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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#51

Post by strongpigeon »

bachmeier wrote: post #12

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make…

Not that I disagree with you, but I’ve heard of such tactic being used in some orgs at both Google and Microsoft as well.

It seems like a common conclusion from a management that wants to push for AI adoption. I doubt it’s super effective, but we’ll see how it turns out.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#52

Post by thomaswoodson »

ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

New around here, but… For those interested in a deep dive, I highly recommend reading the Technological Society, by French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#53

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

fidotron wrote: post #33
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this. Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory. In practice we have no cho…

Not so long ago, I have come to a rather unpleasant realization that whether a lot of that will happen, will depend heavily on whether the ones currently trying to make technology control every facet of our lives decide to allow society get dumber first ( think Idiocracy, which AI very much could allow ) or not in which case it is anyone's guess, because people will still have some basic skills and memories of what could be.

I am hoping for the best, but life has taught me hard not to bet against humanity's worst instincts.

edit: add whether

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#54

Post by stephc_int13 »

layer8 wrote: post #43
stephc_int13 wrote: post #29

I believe that any kind of partial automation is going to make the job more soul-crushing. Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing. I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.

Efficiency gains are more important than people not having to spend their working life with soul-crushing tasks? I don’t quite follow.

The assumption is that orders of magnitude more people will benefit from the efficiency gains, like it was the case in agriculture automation or factory work automation.

In those cases, that led to a transition period, nowadays only a small fraction of the human population is working to produce food, and their job is more about planning, finance and orchestration of machine work, but many specialised jobs were lost or made miserable in the process.

IMHO any job that can be done by a machine should not be done by a human, the tricky part is going there with as little undesirable effects as possible.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#55

Post by joshribakoff »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #42
deanCommie wrote: post #19

Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable. Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other) The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency. For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the wor…

> the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg) I can’t believe I read this sentence, lol. 800k is the ability to buy a house and support a family on a single income. Do you see so many people lamenting the days when this was possible? So many memes about the lifestyle Homer Simpson could provid…

If someone has a 10m portfolio, it really is irrational to chase a higher w-2.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#56

Post by ahartmetz »

krupan wrote: post #20
ahartmetz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the technology. Different technologies redistribute power differently. LLMs are very "centralizing" indeed. It is hardly feasible to train your own LLM as a private person or even a small company - at best you can download a pre-trained one, which at least nobody can silently change or take away from you.

Very well said. Free software was a revolt against technology that you have no control over and I feel like the people that are whole heartedly embracing "AI" have completely forgotten this. They now use an incredibly expensive proprietary piece of technology that they have no control over to write a bunch of code that they cannot (even if they tried) understand and they talk like it's the most amazing thing ever. Th…

Yeah - I really like F/OSS for the freedom aspect and I intensely dislike SaaS LLMs for the same reason. I tolerate them more easily for ancillary tasks like vulnerability search or super-powered LSP-workalikes to learn about a code base. There will eventually be a lot of nuance, I hope and believe - reasonable compromises between going all in and abstaining completely. So far, I'm doing okay just occasionally dabbling in local models. I at least need to know what people are talking about.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#57

Post by alistairSH »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #42
deanCommie wrote: post #19

Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable. Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other) The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency. For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the wor…

> the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg) I can’t believe I read this sentence, lol. 800k is the ability to buy a house and support a family on a single income. Do you see so many people lamenting the days when this was possible? So many memes about the lifestyle Homer Simpson could provid…

While I mostly agree, $200k makes that possible too, if you play it right. For example, go remote, move to the countryside, let your spouse rear the kids or the dogs or whatever.

But yeah, "no difference between 200 and 800", while spelling out some MASSIVE differences is quite a statement.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#58

Post by fidotron »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #53
fidotron wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this. Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory. In practice we have no cho…

Not so long ago, I have come to a rather unpleasant realization that whether a lot of that will happen, will depend heavily on whether the ones currently trying to make technology control every facet of our lives decide to allow society get dumber first ( think Idiocracy, which AI very much could allow ) or not in which case it is anyone's guess, because people will still have some basic skills and memories of what c…

100%. Same applies to any hypothetical sentient AI that may or may not arise. The incentives to keep everyone weak and dumb are too strong.

I have a friend in a position of some influence, and am currently trying to persuade them to stop being so comfortable trusting in humanity to come to the right decisions for exactly that reason.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#59

Post by WillPostForFood »

bananaflag wrote: post #18
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Well, I love to take showers, which involve a lot of tech like running water and water heaters and soap which I can buy from the supermarket. I lived in places without any of those and I wouldn't want to do it again.

Tyranny of antibiotics and vaccines and MRI machines...

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#60

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #17
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.” We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be. Edit: these responses…

Sigh, and what guardrails are common sense? Are those the same level of common sense as those advocated for guns ( and narrowed down at every possible opportunity )? Some of us see this tech as possibly revolutionary and thanks to useful individuals calling for muzzling that tech we now have the worst of both worlds: centrally controlled, not really open ( weights are just weights -- though Meta actually deserves some credit here ), and heavily muzzled.

Clearly, powers that be learned all too well from internet rollout.

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