I'm going to assume it is "more than you think; not as much as you'd like" because I don't have the time to burn this morning to replicate your research.
> This belief system—that AI is useless and that you're not good enough to work on it anyway—hurts three groups
I don't know anyone who thinks AI is useless. In fact, I've seen quite a few places where it can be quite useful. Instead, I think it's massively overhyped to its own detriment. This article presents the author as the person who has the One True Vision, and all us skeptics are just tragically undereducated.
I'm a crusty old engineer. In my career, I've seen RAD tooling, CASE tools, no/low-code tools, SGML/XML, and Web3 not live up to the lofty claims of the devotees and therefore become radioactive despite there being some useful bits in there. I suspect AI is headed down the same path and see (and hear of) more and more projects that start out looking really impressive and then crumble after a few promising milestones.
This person wrote a blog post admitting to tone-deafness in cheerleading AI and talking about all the ways AI hype has negatively impacted peoples' work environment. But then they wrap up by concluding that its the anti-AI people that are the problem. Thats a really weird conclusion to come to at the end of that blog post. My expectation was that the end result was "We should be measured and mindful with our advocacy, read the room, and avoid aggressively pushing AI in ways that negatively impact peoples' lives."
I think this post is cherry-picking history. Jobs also had some disastrous projects chasing ideas outside of Apple's core competency. Newton, Macintosh TV, etc. He also had some grand slam moments that could have been described as trying to do everything. The iPod? Apple had nothing to do with the music industry. iPhone? where did THAT fit in with personal computers?
Rather than poking at the Apple Car project as an example of a company reaching too far, we should be paying attention to whether any actual lessons were learned.
Jobs left Apple in 1985, and there hadn't been anything but one model of Mac by then, and he wouldn't return until 1997. The PC-like explosion of Mac models and various peripheral projects like printers, cameras, and PDAs happened without him.
Of the time they did have Jobs at the helm, he had a remarkable track record with new products outside of their "core competencies" as you put it. This includes the Mac itself, which abandoned wholesale their existing lineage of computers and software for a pretty different paradigm tuned for the non-technical customer.
He had some failures. The Apple III, arguably the first Mac (it really didn't gain traction until Apple loosened on things like expandability and fans that Jobs didn't want), G4 Cube, iPod Hifi, Ping, 3rd gen iPod Shuffle, Apple TV.
The Newton ended up a commercial failure in the end (although for a while it was successful enough to support a few independent software companies, including one of mine), but a whole ton of the lessons learned from producing it were applied to very successful products following it, such as the iPhone.
I think a reasonable case could be made that the Newton was not a failure in the big picture, in the sense that without it, a couple of Apple's later efforts would not have been as good.
Newton and Macintosh TV were both when Jobs wasn't around, and he quickly killed off the spin-off "Newton, Inc" company and the Newton line when he returned when Apple and NeXT merged.
First, I have to admit that I was negatively biased by his appearance. I have a hard time believing anything that some guy who looks like he smokes metric tons of weed and dorks around on his guitar all day has to say.
That being said, the tech world has a bad habit of letting "visionaries" rest on their laurels. He'd have a lot more credence if he was actively developing AI and had more than gut feel to contribute.
Lol, be sure and try side, back, underside for the full experience.
Sidebar: Having done this as a kid, I ended up being able to taste polarity. Hold one wire with finger, taste other and the polarity affects the "taste" sensation.
And I realize I don't really have words to describe what it is like.
