161–170 of 285 posts
The problem with “AI will replace all jobs” hype, is that it also comes with a flavor of “and we all will do creative work”, while in reality AI replaces all the creative work and people go back to collecting garbage or other physically demanding and mundane jobs.
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.
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Yep, that's going to be the main outcome I suspect. The bottom 50% or maybe even 80 to 90% of knowledge workers are going to have to go back to physical work. That too will eventually be automated, but I suspect things like construction work (including the many trades wrapped up therein) will be toward the end of that.
Maybe that's why the current administration is pushing so hard to bring back low end manufacturing. If you're a SWE, Accountant, Marketer, HR person, etc. put out of work by AI, now you can screw together iPhones for just over minimum wage. And if we run out of those jobs, there's always picking vegetables now that all the migrants are getting deported. It would not surprise me one bit if the Tech CEOs see things thi…
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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?
$1 per passenger is huge! For Ryanair it's 200m annually.
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Cars replaced horses, cause they were clearly better at their job. Humans' primary labor value to society at large comes from their brains, and ability to do multiple physical tasks, some featuring precise movements, with little instruction/development. The idea that computers and general purpose robots cannot possibly replace humans is no longer outrageous to me. Especially if we are talking about a few key humans c…
I think humans should have a strong incentive to never let this become reality I do not want to see the bloodbath that will follow And I do pretty strongly think that is the trajectory we're on. We cannot create utopia for 1% of the population and purgatory for the other 99% and expect people to just sit still and take it
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?
So if the white collar bloodbath is true. We have to tell a bunch of people, who have spent a significant portion of their lives training for a specific jobs and may be in debt for that education, to go do manual labor or something. The potential civil unrest from this should really concern everyone.
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>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?
There's a reason we can still spot the sterile whiff of AI written content. When you set coding aside, the evidence just hasn't shown up yet that AI agents can reliably replace anything more than the most formulaic and uninspired tasks. At least with how the tech is currently being implemented...
(There's a reason these big companies spend very very little time talking about the power of businesses using their own data to fine-tune or train their own models...)
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…
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> What if it just makes most jobs worse, or replaces good jobs with more, worse jobs? Right. Consider: 1) Senior engineer writing code vs. 2) Senior engineer prompting and code reviewing LLM agent The senior engineer is essential to the process in each case, because the LLM agent left to its own devices will produce nonfunctional crap. But think about the pleasantness of the job and the job satisfaction of the senior…
I don't think it's an exclusive choice between the two, though. I think senior engineers will end up doing both. Looking at GitHub Copilot's agent, it can work asynchronously from the user, so a senior engineer can send it off to work on multiple issues at once while still working on tasks that aren't well suited for the agent. And really, I think many senior engineers are already doing both in a lot of cases where t…
I don't mentor juniors because it makes me more productive I mentor juniors because I enjoy watching a human grow and develop and gain expertise
I am reminded of reports that Ian McKellen broke down crying on the set of one of The Hobbit movies because the joy of being an actor for him was nothing like acting on green screen sets delivering lines to a tennis ball on a stick
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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 c…
I hope that you're right, but the problem is that the regulatory bodies are captured by the players that they are supposed to regulate. Can you name a time in recent history where a company had to pay a penalty for a harmful action, either intentional or neglectful, that exceeded the profit they gained from the action?