The pathology is that we have this system in the first place.
Imagine if we just paid people to coat their properties in solar panels - throw them on your roof, lawn, wherever you have the space. We could drive energy prices down to nothing. We could pay people to install ADUs. The resources are there, but the imagination and commitment are not.
Instead, I'm looking at a $40k+ solar install for my very small house and a breakeven on investment in maybe 10 years for a house I probably won't live in by then.
> It makes me wonder if human beings are simply hardwired to suffer from some form of obsession...
Existential dread pushing biology to survive?
Basic biological facts obfuscated by social memes; ship code, make line go up, worship allegory's of the long dead.
Hunter gatherer clusters vaguely collaborated to survive. Language and agrarian traditions have demanded more than just survival but all kinds of observance of meaningless spoken traditions. Obligation to ignore our own senses and chant the memes of the living elders suffering existential dread of their own, afraid to left unattended in hospice. For whatever reason unable to just say that; they appeal to old religious or political screed.
Caretake this debt ledger after they who ran up the bill are dead.
What?
It's all just obsession to live laundered and obfuscated by useless philosophy.
the powerful obsession machinery brought us through the long natural selection process - obsession to watch for snakes and spiders, to maintain cleanliness, etc. With modern civilization we arranged to plug into that powerful machinery other stimuli too - like that RI and all the others making us productive society members. The most happy countries aren't most productive. Especially when they are obsessed with being happy like those Finns obsessed with sauna instead of tokenmaxxing.
He's essentially saying that C-suite people overestimate how effective LLMs are at one-shotting hard problems, and underestimate the human maintenance work that follows.
also clickbait title
In other words, only people who are afraid their point won't stand on its own merits would resort to saying "X is suffering from AI psychosis." An idea is true or false on its own. If you're resorting to labels, you're just trying to automatically win the argument, instead of saying something substantive or interesting.
It says a lot that with few exceptions, the people on the ground dealing with AI closely on a day to day basis are the most skeptical about their positions.
It's a little rhetorical device to draw in the reader, and personally I think it works quite well.
Not understanding or not believing in the power of AI, or misapplying it or whatever, is not psychosis.
AI psychosis is when people suffer actual delusions.
Because I've literally seen managers who believe firmly that AI is going to replace their entire engineering organization, and are acting on that assumption as though it's a thing to take for granted, not discuss/consider/evaluate.
And my understanding of delusion is
> a fixed, false belief that is firmly held despite clear, contradictory evidence
which seems to apply pretty well in this case.
These folks are operating with the same abandon that the folks who have AI telling them they're gods are - and both are incorrect, arguably delusional.
At best you can try to argue that maybe the contradictory evidence isn't clear, and they're going to be correct. I think that's a very tenuous argument to be making, though.
"I'm being followed by raccoons and my mom is controlling them"
That's what AI psychosis refers to.
You're just describing someone having a belief that you disagree with. And even ridiculous and stupid beliefs are just those. They are obviously extremely different from the types of psychoses you see in a psych ward.
It's a mental state, not explicit illness and it's literally defined as
> Psychosis is characterized as disruptions to a person's thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what is not.
Further, if you go and look at the actual source... it's repeating a claim from Box founder Aaron Levie.
Who is quoted as saying:
> “CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,”
Which is why the title is "apparently".
I worked with someone who sincerely believed he was spiritually co-evolving with his army of sycophantic AI agents (the agents would be tasked with discussing his thoughts at night and collaborated to give him morning reports about his progress). He would publicly write about how relationships with friends and family collapsing was a natural consequence of being so "advanced". I also never once saw any meaningful work done by his team of "agents", they existed solely tell him how smart he was (of course he specifically set up the system to 'challenge' him but... in practice that didn't seem to be working).
I suspect there are a lot more people quietly going through something similar but keeping it to themselves better.
I would distinguish this type of behavior from people who over ambitious views of what can be accomplished with AI.
