I work in IT and as such I work in AI because there’s no getting away from the hype in my line of work.
But I don’t believe in it and I think it can be very harmful for society. I see a few nice things about it (people with disabilities for example) but mostly negative.
To be honest I’m looking forward to the news of datacenters going up in flames. Which I’m pretty sure will happen when people start losing their jobs en masse.
Paywall-free archive: https://archive.is/PeHtc
I’m not really getting raises for a couple years, despite being a can do high performer. So now I just use AI to do mediocre work, and only work around 3-4hrs per day.
AI allows you to quiet quit without shitty bosses noticing. Win win :/
What I have noticed thispast year is that higher ups aren’t really understanding the total cost of AI solutions. They go use sites to have conversations with the most powerful LLMs not realizing that your company is not going to afford that level of tech. Your current IT infrastucture can’t add a few dozen high power/high cost systems to train the model for your business’s nuance. It is never a build it and forget it problem.
Additionally there is a skill of humans being easily retrained for other tasks. Creating a Jack of All Trades will net you a great workforce with people filling roles when you have medical leave, turnover and business pivots. AI isn’t general enough to make this change without major redesign.
The only “problem” with this amazing skill is that companies no longer run on the idea of employee retention. You get promoted by jumping ship. Working harder doesn’t make the headway in a company like it used to 25+ years ago.
Lol please. America already gutted its entire industrial base to the point where there’s a permanent shortage of blue collar jobs, and most people are working crappy wages in a service role for whichever megacorp owns the entire market.
AI could take over tomorrow and there wouldn’t be enough people to care, despite getting utterly screwed over.
It might only get ugly if purchasing power collapses and causes solvency. Otherwise it’ll just continue to degrade into an infinite debt economy which is basically just generational slavery like a significant portion of exploited labor and human trafficking already is.
Don’t worry though, there’s a million other problems that’ll probably pop the bubble first anyway lol.
I actually like using AI in my workplace to rid the need for tedious data entry. But i realised that if I told people about it, the management might see that they may not need me anymore so i won’t teach anyone how to efficiently use AI.
Years ago, my wife took a job as the lone secretary to a lawyer with a high volume of paperwork, permit applications, etc. The previous secretary, who had retired, didn’t like the computer, and just typed everything by hand.
My wife automated all the forms so she could jump from field to field, and get the paperwork done much faster. So fast in fact, that he decided not to hire the second secretary, and just dump it all on my wife. Then he turned out to be an absolute monster in so many ways that my wife just up and quit one day, which was fine with me.
But she had never told him about her automated forms that she created. He just thought her increased productivity was due to using the computer. So she told me that she made those forms to help herself, not him, and dumped all of them before she left, and he never knew.
Yeah I am aware that managers will just put more jobs on to you if you do it quick. That’s why I don’t tell them if I finished a task early.
There are two big industries that are going to be the canaries in the coal mine, and be the first to take serious hits - Driving, and Fast Food.
Both Uber and Lyft make it clear on their websites that their future is an autonomous fleet, and they’re testing heavily. Waymo has been testing for months, and is starting to roll out in many cities, including mine. Every one of those driverless cars is replacing a human job.
Further, many of the people driving rideshares, would be listed as unemployed, if they weren’t able to eke out a meager living driving. Take away this job, and it isn’t like they have a lot of options to pivot to. If they did, they wouldn’t be driving. Those lost jobs are going straight to the unemployment rolls.
And what about truck drivers? That is another serious driving industry that is going to be fully replaced before long. Again, those drivers don’t have a lot of other options.
Fast Food is the other one. Every fast food corp has been testing a robotic kitchen for years now, and I’d be surprised if even a single one isn’t ready to roll out tomorrow. They are already getting us ready by both phasing in app use, and kiosk use, but also masking the kitchen area. It used to be that you could see the kitchens in fast food places, but new ones are hiding the prep area behind walls, where they can’t be seen, because soon they’ll all be automated.
Fast food is a traditional first job, or a second job, or a second income, or a supplement to retirement, etc. A LOT of households rely on fast food jobs, but within a decade, most of them will be fully automated.
Further, what will happen is that a robotic warehouse will load an autonomous truck, which will go to fully automated fast food outlets, where it will be robotically unloaded, stored, and eventually prepared, and served to a customer, without a human touching it anywhere along the way.
