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How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

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41–50 of 144 posts

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#41
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks

When did this happen? I do exact searches on Google almost every day and it seems to honor the quotation marks just fine for me.

At least 2022, if not earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30130535

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#42
post #39
post #5

FWIW, these studies are too early. Large orgs have very sensitive data privacy considerations and they're only right now going through the evaluation cycles. Case in point, this past week, I learned Deloitte only recently gave the approval in picking Gemini as their AI platform. Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can imagine is going to take a while. To say "AI is failing to deliver" because only 4% efficiency i…

> Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can If rollout at Deloitte has not yet begun... How on earth did this clusterfuck [0] happen? > Deloitte’s member firm in Australia will pay the government a partial refund for a $290,000 report that contained alleged AI-generated errors, including references to non-existent academic research papers and a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment. [0] https://fortune.com…

Because even if an organisation hasn't rolled out generative AI tools and policies centrally yet, individuals might just use their personal plans anyway (potentially in violation with their contract)? I believe that's called "shadow AI".

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#43
post #5

FWIW, these studies are too early. Large orgs have very sensitive data privacy considerations and they're only right now going through the evaluation cycles. Case in point, this past week, I learned Deloitte only recently gave the approval in picking Gemini as their AI platform. Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can imagine is going to take a while. To say "AI is failing to deliver" because only 4% efficiency i…

OpenAI is buying up like half of the RAM production in the world, presumably on the basis of how great the productivity boost is, so from that perspective this doesn't seem any more premature than the OpenAI scaling plan. And the OpenAI scaling plan is like all the growth in the US economy...

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#44
post #42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can If rollout at Deloitte has not yet begun... How on earth did this clusterfuck [0] happen? > Deloitte’s member firm in Australia will pay the government a partial refund for a $290,000 report that contained alleged AI-generated errors, including references to non-existent academic research papers and a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment. [0] https://fortune.com…

Because even if an organisation hasn't rolled out generative AI tools and policies centrally yet, individuals might just use their personal plans anyway (potentially in violation with their contract)? I believe that's called "shadow AI".

Correct. Where I work we are only "allowed" to use AI since December 2025.

But obviously people were copy/pasting content to ChatGPT and Claude long before that.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#45

Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.

Apropos, I once had a boss who said he was running a headcount reduction pilot and anyone who had the time and availability to help him should email him saying how much time they had to spare. I cannot deny this had a satisfying elegance.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#46

Its depressing when people are hearing managers are openly asking all employees to pitch in ideals for AI in order to reduce employee headcount. For those hearing this at work, better prepare an exit plan.

Suggest replacing managers with AI

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#47
Of note, "AI adoption" here means using "technologies that intelligently automate tasks and provide insights that augment human decision making, like machine learning, robotic process automation, natural language processing (NLP), algorithms, neural networks" and not just LLMs.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#48
What stands out for me is that the productivity gains for small and medium-sized enterprises are actually negative. But in Germany, for example, these companies are the backbone of the entire economy. That means it would be interesting to know how the average was calculated, what method was used, what weighting was applied, etc.

All in all, it's an interesting study, but it leaves out a lot, such as long-term effects, new dependencies, loss of skills, employee motivation, and much more.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#49
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The turning point was around when google stopped honoring Boolean ops and quotation marks

The killer app for AI might just be unenshittifying search for a couple of years. Then SEO will catch up and we'll have spam again, but now we'll be paying by the token for it. Probably right around the time hallucination drops off enough to have made this viable. I kind of want to become Amish sometimes.

AI automates spam generation so more than likely all hope is lost for the human driven web.

Re: How AI is affecting productivity and jobs in Europe

#50
post #36
post #5

FWIW, these studies are too early. Large orgs have very sensitive data privacy considerations and they're only right now going through the evaluation cycles. Case in point, this past week, I learned Deloitte only recently gave the approval in picking Gemini as their AI platform. Rollout hasn't even begun yet which you can imagine is going to take a while. To say "AI is failing to deliver" because only 4% efficiency i…

Yeah. We are only just beginning to get the most out of the internet, and the WWW was invented almost 40 years ago - other parts of it even earlier. Adoption takes time, not to speak of the fact that the technology itself is still developing quickly and might see more and more use cases when it gets better.

> We are only just beginning to get the most out of the internet

"The Internet" is completely dead. Both as an idea and as a practical implementation.

No, Google/Meta/Netflix is not the "world wide web", they're a new iteration of AOL and CompuServe.

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