The AI Fad Just Burned to the Waterline, by Charles Hugh Smith

Corporate leaders are more susceptible to fashion than the fashion industry. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Sometimes wide moats and billions of dollars to blow lead not to glory but to hubris, which beckons Nemesis.

While everyone was busy reassuring themselves the stock market was still A-OK, the driver of the market–the AI fad–just burned to the waterline. Yes, the current euphoric expectations for AI are a fad, the latest in the endless stream of “gotta have” status signifiers and cultural frenzies.

The core dynamic in all fads is Human Wetware 1.0. Though we glorify our individuality–The primacy of the Individual is the key characteristic of Modernity–we remain a herd animal, alert to every twitch in the herd’s emotional state and anxious to join the herd when it starts running, lest we’re left behind or lose status.

CEOs are just as prone to fads as the rest of us, and this is how the AI fad gathered momentum. A decade ago the warm-and-fuzzy tech fad that enamored every corporate HQ was fuzzy logic, one of the long line of precursors to the current AI mania. So labels touting “fuzzy logic” were slapped on rice cookers as everyone scrambled to cash in on the latest tech fad.

And so now every package of Kroika Cookies is emblazoned with “powered by AI!” Indeed. The leaders of the herd are especially keen to study every shift in the zeitgeist and the pecking order, as the greatest sin for CEOs is to be revealed as incompetent / clueless by missing the latest boat in corporate fads.

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One response to “The AI Fad Just Burned to the Waterline, by Charles Hugh Smith

  1. All because of DeepSeek?

    These things happen when you are more commie than the workers utopia.

    Corporate CEOs?

    Overpaid educated derelicts.

    This just in from Toxic Reasons:

    Just Another Day

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