The tech to do all of that exists right now. The only reason they haven’t done it is because they know the consumer backlash will be enormous, but they won’t be able to resist the lure of all those new profits for too long, and somebody will finally take the plunge and be the first. They’ll get savaged in the media, but then everyone will follow, and 10 years from now, every fast outlet will be automated, and millions of jobs will evaporate.
It’s inevitable.
Fast food is already as automated as it can be. Replacing cooks with robot kitchen is looks good as a management dream, but anyone who tried it quickly discovers that you need industrial robots, and they are fuckng expensive, and you need engineers anyway to maintain them. So you are replacing cheap cooks with outrageously expensive engineers.
“But no”, some ignorant CEO says, “we’re not assembling cars, we don’t need pneumatic robot arm that can lift 10 tons”. Yeah, you still need a robot arm, and it’s just a miniaturized industrial robot, not any much cheaper.
But robot kitchen exist, and they are actually very profitable. Go to your nearest grocery shop. 99% of items on the shelves were produced by a robot. Everything in a plastic wrap, everything in a jar, was produced on a conveyor. Even fresh produce involves some kind of automation.
So robots won’t fry your potatoes, because french fries have really short shelf life. Otherwise they totally could, but hiring a cook is cheaper.
It’s inevitable
And it totally has the potential to collapse on itself. Let AI replace a lot of office workers. Let self-driving cars replace drivers. Let robots replace fast food workers and delivery persons. Move manufacturing jobs offshore. Everyone is unemployed and nobody can afford your robot-created fast food anymore. You have no customers and go bankrupt
And what about truck drivers? That is another serious driving industry that is going to be fully replaced before long. Again, those drivers don’t have a lot of other options.
Truck driving would have a major knock-on effect as well from diners and truck stops, which are often major cash centers of smaller towns.
As those people move on to other jobs, there will be growth in other areas. This is part of the normal ebb and flow of the economy. Rather let’s make sure everyone is generally being taken care of. We can’t put society in stasis for fear of someone somewhere losing out.
Will there be enough jobs for all those displaced in those ‘other areas’? And how long is it going to take for those to materialise?
Traditionally society has overcome these type of changes. But they weren’t as wide as this one (AI has a huge range of usecases) nor was the change as rapid. And as AI grows into new areas it will continue to displace jobs and human activity.
I really doubt this will turn into a net positive for society and if it does it will still be a very hard transition for at least a decade.
What money are they going to use to move from their home in nowheresville to somewhere where jobs are
I’m not saying leave them out to dry, but we shouldn’t do labor just for the sake of it. If we can automate it and we save labor overall, that’s how society advances. The real question is who gets the benefit, and how we take care of people’s needs, not if it’s a good idea to improve labor efficiency
Would love me some Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, but looking how things are progressing socially, I have my doubts that things are going to end well for anyone worth less then a few million.
Loss of jobs is a distraction. People can get other jobs. If jobs can be automated cheaply, they should be. The problem is how the economy treats people who need to switch jobs and what it means for their income. Automate truck driving, please, but make sure ex-truck drivers are taken care of and can move on to other jobs that need doing.
Edit: I’ll make an exception for jobs that need human interaction. There is a limit to automating things like care or service jobs because most people also need human interaction. And give those people decision making power, too, not this “computer says no” hellscape customer service workers have to go through
As a random thought:
One problem peasants tended to face was (slow) population growth in the face of limited land to feed that population with. There’s only so far that you can divide your farmlands between your sons before it’s not enough to sustain them any more. Some might be able to find employment elsewhere, but you’d eventually be left with young people (men in particular) that were desperate for a livelihood and out of options.
You can imagine that some of them turned to violence. I wonder, how that would play out today. Circumstances differ, so I’d caution transferring past patterns onto current situations is prone to error, but there is some tendency in human social dynamics to repeat. Not necessarily in results, but in mentality at least.
Even the headline is wrong. Jobs have already started disappearing due to AI.
I did some AI training a couple of years ago. Turned out I trained the AI to do what I was doing.
Fool me once…
fool me once… and I’ll not have a chance to be fooled twice
What job were you doing that AI can do it?
It was fairly basic, just analyzing audio tracks and extracting the dialogue from them to text. Simple stuff for AI now.
