Grumpy Coworker

Category: People

  • The AGI Delusion: When Tech Bros Mistake Professional Service for True Love

    confused stickman from https://pixabay.com/vectors/stickman-thinking-worry-confused-310590/

    For those of you lucky enough to not have been completely bombarded by the term, “AGI” = “artificial general intelligence”

    I had an epiphany recently. The AI hype cycle has reached peak absurdity, and I’m watching supposedly smart people make the same mistake that drunk guys at Hooters have been making since 1983.

    You know the type. Guy goes to Hooters, orders some mediocre wings, and because the waitress whose literal job description includes “be friendly to customers” smiles at his terrible jokes and remembers he likes ranch dressing, he’s convinced she’s totally into him. She’s not, Kevin. She’s working. She gets paid to be nice to you. That’s the entire business model.

    Now watch the same thing happening with LLMs and AGI predictions.

    The Pattern Is Identical

    Some VP gets access to Claude or ChatGPT. It writes him a pretty decent email. It explains a concept he was too lazy to Google. It agrees with his half-baked ideas and formats them nicely with bullet points. And suddenly he’s out here telling investors we’re “18 months from AGI” and “revolutionizing human consciousness.”

    No, Brad. The LLM is doing its job. It’s trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest – which in practice means it’s incredibly good at seeming engaged with whatever you’re saying. That’s not consciousness. That’s not intelligence in the way you think it is. It’s professional courtesy, at scale.

    The Mistake Everyone’s Making

    Here’s what’s actually impressive about LLMs: they’re really good at pattern matching across an enormous corpus of text and producing statistically likely continuations that sound human. That’s genuinely cool! It’s useful! I use these tools every damn day.

    But somehow we’ve gone from “wow, this autocomplete is really sophisticated” to “we’re definitely creating a superintelligent entity that will solve all human problems or kill us all, definitely one or the other, probably by 2026.”

    The Hooters guy sees friendliness and projects a whole relationship onto it. The AGI guys see impressive text generation and project consciousness, reasoning, understanding, and generalized intelligence onto it. Both are mistaking a service doing its job really well for something it fundamentally isn’t.

    What We’re Actually Building

    Look, LLMs are transformative technology. They’re genuinely changing how we work. But let’s be honest about what they are:

    They’re really good at:

    • Synthesizing information from their training data
    • Producing human-sounding text
    • Following patterns and instructions
    • Being consistently helpful without getting tired or annoyed

    They’re not good at:

    • At least up until recently, basic arithmetic
    • Actually understanding anything in the way humans do
    • True reasoning versus pattern matching that looks like reasoning
    • Knowing what they don’t know
    • Having any kind of persistent goals or desires
    • Actually being “intelligent” in any general sense

    The Business Angle Makes It Worse

    And here’s where it gets really messy. Just like Hooters has a financial incentive to not tell Kevin that Amber isn’t actually into him (he might stop coming in and ordering $47 worth of wings), AI companies have a massive financial incentive to not correct the AGI misconception.

    Why would you? Every breathless article about being “on the verge of AGI” is free marketing. Every panicked think piece about AI safety makes your product sound more powerful. Every CEO who drinks the Kool-Aid and thinks they need to “prepare for the AGI transition” is another enterprise contract.

    The hype IS the product strategy. It’s working perfectly.

    The Actual Engineers Know Better

    Want to know something funny? Talk to the actual engineers building these systems. Most of them will tell you they’re doing really impressive statistics and pattern matching, not creating consciousness. They’ll explain the limitations, the failure modes, the places where the whole thing falls apart.

    But that doesn’t make for good TED talks or funding rounds, does it?

    “We’ve built a really sophisticated text prediction system with some genuinely novel approaches to context management” doesn’t have the same ring as “WE’RE BUILDING GOD OR SKYNET, DEFINITELY ONE OF THOSE.”

    What This Means for the Rest of Us

    Here’s the practical problem: when everyone’s running around acting like AGI is imminent, we make terrible decisions.

    Companies restructure around AI capabilities that don’t exist yet. People get laid off because executives think Claude can do their job (it can’t, not really, not without massive human oversight). Billions get poured into “AGI research” that’s really just “make the chatbot slightly better at seeming smart.”

    Meanwhile, the actual useful applications of these tools – the boring stuff like “help developers write boilerplate faster” or “make customer service slightly less miserable” – get ignored because they’re not sexy enough.

    The Hard Truth

    AGI – actual artificial general intelligence, the kind that can genuinely reason across domains, understand context, form real goals, and learn truly new things – might be possible someday. I don’t know. Nobody knows, despite what they’ll tell you on Twitter.

    But current LLMs aren’t it, and scaling them up won’t get us there. That’s not how this works. You can’t get to general intelligence by making autocomplete really, really good, any more than you can get to the moon by building taller ladders.

    The sooner we all accept that the AI is being professionally friendly, not actually falling for us, the sooner we can have realistic conversations about what these tools actually are and what we should actually do with them.

    But that would require the industry to give up the hype, and the Hooters guys to accept that Amber is just being nice because that’s her job.

    Neither seems likely anytime soon.

    Grumpy Coworker is tired of watching smart people make dumb predictions. The LLM isn’t into you. It’s math. Very impressive math, but still just math.

  • The Ontological Crisis of the Orphaned Recurring Meeting

    There exists in the corporate universe a peculiar form of digital purgatory: the recurring meeting whose original organizer has long since departed the organization, yet continues to manifest on calendars with the persistence of a poltergeist.

