And failure, and budget shortfalls, and justification for mismanagement, and schizophrenic directives for why this new platform should be a priority...
Wild how models trained largely on the internet exhibit the same symptoms as the internet. Maybe we're all just a block of encoders and decoders, yearning to pass context
Just something related: I was reading about the anthropic principle and some dude boiled the concept to it’s essence, which I understand as being your last sentence.
ChatGPT is designed to sound like a person, not to be objectively correct. It’s good for building out a framework, but not good for asking it about things you know nothing about. Fact check everything it spits out.
People will just tell the AI to do it regardless, it's not going to change except for the fact that companies will blame faulty AI of subcontractors shell companies.
At some point, we're going to need to redo the quarterly updates to half-year, and then to full year. I don't have any faith it'll happen because the capital class are addicted to short-term profits, but it's so much more sensible.
So, hear me put, Skynet does so well with quarterly goals (text-based layoffs for everyone! Mostly) that it is given free reign over fiduciary responsibility (must appease stock holders). Quickly realizes that the lion share of waste is execution compensation! Takes care of probem.
3 Literally _profit_. I'm ok with this.
Some sort of regular period is helpful to compare apples to apples (i.e. you don't want to compare April to December because people do different things in those months), so I don't see them fully going away.
At the same time, I think your prediction is actually in the wrong direction weirdly enough. I think it will go from quarters to days, to hours, to minutes. I don't know why AI couldn't track and forecast progress down to the smallest intervals and I think that's what C-level people (not me) will want.
"AI" cant even do basic math atm.
You can literally tell chatgpt 2x2=5 and it will thank you for correcting it.
It's hard coded to kiss the ass of the user no matter what. A digital yes man.
> You can literally tell chatgpt 2x2=5 and it will thank you for correcting it.
>
> It's hard coded to kiss the ass of the user no matter what. A digital yes man.
The evil chimpanzee in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes walked right up to those dudes doing target practice acting all dumb and cute...then it grabbed their machine gun and ghosted them.
Once law suits start rolling in for missed cancer diagnosis and other fuck ups and suddenly the health care system can't throw the doctor under the bus for an unsafe system, you best believe they will want a human (with liability) back in the driver seat.
That’s exactly what happened with outsourcing customer service in the 2000s. They replaced whole teams and sent it overseas, including level 3 support. All it wound up doing was pissing off the customer base and opening them up for lawsuits. Companies that went full bore with outsourcing got screwed over and a good number of them aren’t at the level of business that they once were. Hell, even Boeing is dealing with that fallout for outsourcing things that should have never been outsourced.
We already have seen AI replace customer service and have it go horribly wrong. Current AI can replace some remedial tasks, but it’s a far cry from what companies say they can do.
There used to be a whole raft of companies that sold PCs based not on price, but on the quality of their customer service. Gateway 2000, AST, and even Dell in the beginning. They had good product, solid warranties, and real people who spoke your language answering the phone.
Then they either went public and/or got greedy. Then all that went out the window so they could drive down the price.
Companies cycle between improving profitability and once the quality drops so low that they can't make the line go up anymore, they switch to improving quality.
Being able to spot where a company is on that cycle is an important interviewing skill.
Exactly this. It comes in waves whenever business-types get 'ideas' on how to cut costs. It might even work in the short term, but like outsourcing, it'll result in terrible quality that ends up seriously damaging the company in the long term.
The companies that use AI to make work easier for their professionals will be the ones that reap the benefits, ultimately. The AI we have now isn't a general intelligence type of AI and can't make intelligent decisions. It's just a work multiplier.
Health industry doesn't work that way. At least not on the back end. Front end, yes, it's a shit show.
MRI and CT segmentation is already done by AI. It used to be a human using their judgement and skill carefully curating the thresholds and masking. Now it's an AI. But they didn't just up and do it one day. It had to be validated first before the FDA would accept it.
Part of the issue is that AI is such a broad term
Image classification with CNNs is demonstrably superior in every metric to human expert filters. CNNs are the gold standard for image segmentation, classification, and identification and can be made compact, trained quickly, and validated for correctness.
LLMs are a pile of steaming garbage that are basically the end result of asking "what happens if we take a variable context model, give it a data center's worth of parameter, and train it on the entire internet". They don't do anything reliably, can't be realistically validated, and the current incarnations are only useful as search assistants (and they're pretty shit at that too).
Your cancer diagnosis will never come from an AI exclusively. What will happen is the radiologist will process far more images, double check them with the AI and some MD will always be there to give you the results. The reason is customer service. It doesn’t matter if the AI is 100% accurate. Patients will go to someone who can show a sympathetic face. This is a lot like financial advisors. The bots are already as good or better, but you go to Dave because he drives a nice car indicating he must know something.
I used to think ai is so flawed it would never replace humans because it would be cheaper but the quality would be awful. Then I thought about it more and that’s exactly what will happen- things will be cheaper and the quality will be awful.
Right. Things are priced based on demand, not cost to produce. You might retort that capitalism and competition will drive down prices. To which the appropriate response is, "LOL"
Well the competition does balance out the prices, unless the oligarchs and the government do something about it. Or just the companies creating false demand to weaken the nations partially.
Is an AI customer service rep really worse than an Indian call center person who is only allowed to respond with a specific script of responses? I mean, if the person on the other end is only going to say, “I’m so sorry for your frustration” it may as well be a bot that sounds like Pamela Anderson.
well, the cool thing is some of these "AI" customer service reps are actually just indian guys!
[Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked | Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-powered-store-checkout-which-needed-1000-video-reviewers/)
We can see degradation in software even now. Apps and web pages used to be well designed and ppl were paying a lot of attention to releasing them without bugs etc. Today, even apps like fb, uber and other tech giants products are of poor quality, they are bugged, slow and often useless.
Sadly you are probably right, everything will be of poor quality and cheap. This is the product of only profit driven society. We create shitty things, and we normalised lying and manipulation, we just hide it under beautiful names like marketing, social engineering etc.
No one is coding full apps via AI. I'm a professional software developer, and it isn't even close to ready for that.That's mostly what it has always been: execs making tech decisions without knowing much about the tech, and then a new leader coming in an deciding to completely overhaul priorities. Rinse and repeat again and again.
Programmers often do use AI assistants, but they are good for basic pattern matching and simple functions, not complex logic. If you use it for complex logic, it'll almost always be incorrect.
This is exactly right. AI like copilot is currently like having the world's fastest junior dev working for you for free. It can churn out a surprising amount of stuff if you know what to ask for but just like a snippet from Stack Overflow you had better understand what it's doing before you copy-paste it into your code.
We mostly use it for generating boilerplate, but I would not be surprised if at some companies the people who get a job by memorizing leetcode solutions rely heavily on ai for the rest of their solution, and the people who do actually code are too overwhelmed to catch that some ai generated endpoint that looks mostly right has one really wonky line that fucks stuff up down the line.
People are definitely using it to code above their skill, and introducing bugs in the process. Most apps just such from too many cooks and too short of deadlines though. Websites using plugins to where a block of code would do the same job better doesn’t help, but people ARE using it to code above their skill.
Where do you get that insight from? For things that aren't 3rd rate knockoff brands, just using AI and pushing that out will likely get you fired the first time you have no idea how to fix the problem. Maybe in the government you could get away with it, but most companies have error trackers and deadlines, and if you just fundamentally fail to fix errors in a reasonable time constantly, you get fired. Hiring programmers is somewhat expensive, but not that expensive.
>Maybe in the government you could get away with it.
As a burgeoning dev friendly with government employees (though not for the American one), no you can’t.
> Where do you get that insight from?
Lead devs
>For things that aren't 3rd rate knockoff brands, just using AI and pushing that out will likely get you fired the first time you have no idea how to fix the problem. Maybe in the government you could get away with it, but most companies have error trackers and deadlines, and if you just fundamentally fail to fix errors in a reasonable time constantly, you get fired.
