People are the hard part of AI

keithbrown.com

4 points·drewlem··3 comments

> "Not only are you responsible for the work getting done, you also now own how it gets done, and therefore are responsible for continual optimization and maximal automation ..." -Proton CTO

The article talks about why humans are getting in the way of AI automation, and I think the main problem is reflected in that statement. Engineers are responsible of a thin vertical of the entire business, and I find it ironic and "rich" for the leadership to constantly demand more of engineers while at the same time scratching their heads why it's not really working.

I actually think AI is going to throw a wrench into this because it's not JUST going to automate engineering, it's going to empower high level engineers to do more... at the cost of handling AI and making sure it works smoothly, and this is going to have a huge overhead.

So I think the two options are, let engineers specialize, become more productive but also more detached from what the business does, creating automation workflows that others use... or try to add AI on top of everything engineers already do and watch your org crash and burn as no one can manage the chaos.

If AI is so easy then why isn't it just building unicorns while making no mistakes?

In a lot of ways it is, when you remove all the humans from the loop it goes really fast. There's tons of unicorns now through AI, way more than before AI. If you are trying to make the point that any human should be able to use AI to create any unicorn, you are making the point of the article. The human still has a huge impact on it.

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