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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#141

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #98
idkwhattocallme wrote: post #23

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock.…

To the contrary - they were providing value to the VP who benefitted from inflated headcount. That's "real value", it's just a rogue agent is misaligned with the company's goals. And AI cannot provide that kind of value. Will a VP in charge of 100 AI agents be respected as much as a VP in charge of 100 employees? At the end of the day, we're all just monkeys throwing bones in the air in front of a monolith we constru…

We really oughta work on setting up systems that don’t waste time on things like this. Might be hard, but probably would be worth the effort.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#142

Post by biophysboy »

PeterStuer wrote: post #132
michaeldoron wrote: post #78

Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and…

"Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic?" It's not CNN exlusive. Newsmedia that did not evolve towards clicks, riling up people, hatewatching and paid propaganda to the highest bidder went extinct a decade ago. This is what did evolve.

This is outdated. Most of journalism has shifted to subscription models, offering a variety of products under one roof: articles, podcasts, newsletters, games, recipes, product reviews, etc.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#143

Post by lurkshark »

abracadaniel wrote: post #86
ben_w wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game theory/Nash equilibrium/Prisoner's Dilemma, and the turkey's perspective in the problem of induction. So far, for any given automation, each actor gets to cut their own costs to their benefit — and if they do this smarter than anyone else, they win the market for a bit. Every day the turkey lives, they get a bit more evidence the farmer is an endless source of free food that only wants the best for them. It's ea…

My long term fear with AI is that by replacing entry level jobs, it breaks the path to train senior level employees. It could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat from it, but could lead to massive collapse as no one is left with any understanding of how existing systems work, or how to design replacements.

I’m actually worried we’ve gotten a kickstart on that process already. Anecdotally it seems like entry level developer jobs are harder to come by today than a decade ago. Without the free-money growth we were seeing for a long time it seems like companies are more incentivized to only hire senior developers at the loss of the greater good that comes with hiring and mentoring junior developers.

Caveat that this is anecdotal, not sure if there are numbers on this.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#144

Post by fny »

hooverd wrote: post #131
fny wrote: post #50

I think everyone is missing the bigger picture. This is not a matter of whether AI will replace humans whole sale. There are two more predominant effects: 1. You’ll need fewer humans to do the same task. In other forms of automation, this has led to a decrease in employment. 2. The supply of capable humans increases dramatically. 3. Expertise is no longer a perfect moat. I’ve seen 2. My sister nearly flunked a coding…

Can you talk about Rust without your friend computer?

Of course not! But I can definitely ship useful tools, and I can could learn to talk the talk in a tenth of the time it would otherwise have taken.

Which is my point, this is not about replacement, it's about reducing the need and increasing supply.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#145

Post by cjs_ac »

abracadaniel wrote: post #86
ben_w wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game theory/Nash equilibrium/Prisoner's Dilemma, and the turkey's perspective in the problem of induction. So far, for any given automation, each actor gets to cut their own costs to their benefit — and if they do this smarter than anyone else, they win the market for a bit. Every day the turkey lives, they get a bit more evidence the farmer is an endless source of free food that only wants the best for them. It's ea…

My long term fear with AI is that by replacing entry level jobs, it breaks the path to train senior level employees. It could take a couple of decades to really feel the heat from it, but could lead to massive collapse as no one is left with any understanding of how existing systems work, or how to design replacements.

This isn't AI-specific, though; businesses decided that it was everyone else's responsibility to train their employees over a decade ago.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#146

Post by fny »

BigJono wrote: post #120
fny wrote: post #50

I think everyone is missing the bigger picture. This is not a matter of whether AI will replace humans whole sale. There are two more predominant effects: 1. You’ll need fewer humans to do the same task. In other forms of automation, this has led to a decrease in employment. 2. The supply of capable humans increases dramatically. 3. Expertise is no longer a perfect moat. I’ve seen 2. My sister nearly flunked a coding…

> I became proficient in Rust in a week, and I picked up Svelte in a day. I’ve written a few shaders too! The code I’ve written is pristine. All those conversations about “should I learn X to be employed” are totally moot. fucking lmao

My point is you learn X and your time to learn and ship Y is dramatically reduced.