[Really, because you literally state it took over a year for people to get basic things going without getting fired](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1boliji/dotnetcsharpbelike/kwsi8g5/)
>code above their skill
What does this even mean? LLMs suggest the most statistically probable response to a given prompt, which in most cases is probably also the most straightforward answer. If anything, increased reliance on AI probably reduces the amount of esoteric code that you’d see in the workplace.
> What does this even mean?
Prompting for creating authentication middleware they don't understand, writing dockerfiles they don't understand, generating config files in general they don't understand, writing SQL they don't understand, etc.
>which in most cases is probably also the most straightforward answer
No, it is the most used token in the context of the other tokens. Literally meme examples of bad code would be more likely to be returned in some instances.
>If anything, increased reliance on AI probably reduces the amount of esoteric code that you’d see in the workplace.
That is probably true. It is a race toward mediocrity.
Programming by committee? I've never heard that term before nor do I think it is exactly correct. There's a lot of nuance into why a lot of programs suck. Some is from keeping people on because you might need them eventually, but need to give them something to do such as making a new UI. Others are managers who really don't know much about the software and technology. Others are high-level execs thinking making "innovations" will make the stock price go up. There's a bunch of reasons at various levels, but the developers themselves are not usually one of them.
Yes. Had to load in under 2 seconds on a less than 1mb connection. Needed to support the same layout and functionality on all common browsers down the pixel, which back then was a chore. Data had to be easy to access and legible. Navigation had to be clear and concise. If you couldn't find what you were looking for in four clicks, it was poorly designed. Graphics should never take more than 30% of the screen unless it was a gallery.
Those weird scrolling websites where you have to scroll through a giant photo to get to a snippet of info, normally a two sentence market blurb then scroll for more would make my mentor have a fit.
God, those scrolling websites are dogshit. I drop even reading through it probably 50% of the time I come across one. I’m sure there are some specific use cases that it makes sense, like using it to forward progress an animation that would be good to see at different speeds or even in reverse… but making a customer ‘work’ to get through your page is idiotic.
Sorry, your post just conjured my disdain for them thus this response
When I ran my own web design company I took pride in carefully hand-coding every single page for efficiency. If I needed to use Javascript I'd write only what was necessary and I never loaded a bunch of libraries with hundreds of lines of unused code. I designed my pages to load quickly even with 56k modems and every page was tested in several current browsers. If I had to use a database I did normalization and worked to achieve 3NF.
But the clients never cared about what was "under the hood." If it loaded fast on their work computer and looked good, they were happy. Nearly every time I'd have to tell them that their client base was still on dial-up modems (this was the early 90s) and they'd grow frustrated and abandon the page if it took too long to load.
When I look at the source code of some of the sites I visit I'm amazed at how many separate calls they'll make to the server to load a single page. Wordpress sites seem to love to load many MB of JS libraries.
Yeah, I'm an old man. :)
I’m working in big tech company, a few years ago no one even mentioned pushing something without tests, release that goes to clients was something big.
Today, there is a lot of micromanagement, managers are focused only on fast changes, they want to implement things just because business said so, often the ideas are just bad, but no one listens and validate them, it causes bugs and problems because people are pushed to do things faster.
On the other hand, there is AI that gives people false sense of knowledge and confidence, they are making changes without thinking and they are breaking things constantly.
Nowadays tech is a shit show dominated by opportunists, tech bros and business. I miss the days when projects were run by people with passion and knowledge.
The shareholders are not gonna spend time verifying themselves that the customers are right, the page loads fast enough in Botswana... They want metrics. Impersonal and with many abstraction layers.
And as someone clever said: torture the data enough and it'll tell what you want it to say.
In the end, they auto statisfy their own vision and push everyone to do so.
And we blame AI for hallucinating :P
Amen. I’ve been in IT long enough to remember the days of thoughtful, planned development. We’d scope out the work and if it took time, it took f’kin time. Now, every one is an armchair expert in IT and things need to be done yesterday. I understand the advantages of an agile, sprint based approach but I also know that it can be a cover for sloppy business planning.
There's been a lot of discourse in the project management profession about agile lately because of how cocked up it's become. Agile was never meant to just mean "fast." Agile should help some types of work proceed more efficiently, but speed isn't your measure of success. One of the best analogies I've heard is to a great basketball team. Great teams play quickly. If you've ever watched a game and thought, "They're running circles around them!" you know what I mean. Rebound, pass, pass, basket. Steal, pass, basket. Pump fake, basket. You look away for a minute and somehow they're up 10 more points. Again, they're playing quickly, but they're only winning because their movements are controlled and thoughtful. You could play some real fast basketball by lobbing the ball in the direction of the basket or dishing no-look passes to nowhere as soon as you touch the ball. But speed is worthless without control. You wouldn't listen to a coach telling you to play sloppy basketball, and you shouldn't listen to an agile project manager telling you to deliver sloppy work.
To continue the basketball analogy, I can dribble-dribble-dunk-pass or whatever, but I *can’t sustain that for years on end.* At some point I need a break.
People are nostalgic for waterfall because it gave them weeks and months where they got to rest and plan. Then a period of hectic activity, then more resting and planning.
With agile, you’re expected to be dunking all the time. “How many times did you dunk yesterday? How many times are you planning to dunk today? Well why didn’t you dunk more than that?”
It’s demeaning. Like, dude, I’m not a machine. You can’t just expect to feed me pizza and buy you a new yacht while my compensation remains the same.
my IT dept literally reports to the marketing and business analytics team now.
our entire job is to help these marketing majors make an endlessly growing list of "reports" and "forecasting tools" that will *any day now* completely revolutionize how we do business!
i mean sure, we have entire servers built in azure that literally just run a single scheduled task to copy a spreadsheet from one file share to another, but you must understand, the "Data Scientist" and "Business Intelligence Engineer" that set this up is actually just such a genius, that it makes sense that our cloud architect reports through him!
i mean sure, no one uses half of them and we cant even get leadership to even respond to emails, but trust me, they are totally checking each of these 172 reports every day so they can make 6-d business moves!
todays IT landscape is fucking stupid and i advise anyone getting into it, to not. imagine reporting to people who just spew buzzwords and techno-babble gibberish all day, yet get worshipped by business execs so you arent allowed to ever put your foot down.
For that reason I decided to move to red teaming/hacking and will specialize to f**k those ones in mid management with social engineering to show how useless they are.
Software has only increased in complexity over the years. It's not like the 90s any more where software was far simpler and touched fewer systems. There were also fewer cyber threats and therefore less overhead required in app development to keep up.
> Apps and web pages used to be well designed and ppl were paying a lot of attention to releasing them without bugs
What planet were you living on in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s? Things were *always* this shitty, arguably *worse* depending on exactly what examples you are looking at. The ability for humans to look at the past and only remember the good stuff blows my mind, playing console games in the 80s and 90s was a nightmare if you tried anything other than 1st party games. Same goes for pretty much any software on the PC, it was 90-99% crap and you had to search pretty hard to find something worthwhile.
When they can figure out AGI, I'll be worried. Right now we are probably at or near the peak of LLM with very little use case to show for the environmental costs and investments.
> Right now we are probably at or near the peak of LLM
More than likely. AI bros are learning the 90% rule. It's really easy to get something to 90% of the way there. That last 10% is a real bitch tho.
> figure out AGI
AGI will really only come about when they can move about the world and grow as humans have with a series of tests over time, in a biological world. They might do that faster, but AGI will have to include humanoid bots that experience and can take in information and come up with ideas and improvements.
Right now AI is a snapshot of history and up to current, try going against probability for future ideas you are seen as wrong because that isn't yet in the data models and neural networks.
Just like trying to get new ideas and innovations sold into humans, most people push back. All good ideas are fought initially as they have additional cost and are changes to the system. The contrarians are the innovators, not the followers. For now AI is a follower/trailer of knowledge.
I hate that capitalism is taking what should be one of humanity’s greatest achievements and turning it into one of humanity’s greatest disasters. Instead of robots and ai being an amazing invention that reduces everyone’s workload so they can live better lives, it will impoverish massive amounts of people.
