I find it amusing how you can promise the world then people will just accept a compromise; "well, that's too far, but maybe it will replace juniors", even when that's also an extraordinary claim.
"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
181–190 of 285 posts
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But if the AI inserts things that constantly cost the company $400k per previous head in a lawsuit when private information is leaked, that equation flips.
This kind of thing won't happen much in our future Technopoly. The regulators are captured by the regulated, and all that will happen when a mistake is made is a shuffling of the cards.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until you have to hire one :)
True true. But I want to try to stay at the "solopreuership" level for as long as I can pull it off. I would prefer not to have too much influence over other peoples lives.
Same here. I'm currently doing the soloist route as a consultant. Going well but I am reaching a point where I'm starting to need help.
Even if you do end up having the best kind of problem and have to scale your business, there are other ways to organize work besides the same ol' tired hierarchy.
Enspiral is one real-life example I can think of. They're a entrepreneurial collective in New Zealand that has figured out its own way of organizing collaboration in a way without bosses/execs. Seems to be working fine for them. (Other types of worker cooperatives / collectives too, they're just a great example.)
I'd rather dare to try to make something perhaps more difficult at first but that allows me to avoid recreating the types of working conditions that pushed me to leave the rat race.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#184Not 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…
This is a perfect example of how AI can be a powerful partner in development when you already know what you’re trying to solve.
Feels like the real sweet spot right now is: humans define the goal and validate the work, AI just helps fill in the middle.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#185We’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?
I think the comparisons to lamp lighters or whatever don't quite capture why this is so much worse. The training for those jobs was relatively low. You don't need a decade of school to become a lamp lighter. 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…
You honestly think it's gonna take more then a few years until everything else to follow?
Seriously, once something is able to do 90% of a white collar workers job, general ai has gotten far enough for robotics to take over/decimate the other industries within the decade.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#186I grew up in the 80s and we were basically taught that at any moment we could see a mushroom cloud and get a minute to say goodbye to everything. As horrible as that was, I think it taught us to deal with uncertainty in a way that maybe other generations didn't get. We learned to accept that we don't always have control over what's going to happen. And in that acceptance, there is a Zen peace.
The truth is, we don't know how AI will evolve. Maybe it will replace all jobs in 10 years. Or maybe never. Or maybe the world will change bit by bit over the next 50 years until it is utterly unrecognizable. Anyone who tells you that they know for sure is selling you something.
If forced to guess, I would say AI is like electricity or the microprocessor: it will change everything, but it will take decades.
Once you accept that things are going to change, it frees you to focus on what's important. Focus on what you can control: your skills, your effort, and your relationships (business and personal).
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#187Not 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…
And eventually they learn the lesson that many companies learned in the early 00s with offshoring. You get what you pay for
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#188It's also a great example of why tech executives shouldn't be trusted, at all. "My thing will break our entire economy. I'm still gonna build it, though." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
You can't constrain an idea whose time has come. China will continue developing AI regardless of whether we will. We have to do it just to stay in the race.
It's the same thing with the atomic bomb. There wasn't really a choice not to do it. All the theoretical physicists at the time knew that it was possible to develop the thing. If the United States hadn't done it, someone else would have. Perhaps a few years or a decade later, but it would have happened somewhere.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They go bankrupt, get acquired, or just hope that no one notices their security mistakes. Admitting mistakes and correcting them directly is not a common thing for CEOs to do.
I guess that's what makes it scary. Good point. thanks.
Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution to doctors arguing with insurance isn't "have an AI do it" it's universal health care so doctors don't need to worry about insurance in the slightest I worked on software for electronic medical record note taking and I'm not sure how an LLM can help a doctor speed that up tbh. All of the stats need to be typed into the computer regardless. The LLM can't really speed that up?
I have no expertise and am prepared to be quite wrong, but I wonder if llm's would be good at listening to a session, and/or a doctor dictating, and putting the right stats in the right place, and the dictated case history into a note. I think llm's are alright at speech recognition and that sort of unstructured to structured text manipulation. At least, in my corner of the customer success world I've seen some uses…
Medical records are incredibly highly regulated so this is probably a really risky thing to try and build tbh
Actually any medical data being processed by AI is probably going to be under a ton of scrutiny
Medicine will likely be one of the last fields we start to see widespread usage of AI for this reason, tbh