The AI hype doesn't add up

The AI hype doesn't add up.jpg

I just realized that I haven't been writing any content for a very long time on the Hive blockchain, and it's time to change that. Over the past months, I have been searching, exploring rabbit holes, and trying to figure out many different things around AI. To be honest, I have arrived at a stage where I feel a little more uncertain about the future than I did before, so it's tricky to define what the future will look like — but I think that's actually an important thing to sit with.

Automating the wrong things with AI

Everybody says "AI will change the future, AI will replace people," but I'm not so convinced anymore, because AI still has a lot of flaws. There are many ways AI genuinely helps, but there are also many areas where it simply doesn't fit or hasn't reached the necessary maturity yet. When I see people using agents to answer their emails, they are essentially delegating what I consider the most important thing: communicating with other humans. If machines are answering machines, what's the point — and how risky is it? You risk alienating your business partners and friends. How do you feel when you reach out to someone and get back a response clearly generated by AI?

The feeling is not different from reading a comment under your hive post and you realize it was written by a bot.

The workflow chaos

The whole world of agents and agentic workflows also looks like a big mess from where I'm standing. People are building pipelines and automations, yet few can clearly point to a business actually making money from it. Those who claim they do often seem to be painting reality in a rosier color than what's really happening.

When the numbers don't add up

After exploring AI image generation, AI video generation, vibe coding, and agentic workflows, I would say we are far from the point where AI will replace real people. I'm also noticing that many companies are quietly backtracking on their agent deployments — and it makes sense, because agents are energy- and token-hungry systems that can quickly spiral out of control. If running an agent costs more than hiring a person, and on top of that introduces mistakes a person wouldn't make, you have to seriously question whether it's worth it.

The right framing: leverage, not replacement

Even as models improve and efficiency increases, I don't think we are where the hype suggests we should be. AI is a great tool — but not one built to replace people. Where it truly shines is in amplifying your own capabilities: helping you implement something step by step, or teaching you the best way to do something you wanted to do anyway. That's the real value of AI. We should stop framing it as a replacement for people or workflows and start asking instead how we can use it to leverage our own potential.


With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.

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3 comments

Yes and no... at my company now when developing an app everyone is just giving instructions to AI, monitoring and review its work. AI is in the driving seat and the human is mostly a spectator.

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I agree with you but I see it as a way to enhance the ingenieurs. They can now generate much more code in the same time frame but you still need somebody to create the PRD and to think about structure and answer the questions that the AI needs.

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Having watched it closely for the last few years, it is amazing to see how far it has come in that short while. To imagine where it could go from here is mind boggling so I just focus on where things are.

Right now, I think it is a little too pandering and focussed on capturing your attention to make you use it as much as possible. The meta and Google platform model. It sometimes goes so far to please the user that it starts to lie and pump out fiction.

Not pleased about that and it is a little worrying where it might go. It may not be able to replace people now but eventually. All in the hands of big corporations who only want profit. Not encouraging!

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The more I study things, the more I have the feeling that we will come to a solution that is independent of these corporations. A lot of businesses are just not allowed to give their data away, so I think that open source and self hosted models will become more and more common in the near future.

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(edited)

maybe the right wording is that AI enhances people productivity, not replacing people with something 100% automated.

The company I have been running now use some AI and we are now less than half of we were used to be. The downside is that if someone fucks up, the impact will be massively significant because none covers your ass anymore lol

!BBH !ALIVE !PIXY

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