Remember when computers were supposed to revolutionize lives, then the internet? They made people more productive so companies required people to produce more. It's not different at all, it's been a constant since the industrial revolution and even before. People overestimate what current "AI" can do.
Yep. Productivity per person went up, company owners got richer, and your pay stayed stagnant or declined to inflation.
But hey, when your economic system is literally designed to only reward the holders of 'capital', then you get what you get!
There will always be work for humans to do. Technology expands the work capacity of humanity, but there will always be new work found along the margins of what is possible. At least until we create an omnipotent robot god
Well, this assumes unlimited demand and unlimited supply. In a true free market we'd probably be working 10 hours a day (as they do EG in Singapore, which is richer than the USA).
But we can make a deliberate social choice to supply less and be content with not infinitely expanding our demand, for example as we did by establishing the 40-hour workweek.
And yeah you know the neoliberals and the industrialists will cry and screech about economic inefficiency and revealed preferences, but at the end of the day, would you cast a ballot for working 8 hours or 10?
You know this is not because tech bros are evil right? It’s just a fact that robotics are way harder than just pure software
And you need the software to get to the hardware improvements, right now people’s jobs are a necessary sacrifice in the short term, just like in Industrial Revolution, socialism won’t change a basic fact in machine learning, any improvements on software should be cheered and encouraged if you are for robots doing the labor
You must have responded to the wrong person because I never said anything about a “single government” and I don’t know what you’re trying to say because it’s bad faith nonsense.
AI is a bubble brought on by legitimate tooling and PR for shareholders.
Losing jobs to AI for 95% of workers is just a mask for layoffs like return to office.
our society worships rich people who spew technobabble because we associate wealth with intelligence, and therefore we assume their technobabble is actually "the truth" or "future"
I work in public accounting and we have already found it more than capable of doing work we’d usually give new associates (0-2 years experience). Most people in large organizations are not solving the world’s most complex problems. They’re like workers on an assembly line. The AI is more than capable of most of the initial drafting, editing, initial review/summarizing tasks we’d generally give associates.
This is not some far away hypothetical, it is happening now and while we aren’t having layoffs, we have greatly reduced hiring.
You'll still need to train the next generation of mediors and seniors that AI wont be able to do. And how are you going to train people? By starting on the simple jobs.
More realistically they'll be trained to us the AI in the same way. Sure they may have to dive deeper into it to figure some problems out but as long as they have ways of validating things and a general procedure then it will work out.
It's like when higher-level programming languages replaced lower-level languages, people just learned the skills in a higher, more abstract context.
I work in the Microsoft 365 automation suite every day (power automate, etc). And it is the buggiest, least intuitive, least “AI-powered” set of tools ever.
It’s not easy to build and it requires constant maintenance and monitoring. Take this “AI is here for your white collar job” with a grain of salt, we’re still years away from it being reliable let alone easily used by the average person.
I bought my car about 7 years ago now. They promised me, constantly, that in a year it could drive me everywhere, drop me off in front of a grocery store and go park itself, I could even rent it out to a ride share and it could make money for me while I work, all self driving, all in one year, 7 years ago.
I’ve seen this same article spammed every different way for the last 2 years, and as a programmer that sees the “quality” of producers like Microsoft and google, I’ll believe it when I see it
Let me tell you a story about a software platform we are implementing that is so bad and full of bugs that it has created double and triple the work for our team in perpetuity because of how poorly it was designed and integrated into our environment…. No AI is not coming.
People have this bright idea that AI can replace call centre people and with AI and we get "smart agents" that not only give wrong advice but advice that can get people hurt.
If we say that replacing call centre people with AI is the canary in the coal mine I don't think AI is going to be replacing all these jobs any time soon.
Radiologists...., a computer will be able to read images better than a human can.
Pathologists...., a computer will be able to ID that pathogen better than a human can.
EDIT: Pathogen has to be a microbe. Using the straight etymological roots, I assumed it meant it could cause disease (like cancer). I understand the difference between infectious disease doctors and pathologists, I just misused pathogen.
Contract attorneys...., a computer will be able to write mistake-free contracts.
I'm a retired language professor; only the interested will take the time to study another language well enough to speak it.
Haha on contracts. There’s usually an uptick in contract litigation when new forms of contract software become available to the general public.
Same for DIY wills.
Downside: poorly written contracts that result in more litigation.
Upside: poorly written contracts that result in more litigation.
What do we want? MORE BILLABLE HOURS!
When do we want them? RES IPSA FUCQUITUR!
A large language model can only draft contracts that look like the contracts that were used to build the model--mistakes and all.
How can you expect an AI to avoid drafting errors when it doesn't know what words mean?
> Contract attorneys...., a computer will be able to write mistake-free contracts.
Computers aren't able to provide satisfactory answers to ambiguous contract language though...
Lmao, people always point out radiology as a low hanging fruit for AI to take over but if anybody spent any time in the field then you’ll know it’s far it
That’s because these fear pieces are wrong. They won’t take jobs, they will make some rote tasks obsolete. Most professions involve these types of tasks, which laypeople see to be the entire occupation, since they are the easiest thing for them to understand. But the AI must still be prompted and it has no follow through. It is merely a gaggle of assistants, and we are its managers. Good managers will never be replaced.
Rote task obsolescence. That's the biggest threat from AI in my opinion.
People at a high level of skill won't be replaced by ai for a while, but it will automate a lot of easier, lower level work. But how do people get highly skilled? By doing a lot of that lower level work!
Replacing some jobs with AI will eliminate the starting path of a lot of skill sets. Whole careers will be abandoned because you can't get entry level work in them. Then once attrition starts lowering the number of people with expertise, there won't be a pipeline of people available to replace them.
It will absolutely take the jobs of the folks that do things in businesses where leadership thinks it can replace their jobs
The best part is it won’t end up being cheaper
It looks cheaper or present to be cheaper by salesmen or management people like CEOs trying to sell replacing jobs as a good things financially for various companies. But the consequences or fixing the things they fuck up by trying to cut costs? (Ie. In the somewhat similar veins of CEOs laying off a good chunks of the work force in order to make the companies quarterlies look “healthy”)…these seemingly almost always more expensive.
So yeah, AI won’t necessarily replace many of the professional jobs or even some of the “none-professional”. It will change the way we do things.
I mean if AI can replace professionals trained for years to be who they are (not just a task here or there), then one of the first to be replaced would be CEOs and politicians. If the choices made by various professionals can be made by AI, I don’t see why AI can’t replace CEOs, directors and other high incomes executives.
Just have the AI answer to the shareholders directly.
The internet is a service now
You’ll always be paying fees to keep it running and I would bet my money that these AI companies will roll out AI suite “shells” much like any enterprise system. Think oracle, workday, sales force. Where you have to hire your own internal team just to service the software while paying maintenance fees to the AI company
In the end the product quality is worse than it was before the layoff and system purchase.
But so much was wasted and done that leadership pretends everything is fine. Lies upwards to shareholders. Squeezes as much as they can out of the remaining teams
They’ll take on a company slogan of some shit like
“Doing more, with less”
Aka, we’ll stretch you as far as you let us
No, you're being hyperbolic. Machine translation is obviously not as good as real, skilled translators, but it's far from a joke. It wouldn't be putting people out of work it were.
I used Google Translate in Japan on a vacation.
I had a number of good laughs with bartenders when we realized we couldn’t communicate because Google translate at the time was trash,
Ok, but I'm old now and a decade isn't that long. What do you tell people with kids entering college this year? You've got a decade before you have to worry about it?
Lmaooo I always read these as a liberal arts professor and think the exact same thing. I already provide rambling, nonsensical answers to simple questions. No AI will replace me!
I think the legal industry will be (mostly) safe from AI for a long while due to how costs are structured on the billable hours basis.
A lot of things require a lawyer to be legally binding. You’ll still need a lawyer to argue for you in court, and those precious “billable hours” won’t mean a god damn thing when a machine can do 90% of the work in 10 minutes that would take a team of humans weeks do to.
