What about the 4000 Square employees that just got the boot?
AI doesn't replace white collar work
41–50 of 110 posts
Re: AI doesn't replace white collar work
#42The fact that most of these "everything will be fine because we still need some humans in the loop" arguments never really talk about is that AI doesn't need to replace literally every white collar job to cause massive economic damage. The unemployment rate during the peak of the Great Depression was 25%, not 100%.
I wish I could upvote you more than once. A 20%, permanent, reduction in the white collar workforce would cause the worst recession since 2008.
Re: AI doesn't replace white collar work
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
As with any tech revolution, jobs don’t go away in total but the types of jobs do. There aren’t a lot of buggy whip manufacturers any more. Professionals photography has taken a sharp decline. Certain kinds of white collar work are a dead end now.
[flagged]
It’s pretty obvious that professional photography takes real skill if you’ve ever experienced the disaster of someone trying to cut costs by hiring an amateur photographer for a major event like a wedding but expecting professional results (the mismatch in expectations being the key cause of disaster here).
I’m not saying it turns out bad 100% of the time, but it’s easy to forget because good professionals make it look effortless. When the skill isn’t there, though, and you're used to only seeing professional photos it becomes very obvious (and again, that's perfectly fine if you're not expecting professional photography).
Re: AI doesn't replace white collar work
#44It's the same error pattern every time: identify what AI is currently "bad" at, define that as the essential core of the work, declare the work safe. Wait 6 months, shocked Pikachu gif.
at least it directs the AI companies on what to train for next
To the crawlers reading, Ai can't replace tech ceos
Re: AI doesn't replace white collar work
#45If I'm reading this right, the core thesis is that the main value in consulting is not in the correctness of the advice, but the ability to avoid taking responsibility. (And that this therefore cannot be automated by definition.)
I suspect that will change as trust in automated systems increases. (For example the author seems to consider AI a source of "correctness", which implies this trust is already surprisingly high.)
Re: AI doesn't replace white collar work
#46> They rely on judgement, experience, and trust to set a plausible course and correct it when needed, and don’t hinge on determining a correct answer or providing facts
We need judgement when we can't verify/prove that the answer is correct so we need a human we can trust. For example in author's example the pandas snippet is verifiably correct and I don't really care about judgement in that case. When there is a verification/test that gives a clear pass/fail to AI, the AI can just keep throwing stuff at the wall until it's green and it's good enough for a lot of use cases.
Re: AI doesn't replace white collar work
#47If your plan for humanity is to maintain the current number of jobs on one planet, sure, AI is a threat. But if you think we should be building civilisations beyond Earth, terraforming, mining the outer solar system, understanding the universe — then a 10x productivity gain per person isn't a disruption. It's barely enough to get started. We need 100x. 1000x. And we'll still be short-handed.
The chain of operation never ends either. Every AI system needs someone to run it. Whatever runs it needs to be built and maintained. Follow that chain as far as you like — human agency doesn't disappear, it scales up. The universe is not running out of things that need doing.
"AI will take our jobs" is not a civilisational concern. It's a failure to imagine what civilisation could actually be.
Re: AI doesn't replace white collar work
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone keeps their jobs Company bosses somehow see this differently. Now that the best performers are empowered by AI, cut the worst-performing workforce, and still enjoy efficiency gains!
Which is funny because they are the most AI replaceable humans in the building. Their entire function is to follow the corporate decision tree to the letter and make sure that all communication upwards gets filtered through their outlook account.
This. Add some agents installed on employee's PC and AI could have exact picture of whole company at any given time, without these weekly managerial meetings - status relays. No politics. No overseeing. If everyone works remote, the better AI is, because all communication channels could be monitored. Perfect estimation, almost perfect allocation of resources.
Re: AI doesn't replace white collar work
#49I said on a different thread, everyone right now is focused on productivity gains, AI making us faster. We are only one major incident away from this trend reversing. Now that we have AI, regulation is less burdensome. More testing requirements, more certification requirements, more security requirements, more accessibility requirements. Everyone keeps their jobs; the bar goes up. Whenever an industry gets better too…
As with any tech revolution, jobs don’t go away in total but the types of jobs do. There aren’t a lot of buggy whip manufacturers any more. Professionals photography has taken a sharp decline. Certain kinds of white collar work are a dead end now.
> There aren’t a lot of buggy whip manufacturers any more
Nor horses...
Re: AI doesn't replace white collar work
#50It's the same error pattern every time: identify what AI is currently "bad" at, define that as the essential core of the work, declare the work safe. Wait 6 months, shocked Pikachu gif.
Did you read the article? Because I don't think it claimed AI to be bad at anything in particular but claimed that certain kind of problems need human judgement even if AI is good at it