Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
We deserve better than this. We can get it.
We are apparently going all in on AI, and the way those in charge talk about it, I can already see it will be a disaster. They think it’s a magic button to solve all our problems. I want no part of it.
I am seeing adoption being rather slow. Some very creative uses have been found though. It’s very good at summarizing content, for example. Especially in a context where it doesn’t matter too much how accurate it is, like summarizing a speech-to-text transcript of a phone call.