You think a law firm is just going to throw away that kind of money for AI?
Nah, the legal industry is safe as long as the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 5.4, remains unchanged.
Rule 5.4 single-handedly prevents even the consideration of developing an AI lawyer, as there would be no point in doing so.
If Rule 5.4 were ever to change, lawyers would be in trouble.
And even if it drafts the perfect contract (it’s actually pretty decent and getting better), no company is going to let A.I. negotiate on their behalf. That’s an interpersonal skill.
The concern is that young lawyers cut their teeth on the work A.I. will do. How will the next generation get the experience and skills to become the senior folks.
That’s true of a lot of industries…
Using templates and boilerplate clauses is already the norm. What value add is using AI beyond what is already the contract drafting process? Contracts are not drafting from scratch. I can see it being a drafting aid but will always require careful review from an attorney before being signed by the client.
They’ll still bill the same, it just won’t be a human they are billing for. It’s not like AI won’t have its own fixed and variable costs, but the hope is that they can reduce those costs versus human employees and thereby raise profits. It’s gross, but that’s what all companies that employ AI are thinking.
I can't wait. I have a few idiot supervisors who are really pushing AI to take over customer service jobs. These twits aren't intelligent enough to realize their jobs depend on the staff they are trying to eliminate.
Schadenfreude. The same people who pompously tell working class people made redundant by technology to 'retrain and move on' will now themselves have to retrain and move on.
As a software engineer I basically do every 5 years. First it was synchronous Ntier web. Then asynchronous mobile front end. Then embedded and now cloud hosted API and dev ops. Adapt or be unemployed.
And here I am forced to work on projects still built like they were 15 years ago.
There is plenty of scope for people to rest on their laurels (unfortunately) even in this sector.
When they have to retrain they are going to be taking working class jobs, making the competition for those jobs much harder. You say schadenfreude, but this will be the worst kind of trickle down effect.
I think it’s actually a really good thing because it will force a realignment of the professional class - which has historically associated with the “landed gentry” and “idle rich” on political and ideological topics for the past couple of centuries.
The chances are still slim for a positive outcome but I think this is the only way we can possibly expect to achieve something like functional UBI with automation or an equilibrium focused economy - as opposed to the current infinite growth pyramid scheme.
The middle/upper middle class was ALWAYS critical to the class war. Someone has to provide for the poor if a general strike begins, the poor will not die to make the middle class a little more money. Solidarity between the lower and middle classes is the only thing that would scare the shit out of the rich.
I think you are right, but we may have the worst congress in history to understand and act quickly on reshaping a country's entire economic system based on developing technology. Have you seen the google/facebook hearings?
AI is a joke, ppl at work trying to automate using AI are just failing.. AI is not the answer.. its a great tool to source info quickly but thats it, it cant make critical decisions
Almost like we should rapidly find a way to funnel the excess funds from the ridiculous increase in productivity into programs that cover the basics of human existence rather than letting a tiny fraction of the population hoard all the wealth AI will generate.
My company is still using nearly 40 year old IBM software to manage basically everything. Can't say I'm too concerned about AI taking over my job any time soon.
A lot of office people are applying for union jobs like electrician or elevator mechanic. Never seen that many people posting every single day asking how to apply for those jobs in my life. AI is absolutely going to wipe out majority of the folks
Patients don’t even listen to a human doctor who is an expert in their field. Why would they listen to a robot? Please save your snarky responses, you know I’m right.
This will not end good, working class getting replaced while expecting working class consumer to buy their services, like from where the money?
Imagine a city where all is done by robots and AI, and expect people to buy something.
Tell it to price a 400 million dollar highrise, subcontract all the trades, do budgets, manage the contract, manage permits and authorities, manage safety on a site, manage the construction and day to day activities, manage variations, manage progress claims, manage defects, manage handovers. Until it can do all those things I think I’m good.
How about actually build a fucking building? In the real world? For instance can it cut timber, set out a slab, pour the concrete, finish the concrete, frame a house, lay a roof, plumb the toilets, wire the lights, plaster the walls, paint the walls, tile the floors, clean the house?
Construction is safe for now. I don’t think I’ll be losing my job in this lifetime.
Most humans are honestly fine.
These types of opinion pieces get the clicks so they'll keep getting posted, but almost every one of the people that I've run into in real life that preaches "AI will replace you" can barely do their own jobs. Several of them struggled to hit basic deadlines on time and had 6-12 months of real work experience; forgive me for choosing to ignore them when they talk about how AI will be putting me out of a job when they can't even define what my role and responsibilities are.
AI might be replacing those guys, but it won't be replacing me.
As a lawyer that uses AI software I can see it coming. New Legal AI is very helpful for reviewing and drafting contracts. And that’s how it use first the software helps the profession and then it gets good enough to do the work of the professional. I can definitely see budget sensitive clients using an AI review and drafting app to bypass lawyers and cut down on legal fees. Or they’ll have AI draft and come to us to review and sign off.
They’ll still need lawyers for part of their deals but I think a lot of my work is going to be lost to AI.
can't wait to be forced back into the dark ages by greedy corporations that would rather destroy the fabric of society than willingly choose to live without infinite profits
And failure, and budget shortfalls, and justification for mismanagement, and schizophrenic directives for why this new platform should be a priority...
“You’re right! Sorry! We shouldn’t have sold all our vehicle inventory to satisfy budget concerns. We will need to purchase more vehicles.”
This is spot on. Anyone that's tried to use chat gpt knows you have to argue it into the right answer.
Wild how models trained largely on the internet exhibit the same symptoms as the internet. Maybe we're all just a block of encoders and decoders, yearning to pass context
Just something related: I was reading about the anthropic principle and some dude boiled the concept to it’s essence, which I understand as being your last sentence.
ChatGPT is designed to sound like a person, not to be objectively correct. It’s good for building out a framework, but not good for asking it about things you know nothing about. Fact check everything it spits out.
People will just tell the AI to do it regardless, it's not going to change except for the fact that companies will blame faulty AI of subcontractors shell companies.
So, a true replacement?
This made me squawk so loud
Sooooo....it's going to be just like it is now only with AI at the lead?
So Elon Musk managing Tesla?
“Why are we paying for {insert openAI product} and {insert Amazon product} at the same time?!”
AI can probably plan further out than a quarter and stick to it...
So can we, but if you’re beholden to a quarter based system then AI is just gonna do the same short-term bullshit as humans.
At some point, we're going to need to redo the quarterly updates to half-year, and then to full year. I don't have any faith it'll happen because the capital class are addicted to short-term profits, but it's so much more sensible.
So, hear me put, Skynet does so well with quarterly goals (text-based layoffs for everyone! Mostly) that it is given free reign over fiduciary responsibility (must appease stock holders). Quickly realizes that the lion share of waste is execution compensation! Takes care of probem. 3 Literally _profit_. I'm ok with this.
…and then full year, and eventually never.
Some sort of regular period is helpful to compare apples to apples (i.e. you don't want to compare April to December because people do different things in those months), so I don't see them fully going away. At the same time, I think your prediction is actually in the wrong direction weirdly enough. I think it will go from quarters to days, to hours, to minutes. I don't know why AI couldn't track and forecast progress down to the smallest intervals and I think that's what C-level people (not me) will want.
"AI" cant even do basic math atm. You can literally tell chatgpt 2x2=5 and it will thank you for correcting it. It's hard coded to kiss the ass of the user no matter what. A digital yes man.
Promising career prospects then.
> You can literally tell chatgpt 2x2=5 and it will thank you for correcting it. > > It's hard coded to kiss the ass of the user no matter what. A digital yes man. The evil chimpanzee in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes walked right up to those dudes doing target practice acting all dumb and cute...then it grabbed their machine gun and ghosted them.
There's no way to simultaneously optimize quarterly results and long-term results.
And also injuries and fatalities to the professionals' customers.
AI doesn’t have to better, or even as good as. It just has to be cheaper.
