Fascinating essay by Nikhil Suresh:
On a trip overseas, I had the privilege of a meeting with one of the Fortune 500 executives mentioned at the beginning of the post, who will remain anonymous so that they are not executed by firing squad by their board. As we were chatting, it became clear that they were very switched-on and technically competent, and they also happened to be at a company that had committed to the usual battery of exorbitant claims about their recent innovations — we’ve 100×’d our productivity, AI is the future of everything, I am but a vessel for OpenAI to make love to my wife. You know, normal things. But since I had them there without any microphones around, I asked why this was being repeated without opposition. Was it just sales fluff?
The answer was a lot more interesting. It was partially ridiculous sales material being delivered to an easily excitable audience, but this was not the dominant factor constraining honesty. Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100× productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer’s executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation. And getting enterprise contracts cancelled because you wanted to opine on something that doesn’t really matter to your organisation’s mission is a great way to get fired.
The whole essay is very much worth reading, and might make you feel saner for harboring your own doubts regarding just how much has been changed in the world by generative AI. The gist of his argument is that the entire corporate world — not merely the computer/tech/industry — is caught up in an AI mania that brooks no dissent. It’s a religious fervor and heretics are excommunicated. But the dissenters, who feel they must remain silent, are largely correct.
One way I’ve been thinking about AI mania is this: Computers have profoundly changed the world. There can be no dispute about that. Computers continue to improve in capability as networking effects grow and especially as Moore’s Law makes them faster and more capable at a pace unlike any other previous technical revolution. But most people are incapable of understanding how computers really work, and thus personally aren’t able to do much with them. Computers, for most people, are communication tools, not creative tools. Generative AI changes that. People with no computer aptitude are able to create things or discover things via ChatGPT and Claude that were simply beyond their ken heretofore. Per Clarke’s third law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Generative AI feels a bit magical to all of us, even those of us with mid-to-high levels of understanding how computers work and how to make them work. But it feels like the first time ever that computers have been tools for their own creation for a lot of rather dimwitted but confident corporate manager/executive types. This moment feels like the Big Bang to them. The religiosity of this is such that there is no way to convince them that AI, as it stands today, is impressive and useful and innovative, yes, but several orders of magnitude less so than they’re imagining that it is. No way to convince them, that is, until the bubble bursts.
★ Saturday, 25 July 2026