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AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

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171–180 of 496 posts

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#171
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile Amazon actually operates by people walking to pickup and deliver most packages by hand to be boxed up. People can actually get a lot of work done in an hour to the point where many things that don’t seem like they should scale end up being trivial expenses.

> Meanwhile Amazon actually operates by people walking to pickup and deliver most packages by hand to be boxed up Given how much Amazon invests in automation that's a pretty gross mischaracterization of what they do.

They have been increasing automation, but over the lifetime of the company it’s a reasonable description for how the majority of all packages where handled.

What’s eye opening is the kiva robots only increase the items picked per worker per hour from ~100 to ~300 even though they drastically reduce the amount of walking.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#173
post #99
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point does it miss?

I would argue that the point is that AI WILL steal lots of jobs (directly or indirectly) and the directness of that theft is fairly irrelevant. :shrug:

It seems like you took the headline to mean something like "You don't need to worry about losing your job because of AI". That would make sense if you only read the first half of it. But the second half completely changes the meaning - it's saying you definitely do need to worry about losing your job because of AI (and maybe you should start taking action to avoid that fate). So I think you not only missed the point but interpreted it backwards.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#174

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

Maybe it will be true for niche creative work, but I really doubt people care if your k8s custom resource definition yaml files have the “human touch” or not

Ironically, people being confidently incorrect - people copying and pasting yaml files without taking the time to understand the boilerplate - have probably cost companies billions of dollars in resource overallocation and downtime.

The files compile, but boy is it wrong.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#175
post #8
post #2

There are two types of people: 1. People afraid AI will take their jobs 2. People using AI to take people's jobs

3. People using AI to take other people’s jobs, because they’re afraid AI will take their jobs.

I'm in this boat. I was worried about AI for a while then I realized I have to figure out how to use it or get left behind.

The problem is I am still having difficulty understanding how to use the tool effectively. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#176
If there are 100 manual jobs today and 80 AI-assisted jobs tomorrow then AI has "stolen" 20 jobs. There's really no other way to frame it. The added productivity gains are going into someone's pocket, and if you are in the labor class then that someone isn't you.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#177

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

Everyone uses AI today directly or indirectly. All search engines and possibly stackoverflow and Reddit will start supporting LLMs. Unless you never use these in your business you will be using AI.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#178

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

You’re going to develop this software in house and not allow your engineers to use AI in that process?

That’s not only unenforceable, it’s business suicide.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#179
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far (super early days, I know) the main thing I've used AI for at work is to write tests for code I'm working on. I get to do the fun bit, solving the problem space, and the AI gets to do the tedious bit (and do it faster than I would). I'm liking at least that level of AI integration.

This is the one that is most scary to me as a user of software. Have the AI write some of the code, sure. But tests have to be correct. Autogenerating a mountain of mostly-correct tests strikes me as a great way of ending up with surprising behavior that is a nightmare to untangle.

Of course I validate the tests. I get it to churn them out then go over them to make sure everything is sane and covered as expected. I'm surprised that people would assume otherwise.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#180
I am finding the combination of LLMs and strongly-typed functional programming to be incredibly potent.

By building programs out of small, single-purpose pure functions, it is much easier to review the output of the LLM, whilst also giving me the ability to grok and steer the overall direction of the code. A traditional type-checker catches many of the looks-right-but-is-subtly-wrong hallucinations too.

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