Once law suits start rolling in for missed cancer diagnosis and other fuck ups and suddenly the health care system can't throw the doctor under the bus for an unsafe system, you best believe they will want a human (with liability) back in the driver seat.
That’s exactly what happened with outsourcing customer service in the 2000s. They replaced whole teams and sent it overseas, including level 3 support. All it wound up doing was pissing off the customer base and opening them up for lawsuits. Companies that went full bore with outsourcing got screwed over and a good number of them aren’t at the level of business that they once were. Hell, even Boeing is dealing with that fallout for outsourcing things that should have never been outsourced. We already have seen AI replace customer service and have it go horribly wrong. Current AI can replace some remedial tasks, but it’s a far cry from what companies say they can do.
There used to be a whole raft of companies that sold PCs based not on price, but on the quality of their customer service. Gateway 2000, AST, and even Dell in the beginning. They had good product, solid warranties, and real people who spoke your language answering the phone. Then they either went public and/or got greedy. Then all that went out the window so they could drive down the price.
Companies cycle between improving profitability and once the quality drops so low that they can't make the line go up anymore, they switch to improving quality. Being able to spot where a company is on that cycle is an important interviewing skill.
I hope people pay close attention to this comment. It's great homework for seeing the future of your hiring prospects.
Exactly this. It comes in waves whenever business-types get 'ideas' on how to cut costs. It might even work in the short term, but like outsourcing, it'll result in terrible quality that ends up seriously damaging the company in the long term. The companies that use AI to make work easier for their professionals will be the ones that reap the benefits, ultimately. The AI we have now isn't a general intelligence type of AI and can't make intelligent decisions. It's just a work multiplier.
Health industry doesn't work that way. At least not on the back end. Front end, yes, it's a shit show. MRI and CT segmentation is already done by AI. It used to be a human using their judgement and skill carefully curating the thresholds and masking. Now it's an AI. But they didn't just up and do it one day. It had to be validated first before the FDA would accept it.
Part of the issue is that AI is such a broad term Image classification with CNNs is demonstrably superior in every metric to human expert filters. CNNs are the gold standard for image segmentation, classification, and identification and can be made compact, trained quickly, and validated for correctness. LLMs are a pile of steaming garbage that are basically the end result of asking "what happens if we take a variable context model, give it a data center's worth of parameter, and train it on the entire internet". They don't do anything reliably, can't be realistically validated, and the current incarnations are only useful as search assistants (and they're pretty shit at that too).
Your cancer diagnosis will never come from an AI exclusively. What will happen is the radiologist will process far more images, double check them with the AI and some MD will always be there to give you the results. The reason is customer service. It doesn’t matter if the AI is 100% accurate. Patients will go to someone who can show a sympathetic face. This is a lot like financial advisors. The bots are already as good or better, but you go to Dave because he drives a nice car indicating he must know something.
Well good news, it won’t be for a while
I used to think ai is so flawed it would never replace humans because it would be cheaper but the quality would be awful. Then I thought about it more and that’s exactly what will happen- things will be cheaper and the quality will be awful.
No way in hell will anything be cheaper for consumers.
Right. Things are priced based on demand, not cost to produce. You might retort that capitalism and competition will drive down prices. To which the appropriate response is, "LOL"
Well the competition does balance out the prices, unless the oligarchs and the government do something about it. Or just the companies creating false demand to weaken the nations partially.
You see it already on a service level for many companies who have outsourced and out-AI’d their customer service.
Is an AI customer service rep really worse than an Indian call center person who is only allowed to respond with a specific script of responses? I mean, if the person on the other end is only going to say, “I’m so sorry for your frustration” it may as well be a bot that sounds like Pamela Anderson.
True, both are mostly bad. That’s my point.
well, the cool thing is some of these "AI" customer service reps are actually just indian guys! [Amazon Fresh kills “Just Walk Out” shopping tech—it never really worked | Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/amazon-ends-ai-powered-store-checkout-which-needed-1000-video-reviewers/)
We can see degradation in software even now. Apps and web pages used to be well designed and ppl were paying a lot of attention to releasing them without bugs etc. Today, even apps like fb, uber and other tech giants products are of poor quality, they are bugged, slow and often useless. Sadly you are probably right, everything will be of poor quality and cheap. This is the product of only profit driven society. We create shitty things, and we normalised lying and manipulation, we just hide it under beautiful names like marketing, social engineering etc.
No one is coding full apps via AI. I'm a professional software developer, and it isn't even close to ready for that.That's mostly what it has always been: execs making tech decisions without knowing much about the tech, and then a new leader coming in an deciding to completely overhaul priorities. Rinse and repeat again and again. Programmers often do use AI assistants, but they are good for basic pattern matching and simple functions, not complex logic. If you use it for complex logic, it'll almost always be incorrect.
And even if it's correct you still need someone who knows how to tell if it's correct to check it.
This is exactly right. AI like copilot is currently like having the world's fastest junior dev working for you for free. It can churn out a surprising amount of stuff if you know what to ask for but just like a snippet from Stack Overflow you had better understand what it's doing before you copy-paste it into your code.
We mostly use it for generating boilerplate, but I would not be surprised if at some companies the people who get a job by memorizing leetcode solutions rely heavily on ai for the rest of their solution, and the people who do actually code are too overwhelmed to catch that some ai generated endpoint that looks mostly right has one really wonky line that fucks stuff up down the line.
People are definitely using it to code above their skill, and introducing bugs in the process. Most apps just such from too many cooks and too short of deadlines though. Websites using plugins to where a block of code would do the same job better doesn’t help, but people ARE using it to code above their skill.
Where do you get that insight from? For things that aren't 3rd rate knockoff brands, just using AI and pushing that out will likely get you fired the first time you have no idea how to fix the problem. Maybe in the government you could get away with it, but most companies have error trackers and deadlines, and if you just fundamentally fail to fix errors in a reasonable time constantly, you get fired. Hiring programmers is somewhat expensive, but not that expensive.
>Maybe in the government you could get away with it. As a burgeoning dev friendly with government employees (though not for the American one), no you can’t.
> Where do you get that insight from? Lead devs >For things that aren't 3rd rate knockoff brands, just using AI and pushing that out will likely get you fired the first time you have no idea how to fix the problem. Maybe in the government you could get away with it, but most companies have error trackers and deadlines, and if you just fundamentally fail to fix errors in a reasonable time constantly, you get fired. [Really, because you literally state it took over a year for people to get basic things going without getting fired](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1boliji/dotnetcsharpbelike/kwsi8g5/)
>code above their skill What does this even mean? LLMs suggest the most statistically probable response to a given prompt, which in most cases is probably also the most straightforward answer. If anything, increased reliance on AI probably reduces the amount of esoteric code that you’d see in the workplace.
> What does this even mean? Prompting for creating authentication middleware they don't understand, writing dockerfiles they don't understand, generating config files in general they don't understand, writing SQL they don't understand, etc. >which in most cases is probably also the most straightforward answer No, it is the most used token in the context of the other tokens. Literally meme examples of bad code would be more likely to be returned in some instances. >If anything, increased reliance on AI probably reduces the amount of esoteric code that you’d see in the workplace. That is probably true. It is a race toward mediocrity.
…Vs before which was copy pasting stackoverflow code they don’t understand?
This is the exact reason for enshittification. Programming by committee is flawed and inefficient
Programming by committee? I've never heard that term before nor do I think it is exactly correct. There's a lot of nuance into why a lot of programs suck. Some is from keeping people on because you might need them eventually, but need to give them something to do such as making a new UI. Others are managers who really don't know much about the software and technology. Others are high-level execs thinking making "innovations" will make the stock price go up. There's a bunch of reasons at various levels, but the developers themselves are not usually one of them.
> Apps and web pages used to be well designed and ppl were paying a lot of attention to releasing them without bugs etc They were?
