Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hard part is preventing theft, not adding numbers.
Is the theft really happening at the checkout? And if so, why can't we detect it via camera + AI?
You detect someone leaving your store with a 4€ item. What then?
AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
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Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cashiers should not, and will not prevent theft. They're not paid nearly enough to get in danger, and it is not their job. I'm sure you can find videos of thefts in San Francisco if you need a visual demonstration. No cashier is going to jump in front of someone to stop a theft.
That's not the type of theft they were talking about. Rather, self scanners purposely not scanning items to get them for free, etc
I had a roommate in college who used to stuff containers of beef into produce bags full of kale, and weigh that on the self-service scanner.
Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's usually a security person or two in the store, looking over the self checkouts. I agree that job prevents a lot of people from becoming opportunistic thiefs, but I'm making a distinction between cashiers and security. Today the store needs both.
Pretty sure if a "security person" worked so well, Walmart wouldn't be severely reducing self checkouts at their stores to Walmart Plus members only.
That might be regional, then. I wouldn't say $COUTNRY is exactly a high-trust society, but it's not quite that bad for us over here.
Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's my point. AI doesn't need to be general to be useful. LLMs might replace software engineers without ever being "general intelligence".
Sorry for not making my point clear. I'm arguing that the category of the problem matters a lot. Chess is, compared to self-driving cars and (in my opinion) programming, very limited in its rules, the fixed board size and the lack of "fog of war".
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" ~ Upton Sinclair
Your stance was the widely held stance not just on hacker news but also by the leading proponents of ai when chatgpt was first launched. A lot of people thought the hallucination aspect is something that simply can't be overcome. That LLMs were nothing but glorified stochastic parrots.
Well, things have changed quite dramatically lately. AI could plateau. But the pace at which it is improving is pretty scary.
Regardless of real "intelligence" or not.. the current reality is that AI can already do quite a lot of traditional software work. This wasn't even remotely true if if you were to go 6 months back.
Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
#95This study feels pretty weak. Software as a occupation is collapsing, but it's not due to AI. Articles and "studies" like this are just a smoke screen to keep your eye off the ball.
Why is it collapsing?
Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always seen it as "Actually Indians", but yeah. That's a lot of what is destroying the US tech job market. It happened to blue collar work in the 90s and early 2000s, now it's our turn.
Nah. Offshoring has been a thing since I started working in 2003. There are always cycles. When offshore projects fail, work comes back.
The difference now is many companies have offices offshore with their own management. This isn’t the old offshore consulting to save a few bucks now. This is company employees who just cost a lot less. Once AI becomes more mature this will accelerate rapidly. Companies are going to do whatever they can to reduce labor costs. Always have.
Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
#97Sensationalist, alarmist, b.s. article.
It emphasizes "AI adoption linked to 13% decline," which implies causation. The study itself only claims "evidence consistent with the hypothesis."
The article also largely highlights job loss for young workers, while only briefly mentioning cases where AI complements workers.
The study's preliminary status -- it is not peer reviewed -- is noted but only once and at end. If the article was more balanced it would have noted this at the beginning.
Articles on the same subject by the World Economic Forum, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs are more balance and less alarmist.
Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
#98Brutal that software engineering went from one of the least automatable jobs to a job that is universally agreed to be "most exposed to automation". Was good while it lasted though.
I'm not sure it's that our job is the most automatable, but that the interface is the easiest to adapt to our workflow.
I have a feeling language models will be good at virtually every "sit at a desk" job in a virtually identical capacity, it's just the act of plugging an AI into these roles is non-obvious.
Like every business was impacted by the Internet equally, the early applications were just an artifact of what was an easy business decision.. e.g. it was easier to start a dotcom than to migrate a traditional corporate process.
What we will see here with AI is not the immediate replacement of jobs, but the disruption of markets with offerings that human labor simply can't out-compete.
Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
#99The accounting note is not true in the traditional sense. The field in the US is just getting offshored to India/PH/Eastern Europe for better or for worse. There is even a big push to lower the educational requirements to attain licensure in the US (Big 4 partners want more bodies and are destroying the pipeline for US students). Audit quality will continue to suffer and public filers will issue bunk financials if th…
Do you have any evidence of this because the rationale seems like a coping strategy or conspiracy theory how it's being suppositioned.
Do you have any actual evidence that supports the headline? The article does not. It simply mentions 13% decline in relative employment and then blames AI with no actual evidence. Given what I know about the current state of AI and off-shoring, I think off-shoring is a million times more likely to be the culprit than AI.
Re: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, 95% of the AI hype is to apply pressure on the labor market and provide cover for offshoring/downsizing.
Where is the evidence for this? Who is "applying pressure on the labour market"?
Every executive publicly saying obviously* false things like X job will be done by AI in 18 months is putting downward pressure on the labor market. The pressure is essentially peer pressure among executives: are we stupid for continuing to hire engineers instead of handing our engineering budget to Anthropic?
* - Someone should maintain a walkback list to track these. I believe recent additions are Amodei of Anthropic and the CEOs of AWS and Salesforce. (Benioff of Salesforce, in February: "We're not going to hire any new engineers this year." Their careers page shows a pivot from that position.)