401–410 of 1001 posts
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Excellent choice of words there: new standard. I'm sure we are, but it doesn't look like an improvement for most people.
Not yet at least, but there’s no stopping this kind of efficiency jump. Anyone who thinks otherwise is in denial.
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Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping peopl…
People keep tossing around this 50% figure like it's a fact, but do you really think these companies just have half their staff just not doing anything? It just seems absurd, and I honestly don't believe it. Everywhere I've ever worked, we had 3-4X more work to do than staff to do it. It was always a brutal prioritization problem, and a lot of good projects just didn't get done because they ended up below the cut lin…
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I've worked at smaller companies where half the people in the meetings were just there because they had nothing else to do. Lots of "I'm a fly on the wall" and "I'll be a note taker" types. Most of them contributed nothing.
My friend's company (he was VP of Software & IT at a non-tech company) had a habit of meetings with no particular agenda and no decisions that needed making. Just meeting because it was on the calendar, discussing any random thing someone wanted to blab about. Not how my friend ran his team but that was how the rest did. Then they had some disappointing results due to their bad decision-making elsewhere in the compan…
Huge amounts of white collar jobs have been automated since the advent of computers. If you look at the work performed by office workers in the 1960s and compared it to what people today do it'd be almost unrecognizable. They spent huge amounts of time on things that software either does automatically or makes 1,000x faster. But by and large that actually created more white collar jobs because those capabilities mean…
I don’t like this argument because 1) it doesn’t address the social consequences of rapid onset and large scale unemployment and 2) there is no law of nature that a job lost here creates a new job there. On the first point, unemployment during the Great Depression was “only” 30%. And those people were eventually able to find other jobs. Here, we are talking about permanent unemployment for even larger numbers of peop…
It'll be a slow burn, though. The projection of rapid, sustained large-scale unemployment assumes that the technology rapidly ascends to replace a large portion of the population at once. AI is not currently on a path to replacing a generalized workforce. Call center agents, maybe.
Second, simply "being better at $THING" doesn't mean a technology will be adopted, let alone quickly. If that were the case, we'd all have Dvorak keyboards and commuter rail would be ubiquitous.
Third, the mass unemployment situation requires economic conditions where not leveraging a presumably exploitable underclass of unemployed persons is somehow the most profitable choice for the captains of industry. They are exploitable because this is not a welfare state, and our economic safety net is tissue-paper thin. We can, therefore, assume their labor can be had at far less than its real worth, and thus someone will find a way to turn a profit off it. Possibly the Silicon Valley douchebags who caused the problem in the first place.
Historically, people have been pretty good at predicting the effects of new technologies on existing jobs. But quite bad at predicting the new jobs / careers / industries that are eventually created with those technologies. This is why free market economies create more wealth over time than centrally planned economies: the free market allows more people to try seemingly crazy ideas, and is faster to recognize good id…
But what this means at scale, over time, is that if AI can do 80% of your job, AI will do 80% of your job. The remaining 20% human-work part will be consolidated and become the full time job of 20% of the original headcount while the remaining 80% of the people get fired.
AI does not need to do 100% of any job (as that job is defined today ) to still result in large scale labor reconfigurations. Jobs will be redefined and generally shrunk down to what still legitimately needs human work to get it done.
As an employee, any efficiency gains you get from AI belong to the company, not you.
I often see people say “AI can’t do ALL of my job, so that means my job is safe. But what this means at scale, over time, is that if AI can do 80% of your job, AI will do 80% of your job. The remaining 20% human-work part will be consolidated and become the full time job of 20% of the original headcount while the remaining 80% of the people get fired. AI does not need to do 100% of any job (as that job is defined tod…
There'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…
You’re probably not going to transform your company by issuing Claude licenses to comfortable middle-aged career professionals who are emotionally attached to their personal definition of competency.
Companies should be grabbing the kids who just used AI to cheat their way through senior year, because that sort of opportunistic short-cutting is exactly what companies want to do with AI in their business.
Historically, people have been pretty good at predicting the effects of new technologies on existing jobs. But quite bad at predicting the new jobs / careers / industries that are eventually created with those technologies. This is why free market economies create more wealth over time than centrally planned economies: the free market allows more people to try seemingly crazy ideas, and is faster to recognize good id…
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I don’t like this argument because 1) it doesn’t address the social consequences of rapid onset and large scale unemployment and 2) there is no law of nature that a job lost here creates a new job there. On the first point, unemployment during the Great Depression was “only” 30%. And those people were eventually able to find other jobs. Here, we are talking about permanent unemployment for even larger numbers of peop…
I'll preface this by saying I agree with most of what you said. It'll be a slow burn, though. The projection of rapid, sustained large-scale unemployment assumes that the technology rapidly ascends to replace a large portion of the population at once. AI is not currently on a path to replacing a generalized workforce. Call center agents, maybe. Second, simply "being better at $THING" doesn't mean a technology will be…
> It'll be a slow burn, though.
Have you been watching the current developer market?
It's really, really rough out here for unemployed software developers.