#Artificial intelligence (AI) in business

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI and the fatfinger economy

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in WELLINGTON TODAY (May 3). More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.

Have you noticed that all the buttons you click most frequently to invoke routine, useful functions in your device have been moved, and their former place is now taken up by a curiously butthole-esque icon that summons an unwanted AI?

https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-buttholes

These traps for the unwary aren't accidental, but neither are they placed there solely because tech companies think that if they can trick you into using their AI, you'll be so impressed that you'll become a regular user. To understand why you find yourself repeatedly fatfingering your way into an unwanted AI interaction – and why those interactions are so hard to exit – you have to understand something about both the macro- and microeconomics of high-growth tech companies.

Growth is a heady advantage for tech companies, and not because of an ideological commitment to "growth at all costs," but because companies with growth stocks enjoy substantial, material benefits. A growth stock trades at a higher "price to earnings ratio" ("P:E") than a "mature" stock. Because of this, there are a lot of actors in the economy who will accept shares in a growing company as though they were cash (indeed, some might prefer shares to cash). This means that a growing company can outbid their rivals when acquiring other companies and/or hiring key personnel, because they can bid with shares (which they get by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet), while their rivals need cash (which they can only get by selling things or borrowing money).

The problem is that all growth ends. Google has a 90% share of the search market. Google isn't going to appreciably increase the number of searchers, short of desperate gambits like raising a billion new humans to maturity and convincing them to become Google users (this is the strategy behind Google Classroom, of course). To continue posting growth, Google needs gimmicks. For example, in 2019, Google intentionally made Search less accurate so that users would have to run multiple queries (and see multiple rounds of ads) to find the answers to their questions:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Thanks to Google's monopoly, worsening search perversely resulted in increased earnings, and Wall Street rewarded Google by continuing to trade its stock with that prized high P:E. But for Google – and other tech giants – the most enduring and convincing growth stories comes from moving into adjacent lines of business, which is why we've lived through so many hype bubbles: metaverse, web3, cryptocurrency, and now, of course, AI.

For a company like Google, the promise of these bubbles is that it will be able to double or triple in size, by dominating an entirely new sector. With that promise comes peril: growth must eventually stop ("anything that can't go on forever eventually stops"). When that happens, the company's stock instantaneously goes from being a "growth stock" to being a "mature stock" which means that its P:E is way too high. Anyone holding growth stock knows that there will come a day when those stocks will transition, in an eyeblink, from being undervalued to being grossly overvalued, and that when that day comes, there will be a mass sell-off. If you're still holding the stock when that happens, you stand to lose bigtime:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

So everyone holding a growth stock sleeps with one eye open and their fists poised over the "sell" button. Managers of growth companies know how jittery their investors are, and they do everything they can to keep the growth story alive, as a matter of life and death.

But mass sell-offs aren't just bad for the company – it's also very bad for the company's key employees, that is, anyone who's been given stock in addition to their salary. Those people's portfolios are extremely heavy on their employer's shares, and they stand to disproportionately lose in the event of a selloff. So they are personally motivated to keep the growth story alive.

That's where these growth-at-all-stakes maneuvers bent on capturing an adjacent sector come from. If you remember the Google Plus days, you'll remember that every Google service you interacted with had some important functionality ripped out of it and replaced with a G+-based service. To make sure that happened, Google's bosses decreed that the company's bonuses would be tied to the amount of G+ activity each division generated. In companies where bonuses can amount to 90% of your annual salary or more, this was a powerful motivator. It meant that every product team at Google was fully aligned on a project to cram G+ buttons into their product design. Whether or not these made sense for users, they always made sense for the product team, whose ability to take a fancy Christmas holiday, buy a new car, or pay their kids' private school tuition depended on getting you to use G+.

Once you understand how corporate growth stories are converted to "key performance indicators" that drive product design, many of the annoyances of digital services suddenly make a great deal of sense. You know how it's almost impossible to watch a show on a streaming video service without accidentally tapping a part of the screen that whisks you to a completely different video?

The reason you have to handle your phone like a photonegative while watching a movie – the reason every millimeter of screen real-estate has been boobytrapped with an icon that takes you somewhere else – is that streaming services believe that their customers are apt to leave when they feel like there's nothing new to watch. These bosses have made their product teams' bonuses dependent on successfully "recommending" a show you've never seen or expressed any interest in to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/15/the-fatfinger-economy/

Of course, bosses understand that their workers will be tempted to game this metric. They want to distinguish between "real" clicks that lead to interest in a new video, and fake fatfinger clicks that you instantaneously regret. The easiest way to distinguish between these two types of click is to measure how long you watch the new show before clicking away.

Of course, this is also entirely gameable: all the product manager has to do is take away the "back" button, so that an accidental click to a new video is extremely hard to cancel. The five seconds you spend figuring out how to get back to your show are enough to count as a successful recommendation, and the product team is that much closer to a luxury ski vacation next Christmas.

So this is why you keep invoking AI by accident, and why the AI that is so easy to invoke is so hard to dispel. Like a demon, a chatbot is much easier to summon than it is to rid yourself of.

Google is an especially grievous offender here. Familiar buttons in Gmail, Gdocs, and the Android message apps have been replaced with AI-summoning fatfinger traps. Android is filled with these pitfalls – for example, the bottom-of-screen swipe gesture used to switch between open apps now summons an AI, while ridding yourself of that AI takes multiple clicks.

