Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#311

Post by didibus » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:20 PM UTC

diatone wrote: post #252

bushbaba wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally disagree. You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs. AI will just usher the next industrial revolution of the modern era.

Worth pointing out, we live better lives not just from the technological breakthroughs, but also from the social movements that have brought us things like the 40-hour work week and keeping children from labour for a reasonable time. Which were direct responses to the Industrial Revolution.

This is an incredibly relevant point.

Take North Korea, they have access the the know how of all the same advancements and yet because of social conditions, it's population is not thriving.

This is true of many countries honestly. The impact of social justice, equality, and all that are huge. And can't be understated.

In fact, we can all easily imagine an Elite ruling the world at the helm of AI powered robots, leaving the rest of us to scrape the bottom.

Social breakthroughs are going to need to keep pace with technological advancements, otherwise those same advancement can also help to bring minority holding power even more stronghold on the rest.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#312

Post by 0xDEF » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:21 PM UTC

usednet wrote: post #174

jarjoura wrote: post #134

If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work. If you're really dreaming for AI that can wipe-out entire classes of decent middle-class jobs in one big swing, don't forge…

The logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.

>socialized economy

Here in Denmark a significant fraction of the population (students, elderly, long-term unemployed) are already on some kind of pseudo basic income.

Why not just do basic income in this future "total AI automation" scenario? Why do so many people on the Internet think only radical socialist revolutions can solve all our problems?

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#313

Post by marcosdumay » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:21 PM UTC

bushbaba wrote: post #234

usednet wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logical conclusion that people don’t like to hear is that there will need to be a fundamental restructuring of the economy. AI will, in the not so distant future, eliminate the vast majority of jobs. The choice will then be between a socialized economy or barbarism.

Totally disagree. You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs. AI will just usher the next industrial revolution of the modern era.

> You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution.

Yeah, and that's when people make it clear they don't know history.

There were many points during the Industrial Revolution when if you said the same thing, you would be absolutely correct.

A few of those times, the problem was "solved" by violence and deep restructure of the economy; other times it was "solved" by violence and letting lots and lots of people die. By the 20th century people realized that if you restructure the economy earlier, you can avoid that violence step, but some also realized they can just spread propaganda saying problems never happen, and stop any reorganization.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#314

Post by dfox » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:22 PM UTC

function_seven wrote: post #117

codetrotter wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> produce that needs to be weighed In Spain and France (and probably other countries too) they’ve been doing something that’s pretty neat in regards to the fruits and vegetables since long before self-checkout even became a thing, but which helps a lot now with self-checkout as well. When you go to the fruits and vegetables section of the store, a lot of these stores have a scale there with a printer. So when you pic…

> You kind of have to experience this in person to see why that works well, but it does :) Nope. Your description of it is enough. This sounds like a great solution to the bulk goods issue (produce, nuts, beans, etc.) I love self checkout at Home Depot. It’s just a wireless barcode scanner. No scales or annoying “unknown item in the bagging area” admonishments. Just scan scan scan scan done. You can leave all the ite…

I remember that in 1991 there was an article (IIRC paid PR by Siemens) how the checkout by RFID is the next big thing that will happen the following year. 20 years later it started to really pop up in the stores in the form of EPC Gen2 RFID for customer-facing applications. The obvious common usecase are libraries, as there is defacto standard extension for exactly that application (the tags can also work as EAS tags that can be enabled/disabled over the EPC radio interface), another huge application are clothing and sporting goods retailers. From extensive playing with the technology I had concluded that the reliability leaves a many things to be wished for, but apparently in these applications either the amount of distinct items is small enough or missing few of them do not really matter (if you scan a whole pallet of EPC tagged items you are bound to miss some of them and thus it is only good as an approximation, if you scan a shopping cart it is probably more reliable. Reason for that is on one hand the physics of the radio interface that can be shadowed by somewhat surprising kinds of objects, like people, and the other is that there is a ridiculously large, but still finite amount of tags that can be de-conflicted and read in a given time).

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#315

Post by medion » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:23 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #180

digdugdirk wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mean quality of life is irrelevant if the mode quality of life is only a tenth of that.

