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What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
121–130 of 412 posts
Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the point having read much the same from Tesla (and fans) regarding self driving cars that still haven't done half the things that Musk said was just around the corner pending regulators a decade ago and repeatedly since then. And myself I keep making comparisons between AI and the progress in 90s video games where every minor improvement got called "photo realistic" and then forgotten with the next game engine…
I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan it really got ”good enough” recently with version 14. The tipping point was suddenly, much more often than not, it can drive end to end from start (my garage) to finish (parked at destination) with no interventions. I can text and watch videos on my phone and as long as I glance up once a minute, it doesn’t complain. Handling highway driving with lane changes was…
> I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan
Half-and-half. I'm not denying that self driving cars (and LLMs) are improving, I'm comparing it against the standards set by the biggest proponents. But yes, I have heard basically the same thing you just wrote for the previous several major releases of FSD.
Where we agree is that, while you are a fan, you do explicitly give as an example of something you think it will never do, something very close to what Musk has promised:
"Ultimately you'll be able to summon your car anywhere … your car can get to you. I think that within two years, you'll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever your phone is … and it will just automatically charge itself along the entire journey."
(That said, I think Tesla's FSD will never get there, not that it's impossible. The way Musk is behaving, there's going to be a financial scheme named after him in whatever passes for a textbook in 20 years, and it won't be the positive kind of example).
Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I trust you when you say that. > What the heck would I be "stealth-marketing" here? Cynically, "thought-leaderishness". I've been spending a lot of my time these days outlining why we can't "just make an agent for it" to CEOs who read blogs like yours. They can't distinguish a production system from a quick HTML tool from a guy whose job doesn't depend on it working.
One of the goals of my blog is to help CEOs who read it not make stupid decisions. I aim to be a counter to the breathless LinkedIn hype they are exposed to everywhere else.
Looking foward to the generated images of a CEO riding a toilet
Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
#124Organizational inertia is a real thing. There are still fortune 500 companies with internal bans on AI. A lot of the answer to "how much impact has AI had" comes down to "how much have we even attempted?" In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet.
> In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week. The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet. Interesting to see the impact in the long term when battle tested software gets replaced with vibecoded variants by non-programmers. Does it increase data breaches or quality actually goes up?
One of the upside I can foresee is the return of single payment software. No one is going to be paying subscriptions when they can LLM themselves, but paying someone else to LLM for them would let them shrug off accountability for malfunctions
Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool! Which ones? (Replacing overpriced garbageware with something I scraped together in 3 days is my jam. But the specifics matter a lot.)
The software which manages our instrument spec sheets, and the software which manages our field tech rounds.
Thanks for sharing this. I can well imagine that managing field tech rounds is plausible if it is limited to in-house use. I assume that is planning, documenting and scheduling of field trips with a front-end for the planning and some way to show on mobile device or laptop for the tech?
Is instrument spec sheet management focused on storage and presentation, and occasionally updating values such as service interval, calibration dates etc ? If so I also find this plausible.
Both use cases are focused in terms of use case complexity (especially if your company is focusing on your requirements only as opposed to software vendors covering variations), low in complexity in terms of involved parties, and inter-system boundary crossings.
Very interesting. The spec management is probably the higher risk use case, but I assume you have proper engineering review and a tight test strategy to control this aspect.
Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, the goalposts just keep shifting. In reality: they still don't work well, unless you're content with producing low quality work.
"unless you're content with producing low quality work." - With the right guiding hand, it is a productivity multiplier without compromising quality. As a fully autonomous developer, it is a disaster.
How are junior devs becoming qualified “guiding hands” these days? If the expert with LLM assistance is multiplied, what’s a company’s incentive to pay for a junior, and how would they train to get good in these conditions?
Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's because of the lack of feedback. Humans also can't do much without feedback. E.g. I doubt most people could write 100 lines of code that works first time without even compiling it once.
Disagree. When tool limitations meant that this was the way people had to work, many people could do this. It was much more inefficient, because it's easier to find bugs after compiling or running the code. But it is perfectly possible.
Even more extreme than that, if you were working on a large code base where compiling it took forever, or you needed to rely on a very slow CI pipeline, it became very important to git gud and write shit that worked first time in order to deliver when promised. I'd argue if you've never had one of those moments where you sunk a bunch of time into some changes and it all compiled/worked flawlessly the first time, you're missing out.
Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
#128Recently poked around the job market to see what I qualify for in this day and age. Working as a solo builder in my org I would say that I have done enough in the last 18 months to consider myself “with it”. What I found was pretty brutal. Companies asking for 4 years of agentic AI experience… pardon? Then it hit me. Oh they are all making shit up now and have no bar that anyone can hit because they are believing in…
Just in case, because a lot of people don't know this... When a company lists job requirements they aren't really requirements. Don't skip a job because it says you need X years of Y but you only have X-1. They're basically writing down a wish list. They don't expect to get it or necessarily even care that much about some of the points. Also "X years of experience" isn't really asking for literal years. It's a proxy…
yeah the lead lecturer on my data engineering masters once told us about a job posting he saw asking for 8 years of Hadoop experience, even though Hadoop had only been publicly available for 5 years at the time.
it's often HR / hiring managers throwing some numbers into a text document based on what they've heard is important for the role, not what you'll actually need for the job.
similarly, something like "has previous experience with kubernetes" doesn't usually translate to "knows absolutely everything there is to know about kubernetes". it means "you've used it at least once, ideally more, but can at least talk about when / how you used it / what problems it solved and could probably get up to speed on it fairly quickly when you join and/or in the time before you join" (kinda writing this last bit about an interesting job posting i saw that i've been talking myself down on and i really ought to be doing the opposite).
Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get the point having read much the same from Tesla (and fans) regarding self driving cars that still haven't done half the things that Musk said was just around the corner pending regulators a decade ago and repeatedly since then. And myself I keep making comparisons between AI and the progress in 90s video games where every minor improvement got called "photo realistic" and then forgotten with the next game engine…
I’m probably illustrating your point but as a FSD fan it really got ”good enough” recently with version 14. The tipping point was suddenly, much more often than not, it can drive end to end from start (my garage) to finish (parked at destination) with no interventions. I can text and watch videos on my phone and as long as I glance up once a minute, it doesn’t complain. Handling highway driving with lane changes was…
Who is responsible for any accident happening while you use your phone during FSD?
It's not FSD until the human is no longer responsible.
This half measure bullshit is a joke.
Re: What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality
#130I don't feel like reading an article that will probably be out of date in 6 months, but from what I've seen, if agents keep improving at this rate, 80% of SWEs are going to be looking for new careers in 5 years.
The problem is not necessarily job losses as such. When artisans were replaced by factory work, it took a long time for automation to actually reduce the number of workers. What happened quickly was that the asset of the artisans -their skill and experience - was replaced by an asset owned by the factory owner
-the capital equipment. That converted workers from having guaranteed work, and a degree of autonomy, to being a replaceable commodity dominated by the factory system.
This is the real threat today. The growth of the middle class was essentially the growth of jobs in which the workers have human capital in their skill and experience again. That experience is being slurped up by LLMs and other models.
The question is whether "LLM operator" is really going to be a profession which requires scarce skills and experience, or whether many companies will be operable with less well-rewarded workers. I think that those who think there's an obvious correct prediction here are overconfident.