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How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

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Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it depressing? Personally, unless the alternative is literally starving, I wouldn't want to do a job that a robot could do instead just so that I could be kept busy. That sounds like an insult to human dignity tbh.

You know what is an insult? Supermarket on my street putting on display sloppy ads with ramen bowl that has 3 different thickness chopsticks and cartoon characters with scrambled faces. Now that is an insult, because there was a human being doing that job, and I am sure there was a great "productivity boost" related to that change. I am a heavy AI user myself, and sure as hell I am not putting my foot in that place a…

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Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#102
post #100

x

> fintec startup in Berlin, > This was mostly due to second line pushing back because of data protection, data privacy and all other regulatory requirement and bureaucratic paperwork Fintec startup. Fintech . Handling people's money. Handling a lot of extremely sensitive data. Complaining that they have to deal with some "bullshit bureacracy about the things like privacy and data regulations or something". Really? Re…

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Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#103
post #89
post #37

> The EU trails the US not only in the absolute number of AI-related patents but also in AI specialisation – the share of AI patents relative to total patents. E.U. patent law takes a very different attitude towards software patents than the U.S. Even if that wasn't the case: “Specialisation” means that no innovation unrelated to AI gets mind share, investment, patent applications. And that's somehow a good thing? No…

Makes me wonder how AI will influence the work of patent officers. Perhaps it will make patent trolling a bit harder because it is easier to look up existing work and to check if an idea is obvious?

> Perhaps it will make patent trolling a bit harder because it is easier to look up existing work and to check if an idea is obvious?

Haha, funny :)

No, it'll be like the rest of the industries that use more AI, they'll spend the same amount of effort (as little as possible) and won't validate anything, and provide worse service, not better. AIslop is everywhere, and seemingly unavoidable for companies to use more and more to cut more corners.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#105
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You trust these stochastic text/slot machines for scheduling and follow-ups? Human intention is important for both of these. triage and reminders I can see, but if you send me an llm generated follow up, I'm just going to assume you don't care.

> if you send me an llm generated follow up, I'm just going to assume you don't care. Ironically you just replied to an automated message on a forum and didn't realise :) (hint: click on the user, go to their comment history, you'll see the pattern)

:eyes:

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#106
post #97

x

Big companies are surprisingly nimble when it comes to AI. They typically white label Azure LLM offerings or use Github Copilot Enterprise and sign everyone up wholesale. Some with competent IT dept wrote their own router and offer multiple models from multiple vendors and present it as " chat".

Not in EU. There is a sacred process that has to be followed that can take months even to flip a switch.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#108
post #2

I wonder if web searches used to be pretty productive, then declined as sponsored results and SEO degraded things. Nowadays an ai assist with a web search usually eliminates the search altogether and gives you a clear answer right away. for example, "how much does a ford f-150 cost" will give you something ballpark in a second, compared to annoying "research" to find the answer shrouded in corporate obfuscation.

I used to be able to google a question like that and get an accurate answer within the top 3 results nearly every time about 20 years ago. Then it got worse and worse and became pretty much completely useless about 10 years ago. Now AI will give me a confident answer that is outright wrong 20% of the time or kind of right but not really 30% of the time. So now I ask something using an AI chatbot and carefully word it…

Web scraping for LLMs has almost completely ruined the search experience. In the past I could search for simple questions, and quickly get an answer without even having to click through to the links.

This was horrible for web traffic, but the utility level was off the charts. It was possible to get accurate results in milliseconds. It was faster than using an LLM.

Now sites put almost no info in the search result headers, to get people to click through. I think this will work on some users, but most will start using LLMs as search by default.

Search engines have gotten so bad that I almost feel forced to try running SearXNG or some other search engine locally. Its a pain to set up, but degooglefication is always worth it.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#109
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how capitalism works. It doesn't matter if your job is useful but if you don't do anything, you don't get money. More people without jobs will be a heavy burden on social security systems, so in the end it's literally about starving.

Assuming large-scale automation[1]: workers have in aggregate automated themselves. It takes labor to automate. And yet those former workers are now a “burden”? We’re assuming automation, so was the making of the food stuff, the transportation of the food stuff, the automation of the infrastructure maintenance... was that done or not? Where is the burden being felt? You’re gonna call the people that built everything…

More jobless are a burden in a capitalism based social security system. Has nothing to do if those build something useful or not. Caputalism doesn't care.

In the end the upper 0.1% get the profit and those who still have jobs have to finance the social security systems. More jobless and less working means the jobless become a burden and in the long run the system will fail.

So you either need to tax automation or the rich. Guess if that will happen.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#110
post #25
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You trust these stochastic text/slot machines for scheduling and follow-ups? Human intention is important for both of these. triage and reminders I can see, but if you send me an llm generated follow up, I'm just going to assume you don't care.

Yes. Other humans are generally accepting of mistakes below some frequency threshold, and frontier models are very robust in my experience

Have fun annoying a ton of people, and also, getting prompt injected on a weekly basis and leaking who knows what from your inbox.
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