There are mornings when I open my news feed and feel as though I'm drowning, not in water but in words. An endless cascade of breathless pronouncements about the AI wave wash over me like a digital deluge. Each headline promises a revolution, each article heralds transformation, and yet buried beneath this avalanche of enthusiasm the truth moves quiet as a shadow.
In an age where machines are learning to think, our human discourse about these very machines has become increasingly thoughtless. The signal-to-noise ratio has become so poor that finding genuine insight feels like panning for gold in a river of fool's pyrite. We have created an ecosystem where the loudest voices often belong to those who understand the least and complexity is sacrificed for clicks. Where there is no nuance there is no beauty. Where there is no spice, there is no taste.
Consider what's happening now: The Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer published summer reading lists featuring books that don't exist. S&P Global reports that 42% of companies are abandoning their AI initiatives, up from 17% last year. McKinsey finds that only 1% of companies have reached AI maturity (whatever that means), despite 92% planning to increase investments. Meanwhile, headlines declare this "the year of AI agents," projecting growth from $5 billion to $47 billion by 2030.
To build a future, both professionally and personally, on such fevered dreams is to court disaster. We should know better than to believe the latest hype, and yet, as Auden warned, "we would rather be ruined than changed."
But beneath the froth, profound change unfolds in the quieter corners of our tech world: I see portfolio companies parsing contracts in minutes instead of days; algorithms catching fraud patterns invisible to human eyes; diagnostic systems finding tumors that save lives. Even in code gen, the frothiest sector of all, it’s the small improvements that create a big impact: AI coding agents handling localization, preflight CI checks, variable renaming. These aren't the stories that trend. They lack the theatrical flair of a chatbot gone rogue, but they compound daily like interest. The slow blade penetrates the shield.
The noise will fade, as noise always does. What remains will surprise us all. Not because it's revolutionary, but because it's real.