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I'm not worried about AI job loss

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Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#51

Post by ianbutler »

pfisch wrote: post #35
ianbutler wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just skimmed this and the so called zeitgeist here is fear. People are scared, it's material concern and he effectively stoked it. I work on this technology for my job and while I'm very bullish pieces like that are as you said slopish and as I'll say breathless because there are so many practical challenges here to deal with standing between what is being said there and where we are now. Capability is not evenly d…

Are you ever concerned about the consequences of what you are making? No one really knows how this will play out and the odds of this leading to disaster are significant. I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

Of course, I think about this at least once a week maybe more often. I think that the technology overall will be a great net benefit to humanity or I wouldn't touch it.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#52

Post by rockbruno »

malyk wrote: post #33
gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

Can you give an example to help us understand? I look at my ticket tracker and I see basically 100% of it that can be done by AI. Some with assistance because business logic is more complex/not well factored than it should be, but most of the work that is done AI is perfectly capable of doing with a well defined prompt.

I think the "well defined prompt" is precisely what the person you responded to is alluring to. They are saying they don't get worried because AI doesn't get the job done without someone behind it that knows exactly what to prompt.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#53

Post by Kiro »

kerblang wrote: post #15
simonw wrote: post #4

I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further. And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403 It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.

Let me get something straight: That essay was completely fake, right? He/It was lying about everything, and it was some sort of... what? Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading? Have we now transitioned to a point where we gaslight everyone for the hell of it just because we can, and call it, what, thought-provoking?

What was fake? I don't see anything controversial or factually wrong. I question the prediction but that's his opinion.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#54

Post by scottmf »

kerblang wrote: post #15
simonw wrote: post #4

I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further. And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403 It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.

Let me get something straight: That essay was completely fake, right? He/It was lying about everything, and it was some sort of... what? Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading? Have we now transitioned to a point where we gaslight everyone for the hell of it just because we can, and call it, what, thought-provoking?

The guy is a fraud https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-open-source-ai-leader-reflect...

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#55

Post by betenoire »

bobthepanda wrote: post #43
qgin wrote: post #40

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

Also, you don’t need AI to replace your job, you need someone higher up in leadership who thinks AI could replace your job. It might all wash out eventually, but eventually could be a long time with respect to anybody’s personal finances.

Right, it doesn't help pay the bills to be right in the long run if you are discarded in the present.

There exists some fact about the true value of AI, and then there is the capitalist reaction to new things. I'm more wary of a lemming effect by leaders than I am of AI itself.

Which is pretty much true of everything I guess. It's the short sighted and greedy humans that screw us over, not the tech itself.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#56

Post by e_i_pi_2 »

gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

A lot of this can be provided or built up by better documentation in the codebase, or functional requirements that can also be created, reviewed, and then used for additional context. In our current codebase it's definitely an issue to get an AI "onboarded", but I've seen a lot less hand-holding needed in projects where you have the AI building from the beginning and leaving notes for itself to read later

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#57

Post by password54321 »

qgin wrote: post #40

You don't need AI to replace whole jobs 1:1 to have massive displacement. If AI can do 80% of your tasks but fails miserably on the remaining 20%, that doesn't mean your job is safe. It means that 80% of the people in your department can be fired and the remaining 20% handle the parts the AI can't do yet.

We are already in low-hire low-fire job market where while there aren't massive layoffs to spike up unemployment there also aren't as many vacancies.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#58

Post by Morromist »

password54321 wrote: post #13
ddtaylor wrote: post #9

Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away. Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none…

>the most unskilled labor People are worried about white-collar not blue-collar jobs being replaced. Robotics is obviously a whole different field from AI.

Yeah, although in the "Something big is happening" Shumer did say at the end "Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They're not quite there yet. But "not quite there yet" in AI terms has a way of becoming "here" faster than anyone expects."

Being the hype-man that he is I assume he meant humanoid robots - I think he's being silly here, and the sentence made me roll my eyes.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#59

Post by mattlondon »

ddtaylor wrote: post #9

Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away. Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none…

Jobs that require physical effort will be fine for the reasons you state

Any job that is predominantly done on a computer though is at risk IMO. AI might not completely take over everything, but I think we'll see way fewer humans managing/orchestrating larger and larger fleets of agents.

Instead of say 20 people doing some function, you'll have 3 or 4 prompting away to manage the agents to get the same amount of work done as 20 people did before.

So the people flipping the burgers and serving the customers will be safe, but the accountants and marketing folks won't be.

Re: I'm not worried about AI job loss

#60

Post by rockbruno »

gordonhart wrote: post #23

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a…

While true, my personal fear is that the higher-ups will overlook this fact and just assume that AI can do everything because of some cherry-pick simple examples, leading to one of those situations where a bunch of people get fired for no reason and then re-hired again after some time.
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