This is an entirely material phenomenon. Google doesn't necessarily believe that you will ever want to use AI, but they must convince investors that their AI offerings are "getting traction." Google – like other tech companies – gets to invent metrics to prove this proposition, like "how many times did a user click on the AI button" and "how long did the user spend with the AI after clicking?" The fact that your entire "AI use" consisted of hunting for a way to get rid of the AI doesn't matter – at least, not for the purposes of maintaining Google's growth story.

Goodhart's Law holds that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." For Google and other AI narrative-pushers, every measure is designed to be a target, a line that can be made to go up, as managers and product teams align to sell the company's growth story, lest we all sell off the company's shares.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/#principal-agentic-ai-problem

Image: Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Index_finger_%3D_to_attention.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

--

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[political-us]

[lobotomizedskull]

[mouthtapedguy]

Why are you in jail: "I used humans instead of AI" :| :| :|

[kayfeyt]

🚀 حول أفكارك إلى صور مذهلة بالذكاء الاصطناعي! 🎨

تخيل لو كان بإمكانك كتابة فكرة، وتحويلها ف��رًا إلى إنفوجرافيك احترافي بدون أي مهارات تصميم! ✍️

هذا بالضبط ما يفعله Napkin AI! 🔥 📌 اكتب نصًا بسيطًا 📌 ودع الذكاء الاصطناعي يحوله إلى صورة توضيحية جذابة

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[mewsmagic]

Honestly, this whole AI bs did so much critical damage to my emotional HP, I felt we really needed more people talking about it, so here I am!

Putting the title aside though, I’m really not here to tell you what to do, you decide what’s best for you based on your own circumstances!!

I made this post merely to calm you down, show the options and give you some hope that yes, there’s still a future for our career!

We’ll have to keep fighting for it of course, but that’s a topic for another comic, stay tuned! 👀

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

You get what you deserve, CEOs are just as replaceable if more so then workers. I mean there's only one CEO per company so it's way easier. In fact why don't we do away with capitalism as a whole and automated most of the economy as possible? We deserve to seize the means of production and do with it what we want.

[seriously-mike]

Where is the money that this supposedly revolutionary, world-changing industry is making, and will make? The answer is simple: I do not believe it exists. Generative AI lacks the basic unit economics, product-market fit, or market penetration associated with any meaningful software boom, and outside of OpenAI, the industry may be pathetically, hopelessly small, all while providing few meaningful business returns and constantly losing money.

Ed Zitron is at it again.

So, OpenAI lost five billion dollars last year, and the rest of the market is also in the red. Google already limits the number of heavily hardware-taxing voice summaries for NotebookLM to three per day unless you're a paid customer, something that's harder to bypass than the limitation of generating human characters by Gemini/Imagen.

There are many uncomfortable questions to ask here, starting with "why are they allowed to lose borderline unspendable amounts of money?" To put the five-billion figure into perspective: this is roughly as much as the European Union funding approved for Poland for the entirety of 2025. The kind of money a medium-sized European country can't afford to blow on bullshit. And it's by far not the biggest figure AI corporations are throwing around.

[smetips]

Controversy created from Billboards.. yeah

this AI startup put up billboards that created a lot of heat but it was a clever marketing strategy

what do you think? also check out my blog on this hot news

[carlhofelina]

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[verticalmomentum1]

The reason AI-generated content often sounds off is because it’s been trained on books written and edited by professionals—people who excelled in English class.

They use perfect grammar, punctuation, and structure.

But that’s not how most of us talk.

So when content comes out sounding too polished, it’s a dead giveaway that it didn’t come from someone like me—it just doesn’t reflect how I naturally communicate.— Jonathan Mast

#AuthenticVoice

#AIContent

#HumanVsAI

#ContentCreation

#RealTalk

[sumonama]

Social Impact Meets AI: Reinventing Education for Kids with Autism

In this powerful episode of SyncCast, we explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping autism education—starting in rural and underserved communities. Featuring real stories from Texas educators, this video dives deep into how AI, behavioral science, and social-emotional learning are being used to support neurodivergent students like never before. We reveal the gaps in public education, the urgent need for systemic reform, and how technology can amplify human empathy—not replace it. Whether you're a parent, educator, policymaker, or tech innovator, this is a conversation you can't afford to miss. 👉 Book a 1:1 strategy session: https://calendly.com/kaisambaandassociates/new-meeting 🔔 Subscribe for more interviews at the intersection of AI, GovCon, and social change. 💬 What’s your take on AI in special education? Comment below!

[cursedbanalities]

HEY YOU! YES, YOU RIGHT THERE, WITH THE EYES!

Doesn't ai suck? Don't you hate seeing all of this generative AI crap?

Introducing my new business: Writing for Fun!

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Hope to hear from you all soon!

[monetizeme]

In a memo sent to employees titled “Some thoughts on Generative AI,” Jassy spent 1,200 words largely rattling off examples of Amazon’s AI progress. It is making Alexa, its personal assistant software, “meaningfully smarter,” and turning its customer service chatbot into “an even better experience.” (How, and by what measure? He didn’t say. But “you get the idea,” he wrote.)

Then in a textbook example of burying the lede, he got to the point around paragraph 15: We’re almost certainly going to replace some Amazon workers with AI “agents.”

When? “In the next few years.”

How many jobs are we talking about? “It’s hard to know… we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”

Where are all these so-called agents? “Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast.”

Fast! Soon! We expect! They’re coming!

To be clear: I’m not saying Jassy is lying. But he is clearly invoking AI to put a modern spin on a strategy as old as time: Keep workers working by making them afraid of losing their jobs.

[abathurofficial]

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[kayfeyt]

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