It would have taken me a month to write the GPU code I needed in Blender, and I had everything working in a week.

And none of this was "vibed": I understand exactly what each line does.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#147

Post by surgical_fire »

paulluuk wrote: post #33

Around the time when bitcoin started to get serious public attention, late 2017, I remember feeling super hyped about it and yet everyone told me that money spent on bitcoin was wasted money. I really believed that bitcoin, or at least cryptocurrency as a whole, would fundamentally change how banking and currencies would work. Now, almost 10 years later, I would say that it did not live up to my believe that it would…

Something can be useful and massively overhyped at the same time.

LLMs are good productivity tools. I've been using it for coding, and it is massively helpful, really speeds things up. There's a few asterisks there though

1) I does generate bullshit, and this is an unavoidable part of what LLMs are. The ratio of bullshit seems to come down with reasoning layers above it, but they will always be there.

2) LLMs, for obvious reasons, tend to be more useful the more mainstream languages and libraries I am working with. The more obscure it is, the less useful it gets. It may have a chilling effect on technological advancement - new improved things are less used because LLMs are bad at them due to lack of available material, the new things shrivel and die on the vine without having a chance of organic growth.

3) The economics of it are super unclear. With the massive hype there's a lot of money slushing around AI, but those models seem obscenely expensive to create and even to run. It is very unclear how things will be when the appetite of losing money at this wanes.

All that said, AI is multiple breakthroughs away of replacing humans, which does not mean they are not useful assistants. And increase in productivity can lead to lower demand for labor, which leads ro higher unemployment. Even modest unemployment rates can have grim societal effects.

The world is always ending anyway.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#148

Post by icedchai »

idkwhattocallme wrote: post #23

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock.…

I've worked at smaller companies where half the people in the meetings were just there because they had nothing else to do. Lots of "I'm a fly on the wall" and "I'll be a note taker" types. Most of them contributed nothing.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#149

Post by ElevenLathe »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #128
sevensor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think productive work is what consulting companies are selling? They're there for laundering accountability. When you bring in consultants to roll out your corporate AI strategy, and it all falls apart in a few years, you can say, "we were following best practices, nobody could have anticipated X," where X is whatever failure mode ultimately tanks the AI strategy.

Do you think that it's possible in principle to have a better or worse corporate AI strategy? I do, and because I do, it seems clear that companies paying top dollar are doing so because they expect a better one. There's no reason to pay KPMG's rates if all you need is a fall guy. Most criticisms I see of management consulting seem to come from the perspective, which I get the sense you subscribe to, that management…

I'm willing to believe that one can be better or worse at management, and that in principle somebody could coach you on how to get better.

That said, how would we measure if our KPMG engagement worked or not? There's no control group company, so any comparison will have to be statistical or vibes-based. If there is a large enough sample size this can work: I'm sure there is somebody out there that can prove management consulting works for dentist practices in mid-size US cities or whatever, though any well-connected group that discovers this information can probably make more money by just doing a rollup of them. This actually seems to be happening in many industries of this kind. Why consult on how to be a more profitable auto repair business when you can do a leveraged buyout of 30 of them, make them all more profitabl, and pocket that insight yourself? I can understand if you're an poorly-connected individual and short on capital, but the big consulting firms are made up entirely of well-connected people who rub elbows with rich people all day.

Fundamentally, there will never be enough data to prove that IBM engaging McKinsey on AI in 2025 will have made any difference in IBM's bottom line. There's only one IBM and only one 2025!

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#150

Post by idkwhattocallme »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #98
idkwhattocallme wrote: post #23

I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock.…

To the contrary - they were providing value to the VP who benefitted from inflated headcount. That's "real value", it's just a rogue agent is misaligned with the company's goals. And AI cannot provide that kind of value. Will a VP in charge of 100 AI agents be respected as much as a VP in charge of 100 employees? At the end of the day, we're all just monkeys throwing bones in the air in front of a monolith we constru…

True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their directs were like Nobles in a feudal kingdom constantly quibbling/battling for territory. There were alliances with others and full on takeouts at points. One VP described it as Game of Thrones. Not sure how this all changes when your kingdom is a bunch of AI agents that presumably anyone can operate.
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