On par with the recent news of Air Canada hiring a hallucinating chatbot for customer support. Fun times ahead.
The Layoff
51–60 of 175 posts
Re: The Layoff
#52Interestingly, the story fails to load on Chrome 121, actually removing DOM nodes with the story...
Worked fine in Firefox though.
Re: The Layoff
#53That was interesting. I'm reminded of the sci-fi story called "Manna" that I read a while ago, which explored a bit of a dystopian future, where advancements in technology eventually made a lot of people unemployed: https://marshallbrain.com/manna Actually, the Wiki page has more info on it, for those that don't have the time to read it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) The story is from 2003, but hearing…
Do you have any sources for layoffs "due to AI/LLM advances" other than layoffs-in-one-sector-to-replace-with-AI-experts which I can find plenty of, but which are not really due to efficiency improvements?
Re: The Layoff
#54The author comments about the story here:
Re: The Layoff
#55That was interesting. I'm reminded of the sci-fi story called "Manna" that I read a while ago, which explored a bit of a dystopian future, where advancements in technology eventually made a lot of people unemployed: https://marshallbrain.com/manna Actually, the Wiki page has more info on it, for those that don't have the time to read it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) The story is from 2003, but hearing…
The most unrealistic part of this is Australia being a utopia of universal basic income. Unfortunately we've gone the way of the USA in many ways, though at least centrelink (unemployment/dole) still exists as a minimal safety net.
> The most unrealistic part of this is Australia being a utopia of universal basic income.
To be fair, a corporation had to raise a trillion dollars of capital and build that society from scratch before anyone else even seemed interested. How it progressed from that point to "the rest of Australia signed on" is entirely hand-waved away.
Just like real life, where nobody cares about programs like this and everyone refuses to help until they're already taking off. Which may or may not ever happen.
Re: The Layoff
#56[Spoiler alert - look away now if you haven't read the story]
I'd expect the logical extension to this to wholly be using AI for the managerial aspect of bringing you into the conversation. Employers will have the right to make use of a manger's likeness for reasons they see fit, such as using a bot to layoff their direct reports. Removes the emotional liability from the manager.
Re: The Layoff
#57That was interesting. I'm reminded of the sci-fi story called "Manna" that I read a while ago, which explored a bit of a dystopian future, where advancements in technology eventually made a lot of people unemployed: https://marshallbrain.com/manna Actually, the Wiki page has more info on it, for those that don't have the time to read it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel) The story is from 2003, but hearing…
Manna(one of my favorite writings on AI), is incredibly optimistic and sugar-coated. All the "basic income" parts and Australia would have to be realistically fought tooth-and-nail with people viewing welfare recipients as "lazy" and "entitled"..
People can only view welfare recipients as lazy and entitled from the pedestal of a decent job. 80% of the white collar middle class is going to have to learn to become AI "composers" or learn trades, and I'm guessing trades will be vastly more accessible for the majority of the displaced. The mass influx of tradespeople is going to depress earnings due to competition (which already weren't great unless you were a master tradesman with employees), so we're going to end up with 75% of the population below average income and people struggling to afford rent and food. When that happens I don't expect the pushback against some form of social service or basic income to be so great.
Re: The Layoff
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the issue is rather that the manager tries to sugarcoat the fact that someone has died by using very abstract language.
Might have being going for “passed away” Managers are people too and will have their own emotions they are dealing with.
At least they weren't announced as 'useless', so there is that.
Re: The Layoff
#59This was a really fun read. I’ve only read a couple short stories ever that so narrowly focus on the technology of today, but I think it’s great. Such an effective and entertaining way of discussing what’s in the news cycle.
Re: The Layoff
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone at my work created a secret bot that scrapes the outlook contacts list and diffs it from the previous day, each day. This way we get daily updates whenever a new person is onboarded or offboarded. As employees we now have more clarity about the state of layoffs and hiring decisions that most of the management team does. I suggest doing the same within your org if you can.
We did the same informally with Slack, but it's a great tip :) There's even some automations around leadership calendar meeting titles+invitees that I might or not have heard about. If leadership wants to play games people can play games back.
If the politics internally are nutty enough you can do alot with this sort of skullduggery… It only works if it’s secret or the folks are oblivious.
I worked at a place where this sort of thing was done. It became practice to setup fake meetings or conduct real meetings with vague titles as a misdirection.
The other scenario is if you let consultants inside the firewall. Big 5 guys always gather intel on org charts and goings on for more business. These guys aren’t very clever and are easy to manipulate with this sort of thing.