I'm not necessarily suggesting Doctorow is correct with this assertion, but on a macro scale what productivity gains will generate AI provide?

Yes there's a few skills it's good at coding, medical research, and image recognition being a few.

The genuine question is: has this improved everyone's quality of life?

Part of the problem is AI isn’t a literal thing with a fixed definition. It’s more of a marketing term that translates into “I want you to buy this thing”. So some things are considered AI that are legitimately useful and others are not and then there’s the debate if wether it’s because it really is AI or if it is and AI just sucks.

The later section addresses this

The other question Suresh implicitly raises is: "How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?"

LLMs are like a dishwashers. You could wash all the dishes yourself and probably get them cleaner in less time, but it’s useful to let a machine do the work, even I though it’s mandatory inspect every single dish to make sure the machine got them clean enough and re-wash a certain percentage of them. Dishwashers are useful, but the world wouldn't end if we didn’t have them. They also have the benefit of using less water than when do them yourself, which certainly isn’t the case with LLMs.

Nothing is helpful until you need help. The fact that you think AI is helpful for you don't have to force me to use AI. If you pay me $100k+ per year and you force me to use your tools to do my job why you even hired me ? To force this cult on me or to do the job ?

OK, but the point still stands if you allow that: It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are often not, in fact, helpful.

It is a double edged sword.

If you're already experienced developer and you use it skillfully, validate produced code it can help.

If you aren't (and unfortunately everyone thinks they are better than they actually are), it actually can do the opposite, it can help generate a lot of junk code.

Now when working in a team usually majority of people aren't that great developers typically there might be one or two star developers. The problem is that the other people will still use AI and generate MRs. Reviewing those is extremely time consuming and no one wants to do it. It's weird to say what's exactly wrong with those MRs they seem to do things but they seem to do things in a more complicated way.

The thing is that no one wants to review those MRs, everyone is afraid to point AI slop, so the quality of code goes down and even the people who previously were good are getting lost in the code themselves.

I have tons of random receipts that come in every month that need to be captured, memoed, categorized and sent off to finance.

I made python to read image/pdf/whatever to text, easy.

I regex the value out, hard and fragile

I try to pull the vendors name out, just not reliable

Category... nearly impossible so i need to make some form of memory system to remember once I do it.

Python renames the file with input if it needs it and provides the meta

OR

python to text because it's effciient

api call to Ollama and let my old 2070 work it out. (highly reliable)

python renames the file and provides the meta

It's small, low power, hard to do with code, basically the perfect use case. This is a good use of AI

Go Rewrite FFMPEG in Rust.... that's a bad use of AI.

There's a lot of people out there using it in ways that cost a lot more than human eyes and have horrible societal and environmental impacts.

There's a lot of people using it for dictation, document triage and basic scripting where it has great advantages and isn't making the world a worse place.

His article is at odds with a great deal of his book. I wonder if this isn't just a grab to get hardcore anti-ai to buy it.

It depends on the tool to be honest. If it's Claude code and you're a programmer, sure that's helpful. But often it's an "agentic workflow engine" that's been developed in house that's complete garbage, or a chatbot that doesn't know anything telling you that it can't answer your question that was put together by your company. These custom tools are almost always not helpful.

Doctorow knows this as well, he writes about this crap constantly and has broken it down by user type in other pieces.