A lot of the applications of Ai are going to have to go through "normal" innovation routes.

Eg low-end disruption. I have already seen "Ai lawyer" at play here.

A colleague of mine is involved in a long class action against a builder. The group chats have gone absolutely chaotic this year... as members consult heavily with LLMs and the (real) lawyer can't deal with the volume of action.

Another friend is a wholesaler and does a lot of small-scale commercial deals. Contracts have gotten bigger and negotiation has gotten more involved as "Ai lawyers" read and write these contracts.

Employment contracts are much more likely to be negotiated, referenced, etc.

So... These are all routes to "classic" disruptive innovation. It's not replacing billable hours at law firms. It is replacing non-consumption.

Law is adversarial. A formal legal letter requires a form of legal letter in response. Law generates its own demand.

I would be watching a lot more for ground up innovation, rather than adoption at firms.

It's kind of worth reading. Not to learn about AI. But... it is an interesting/historic intersection of religion and technology.

Side note: (a) This new pope is very good at "political rhetoric" and (dare I say) polemic. He's a lot more relevant than recent popes. (b) There seems to have been a vibe shift, re: secular sentiments towards religion.

There is potentially a lot happening at this intersection... say catholicism and AI.

For example... LLMs make scripture a lot more accessible. That tends to be impactful, historically. It's Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza and Schmidt. This kind of thing is a niche interest... even among the faithful, but an important niche. And... it just answers your questions, patiently.

It's also a therapist, confidant and advice giver... potentially a confessor or priest. Talk of "making an AI god" got a little stale, but... there are many ways that LLMs might take god-like roles in people's lives.

Predictions are futile, but I suspect we are going to see AI encroachment into religious/spiritual domains. I further suspect that good, natural, conversational audio is the bottleneck.

Personally... I'm curious about this Pope/AI thing. I find it interesting.

I'm an atheist, but I have to admit the previous guy was pretty dope.

> re: secular sentiments towards religion I'm not sure if we are talking about the same phenomenon here, but I have certainly seen indications of something I would describe in similar words. I have heard a lot of people recently think along the lines of appreciation for religion without really believing it. People that are skeptical whether Noah's ark ever really happened but that still think that the story is metaphorically wise enough to be counted as true in some sense.

Maybe it is just that I am getting older and wiser and projecting my own spiritual development on the people around me, but I think this general view towards religion seems to be gaining a lot of traction.

...you could also swap out with "rich people" or "all people," "governments."

In fact, reading these sentences with ad-lib on the subject tends to give these sentences interestingly different connotations.

I think we have so many hangups about this subject that we ended up leaving it unexplored and misunderstood.

Talent, drive, inherent traits interacting with learnable traits, learning curves, etc. What you are good at. What you are good at getting better at.

"Blank slate" is a better ethic. It's sort of the basis for modern public/political moral perspectives. But also for personal ethos... the "growth mindset* is a much better ethos and mentality.

But Otoh... we are who we are. We have the body we have. The genes we have. The childhood development we have. The education and experience we have. The personality we have. Etc.

We don't really have the have the culture of weighing these, and "knowing ourselves" via a mattwr-of-fact, calculating examination.

This is a good approach.

That said... It's hard to deny the romanticization and projection point above.

Beer goggles can be a mind expanding POV, but you need to be aware of it or you just end up being wrong for silly reasons.

A sober look at different is a good thing. Ooh... I agree that better and more advanced org concepts are likely still to be developed. But Otoh...

No. Not if the valuations and downstream effects of valuations are formulaic, which they often are.

Google might be jumping the gun here... and making an innovators dilemma type mistake.

LLMs are an alternative to search engines, which endangers google's whole ad business.

"AI mode" search is a sort of bridge. It gets Gemini a lot of customers that otherwise would not have used an LLM at all.

They may get stuck trying to keep the llm pattern similar enough to the search engine that the adwords business working more or less the same way.

This could be self limiting.

Coding goodness is just "unevenly distributed."

Irl, (a) different people's ways of working with ai are a million little islands and (b) bottlenecks vary enormously by coder and codebase/task.

Also... I think our era has an intrinsic bias that change=progress, productivity, etc.

Take the "networked computing revolution" of 1990-2000. These computers did land on every desk and every pocket. They are administration powerhouses. Excellent for all manner of administration tasks.

But... what this netted out to is "change." We send a lot more emails than we did letters. We communicate a ton. Secretaries went extinct. But "administration" grew.

A university faculty typically has more admins. Companies hire more accountants, HR, project managers, etc.

Maybe administration was never really a bottleneck.

Code has a lot of this. Everyone has a road map, wishlist, etc. It appears as though "code capacity" is the bottleneck. But maybe most of those companies can't really generate much more value from more software.

Anecdotally, it seems that many mid-tier shops are migrating/ modernizing their stack, and suchlike.

I haven't heard of many belting out features, and increasing prices or sales.

Most bottlenecks are upstream of another bottleneck. Few are a "dam."

>What people typically don’t do is look at why this is taking so long, and even more importantly: long duration does not automatically mean the problem originates there.

To some extent, we tell as many lies as we can get away with. Some answers are more convenient then others.

"Why" this is taking so long, like "why did this fail?" are prone to broadly agreed lies. Sometimes this is for obvious blame liability reasons. Often, this is because the lie conflicts with some "meta."

One such fallacy is the idea that software=value. Code= money, because it cost money to write. Features=revenue. Etc.

Irl.. startups produce features very quickly because they actually need features. They start with zero features.

But... LinkedIn, visa or even Facebook.... What they are short on is opportunities to develop code with value. Ie... Something that will increase revenue.

FB aren't resource constrained. They're demand constrained. If there were a "write code, make revenue" opportunity available... they'd have taken it already.

This totally conflicts with the experience of working somewhere. That's because you have wishlists, road maps and deadlines.... and it always appears that demand for code is sky high.

Good point.

Precise motives are hard to work out as a general rule. Ultimately, it often comes down to a decision that decision makers like or don't like for a confluence of reasons.