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"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

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141–150 of 285 posts

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#141
post #23

What if it just makes most jobs worse, or replaces good jobs with more, worse jobs? "Meat robot constantly monitored and directed by AI overlords" is technically a job.

I can't make up my mind if I'd prefer an AI boss or not. Human bosses can be quite terrible and not having to deal with an emotional being seems kinda nice.

your ai boss isn't going to bend rules for you, and isn't going to advocate for you. You can see how an ai boss would go by looking to amazon warehouses and drivers, or call centers, and how those folks are managed. It's already by computer, they already uses machines learning to detect when people are deviating from expected rails, and you can decide for yourself if that looks appealing

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#142

My personal thoughts on this are - A good lawyer + AI will likely win in court against a non lawyer with AI who would likely win in court against just an AI - A good software engineer + AI will ship features faster / safer vs a non engineer with AI, who will beat just AI - A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI As long as a human has a marginal boost to AI…

You (and I) prefer to keep the pilot s there, but still, there's a push to need only one person and not two in that plane/cockpit. I have little to no doubt we'll have to relearn some hard lessons after we've AI'd up pilots.

I know airlines are a cutthroat business, but wouldn't the copilot add no more than $1 per passenger for the average flight?

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#143

My personal thoughts on this are - A good lawyer + AI will likely win in court against a non lawyer with AI who would likely win in court against just an AI - A good software engineer + AI will ship features faster / safer vs a non engineer with AI, who will beat just AI - A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI As long as a human has a marginal boost to AI…

> A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI Ok, what about an Average doctor with an AI? Or how about a Bad doctor with an AI? AI assisted medcare will be good if it catches some amount of misdiagnoses AI will be terrible if it winds up reinforcing misdiagnoses My suspicion is that AI will act as a force multiplier to some extent, more than a safety net Yes,…

Not sure about what will happen with software engineers, lawyers, or doctors, but I do know how computer assistance worked decades ago when it took over retail clerks, the net effect was to de-skill and damage the job as a career, by bringing everyone up to the same baseline level management lost interest in building skills above that baseline level.

So until the 1970's shopping clerk was a medium-skill and prestige job. Each clerk had to know the prices for all the items in your store because of the danger of price-tag switching(1). So clerks who knew all the prices were faster at checking out then clerks who had to look up the prices in their book, and reducing customer friction is hugely valuable for stores. So during this era store clerk is a reasonable career, you could have a middle-class lifestyle from working retail, there are people who went from clerk to CEO, and even those who weren't ambitious could just find a stable path to support their family.

Then the UPC code, laser scanner, and product/price database came along in the 1970's. The UPC code is printed in a more permanent way so switching tags is not as big a threat (2). Changing prices is just a database update, rather than printing new tags for every item and having the clerks memorize the new price. And there is a natural language description of every item that the register can display, so you don't have to keep the clerk around to be able to tell the difference between the expensive dress and the cheap dress- it will say the brand and description. This vastly improved the performance of a new clerk, but also decreased the value of the more experienced clerk. The result was a great hallowing-out of the retail sector employment, the so-called "McJob" of the 1990's.

But the result was things like Circuit City (in its death throes) firing all of their experienced retail employees (3) because the management didn't think that experience was worth paying for. This is actually the same sort of process that Marx had noted about factory jobs in the 19th century- he called it the alienation of labor, this is capital investment replacing skilled labor, to the benefit of the owners of the investment- but since retail jobs largely code as female no one really paid much attention to it. It never became a subject of national conversation.

1: This also created a limit on store size: you couldn't have something like a modern supercenter (e.g. Costco, Walmart, Target) because a single clerk couldn't know the prices for such a wide assortment of goods. In department stores in the pre-computer era every section had its own checkout area, you would buy the pots in the housewares section and then go to the women's clothes area and buy that separately, and they would use store credit to make the transaction as friction-less as possible.

2: Because in the old days a person with a price tag gun would come along and put the price directly onto each item when a price changed, so you'd have each orange with a "10p" sticker on it, and now it's a code entry and only the database entry needs to change, the UPC can be much more permanently printed.

3: https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2994476 all employees paid above a certain amount were laid off, which pretty much meant they were the ones who had stuck around for a while and actually knew the business well and were good at their jobs.

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#144

My personal thoughts on this are - A good lawyer + AI will likely win in court against a non lawyer with AI who would likely win in court against just an AI - A good software engineer + AI will ship features faster / safer vs a non engineer with AI, who will beat just AI - A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI As long as a human has a marginal boost to AI…

I generally agree with your thoughts.

I am also concerned about couple of important things: human skill erosion (a lot of new devs who use AI might not bother to learn the basics that can make a difference in production/performance, security, etc.), and human laziness (and thus, gradually growing the habit to trust/rely on AI's output entirely).

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#145

The analogies to previous technologies always seem misguided to me. Maybe it allows us to make some predictions about the next few years, but not more than that. We do not know when/where we will hit the limits on AI capabilities. I think this is completely unlike any previous technology. AI is intentionally being developed to be able to make decisions in any domain humans work in. This is unlike any previous technol…

Let me give my two cents. I remember when people used to think ai models are all the rage and one day we are gonna get super intelligence. I am not sure If we can call the current sota models that. Maybe, maybe not. But a little disappointing. Now everyones saying that ai agents are the hype and the productivity gains are in that, the Darwin Gödel paper which was recently released for example. On the same day (yester…

LLMs have only really been around a handful of years and what they are capable of is shocking. Maybe LLMs hit a wall and plateau. Maybe it's a few years before there's another breakthrough that results in another step-change in capabilities. Maybe not. We can focus on the hype and the fraud and the marketing and all the nonsense, but it's missing the forest for the trees.

