I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I’m reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how “work” might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work “you and I do today” (including Altman himself), doesn’t look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity’s core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn’t seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they’re made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don’t need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn’t have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
Your examples are all commoditized and measurable. Many roles are not this quantifiable.
Compliance, marketing, social outreach, branding.
Putting a $ amount on these and other similar roles is very difficult.
But I agree, if the value added is known to be zero or negative then usually no-one is paid to do it.
Not when they are set up, but they can become unprofitable over time, and get overlooked.
Compliance is calculated with previous years costs in workman’s comp, hiring and training costs, and lawsuit and fine payouts. It’s one of the easiest tasks to break down to dollar amounts. If we paid $8k at every site and one site paid $2k because they didn’t get fined on electrical outlets out of code, then one task in compliance saved $6k I’m not theorising with you. I have seen the excel spreadsheets, this isn’t me assuming they exist, this is quantified. This is specified on paper man. What don’t you get here? Marketing is VERY easy to assign a dollar amount to. We made $100k one quarter with $1k paid in marketing, we made $200k next quarter with $2k paid on marketing. Very easy to determine. You want to wake everyone in the morning meeting up? Tell them you want to pull money out of Advertising and redirect it to payroll. They’ll all spit their coffee out. Social media is also very easy to quantify. You just compare metrics across all quarters and pair them to social media follows, this is a huge metric that a lot of business decisions are made on, this isn’t amorphous just because you’re unaware of how important it is to business. Branding also has hard values assigned, and supporting or changing branding is very much a numbers game. Why else do you have companies willing to buy the name of another company even when they don’t need their production or staff along with it? I don’t think you grasp that every single task someone does for a corporation is matched to a dollar figure amount. Seriously. If I could get labor class people to drop one myth it would be that their labor has next to no value. They know what you’re worth and they know how much they aren’t paying you out of the value you produce.
No, that’s just what you spent last year.
It’s easy to see how much it costs. It’s very hard to determine exactly how much additional revenue any particular campaign creates.
Pick anyone at the C-Level. How much revenue do they bring in? What’s the ROI of a CFO?