although the dream with ai is an economy without the need for workers (we wouldn’t be a part of it), or labour power pushed to such an insignificant little atomised role that withholding it is no longer a threat.
Instead of paying us to work they will have to pay us not to throw molotovs at their datacentres.
I think that was always the assumption except people forgot their own power.
Nice to see something like this on a gaming site (but fuuuuuuck their popups):
Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don’t understand.
“Slowly”
Let’s get something straight. The people at the top are all hired by the CEO and want money. They tell the CEO what a special smart boy he is, the biggest dickus around.
This has been the way of things for decades.
CEOs and higher ups give themselves their own “yes man” psychosis and the higher you go, the more prevalent it is, and it flows down from there.
AI is just socializing the yes man sycophancy psychosis our “corporate leaders” have been experiencing by isolating themselves from society and only surrounding themselves with an echo chamber of paid sycophants.
the real trickle down economics was the psychosis we gained along the way
Just look at our current president. He is the ultimate byproduct of this mentality.
CEOs get rewarded for getting rid of staff so here we are. Who gets rewarded when the CEOs are let go? Oh right, they get golden parachutes.
This is why companies should be worker owned cooperatives. Yes, management is a useful skill, and the workers can hire it.
Wishful thinking I know, but so much more sustainable.
It’s become particularly nasty with generative AI, however, because now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don’t understand
CEO looks at AI quake: “it’s literally the same thing!”
(for those who don’t know what AI quake is: https://youtu.be/iBmjTXOK9xw)That looks suuuper fun to play!
Kinda like “I had a dream I was playing Quake 2”
a fever dream