I think your job might be safe. AI has been doing speech to text for over a quarter century. It’s been bundled with Windows since XP. And nobody uses it because it has all the same problems that modern AI has.
Well yeah it has but it really sucked at it till things like Whisper came along. You really had to train it to specific speakers and even then you’d have to manually go over everything.
Now running the heaviest whisper model and then an LLM to fix obvious mistakes and you have the same quality a human contractor would deliver. Except it can do a day’s work in 5 minutes.
They were freelance contract jobs, and I haven’t seen anything that easy in a long while 😒
I’m sorry if you lost your job, but if you actually helped improve talking to these damn things then I thank you for your service.
Writing snarky emails to end users.
They got you too, huh
I would love to see an AI trying to my job. It’s useless at almost every aspect except for seeming like it knows what it’s talking about.
So the higher ups who never know anything will listen to it, implemented it’s dumb suggestions that are either unworkable or actually illegal and will burn the company to the ground. It would be hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that I would be out of a job.
They want a new financial management solution (currently they’re using some ancient thing on SAP) they’ve looked at a few solutions but they don’t like any of them because they all cost a lot of money since they all go with the subscription model these days rather than just letting you buy the software in one big payment. They have actually considered letting an AI right some software for them. Should be fun.
exactly this happens constantly as tech advances we both find new stuff to do and things like universal income pop up as efficient ways of keeping people happy and healthy
I’m told that AI can’t actually replace humans, so presumably those jobs will be back in short order.
They were just layoffs in disguise, so they wont be back for a while.
I think they’ll all come back after public sentiment seems to lean towards, “I’ll take what I can get and keep my head down, if it means I can afford groceries.” Then, they’ll be able to hire back senior specialists at a massive discount.
I wonder if there is a way to impose a tax if use, or better production, of LLM tokens. And that money could be spent ob social security.
Of course this is NEVER gonna happen 🤣
Since we’re dealing with hyperbole, and I know this will sound preposterous, but what if had companies and the filthy rich pay their fair share of taxes 🤣
this is absolutely ridiculous. Everybody knows that not taxing the rich ensures the money trickles down the chain. We live a golden age of prosperity /s
“If”? 🤔
AI hasn’t taken anyone’s job.
The Epstein class use AI as an excuse to fire thousands and artificially lower wages to keep the plebs in check for the next few decades.
I’ve personally seen multiple departments eliminated because they would rather send the jobs to Indian sub contractors backed by AI.
Right so it was outsourced to Indians. Thats old news.
It wouldn’t have been without AI. They believe telling them to use AI is cheaper.
Huh? The tech industry has outsourced to India every few years, it backfires, and yet they still don’t learn lol
It’s different this time because previously, the folks in India didn’t know anything, the execs here believe they can fire people with years of experience and replace them with Indian techs using AI and be just as good.
It will still blow up in 1-2 years, but that’s the idea for now.
This article starts by earnestly quoting Steve Bannon so fuck it and fuck him.
We’ve at a very strange time, there is no question things will probably get ugly as they usually do in these uncomfortable transition periods between eras.
That man should fear walking around due to the amount of shit he’s caused
Yeah - there’s a fairly significant game of The Emperor’s New Clothes going on, as the new set of impossibly wealthy assholes insist on pretending they’re not impossibly wealthy assholes and instead try to force society into accommodating them, apparently entirely unaware of the simple fact that all they’re doing is hastening the demise of the civilization that birthed them and on which they’re little more than grossly destructive parasites.
And that’s not an opinion - either mine or anyone else’s. It’s a simple fact that’s been borne out by history over and over throughout the ages, and will be again, no matter how many comforting lies people tell themselves and each other.
I just don’t get the lack of vision, these massive data centers are just such incredible wastes you have to be so deluded to think they are a good idea at this point in time, but here we go, these guys are all in on them. I hope it leads to their downfall since no one but them really wants them no matter how many emerging markets they get hooked on using their slop machines. Time will tell though.
The thing with the data centers is that the goal is entirely different from anything we’ve been told.
The key is that Google is implementing a system that allows people to get the information they’re after directly from them rather than clicking theough to a website. That’s undermining ad revenue, which not only threatens the existence of the websites but threatens Google’s existing ad-based business model.
