"AI will be disruptive. Jobs will look different, companies will have to adapt, and all of us – from shift workers to CEOs – will have to learn how to work in new ways," she said in a blog post. We don't have to do anything. People always listen to this propaganda from the wealthy and think the latest gadgets are inevitable. We can go on a general strike until copyright is restored and the "AI" companies go bankrupt.…
> We can go on a general strike until copyright is restored and the "AI" companies go bankrupt. Journalists can write sharper and sharper articles. You can refuse to use "AI". This sounds like naive wishful thinking. Add “theoretically” after every “can” for real life.
It has worked against nuclear energy in Germany. The major protests were in the 1980s against an all powerful government and an all powerful industry lobby.
Personally, I'm for nuclear energy but this is one of many examples that a population can get its will.
Either I am mistaken that Walmart was offering store associate type jobs or the author doesn't realize Walmart has software engineering teams. Quite a few non-tech companies have very hip, modern, and high-power tech teams behind them. https://github.com/walmartlabs Walmart has been doing this level of work since at least 2013/2014 to my knowledge so it's not something new. Getting a job on the Walmart engineering te…
It’s got a metaphorical name - a bait - for your clicks.
"AI will be disruptive. Jobs will look different, companies will have to adapt, and all of us – from shift workers to CEOs – will have to learn how to work in new ways," she said in a blog post. We don't have to do anything. People always listen to this propaganda from the wealthy and think the latest gadgets are inevitable. We can go on a general strike until copyright is restored and the "AI" companies go bankrupt.…
This won't happen. Even if western countries will outlaw LLMs (they won't, people care about unemployed software developers just as much as most software developers cared about unemployed translators), China won't. And why would we even do that? Because software developers like their cushy job and don't want to do blue-collar jobs?
>Because software developers like their cushy job and don't want to do blue-collar jobs?
In the US of A, most blue-collar jobs:
1. Pay less
2. Offer poor, or zero benefits
3. Are hard on your body
Not to mention that if suddenly millions of people flood the markets for blue-collar work, then wages will drop further in those fields.
Why would you expect someone to be comfortable with that future?
How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.
It's rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and large companies, generally, aren't even attempting that). Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materia…
> the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization
AI alone can't do that, even if you make the weakest link in the chain stronger, there are probably more weak links. In a complex system the speed is controlled by the weakest, most inefficient link in the chain. To make an organization more efficient they need to do much more than use AI.
Yeah but what we are all whining here about (apart from folks working on llms and/or holding bigger stocks of such, a non-trivial and a vocal group here) has hit many other jobs already in the past. Very often thanks to our own work. It is funny, in worst way possible of course, that even our chairs are not as stable as we thought they are. Even automation can be somehow automated away. Remember all those posts stati…
There’s two kinds of programmers: 0. The people who got into it just as a job 1. The people who thought they could do it as art And #1 is getting thrashed and thrown out the window by the advent of AI coding tools, and the revelation companies didn’t give a darn about their art. Same with AI art tools and real artists. It even begs the question if programming should ever have been viewed as an art form. On that note,…
> building unnecessarily deadly weapons at Northrop Grumman
Northrop Grumman only builds what Congress asks of them, which is usually boring shit like toilet seats and SLEPs. You can argue that they design unnecessarily deadly weapons, but if they've built it then it is precisely as deadly as required by law. Every time Northrop grows a conscience, BAE wins a contract.
It's rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and large companies, generally, aren't even attempting that). Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materia…
When my father joined an attorney's office as recently as the 80s, there was a whole team of people that worked with: Of course, there were the attorneys who actually argued the cases, but also legal assistants who helped create various briefs, secretaries who took dictation (with a typewriter, of course) to write those documents, receptionists who managed the attorney's schedules and handled memos and mail, filing c…
Head on the nail. I try to explain this to everyone who thinks we are heading to global collapse. AI isn't good enough to replace a person. It enables a person to replace a team. That will take awhile since, as cool and great AI is now, it is not yet as powerful and integrated yet for teams to be totally replaced. Only as fast as people naturally leave, so instead of hiring someone to replace that job, one guy inherits his teammates job and his own, but has more tools to do both. It sounds like a person is being replaced, but I've never worked anywhere where people weren't complaining about being understaffed. The budget likely wasn't cut, so now they can hire someone to do a different job. A job an idea-fairy wanted someone to do but they lacked the bandwidth. The old position is gone, but new ones have opened. It is the natural was of the world. We innovate, parts of our lives get easier, our responsibility scope increases, our life is full again. For a person, that translates to never feeling rich if they allow their standard of living to match their income, and for a company, that translates to scope increase as well if the company is growing, shown as either more job openings or more resources for the employees (obviously the opposite for both cases if a person/company is "shrinking")
The book "Why We Fear AI" by Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer talks about this dynamic. Whether it will lead to a class awakening because previously if you were aligned with the company you were rewarded as well, but now if you align with the company you're advocating to destroy your livelihood. What rational worker would want to take part in this?
Lots? I mean most people I know aren't even willing to entertain the notion wherever it's gonna happen within our lifetime. The argument usually centers around the fact that LLMs aren't AGI, which is obviously true but also kinda missing the point
We don't need AGI to cause a massive amount of disruption. If leadership of companies want to force use these LLMs, which is what we've been experiencing the last two years, workers will be forced to use them.
It's not like there is an organic bottom up movement on driving this usage. It's always top down mandated by executives with little regard on how it impacts worker's lives.
We've also seen how these tools have made certain jobs worse, not better, like translating:
This won't happen. Even if western countries will outlaw LLMs (they won't, people care about unemployed software developers just as much as most software developers cared about unemployed translators), China won't. And why would we even do that? Because software developers like their cushy job and don't want to do blue-collar jobs?
>Because software developers like their cushy job and don't want to do blue-collar jobs? In the US of A, most blue-collar jobs: 1. Pay less 2. Offer poor, or zero benefits 3. Are hard on your body Not to mention that if suddenly millions of people flood the markets for blue-collar work, then wages will drop further in those fields. Why would you expect someone to be comfortable with that future?
I wouldn't. But most software developers didn't care whether translators liked the new jobs they had to find. So I think most non-programmers won't care whether you'll like your new job.
The book "Why We Fear AI" by Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer talks about this dynamic. Whether it will lead to a class awakening because previously if you were aligned with the company you were rewarded as well, but now if you align with the company you're advocating to destroy your livelihood. What rational worker would want to take part in this?
Software developers. Many of them are still championing LLMs. Also anybody who still contributes to open source software.
In contributing to open source software at scale I'm teaching apprentices. I expect them to adapt what I've done to their own purposes, and have seen a good amount of that out in the wild, often people who ended up doing something entirely different like building hardware that also contains software.
I don't think LLMs will be able to pick up on what's done by an evolving and growing codebase with previous projects also included. More likely it will draw from older stuff and combine it with other people's more normal stuff and end up with an incoherent mess that won't compile. Not all work is 'come up with the correct answer to the problem, and then everybody uses it forever'.