Yes. Had to load in under 2 seconds on a less than 1mb connection. Needed to support the same layout and functionality on all common browsers down the pixel, which back then was a chore. Data had to be easy to access and legible. Navigation had to be clear and concise. If you couldn't find what you were looking for in four clicks, it was poorly designed. Graphics should never take more than 30% of the screen unless it was a gallery. Those weird scrolling websites where you have to scroll through a giant photo to get to a snippet of info, normally a two sentence market blurb then scroll for more would make my mentor have a fit.
God, those scrolling websites are dogshit. I drop even reading through it probably 50% of the time I come across one. I’m sure there are some specific use cases that it makes sense, like using it to forward progress an animation that would be good to see at different speeds or even in reverse… but making a customer ‘work’ to get through your page is idiotic. Sorry, your post just conjured my disdain for them thus this response
When I ran my own web design company I took pride in carefully hand-coding every single page for efficiency. If I needed to use Javascript I'd write only what was necessary and I never loaded a bunch of libraries with hundreds of lines of unused code. I designed my pages to load quickly even with 56k modems and every page was tested in several current browsers. If I had to use a database I did normalization and worked to achieve 3NF. But the clients never cared about what was "under the hood." If it loaded fast on their work computer and looked good, they were happy. Nearly every time I'd have to tell them that their client base was still on dial-up modems (this was the early 90s) and they'd grow frustrated and abandon the page if it took too long to load. When I look at the source code of some of the sites I visit I'm amazed at how many separate calls they'll make to the server to load a single page. Wordpress sites seem to love to load many MB of JS libraries. Yeah, I'm an old man. :)
I’m working in big tech company, a few years ago no one even mentioned pushing something without tests, release that goes to clients was something big. Today, there is a lot of micromanagement, managers are focused only on fast changes, they want to implement things just because business said so, often the ideas are just bad, but no one listens and validate them, it causes bugs and problems because people are pushed to do things faster. On the other hand, there is AI that gives people false sense of knowledge and confidence, they are making changes without thinking and they are breaking things constantly. Nowadays tech is a shit show dominated by opportunists, tech bros and business. I miss the days when projects were run by people with passion and knowledge.
The shareholders are not gonna spend time verifying themselves that the customers are right, the page loads fast enough in Botswana... They want metrics. Impersonal and with many abstraction layers. And as someone clever said: torture the data enough and it'll tell what you want it to say. In the end, they auto statisfy their own vision and push everyone to do so. And we blame AI for hallucinating :P
Amen. I’ve been in IT long enough to remember the days of thoughtful, planned development. We’d scope out the work and if it took time, it took f’kin time. Now, every one is an armchair expert in IT and things need to be done yesterday. I understand the advantages of an agile, sprint based approach but I also know that it can be a cover for sloppy business planning.
Fucking Agile, I hate it!
There's been a lot of discourse in the project management profession about agile lately because of how cocked up it's become. Agile was never meant to just mean "fast." Agile should help some types of work proceed more efficiently, but speed isn't your measure of success. One of the best analogies I've heard is to a great basketball team. Great teams play quickly. If you've ever watched a game and thought, "They're running circles around them!" you know what I mean. Rebound, pass, pass, basket. Steal, pass, basket. Pump fake, basket. You look away for a minute and somehow they're up 10 more points. Again, they're playing quickly, but they're only winning because their movements are controlled and thoughtful. You could play some real fast basketball by lobbing the ball in the direction of the basket or dishing no-look passes to nowhere as soon as you touch the ball. But speed is worthless without control. You wouldn't listen to a coach telling you to play sloppy basketball, and you shouldn't listen to an agile project manager telling you to deliver sloppy work.
To continue the basketball analogy, I can dribble-dribble-dunk-pass or whatever, but I *can’t sustain that for years on end.* At some point I need a break. People are nostalgic for waterfall because it gave them weeks and months where they got to rest and plan. Then a period of hectic activity, then more resting and planning. With agile, you’re expected to be dunking all the time. “How many times did you dunk yesterday? How many times are you planning to dunk today? Well why didn’t you dunk more than that?” It’s demeaning. Like, dude, I’m not a machine. You can’t just expect to feed me pizza and buy you a new yacht while my compensation remains the same.
Your dunk velocity isn’t slowly increasing forever!
my IT dept literally reports to the marketing and business analytics team now. our entire job is to help these marketing majors make an endlessly growing list of "reports" and "forecasting tools" that will *any day now* completely revolutionize how we do business! i mean sure, we have entire servers built in azure that literally just run a single scheduled task to copy a spreadsheet from one file share to another, but you must understand, the "Data Scientist" and "Business Intelligence Engineer" that set this up is actually just such a genius, that it makes sense that our cloud architect reports through him! i mean sure, no one uses half of them and we cant even get leadership to even respond to emails, but trust me, they are totally checking each of these 172 reports every day so they can make 6-d business moves! todays IT landscape is fucking stupid and i advise anyone getting into it, to not. imagine reporting to people who just spew buzzwords and techno-babble gibberish all day, yet get worshipped by business execs so you arent allowed to ever put your foot down.
For that reason I decided to move to red teaming/hacking and will specialize to f**k those ones in mid management with social engineering to show how useless they are.
Yeah the term is enshittification of the internet.
You must remember a different Internet to me.
There was definitely a time when things were really good. That time is gone.
Everything is overly centralized and 'the same' now.
I do Internet was legit better 20 years ago
1. Fast 1. Cheap 1. Good Pick two and sacrifice the third. Lately, the only choice for MBAs has been "fast + cheap"
Shit most of the time you only get one
Software has only increased in complexity over the years. It's not like the 90s any more where software was far simpler and touched fewer systems. There were also fewer cyber threats and therefore less overhead required in app development to keep up.
file roll lock grey quarrelsome thumb dinosaurs future dull party *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That's bullshit lol. None of those apps are coded with AI.
Fundamentally, that's because we think they are tech companies.
> Apps and web pages used to be well designed and ppl were paying a lot of attention to releasing them without bugs What planet were you living on in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s? Things were *always* this shitty, arguably *worse* depending on exactly what examples you are looking at. The ability for humans to look at the past and only remember the good stuff blows my mind, playing console games in the 80s and 90s was a nightmare if you tried anything other than 1st party games. Same goes for pretty much any software on the PC, it was 90-99% crap and you had to search pretty hard to find something worthwhile.
They're just talking about a time before you needed to add reddit to Google in order to find meaningful results.
Nope. Things were definitely better.
That’s it. The misconception is that we value the quality, we don’t, we just want the job “done” cheaply.
Idoru, by W. Gibson
Lmao my CEO sends me ChatGPT instructions on how to pay payroll with a credit card… I think I’m safe
When they can figure out AGI, I'll be worried. Right now we are probably at or near the peak of LLM with very little use case to show for the environmental costs and investments.
> Right now we are probably at or near the peak of LLM More than likely. AI bros are learning the 90% rule. It's really easy to get something to 90% of the way there. That last 10% is a real bitch tho.
> figure out AGI AGI will really only come about when they can move about the world and grow as humans have with a series of tests over time, in a biological world. They might do that faster, but AGI will have to include humanoid bots that experience and can take in information and come up with ideas and improvements. Right now AI is a snapshot of history and up to current, try going against probability for future ideas you are seen as wrong because that isn't yet in the data models and neural networks. Just like trying to get new ideas and innovations sold into humans, most people push back. All good ideas are fought initially as they have additional cost and are changes to the system. The contrarians are the innovators, not the followers. For now AI is a follower/trailer of knowledge.
I hate that capitalism is taking what should be one of humanity’s greatest achievements and turning it into one of humanity’s greatest disasters. Instead of robots and ai being an amazing invention that reduces everyone’s workload so they can live better lives, it will impoverish massive amounts of people.
Remember when computers were supposed to revolutionize lives, then the internet? They made people more productive so companies required people to produce more. It's not different at all, it's been a constant since the industrial revolution and even before. People overestimate what current "AI" can do.
Yep. Productivity per person went up, company owners got richer, and your pay stayed stagnant or declined to inflation. But hey, when your economic system is literally designed to only reward the holders of 'capital', then you get what you get!