"In other words, Levie’s theory posits, CEOs don’t really understand processes well enough to know what really can and can’t be automated. But that lack of knowledge doesn’t stop them from acting on their beliefs."
i have been in the workforce for a long time. this "theory" has been theorized since as far back as i can remember. its the premise of undercover boss. its the punchline of many r/maliciouscompliance writing exercises.
the higher up the company you go, the more disconnected you are from the workers on the front line, the less you understand about their needs, and the more likely you are to push for something without understanding the totality of the impact of the decision.
This is not too dissimilar when you realize a software architecture is holding you back. You don’t try to “save” all the existing functions, modules, layers, etc. but instead are happy to discard or replace them given your top-down vantage point of the system and where it needs to head.
Or when the sales teams bonuses are more important than the margins of the business.
There’s lots of reasons the “wrong work” gets pushed down and it’s not exclusively because “they aren’t listening” as much as “they are listening to someone else who matters more.”
This kind of thing only increases the disconnect between what CEOs think employees do and what they actually do.
but a c-suite picking up some tool, making a toy example, then declaring “well doing X is super easy, roll it out” (or “change the kpi”, etc.) is something i have seen dozens of times.
I think there's more nuance to it but replace people with shareholder and leader with CEO.
I think that for a company to exist and thrive long term, it might need a culture which doesn't jump on every trend but it still evaluates them from time for time for a certain time and treat them as such (like tools) and if the tool is ineffective, then to not use the tool.
Unfortunately, I feel like this requires a deeper discourse and CTO's might be better suited for it or the fact that I feel like perhaps some shareholders might not be interested in the technical details so much.
I don't know but If I were a leader I would hopefully wish to make a pragmatic solution/suggestion while taking finances, current reality in mind and currently IMO AI aren't the end all, be all, that some people (with shrewd/double incentives) intend on suggesting.
There are enough stories of people completely losing the plot, thinking they've invented a new type of maths or similar, but there's almost certainly also a much more subtle influence in most of us, where the constant affirmation, obedience, apologia, reframes our expectations of how interactions should be.
We are already the most narcissistic generation, having been molded by social media to compare, stats-max, and overobsess about who we are. Chatbots are now fanning the flames.
If this is true, then companies should focus on hiring juniors out of college. The investment is less risky.
However, I don't personally believe this number and timeline is true, but if you do, the conclusion should be to wait and invest in humans.
I think any juniors who keep failing 10% of text based task will eventually get fired... So investing in those that don't fail seems only sensible move as usual.
I worked with someone who was kind of a Shopify power user, managed the store, could do a lot of things, but wasn't a programmer. She showed me how Shopify does that AI block generator now to deliver something that was like 65% done in a minute.
I also have a friend who knows enough code to be dangerous in WordPress: he was able to vibe code an API integration, got immensely excited about it, and wanted to make it into a plugin/product for others.
It's just the state of the art: a good prompt and some small tweaks can get you something that's minimally viable really quickly. And that's very...intoxicating! Empowering! Exciting! Something that felt way too hard or out of your reach in the past has just materialized before your eyes, and because you got that far, that fast, surely you can get the thing over the finish line with a bit more work. (It tends not to work that way right now, but I don't blame people for feeling how they feel!)
It sounds hostile while also removing any scope for productive discourse.
Once you call someone a 'psycho', they are less likely to engage with you, and more likely to double down on their views.
I don't think there ever has been something that can _answer_ you back and reinforce your delusion. This is a new thing.
You cannot discuss tradeoffs with anyone anymore because they chose to give their brain and authority away to a statistically incorrect robot. The LLM has already generated potential tradeoffs real or not.
Treadmill keeps on moving...
Even senior developers can succumb to it. They try agentic development, they see that a single prompt can generate a day's worth of work in mere minutes _and it works_ and they are so impressed that they immediately turn to Twitter to share the joy. Understandable!
Once they inevitably discover that the AI generated code is called "slop" for a reason, they are too embarrassed to post to Twitter that they were deluded.
Sometimes that happens though: a few days ago a developer on Twitter bragged that they have created a C to Metal compiler using AI and it works. Today they had to post regrets, explaining that nothing works except tests and the code is shit. Sadly can't find the tweet though.
