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AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

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Re: AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

#191

Post by testing22321 »

cedws wrote: post #118
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #11

I am probably different to most people, but I always have trouble understanding why people want to have jobs so much. The obvious and direct answer immediately of course is "to be able to pay the bills". But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income. Then the concern is of course, that the owners will not share the…

UBI is never coming man. Rich countries don’t even properly provide healthcare or take care of pensioners, let alone handing everyone a paycheck every month for doing nothing.

> Rich countries don’t even properly provide healthcare

ONE rich country doesn’t. The rest are great.

Re: AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

#192

Post by [deleted] »

lucaspiller wrote: post #130
pornel wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such dismissive quip is unkind. The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine. Instead of satisfaction of solving challenging problems with your own skill and creativity, you babysit a text extruder and slog through mistakes in its generated output. Arguably this may make software cheaper to make and accessible to non-programmers, but for people who liked their job it's like being demoted from a…

This also perfectly describes the career change from software engineer to engineering manager. Instead of solving things yourself, you need to learn how to describe them in a way others can solve them. Otherwise you will just be fighting the instinct to just do it yourself.

[deleted]

Re: AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

#193

Post by ericfr11 »

derektank wrote: post #45
moron4hire wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the US did not spend more than ever Western country combined on "Defense", and stuck to just, IDK, 75% of every Western country combined, we could do it today. At a bare minimum, we could eliminate homelessness and starvation, today. But we live in a society that believes cronie capitalism for capitalism's sake is more important than people's lives, because of the off chance some of them might be "lazy". UBI is ne…

You could completely eliminate US defense spending and you would only be able provide every individual with roughly $3000 annually. Also, your comparison to other countries is confounded by the fact that Western countries (i.e. Europe) maintain a low level of defense spending because they have an explicit guarantee of defense under the North Atlantic treaty and a promise of being covered by the US’s nuclear umbrella.…

If the US stopped getting into futile wars, the world would be very different

Re: AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

#194

Post by ericfr11 »

_heimdall wrote: post #80
SiempreViernes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, you realise what you are actually opposed to is sedentary civilisation itself? Specialisation is old dude.

How so? If your argument or assumption is that civilization is directly linked to dependence and individual helplessness that seems like a terrible long term strategy. I don't agree that civilization demands dependence, by the way. We can choose to buy food from someone else while knowing how we would do it ourselves, ideally with some experience. We can buy our food from someone local, reducing our dependence by shr…

I would venture that you are able to live this life because others are not. What if everyone was growing their own food, and fixing plumbing: who would be a doctor, a snowboard maker, making phones/internet that we rely on to plan/communicate/learn. Its almost impossible to do everything by yourself, unless we go back to the life of our hunting ancestors

Re: AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

#196

Post by ericfr11 »

simonw wrote: post #18
wiseowise wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How utterly pointless. What would make it less pointless in your opinion?

If someone had written it. It's well curated slop, but it's still slop. Consider this bit: > A profession does not need to be eliminated to be mourned. It is enough for its center to fall out, leaving the people who built careers in that center with credentials that no longer map to a stable role. When AI threatens the work, it threatens the self, which is why the response looks less like ordinary job-loss fear and m…

As a human, I relate to a few of the article's points. You might not have felt it yet. It will come sooner than you might think

Re: AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

#197

Post by ericfr11 »

simonw wrote: post #131
bluefirebrand wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to make a personal attack here, but you're one of the names I most associate with being AI positive on this site. In fact that's pretty much the only reason I recognize your name at all. Maybe I've misread your previous posts and the stuff from your blogs that have been posted here, but that's the vibe I've had from you. That said, slop is going to be a massive, natural, and utterly predictable consequen…

I'm actually credited on the Wikipedia page for "slop" for helping spread the term - I wrote about it right as it was emerging https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/8/slop/ and did some press interviews to push it around then too. I'm up to 40 posts on my blog tagged "slop" now: https://simonwillison.net/tags/slop/ I consider covering AI misuse as part of my "beat" that I write about - there are so many bad ways to appl…

We should also be cautious to not characterize an article we don't like as slop

Re: AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

#198

Post by nyxtom »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #189
denkmoon wrote: post #109

I’m close to despondent about how my job has changed. If the next 15 years of my life is just waiting on LLMs, I don’t think I can do it.

It isn't ideal, but I am starting to write code (with AI tab completions) while waiting for LLMs. The tab completions are sometimes overeager and I wish I had more control over them, but at least I am not staring at "Thinking" all day. Having said that sometimes you have to monitor AI because, e.g., AGY CLI, often goes off the rails completely, including writing code outside of the "sandbox."

This right here ^ x 1000s. I can’t get into flow state with AI.

Re: AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

#199

Post by sieabahlpark »

ornornor wrote: post #149
watwut wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truck driver to nurse is special kind of issue, because nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity. But they will take jobs that are not that much feminine. And nursing also require a lot more study then people assume, 40 years old trucker will have hard time spending that much time in school even if it was his lifelong dream.

> nursing is feminine coded occupation and trucking attracts men who want to prove own masculinity In your head maybe?

[dead]

Re: AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers

#200

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

tdeck wrote: post #176
denkmoon wrote: post #109

I’m close to despondent about how my job has changed. If the next 15 years of my life is just waiting on LLMs, I don’t think I can do it.

It's not just waiting on them, you're going to be reviewing an endless flood of their agentic slop, cajoling or bullying them into sticking with a problem or looking harder for information, all in between glancing at AI summaries of your colleagues' AI generated Slack messages and approving the AI generated auto-replies.

It's like having a whole team of developers to help me!! Except they're all brain damaged and completely incapable of learning from experience and never improve on their brain damaged ways. On the plus side, I can let my frustration out by calling them fucking morons without getting HR mad at me
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