So it can only be the case that they’re pivoting to a new business model.
And the key to that is the data centers.
Their goal, I grow more certain nearly every day, is to effectively privatize the internet by driving independent sites out of business, so that they (and their handful of more or less equally wealthy and powerful competitors) become the only source for all of that data they’ve already stolen.
That seems like a goal for like, 10 or 15 years ago but nowadays apps have pretty much destroyed it anyways, although I suppose one could see the attractiveness of an all knowing information portal, to me half of the fun was always the research and digging in and finding things because you come up with happy accidents and surprises along the way, when everything is curated or there are strict rules in places, the quality of the content suffers enormously and originality and unique ideas die.
Hey everyone, check out how edgy and dismissive this guy is!
God, not listening or thinking is so cool. How do you maintain your ability to not engage with the discussion topic while still thinking you have something to say that’s worth listening to?
I have no problem with giving people time. I have a problem with people who have shown themselves to be liars and disingenuous time and time again to be given equal time to people who are trying to tell the truth. I have a problem with these give an inch steal a mile assholes who have taken over everything because people are not standing up to the gas filled bullies. The fact that you’re even making that argument is disingenuous. This man is a dangerous white supremacist and they are treating him like Joe Everyday. Fuck that.
Yeah, and he’s quoted once to make the point that the fact that someone like that, and someone like Bernie Sanders agree on AI hurting workers, shows that the anti-AI backlash is cross partisan.
Your righteous ignorance is just anti-intellectual trash.
Read the full article, then critique it and him if you want, or keep your mouth shut and don’t judge a full article because it’s opening line quotes someone you despise when you don’t even understand that the context is not validating or praise worthy.
MY point is he should not even be quoted or mentioned anywhere because his fucking opinion as a giant piece of shit doesn’t matter. Good day.
Yeah, and my point is that your point is anti-intellectual horseshit wrapped in righteous indignation.
Agree to disagree, white supremacists are not intellectuals.
Lmfao, so now Lila Shroff, staff writer at the Atlantic, is a white supremacist?
The quote was being used to make the article author’s point in the context of the article, it wasn’t a feed of quotes the author found inspiring from people they think you should pay attention to.
By your logic Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards fame is a white supremacist because he’s quoted them before.
Bullish on scrap yards. Death to clankers.
I mean, being against AI is not really a long-term solution. It’s just pushing the can further down the road. Eventually, a lot of jobs will be lost anyways, due to conventional automation that has already happened the last 200 years. Progress is not an infinite story. It brings us from A to B and once we’re there, it’s the end of progress. Without progress, there are very few jobs, and there’s absolutely no way that there’ll be enough jobs for everybody in 30 years from now, AI or no AI. i don’t see the protests against AI changing anything at all about that, even if they were effective (which they are very clearly not btw).
Really we need to find a way to organize society around something else than perpetual work. Only then can we find peace. I propose formulating laws around a society using universal basic income or some equivalent thereof (such as universal basic services). Just write a proposal for these laws, because only once there are meaningful proposals, we can actually demand politicians to implement them. So just start thinking about it now. The sooner, the better.
All of this sounds delusional, neither the corporations nor the government care about their people. the jobless will be bulldozed like the people in gaza and lebanon, the kind of necropolitics that have been happening in the global south for decades are coming for the west.
I don’t think people have a problem with progress as a concept, but the AI shift is a major hit on the job market and therefore the economy and governments are failing the people. Not only that but the replacements are subpar and generally make things worse and add a huge amount of technical debt. People are losing livelihoods in a system that doesn’t care for them and hasn’t cared for them in ages, and it’s all decided by business suits that fall for weak marketing.
well, i’d go as far as to say that the reason why politicians haven’t cared about people in ages is because there was no reason to care for people. if you treat people badly and make sure that they’re stuck in a miserable position, that makes it more likely that they’ll take on crippling jobs and bad working conditions. if there are no jobs to be done in the first place, then that just means that you don’t have a reason to keep the people in these miserable conditions anymore.
if there are no jobs to be done in the first place, then that just means that you don’t have a reason to keep the people
in these miserable conditions anymore.FTFY
so you are saying, if people are not being kept, then they would die? like a pet that can’t care for itself? do you think that people are that dependent on government to provide for them? are you not an anarchist?