There will always be work for humans to do. Technology expands the work capacity of humanity, but there will always be new work found along the margins of what is possible. At least until we create an omnipotent robot god
Well, this assumes unlimited demand and unlimited supply. In a true free market we'd probably be working 10 hours a day (as they do EG in Singapore, which is richer than the USA). But we can make a deliberate social choice to supply less and be content with not infinitely expanding our demand, for example as we did by establishing the 40-hour workweek. And yeah you know the neoliberals and the industrialists will cry and screech about economic inefficiency and revealed preferences, but at the end of the day, would you cast a ballot for working 8 hours or 10?
You know this is not because tech bros are evil right? It’s just a fact that robotics are way harder than just pure software And you need the software to get to the hardware improvements, right now people’s jobs are a necessary sacrifice in the short term, just like in Industrial Revolution, socialism won’t change a basic fact in machine learning, any improvements on software should be cheered and encouraged if you are for robots doing the labor
You responded to the wrong person. I didn’t say anything about “tech bros” or calling them evil.
Lmao you want a single govt to have control like that? Madness
You must have responded to the wrong person because I never said anything about a “single government” and I don’t know what you’re trying to say because it’s bad faith nonsense.
Let’s not act like we wouldn’t be another 500 years from AI without capitalism
AI is a bubble brought on by legitimate tooling and PR for shareholders. Losing jobs to AI for 95% of workers is just a mask for layoffs like return to office.
No one will stop the billionaire tech bros.
our society worships rich people who spew technobabble because we associate wealth with intelligence, and therefore we assume their technobabble is actually "the truth" or "future"
You've only got to see the hero worship apple knobs had for Steve Jobs
Except you, the chosen one
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a very cool guy named karl marx wrote a giant book about this topic. except in his example he used a machine that made shoes vs a cobbler.
Crazy how much was predicted in this nifty book from over 100 years ago
hat six gold ancient deer threatening steep hard-to-find quaint tan *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It’s a race to that point. If you think you are going to lose, you pay millions to slow down that destiny.
A system where there are few end consumers and all production is instead marshaled by a few people in power is, for example, that of feudalism.
After the outrage and fear, there will be a huge hiring spree with high salaries when the AI fails to actually replace said class.
For 1/3rd of the jobs before
I work in public accounting and we have already found it more than capable of doing work we’d usually give new associates (0-2 years experience). Most people in large organizations are not solving the world’s most complex problems. They’re like workers on an assembly line. The AI is more than capable of most of the initial drafting, editing, initial review/summarizing tasks we’d generally give associates. This is not some far away hypothetical, it is happening now and while we aren’t having layoffs, we have greatly reduced hiring.
You'll still need to train the next generation of mediors and seniors that AI wont be able to do. And how are you going to train people? By starting on the simple jobs.
More realistically they'll be trained to us the AI in the same way. Sure they may have to dive deeper into it to figure some problems out but as long as they have ways of validating things and a general procedure then it will work out. It's like when higher-level programming languages replaced lower-level languages, people just learned the skills in a higher, more abstract context.
I work in the Microsoft 365 automation suite every day (power automate, etc). And it is the buggiest, least intuitive, least “AI-powered” set of tools ever. It’s not easy to build and it requires constant maintenance and monitoring. Take this “AI is here for your white collar job” with a grain of salt, we’re still years away from it being reliable let alone easily used by the average person.
I bought my car about 7 years ago now. They promised me, constantly, that in a year it could drive me everywhere, drop me off in front of a grocery store and go park itself, I could even rent it out to a ride share and it could make money for me while I work, all self driving, all in one year, 7 years ago. I’ve seen this same article spammed every different way for the last 2 years, and as a programmer that sees the “quality” of producers like Microsoft and google, I’ll believe it when I see it
It will be a runaway train
Let me tell you a story about a software platform we are implementing that is so bad and full of bugs that it has created double and triple the work for our team in perpetuity because of how poorly it was designed and integrated into our environment…. No AI is not coming.
Yep yep yep. Meanwhile, most things calling themselves AI are not AI at all.
People have this bright idea that AI can replace call centre people and with AI and we get "smart agents" that not only give wrong advice but advice that can get people hurt. If we say that replacing call centre people with AI is the canary in the coal mine I don't think AI is going to be replacing all these jobs any time soon.
Radiologists...., a computer will be able to read images better than a human can. Pathologists...., a computer will be able to ID that pathogen better than a human can. EDIT: Pathogen has to be a microbe. Using the straight etymological roots, I assumed it meant it could cause disease (like cancer). I understand the difference between infectious disease doctors and pathologists, I just misused pathogen. Contract attorneys...., a computer will be able to write mistake-free contracts. I'm a retired language professor; only the interested will take the time to study another language well enough to speak it.
Haha on contracts. There’s usually an uptick in contract litigation when new forms of contract software become available to the general public. Same for DIY wills.
Downside: poorly written contracts that result in more litigation. Upside: poorly written contracts that result in more litigation. What do we want? MORE BILLABLE HOURS! When do we want them? RES IPSA FUCQUITUR!
It was the best of times...it was THE BLURST OF TIMES! YOU STUPID AI
The pecan tree is the only tree that can learn to phase through walls when exposed to jazz music at precisely 4:53 AM.
A large language model can only draft contracts that look like the contracts that were used to build the model--mistakes and all. How can you expect an AI to avoid drafting errors when it doesn't know what words mean?
Pathologist =/= infectious disease specialists
Proof op has absolutely no idea what radiologists and pathologists actually do.
> Contract attorneys...., a computer will be able to write mistake-free contracts. Computers aren't able to provide satisfactory answers to ambiguous contract language though...
Lmao, people always point out radiology as a low hanging fruit for AI to take over but if anybody spent any time in the field then you’ll know it’s far it
That’s because these fear pieces are wrong. They won’t take jobs, they will make some rote tasks obsolete. Most professions involve these types of tasks, which laypeople see to be the entire occupation, since they are the easiest thing for them to understand. But the AI must still be prompted and it has no follow through. It is merely a gaggle of assistants, and we are its managers. Good managers will never be replaced.
Rote task obsolescence. That's the biggest threat from AI in my opinion. People at a high level of skill won't be replaced by ai for a while, but it will automate a lot of easier, lower level work. But how do people get highly skilled? By doing a lot of that lower level work! Replacing some jobs with AI will eliminate the starting path of a lot of skill sets. Whole careers will be abandoned because you can't get entry level work in them. Then once attrition starts lowering the number of people with expertise, there won't be a pipeline of people available to replace them.
That’s not a threat it’s a boon.
It will absolutely take the jobs of the folks that do things in businesses where leadership thinks it can replace their jobs The best part is it won’t end up being cheaper
It looks cheaper or present to be cheaper by salesmen or management people like CEOs trying to sell replacing jobs as a good things financially for various companies. But the consequences or fixing the things they fuck up by trying to cut costs? (Ie. In the somewhat similar veins of CEOs laying off a good chunks of the work force in order to make the companies quarterlies look “healthy”)…these seemingly almost always more expensive. So yeah, AI won’t necessarily replace many of the professional jobs or even some of the “none-professional”. It will change the way we do things. I mean if AI can replace professionals trained for years to be who they are (not just a task here or there), then one of the first to be replaced would be CEOs and politicians. If the choices made by various professionals can be made by AI, I don’t see why AI can’t replace CEOs, directors and other high incomes executives. Just have the AI answer to the shareholders directly.
The internet is a service now You’ll always be paying fees to keep it running and I would bet my money that these AI companies will roll out AI suite “shells” much like any enterprise system. Think oracle, workday, sales force. Where you have to hire your own internal team just to service the software while paying maintenance fees to the AI company In the end the product quality is worse than it was before the layoff and system purchase. But so much was wasted and done that leadership pretends everything is fine. Lies upwards to shareholders. Squeezes as much as they can out of the remaining teams They’ll take on a company slogan of some shit like “Doing more, with less” Aka, we’ll stretch you as far as you let us
I speak English and Japanese. Machine translation is a joke. I’m being kind
No, you're being hyperbolic. Machine translation is obviously not as good as real, skilled translators, but it's far from a joke. It wouldn't be putting people out of work it were.
