AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making w/ Nik Suresh

**Ed Zitron** (0:02)
Call Zone Media Greetings, hello, and salutations. I am Ed Zitron, and this is Better Offline.
We are back. You need to subscribe to the newsletters. You need to download the podcast you're already listening to. Take your friend's phones, download it on there. You will have failed me if you don't do this. Not really. I love you all dearly. But look, today I am joined by the incredible writer and consultant, Nik Suresh, who two weeks ago put out one of the best pieces on AI I've ever read, and not just because it confirms my biases, and it's called AI Mania is Eviscerating Global Decision Making. Nik, thank you for joining me.

**Nik Suresh** (0:47)
Hey, thank you so much for having me on again.

**Ed Zitron** (0:49)
This piece was terrifying. I just want to be really clear that the things that I read in here, a lot of them I was like, I assumed this was happening. I assumed that it was this bad, but to summarize the piece in short, it appears that just AI is this bordering on religious thing within business now that people get into, regardless of whether it even does anything.

**Nik Suresh** (1:16)
Yeah, yeah. And I think the thing that got us so widely circulated is even that people who use AI in their work and say they're seeing benefits, a lot of the more sensible people are looking at their colleagues and going, what are you guys doing?
Like, I think I'm a little bit faster at my job, and here we have my CEO saying, let's just scrap every other project, we'll remove all the employees, we're gonna have 100x productivity. And even sensible people that enjoy it are getting a little bit worried by the level the mania has gotten to.

**Ed Zitron** (1:48)
Yeah, so give me an example here. The first section is called AI Investments are Generally Total Failures, and I realize the title really does say it all there, but can you break that down for me?

**Nik Suresh** (2:00)
Yeah, so it's interesting because most projects at companies do fail, especially big companies. They're just bad at running tech projects. I've written about this well before the AI thing was big.
What is fascinating is that they have an even higher failure rate for the AI projects. And again, we don't need to get into an argument with people about whether it works or not, right? We can just start with the basis of normal IT projects fail a bunch. Right. AI projects are novel technology, so these are failing even more. And the protective factor at a company is normally that they don't want to spend all their money on IT. They actually want to spend the smallest amount on IT possible, right? It's mostly a thing, it's a cost for the business. Right. With AI, this is totally inverted, and companies are going, I'd like to take as much budget as I can feasibly get, and I'm going to put it all into this thing that I know I'm bad at, and I want to do a harder version of that.
But I can't admit to anyone, I've just wasted millions and millions of dollars. So it's sort of like all the organizations in the planet are going all in on the thing they know they're bad at, playing it on hard mode, and then sort of just lying about it after the fact.

**Ed Zitron** (3:08)
And when you say lying, what do you mean? Are they just being like, yeah, this is making me one bazillion more productive percents. I'm so good at AI, I love it.
What are they doing? What are they actually doing with this crap?

**Nik Suresh** (3:25)
Well, okay, so it happens in a couple of ways, right? When I say lying, that sounds like very intentional. And there are people that lie because there are people that lie everywhere. But usually it's two things. Internally, it can be a lot of delusion. There are a lot of executives out there who have funded AI projects, and they don't realize that the whole organization has sort of shifted into presenting them with the rosiest view of what is happening that is possible. Like if you're a CEO who has heard good things about AI, and let's say you've got two guys underneath you gunning for a promotion. Right. Those two guys are now at an arms race to talk about their AI productivity and how much AI they're rolling out across the business. Like that is the goal. It's not to make money. It's to be the most AI, whatever the fuck that means. Right. So it's pretty nonsensical. But that's self-delusion.