We genuinely have seen a shocking increase in reasoning abilities over the course of only a decade from things that aren't human. There may be bumps in the road, but we have very little idea how long this trajectory of capability increases will continue. I don't see any reason to think humans are near the ceiling of what is possible. We are in uncharted territory.

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#146
post #77
post #55

We’ve seen tech completely eliminate jobs like phone switch operators and lamp lighters. And it’s decimated other professions like manual agriculture, assembly line jobs, etc. It seems like people are debating whether the impact of AI on computer-based jobs will be elimination or decimation. But for the majority of people, what’s the difference?

>And it’s decimated other professions like manual agriculture, assembly line jobs, etc. When Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line, production went from hundreds of cars to thousands. It had a profoundly positive impact on the secondary market, leading to an overall increase in job creation. I've yet to see any "AI is gonna take your job" articles that even attempt to consider the impact on the secondary mar…

What do you think the secondary market for knowledge work is?

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#147
post #128
post #108

Not an expert here, just speaking from experience as a working dev. I don’t think AI is going to replace my job as a software developers anytime soon, but it’s definitely changing how we work (and in many cases, already has). Personally, I use AI a lot. It’s great for boilerplate, getting unstuck, or even offering alternative solutions I wouldn’t have thought of. But where it still struggles sometimes is with the why…

I would agree with you, but the people making the decision to fire or keep you don’t care about quality, nor do they care about understanding AI or its limitations. If AI mostly does kinda the right thing 70% of the time but saves the company $80k a year, that’s a no-brainer. We’re being Pollyanna-ish to think that anyone cares about the things we care about, that you mention in your post. If firing you saves $1.50 a…

Fair enough, but what happens when those same companies start realizing it’s not just about reduced quality, but also security risks and costly errors? At some point, the savings get wiped out by the consequences.

Do they go back to hiring human expertise then?

I totally agree though, the business mindset of saving a buck often outweighs everything else. I’m actually going through something similar right now with a client being swayed by a so-called “AI expert” just to cut costs. But that’s a whole other story.

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These basic CRUD apps are solved with no-code tools today aren't they? Why do we need AI for that 'the everything machine' is pure fantasy and hype

No they aren't solved by No-Code tools. No-Code tools have become "Don't write code, just write endless configuration. And then when it doesn't do what you want, write code anyways" Except now your code starting point is an absolute mess under the hood so it's a complete crapshoot to build out anything meaningful

So true. No-code tools splatter your code, your business logic, across a thousand windows and forms.

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#149
post #108

Not an expert here, just speaking from experience as a working dev. I don’t think AI is going to replace my job as a software developers anytime soon, but it’s definitely changing how we work (and in many cases, already has). Personally, I use AI a lot. It’s great for boilerplate, getting unstuck, or even offering alternative solutions I wouldn’t have thought of. But where it still struggles sometimes is with the why…

> Even if I prompt with security as the top priority

LLMs do really poorly with general statements like that, so not sure it's unexpected. If you put "Make sure to make it production worthy", you'll get as many different answers as there are programmers, because not even us human programmers agree what that really means.

Same for "Make sure security is the top priority", most programmers would understand that differently. If you instead spell out exactly what behavior you expect from something like that (so "Make sure there are no XSS's", "Make sure users can't bypass authentication" and so on), you'll get a much higher probability it'll manage to follow those.

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#150
post #108

Not an expert here, just speaking from experience as a working dev. I don’t think AI is going to replace my job as a software developers anytime soon, but it’s definitely changing how we work (and in many cases, already has). Personally, I use AI a lot. It’s great for boilerplate, getting unstuck, or even offering alternative solutions I wouldn’t have thought of. But where it still struggles sometimes is with the why…

I feel like I ran into a example use case yesterday that really illustrates how I work with AI as a dev. It's a simple db entity, with a field called "parent" that is the id of another entity of the same type. Theoretically there can be any number of parents (though practically w the data we're modeling we don't ever expect more than 3 levels). Classic case for recursion, right? So I whip up a quick method that goes something like

public void getEntityWithParents(List entityList, String id) { DBEntity entity = dao.getById(id); entityList.add(entity); if (entity.getParent() != null) { getEntityWithParents(entityList, entity.getId()); } }

Because I'm working from a make it work first then make it efficient perspective I realize that I'm making a lot of DB calls there. So I pop open gemini, copy/paste that algorithm and ask it "How can I replace this method with a single call to the database, in postgresql?" and it gives me

WITH RECURSIVE parent_chain AS (SELECT id, name, parent, 0 AS depth FROM table WHERE id = :id UNION ALL SELECT i.id, i.name, i.parent, pc.depth + 1 FROM fam.dx_concept i INNER JOIN parent_chain pc ON i.id = pc.parent) SELECT id, name, parent FROM parent_chain ORDER BY depth;

That might have been a day or two of research, instead it was 5 minutes to come up with a theory and an hour or so writing tests. Gemini saved the day there. But it wasn't able to determine what needed done (minimizing DB calls), only how to do it, and it wasn't able to verify correctness. That's where we'll fit in in all of this: figuring out what to do and then making sure we actually did it.

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