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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

cnn.com

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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#531

Post by eastbound »

autobodie wrote: post #518
jameslk wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keynes suggested that by 2030, we’d be working 15 hour workweeks, with the rest of the time used for leisure. Instead, we chose consumption, and helicopter money gave us bullshit jobs so we could keep buying more bullshit. This is fairly evident by the fact when the helicopter money runs out, all the bullshit jobs get cut. AI may give us more efficiency, but it will be filled with more bullshit jobs and consumption,…

Keynes lived in a time when the working class was organized and exerting its power over its destiny. We live in a time that the working class is unbelievably brainwashed and manipulated.

It is very possible that foreign powers use AI to generate social media content in mass for propaganda. If anything, the internet up to 2015 seemed open for discussion and swaying by real people’s opinion (and mockery of the elite classes), while manipulation and manufactured consent became the norm after 2017.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#532

Post by csomar »

snowwrestler wrote: post #400

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…

I think the takeaway is that interest rates have to be maintained relatively high as the ZIRP era has showed that it breaks the free market. There is a reason why the Trump wants to lower the interest rate.

Sure it is painful but a ZIRP economy doesn't listen to the end consumers. No reason to innovate and create crazy ideas if you have plenty of income.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#533

Post by chii »

godelski wrote: post #472
leflambeur wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simply the old Capital vs Labor struggle. CEOs and VCs all sing in the same choir, and for the past 3 years the tune is "be leaner". p.s.: I'm a big fan of yours on Twitter.

> the tune is "be leaner". Seems like they're happy to start cutting limbs to lose weight. It's hard to keep cutting fat if you've been aggressively cutting fat for so long. If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left

> If the last CEO did their job there shouldn't be much fat left

funny how that fat analogy works...because the head (brain) has a lot more fat content than muscles/limbs.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#534

Post by itishappy »

autobodie wrote: post #521
pmlnr wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keynes was talking about work in every sense,including house chore. We're well below 15 hours of house chores by now, so that part became true.

Source? Keynes was a serious economist, not a charlitan futurist.

John Maynard Keynes (1930) - Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren

> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/files/cont...

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#535

Post by Izkata »

SteveNuts wrote: post #498
topspin wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output?" No. The bottleneck isn't intellectual productivity. The bottleneck is a legion of other things; regulation, IP law, marketing, etc. The executive email writers and meeting attenders have a swarm of business considerations ricocheting around in their heads in eternal battle with each other. It takes a lot of supposedly brilliant thinking to safely monetize all…

>A little further on and it'll be writers, actors, etc. The tech is going to have to be absolutely flawless, otherwise the uncanny-valley nature of AI "actors" in a movie will be as annoying as when the audio and video aren't perfectly synced in a stream. At least that's how I see it..

This was made a little over a week ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaTech/comments/1ksjcsr/this_vid...

For most of them I'm not seeing any of those issues.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#536

Post by intended »

elif wrote: post #526
nradov wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10× better by what metric? Progress on LLMs has been amazing but already appears to be slowing down.

with autonomous vehicles, the narrative of imperceptibly slow incremental change about chasing 9's is still the zeitgeist despite an actual 10x improvement in homicidality compared to humans already existing. There is a lag in how humans are reacting to AI which is probably a reflexive aspect of human nature. There are so many strategies being employed to minimize progress in a technology which 3 years ago did not ex…

This is my favorite thing to point out from the day we started talking about autonomous vehicles on tech sites.

If you took a Tesla or a Waymo and dropped into into a tier 2 city in India, it will stop moving.

Driving data is cultural data, not data about pure physics.

You will never get to full self driving, even with more processing power, because the underlying assumptions are incorrect. Doing more of the same thing, will not achieve the stated goal of full self driving.

You would need to have something like networked driving, or government supported networks of driving information, to deal with the cultural factor.

Same with GenAI - the tooling factor will not magically solve the people, process, power and economic factors.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#537

Post by drodgers »

jaggederest wrote: post #516
nradov wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10× better by what metric? Progress on LLMs has been amazing but already appears to be slowing down.

All these folks are once again seeing the first 1/4 of a sigmoid curve and extrapolating to infinity.

No doubt from me that it’s a sigmoid, but how high is the plateau? That’s also hard to know from early in the process, but it would be surprising if there’s not a fair bit of progress left to go.

Human brains seem like an existence proof for what’s possible, but it would be surprising if humans also represent the farthest physical limits of what’s technologically possible without the constraints of biology (hip size, energy budget etc).

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#538

Post by ramesh31 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #104

These are the moments that make millionaires. A majority of people believe that AI is going to thoroughly disrupt society. They've been primed to worry about an "AI apocalypse" by Hollywood for their entire lives. The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. You can't get more diametrically opposed than that. If you can correctly guess (or logically determine) which is correct, and bet all of y…

>The prevailing counter-narrative is that AI is going to flop. HARD. You can't get more diametrically opposed than that.

The answer (as always) lies somewhere in the middle. Expert software developers who embrace the tech whole heartedly while understanding its' limitations are now in an absolute golden era of being able to do things they never could have dreamed of before. I have no doubt we will see the first unicorns made of "single pizza" size teams here shortly.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#539

Post by bayarearefugee »

drewcon wrote: post #106
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing how comparing AI to a virus that killed millions and left tens of millions crippled is an effective way to support your argument.

Humans are not familiar with exponential change so they have almost no ability to manage through exponential change. Its an apt comparison. The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.

As a developer that uses LLMs, I haven't seen any evidence that LLMs or "AI" more broadly are improving exponentially, but I see a lot of people applying a near-religious belief that this is happening or will happen because... actually, I don't know? because Moore's Law was a thing, maybe?

In my experience, for practical usage LLMs aren't even improving linearly at this point as I personally see Claude 3.7 and 4.0 as regressions from 3.5. They might score better on artificial benchmarks but I find them less likely to produce useful work.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#540

Post by andsoitis »

godelski wrote: post #492
leflambeur wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet this will continue until it grounds to a halt. It's amazing and cringy the level of parroting performed by executives. Independent thought is very rare amongst business "leaders".

Let's make the laptops thinner. This way we can clean the oil off of the keyboard, putting it on the screen. At this point I'm not sure it's lack of independent thought so much as lack of thought. I'm even beginning to question if people even use the products they work on. Shouldn't there be more pressure from engineers at this point? Is it yes men from top to bottom? Even CEOs seem to be yes men in response to share…

> I'm an engineer, it's not my job to make up a number about how valuable some bug fix is or isn't.

So you think all bugs are equally important to fix?

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