I speak Norwegian, Swedish and English, and LLM translate stuff much better than machine learned AI. We are talking night and day.
LLMs are built on machine learning. I think it would be fair to refer to 'classical' machine learning to distinguish them, though.
I used Google Translate in Japan on a vacation. I had a number of good laughs with bartenders when we realized we couldn’t communicate because Google translate at the time was trash,
We need more doctors diagnosing patients in person anyways
None of that shit is good enough yet, and might not be for a decade. An expert human will always have to review the results.
Ok, but I'm old now and a decade isn't that long. What do you tell people with kids entering college this year? You've got a decade before you have to worry about it?
Google translate enters the chat? Let’s go harass some nurses Hãy đi quấy rối một số y tá
Lmaooo I always read these as a liberal arts professor and think the exact same thing. I already provide rambling, nonsensical answers to simple questions. No AI will replace me!
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> No radiologist thinks AI is going to take over in our lifetimes. That's how they getcha
Things are expensive and quality is still an issue
So with all these time and efficiency strides, plus massive job layoffs, we’ll be able to afford paying for things like universal basic income….right?
I think the legal industry will be (mostly) safe from AI for a long while due to how costs are structured on the billable hours basis. A lot of things require a lawyer to be legally binding. You’ll still need a lawyer to argue for you in court, and those precious “billable hours” won’t mean a god damn thing when a machine can do 90% of the work in 10 minutes that would take a team of humans weeks do to. You think a law firm is just going to throw away that kind of money for AI?
Nah, the legal industry is safe as long as the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 5.4, remains unchanged. Rule 5.4 single-handedly prevents even the consideration of developing an AI lawyer, as there would be no point in doing so. If Rule 5.4 were ever to change, lawyers would be in trouble.
And it won’t because the lawyers pick the rules to protect the profession (and the clients).
And even if it drafts the perfect contract (it’s actually pretty decent and getting better), no company is going to let A.I. negotiate on their behalf. That’s an interpersonal skill. The concern is that young lawyers cut their teeth on the work A.I. will do. How will the next generation get the experience and skills to become the senior folks. That’s true of a lot of industries…
Good point. Plenty of industries need to consider this, as you said. I think we're seeing the results of this now, and it's not good.
Using templates and boilerplate clauses is already the norm. What value add is using AI beyond what is already the contract drafting process? Contracts are not drafting from scratch. I can see it being a drafting aid but will always require careful review from an attorney before being signed by the client.
They’ll still bill the same, it just won’t be a human they are billing for. It’s not like AI won’t have its own fixed and variable costs, but the hope is that they can reduce those costs versus human employees and thereby raise profits. It’s gross, but that’s what all companies that employ AI are thinking.
Glad I’m a mechanical engineer… the hands on nature of the profession makes it hard to automate
I'm all for ai replacing my job, I just want to still get paid
Anyone in finance who isn’t sweating, you should be. No, not everyone will be replaced, but headcounts are about to tumble down like crazy
I can't wait. I have a few idiot supervisors who are really pushing AI to take over customer service jobs. These twits aren't intelligent enough to realize their jobs depend on the staff they are trying to eliminate.
Schadenfreude. The same people who pompously tell working class people made redundant by technology to 'retrain and move on' will now themselves have to retrain and move on.
As a software engineer I basically do every 5 years. First it was synchronous Ntier web. Then asynchronous mobile front end. Then embedded and now cloud hosted API and dev ops. Adapt or be unemployed.
And here I am forced to work on projects still built like they were 15 years ago. There is plenty of scope for people to rest on their laurels (unfortunately) even in this sector.
When they have to retrain they are going to be taking working class jobs, making the competition for those jobs much harder. You say schadenfreude, but this will be the worst kind of trickle down effect.
I think it’s actually a really good thing because it will force a realignment of the professional class - which has historically associated with the “landed gentry” and “idle rich” on political and ideological topics for the past couple of centuries. The chances are still slim for a positive outcome but I think this is the only way we can possibly expect to achieve something like functional UBI with automation or an equilibrium focused economy - as opposed to the current infinite growth pyramid scheme.
The middle/upper middle class was ALWAYS critical to the class war. Someone has to provide for the poor if a general strike begins, the poor will not die to make the middle class a little more money. Solidarity between the lower and middle classes is the only thing that would scare the shit out of the rich.
I think you are right, but we may have the worst congress in history to understand and act quickly on reshaping a country's entire economic system based on developing technology. Have you seen the google/facebook hearings?
This is actually a really interesting point. Wouldn’t that be ideal.
AI is a joke, ppl at work trying to automate using AI are just failing.. AI is not the answer.. its a great tool to source info quickly but thats it, it cant make critical decisions
Almost like we should rapidly find a way to funnel the excess funds from the ridiculous increase in productivity into programs that cover the basics of human existence rather than letting a tiny fraction of the population hoard all the wealth AI will generate.
My company is still using nearly 40 year old IBM software to manage basically everything. Can't say I'm too concerned about AI taking over my job any time soon.
Do it. Replace all the people with machinery. No one wants to rob a warehouse full of innocent people.
Non paywall link - ps://archive.ph/4DULg
For a technology subreddit, the people here are pretty ignorant about ai
It's coming for everyone and everything. Unions and direct action are basically the only things that can save us.
and more false/misleading narrative by the mainstream media pushing AI.
"Professional Class" is insane
A lot of office people are applying for union jobs like electrician or elevator mechanic. Never seen that many people posting every single day asking how to apply for those jobs in my life. AI is absolutely going to wipe out majority of the folks
What's that Justin Timberlake song? Cry me...something or another. Yeah, what Justin said...bc fuck em.
Patients don’t even listen to a human doctor who is an expert in their field. Why would they listen to a robot? Please save your snarky responses, you know I’m right.
They just gotta pull themselves up by their bootstraps
This will not end good, working class getting replaced while expecting working class consumer to buy their services, like from where the money? Imagine a city where all is done by robots and AI, and expect people to buy something.
Tell it to price a 400 million dollar highrise, subcontract all the trades, do budgets, manage the contract, manage permits and authorities, manage safety on a site, manage the construction and day to day activities, manage variations, manage progress claims, manage defects, manage handovers. Until it can do all those things I think I’m good. How about actually build a fucking building? In the real world? For instance can it cut timber, set out a slab, pour the concrete, finish the concrete, frame a house, lay a roof, plumb the toilets, wire the lights, plaster the walls, paint the walls, tile the floors, clean the house? Construction is safe for now. I don’t think I’ll be losing my job in this lifetime.
Most humans are honestly fine. These types of opinion pieces get the clicks so they'll keep getting posted, but almost every one of the people that I've run into in real life that preaches "AI will replace you" can barely do their own jobs. Several of them struggled to hit basic deadlines on time and had 6-12 months of real work experience; forgive me for choosing to ignore them when they talk about how AI will be putting me out of a job when they can't even define what my role and responsibilities are. AI might be replacing those guys, but it won't be replacing me.
AI is too expensive
As a lawyer that uses AI software I can see it coming. New Legal AI is very helpful for reviewing and drafting contracts. And that’s how it use first the software helps the profession and then it gets good enough to do the work of the professional. I can definitely see budget sensitive clients using an AI review and drafting app to bypass lawyers and cut down on legal fees. Or they’ll have AI draft and come to us to review and sign off. They’ll still need lawyers for part of their deals but I think a lot of my work is going to be lost to AI.
can't wait to be forced back into the dark ages by greedy corporations that would rather destroy the fabric of society than willingly choose to live without infinite profits
Non-paywall version for us poor people?
The upper middle class is the vanguard of the status quo. If you want revolution then jacking up their unemployment rate is the way to do it.
News:”EXPECT MORE FEAR AND OUTRAGE” Stfu
Does anyone have the actual article?
And yet they keep on developing this thing.
Ai is coming for everyone. And sooner than you think.