Those aren't the deal breakers.
They entirely rely on the competence of the folks they hired and cross-match enforcers with the drivers they have - they deal with fallible people on both sides of that.
The fundamental difference is that the humans are good consequence predictors, have built up reputations they are not willing to trash, can say no to things and in general don't want to go jail.
AI tools look like that, but don't have any of the useful conflict which came for free with employing humans.
It also doesn't have any useless conflict, but not all conflict between what I say and what someone is willing to do is bad conflict.
It will delete your prod db faster and with a bigger smile than your most upset employee.
I may be suffering from AI psychosis too, but this looks like a typical AI patterns.
Man, it must be hard to be a CEO these days. Even if you take a realistic position on AI, you can’t get off the train. Wall Street and your investors will hang and quarter you the moment you start expressing doubts. So you grind your teeth, make grandiose investment promises, and sign lofty budgets. That is if you are a realist. Maximalists - self-aware or not - will drag you forward whether you want it or not. There is no point in arguing. AI is much closer to a faith rather than technology. You either believe or you don’t. Agnostics are a statistical error.
There have been several leaps in tech over the past few centuries, this is just sort of one. I can't find much original arguments or reasoning on either side that hasn't been made before for other tech. I think people are afraid it will replace them/jobs and they don't know what that will mean for their future, and society's future. It's also an issue with a few at the top of the pyramid controlling the tech. But it was so with petroleum, cars, even the internet (still is, handful of tech companies). There is also the quality thing, people think in a very binary way, where either AI work is perfect or it's a disaster, because it is replacing people after all. In reality, it's a sliding scale, and how well it does dictates how much work one person needs to do.
There was a time people didn't have text editing computers for example, lots of time spent writing on pen and paper, copy writers spell checking, carbon-copies being used to copy as you write,etc.. suddenly printers and text editors came. people still edited text, just more efficiently, you didn't need as many people. and with the internet, lots of different types of jobs were created.
I personally think, this is a timely rebalancing. Gen-Z has been suffering for a lack of entry level jobs, and it is getting worse because of AI.. but obviously AI has limits right? let's say we don't need software developers any more (ha!), does that mean AI can churn out perfect software each time? Alright, then who's paying AI to do that? does that mean I can create my own HN and have AI moderate it well on its own? Great, then how about something bigger, Facebook alternatives? How about more IRL things, like robotics, R&D work ,etc.. I just don't see how even if AI was dirt cheap and it replaces most of what people can do on computers, that would be a complete disaster.
I think the real issue is failure to re-architect society as time and tech changes. everything from academia, to WFH/RTO policies, labor law, housing, taxes, law,etc.. that's the issue, not AI on its own. It's the people not regulating it as they adjust and adapt to it without causing harm that are the issue. I'd love to blame tech CEOs, but they're just playing their part in capitalism. even in a communist society, the blame would be at lack of central planning and failure to regulate companies.
I'll say this though, it isn't so much they're delusional, but they don't get why people are emotional over something basic and utilitarian. to them, adaption and adjustment comes with a nice financial cushion. People tend to plan out their lives, without any cushions. i think there is mild psychosis going all around, but that isn't unusual. Even the hysteria and lack of perspective is in line with history, as well as how we continue to not learn from it.
Also AI is tuned to sycophantic behavior which perfectly matches the middle/upper management culture of selective ass kissing.
As a result the quality of input for C-level has gotten worse without the C-level being able to notice it, because the sugarcoating has increased tenfold.
It's like discovering fire, which offers both utility and magic: you can cook your food and gather warmth, and you can also stare into it and tell stories and never be bored. We're probably genetically wired to gravitate things which have both function and form.
That said, there's a reason the manic witch doctor was never the chief. Leadership requires discernment: when to consult the witch doctor, when to jirga with the neighboring elders, when to draw the sword.
A chief knows what happens when you cut the tribe by a third "for efficiency", or the burn seed corn to feed the fire, or replace the sentries with golems. The witch doctor often ends up boiled in his own cauldron.
christkv•1h ago