Because like AI, your CEO is a tool.

Because unlike with the other tools you use the CEO of your company is investing millions of dollars into AI and they want a big return on their investment.

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is forcing AI on all the employees

I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.

Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done?

Not just that… why do they have to threat and push for people to use a tool that allegedly is fantastic and makes everything better and faster?.. the answer is that it does not work but they need to pump the numbers to keep the bubble going

It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.

If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.

tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care

They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.

Accurate description of most managers i’ve encountered.

Because they make money selling you the AI. It’s that simple.

They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.

AI make money line go up. It’s not clueless, he’s trying to sell a kind of snake oil (ok, not “snake oil”, I don’t think AI is entirely bad).

It’s like all those companies who fast tracked their way into profits by ignoring the catastrophic effects they were having on the environment… Down the road.

Later is someone else’s problem. Now is when AI-pushers want to make money.

I hate where things have been heading.

same as how it goes on the stock market? they don’t care about the long term, but only the short term. what happens on the long term is somebody else’s problem, you just have to squeeze out everything, and know when to exit.

they are gambling with our lives. but not with theirs. that’s (one of) the problem: they are not fearing their lives.

it’s also sort of a description of his own role, innit?

Which is how you know they have a good product that they have full faith in.

when they have to blackmail, threaten, coerce, and force people to accept their product.

Threats work well for scams. People who couldn’t be bothered to move by promises of something new and better can be motivated by fear of losing what they already have.

It’s really unfortunate psychology is looked down upon and psychologists are viewed as some “soft” profession. Zuck is a psychology major. It’s been 2 decades, most of the radical changes in which were not radical in anything other than approach to human psychology.

BTW, I’ve learned recently that in their few initial years Khmer Rouge were not known as communist organization to even many of their members. Just an “organization”. Their rhetoric was agrarian (of course peasants are hard-working virtuous people, and from peasantry working the earth comes all the wisdom, and those corrupt and immoral people in the cities should be made work to eat), Buddhist (of course the monk-feudal system of obedience, work and ascese is the virtuous way to live, though of course we are having a rebirth now so we are even wiser), monarchist (they referred to Sihanouk’s authority almost to the end), anti-Vietnamese (that’s like Jewish for German Nazis, Vietnamese are the evil). And after them taking power for some time they still didn’t communicate anything communist. They didn’t even introduce their leadership. Nobody knew who makes the decisions in that “organization” or how it was structured. It didn’t have a face. They only officially made themselves visible as Democratic Kampuchea with communism and actual leaders when the Chinese pressured them. They didn’t need to, because they were obeyed via threat (and lots of fulfillment) of violence anyway.

This is important in the sense that when you have the power, you don’t need to officially tell the people over which you have it that you rule them.

So - in these 2 decades it has also came into fashion to deliberately stubbornly ignore the fact that psychology works over masses. And everybody acts as if when there’s no technical means to make people do something, then it’s not likely or possible.

“The Sky Is Falling! Buy My Magic Umbrella!” is a classic hypeman’s trick.

For some odd reason, this calls to mind an emotionally immature parent trying to get their toddler to eat vegetables… no reason at all…

The code reviews will continue until morale improves.

Error: Buffer overflow.

No, they’re all super special and have an “instinct” that a robot could never have. Of course the same does not go for artists or anyone who does the actual work for these “titans of industry”.

*by “instinct” we, of course, mean survivorship bias based on what is essentially gambling, exploitation, and being too big to fail.