We can’t really say what this means. Maybe heavy AI use caused companies to perform better and grow. Or maybe the type of company that went big into AI was the type of company that was getting investments and growing because of it?
I think it’s also just that there’s not that much it makes sense to automate in the home. I run Home Assistant, and I do not have much of the typical home stuff on it. Why would I want to automate lights? My cat feeder has a timer already. I’m not about to get a smart lock and can’t imagine why I would want to automate one.
The useful things I do use it for are:
-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)
-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost
-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer
-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.
That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
Same experience, I thought using chatGPT to find some fairly specific things to buy would be a slam dunk, but it couldn’t provide links half the time and also failed to hold to criteria like shipping region etc. I would tell it to give direct links and it would mostly just say ”go on Amazon and search for X”.
There’s a special type of frustration when an LLM is close to being useful but just… isn’t.
When someone tells you about the hard times in their life and you find out they just made it up, you probably feel upset about it. Same thing. The experiences people have matter.
If you play at a casino, you’re statistically guarantee to lose money, edge cases not withstanding. Do you see casinos closing down because people stop playing?
I don’t know that I agree that it’s only now become acceptable. Successful artists have long employed others to aid in their work - see e.g. Leonardo and his studio assistants who helped paint probably large parts of some of the paintings attributed to him.
It’s not that it wouldn’t work, it’s that in order for management to put this kind of restriction on their own power in place, they’d have to first admit they need it. People usually don’t like to tie their own hands.
Now, if the employees unionised like in the film industry, it might happen.
Employment rates aren't the issue IMO, wealth concentration is. And that's increasing.
It's important because wealth is essentially power, so concentration of wealth inevitably changes the balance of power in society. And that in turn creates a feedback loop where the wealth and powerful can undermine thelaws and regulations intended to keep the distribution of wealth and power from becoming too lopsided.
This is why I view the current everything-as-a-service model that takes things people used to own and turns them into things people rent pretty skeptically.