i really liked this article, it puts into perspective how great claims require great proof, and so far all we've heard are great claims. i love ml tech but i just dont trust it to replace a human completely. sure it can augment roles but thats not the vision we're being sold.
The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
#382I don’t understand how any business leader can be excited about humans being replaced by AI. If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff? When the unemployment in the country goes up, consumer spending slows down and recession kicks in. How could you be excited for that?
They want an omnipresent, lobotomized and defeated underclass who only exists to "respond" to the ai to continue to improve it. This is basically what alexander wang from Scale AI explained at a recent talk which was frankly terrifying. Your UBI will be controlled by the government, you will have even less agency than you currently have and a hyper elite will control the thinking machines. But don't worry, the elite…
We already have that "defeated underclass" courtesy of a century of mainstream schooling (according to NYS Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto):
"The Underground History of American Education -- A conspiracy against ourselves"
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/10/john-taylor-gatto/the-cu...
"As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom you have little trouble figuring out why, in the nature of things, government schools and those private schools which imitate the government model have to make most children dumb, allowing only a few to escape the trap. The problem stems from the structure of our economy and social organization. When you start with such pyramid-shaped givens and then ask yourself what kind of schooling they would require to maintain themselves, any mystery dissipates — these things are inhuman conspiracies all right, but not conspiracies of people against people, although circumstances make them appear so. School is a conflict pitting the needs of social machinery against the needs of the human spirit. It is a war of mechanism against flesh and blood, self-maintaining social mechanisms that only require human architects to get launched. I’ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises — no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system...."
In 2010, I put together a list of alternatives here to address the rise of AI and Robotics and its effect on jobs: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
#383There's definitely a big problem with entry-level jobs being replaced by AI. Why hire an intern or a recent college-grad when they lack both the expertise and experience to do what an AI could probably do? Sure, the AI might require handholding and prompting too, but the AI is either cheaper or actually "smarter" than the young person. In many cases, it's both. I work with some people who I believe have the capacity…
imo comparing entry-level people with ai is very short sighted, I was smarter than every dumb dinosaur at my first job, I was so eager to learn and proactive and positive... i probably was very lucky too but my point is i don't believe this whole thing that a junior is worse than ai, i'd rather say the contrary
Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, but two questions: First, is AI really a better scapegoat? "Reducing headcount due to end of ZIRP" maybe doesn't sound great, but "replacing employees with AI" sounds a whole lot worse from a PR perspective (to me anyway). Second, are companies actually using AI as the scapegoat? I haven't followed it too closely, but I could imagine that layoffs don't say anything about AI at all, and it's mostly media and FU…
the one does actually sound worse because... it's actually worse. it clarifies that the companies themselves were playing games with people's livelihoods because of the potential for profit. whereas "AI" is intuitively an external force; it's much harder to assign blame to company leadership.
I'd read the first as adjusting to market demand, not playing with people's lives. If if were construed as playing with lives, that could apply to basically any investment.
Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
#385What AI is going to wipe out is white collar jobs where people sleepwalk through the working day and carelessly half ass every task. In 2025, we can get LLMs to do that for us. Unfortunately, the kind of executive who thinks AI is a legitimate replacement for actual work does not recognize the difference. I expect to see the more credulous CEOs dynamiting their companies as a result. Whether the rest of us can surviv…
I haven't worked in the US; and - have not yet worked in a company where such employees exist. Some are slower, some are fast or more efficient or productive - but they're all, everyone, under the pressure of too many tasks assigned to them, and it's always obvious that more personnel is needed but budget (supposedly) precludes it. So, what you're describing is a mythical situation for me. But - US corporations are f…
No, it's the same in the US, too. I don't know what these mythical companies are where people are saying 50% of the workforce does nothing, but I've never seen such a place. Everywhere I've ever worked had way more projects to get done than people available to do them. Everyone was working at capacity.
Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is so true. We had a (admittedly derogatory) term we used during the rise in interest rates, "zero interest rate product managers". Don't get me wrong, I think great product managers are worth their weight in gold, but I encountered so many PMs during the ZIRP era who were essentially just Jira-updaters and meeting-schedulers. The vast majority of folks I see that were in tech that are having trouble getting hir…
Off-shoring is pretty big right now but what shocks me is that when I walk around my company campus I see obscene amounts of people visibly and culturally from, mostly, India and China. The idea that literally massive amounts of this workforce couldn't possibly be filled by domestic grads is pretty hard to engage with. These are low level business and accounting analyst positions. Both sides of the aisle retreated fr…
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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
#387The real value is going to be in areas that neither machines nor humans could do previously.
Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just curious, did you put yourself in the superfluous category either time?
Ultimately (and sadly) yes. While I never habitually or intentionally attended meetings to just look busy, I did work on something I knew had a long shot of creating value for the business. I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted. I left both on my own accord seeing the writing on the wall.
> I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted.
You said you were at large companies, so this is a hard call to make. A lot of large companies work on lots of small products knowing they probably won't work, but one of them might, so it's still worth it to try. It's essentially the VC model.
Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
#389This type of hype is pretty perplexing to me. Supposing that you are trying to increase AI adoption among white-collar workers, why try to scare the shit out them in the process? Or is he moreso trying to sell to the C-suite?
He’s selling exclusively to the C-suite. Why would he care about the white collar workers? He wouldn’t be trying to put them all out of work if he cares
Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine
#390This type of hype is pretty perplexing to me. Supposing that you are trying to increase AI adoption among white-collar workers, why try to scare the shit out them in the process? Or is he moreso trying to sell to the C-suite?
Because it creates FOMO which creates sales.