> This belief system—that AI is useless and that you're not good enough to work on it anyway—hurts three groups
I don't know anyone who thinks AI is useless. In fact, I've seen quite a few places where it can be quite useful. Instead, I think it's massively overhyped to its own detriment. This article presents the author as the person who has the One True Vision, and all us skeptics are just tragically undereducated.
I'm a crusty old engineer. In my career, I've seen RAD tooling, CASE tools, no/low-code tools, SGML/XML, and Web3 not live up to the lofty claims of the devotees and therefore become radioactive despite there being some useful bits in there. I suspect AI is headed down the same path and see (and hear of) more and more projects that start out looking really impressive and then crumble after a few promising milestones.
I think this post is cherry-picking history. Jobs also had some disastrous projects chasing ideas outside of Apple's core competency. Newton, Macintosh TV, etc. He also had some grand slam moments that could have been described as trying to do everything. The iPod? Apple had nothing to do with the music industry. iPhone? where did THAT fit in with personal computers?
Rather than poking at the Apple Car project as an example of a company reaching too far, we should be paying attention to whether any actual lessons were learned.
First, I have to admit that I was negatively biased by his appearance. I have a hard time believing anything that some guy who looks like he smokes metric tons of weed and dorks around on his guitar all day has to say.
That being said, the tech world has a bad habit of letting "visionaries" rest on their laurels. He'd have a lot more credence if he was actively developing AI and had more than gut feel to contribute.