    You know the one. Every Tuesday at 2 PM, “Weekly Sync – Q3 Initiative” still appears. Janet created it in 2019. Janet left in 2021. It’s now 2025. The meeting persists.

    The Ship of Theseus, But Make It Annoying

    Philosophy majors spent centuries debating whether a ship remains the same ship after every plank has been replaced. Corporate drones face a more pressing question: Is it still “Janet’s Weekly Sync” if Janet is now a VP at a competitor and half the original attendees have been reorganized into oblivion?

    The meeting has evolved. New people have been added. The agenda (if one ever existed) has drifted from “Q3 Initiative” to “whatever fire we’re currently putting out.” Someone changed the meeting location from “Conference Room B” to “Zoom – see link.” The organizer field still reads “Janet Thompson (External).”

    It’s the meeting equivalent of a hermit crab inhabiting an abandoned shell.

    The Metaphysical Hierarchy of Meeting Death

    Let us establish a taxonomy of meeting cessation:

    Clinical Death occurs when the organizer deletes the recurrence. Clear. Decisive. The meeting is dead, and everyone receives a notification of its passing. We can grieve and move on.

    Brain Death happens when the organizer leaves the company but the meeting remains. The meeting has lost its consciousness, its original purpose, but the body continues to function. Attendees still show up, confused, like neurons firing in a deceased host.

    Zombie State emerges when attendees begin dropping off one by one, but the meeting continues to exist for the two remaining participants who lack either the authority or the initiative to kill it. They meet. They know it’s pointless. They do not speak of it.

    Schrödinger’s Meeting exists when literally no one attends anymore, but the calendar invites persist. Is it a meeting if nobody comes? Does it exist in any meaningful sense? The calendar insists it does.

    The Problem of Remaining Attendees

    Here’s where it gets thorny. If the organizer departs but six people remain, surely the meeting still “exists” in some form. But what if it’s down to two people? One person?

    At what threshold does a “team meeting” become just “two people on a call who should probably just Slack”?

    And here’s the real question that keeps enterprise architects up at night: Who has the moral authority to delete someone else’s recurring meeting?

    You’re not the organizer. You’re just an attendee. Can you unilaterally declare this meeting dead? That’s not murder—that’s more like… meeting euthanasia. Merciful, perhaps, but do you have the right?

    The Solution No One Wants

    The answer, of course, is that someone needs to be granted organizer privileges so they can officially end it. This requires:

    1. Someone to care enough to do this
    2. IT to process the request
    3. Agreement among the remaining attendees that yes, this meeting has earned its rest

    In practice, what happens is: nothing. The meeting continues until the heat death of the universe or the next corporate restructuring, whichever comes first.

    The Deeper Truth

    Perhaps the recurring meeting never truly dies. Perhaps it exists eternally in some quantum state, simultaneously alive in someone’s accepted calendar invites and dead in the absence of human attendance.

    The meeting is not the organizer. The meeting is not the attendees. The meeting is not even the recurrence pattern.

    The meeting is the shared corporate delusion that synchronous time spent together produces value.

    And as long as that delusion persists, so too shall Janet’s Weekly Sync, 2 PM every Tuesday, until the end of time.

    See you there. Or not. The meeting doesn’t actually care.

  • I Didn’t Get Any Cake

    Milton Waddams in Office Space:

    Nina: Now Milton, don’t be greedy, let’s pass it along and make sure everyone gets a piece.
    Milton Waddams: Yeah, but last time I didn’t receive a piece. And I was told…
    Nina: Just pass.
    [while the cake passes Milton mutters – eventually everybody but Milton gets a piece]
    Milton Waddams: [muttering] I could set the building on fire.

    When you start getting your meetings bumped, your invitations dumped, and not receiving cake–is there any other conclusion than Milton’s underlying suspicion that he’s intentionally being choked off?

    I understand that the time of one person at a higher level is more valuable, but one wasted hour of a higher level employee can erode hours worth of productivity. Bump people sparingly. Respect their time.

  • Respect and The Prefix “Pre-“

    In many ways, good parents, good teaching, and good management have similar traits. There has to be respect to have control. Respect is not about being liked; respect is about being trusted to make good on whatever promise or threat is given. Maybe that oversimplifying, but take away that aforementioned trust and see what happens to the respect. Moreover, respect doesn’t just involve the person who is the recipient of the promise or threat; respect involves all observers.

    Sending out materials labeled “pre-” indicates that you are making a request. Not expecting that request to be fulfilled diminishes our respect for you.

    The meeting pre-read: Pre-reads which are read in their entirety in a meeting. This is such an established pattern that many people don’t even bother to open the document prior to the meeting.

    Why bother? We’re going to read word-for-word in the meeting anyway, and spent 90% of our time rereading a handful of sentences.

    Some of the problems with the pre-read are a consequence of no one wanting to read a 80-100 page document for the first time during a meeting. Keep the pre-reads reasonable if you want any hope of them being read beforehand.

    Canceling the meeting for lack of pre-read participation would be a nice luxury, but that would be more likely to encourage people to not do the pre-reads.

    Pre-work for classes: Having pre-work for classes and not expecting it to be done diminishes your students’ respect for you.

    Working through the pre-work as the body of the class makes those of us who do the work beforehand despise you.

    Either the pre-work is an “agenda” for the class and needs to be stated as such, or it needs to be given a good faith attempt by all students. If it’s an agenda for the class, I’ll probably opt for the class that considers it pre-work and save myself some time and aggravation.

    Enhanced by Zemanta