The mode quality of life is also sky high compared to 100 years ago. So is the median quality of life. Mode and median were raised even faster than the average. Humanity managed to uplift a huge fraction of people out of extreme poverty. In 1820s around 70-80% people lived in extreme poverty In 1920s it was around 60-70% In 2020s it's around 10% source: e.g. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?…

While quality of life has improved percentage wise for a small percentage of the earth's inhabitants, it is also a completely unsustainable way of living - it's a quality of life built on fossil fuels and debt. It's all a complete facade - if fossil fuels and access to effectively free money were wiped out tomorrow, quality of life would revert almost overnight... The fragility of it all is just extraordinary.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#316

Post by CharlieDigital » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:25 PM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #310

jarjoura wrote: post #134

If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work. If you're really dreaming for AI that can wipe-out entire classes of decent middle-class jobs in one big swing, don't forge…

One tractor can do the work of tens of people easily, and in the last ~150-200 years, we've gone from a vast majority of people producing food to a tiny minority, while the rest can be social media managers and feng-shui specialist. One excell spreadsheet can do the work of a 100+ paper-based accountants, and that's even before a database and automation. We could've stopped at tractors, lived the same lifestyle as be…

Key difference: productivity gains in agriculture made food not only more plentiful, but also cheaper.

We can say the same for the steam engine and transportation. It made it cheaper to move goods and people.

Question is whether advancements in AI translate to making some fundamental goods or services cheaper and more accessible.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#317

Post by vic-traill » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:25 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #165

almost_usual wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as the Earth burns away and we choke on the smoke we rejoice as we have our AI entertainment and we can go quietly into the night.

Lol. Nobody is choking on smoke. The earth is fine. Humans may make life slightly more difficult for themselves in the next century or two due to global warming, but those difficulties will be more than offset by advances in technology, even under pessimistic assumptions.

This link is the parents speaking, nonetheless another data point [0}

I'm respiratorily at risk to particulate matter in the air (partially my own fault for cigarette smoking for many years, partially happenstance via a house fire/smoke inhalation), and the air quality has been a bastard in ON Canada this summer. It certainly has affected my outdoor activities.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/nine-year-ol...

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#318

Post by emporas » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:27 PM UTC

data-ottawa wrote: post #273

emporas wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New jobs are possible however. Given the state of A.I. even today, which is not that advanced, we need one terabyte per day or per week for training purposes. Someone has to produce that data and combine human made data with machine generated data. Synthetic data like that will be fed into ML algorithms. That simple process, in my calculations, will be the biggest industry on the planet by 2030. The data has to grow…

Does that mean jobs or filling a captcha to get a food stamp? I don’t see how that provides any employment.

As soon as A.I. is used for serious applications like self driving cars, then data have to be audited by humans. Human judgment is irreplaceable. These machines are statistical algorithms anyway, so even with the best data possible, they will err occasionally. So we combine two or three of them and average the result given some score, for even better accuracy.

But data is the foundation of everything in their function. The transformation of data -> information is always done by humans. Given better and better statistical algorithms, that gap will become smaller and smaller, but automation will never be able to produce information by itself.

Other serious applications include medicine and doctors. How about building houses out of epoxy and graphene walls, weighing 10 kg every house and stacking 10000 houses on top of one another? I.e. skyscrapers the size of Everest? Don't we need some serious data and A.I. architecture for the construction to stand tall?

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#319

Post by jfengel » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:28 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #313

bushbaba wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally disagree. You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yet here we are living better lives from the technological breakthroughs. AI will just usher the next industrial revolution of the modern era.

> You could have said the same of Industrial Revolution. Yeah, and that's when people make it clear they don't know history. There were many points during the Industrial Revolution when if you said the same thing, you would be absolutely correct. A few of those times, the problem was "solved" by violence and deep restructure of the economy; other times it was "solved" by violence and letting lots and lots of people d…

It was also tied to a number of other events that massively depleted the population, including the Black Death. Not violent but very deadly, leaving Europe open to social restructuring.

Re: Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI

#320

Post by splatzone » Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 10:28 PM UTC

kec wrote: post #200

avery17 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've never had a gpt powered customer support though. It will be fine tuned on all of their recorded customer interactions ever. I could see this being way better than typical customer support where you have minimally trained, low wage employees who barely know how to use a computer just reading a script.

The problem with customer support broadly isn’t having the agent understand you, it’s often about escalation until you get to an agent with the authority to handle your particular exceptional circumstance. There is no godly way any company will ever allow a chatbot, however capable, to go off script.

No, but it could defer to a human if it’s unable to assist. If a chatbot can cover 80% of common support tasks, that vastly reduces the number of support staff but those who remain will be necessarily more skilled and have more authority