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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

#561

Post by threeseed »

digitcatphd wrote: post #474
simonsarris wrote: post #465

I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 lev…

As of now yes. But we are still in day 0.1 of GenAI. Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and 100x cheaper? There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.

How are we in 0.1 of GenAI ? It's been developed for nearly a decade now.

And each successive model that has been released has done nothing to fundamentally change the use cases that the technology can be applied to i.e. those which are tolerant of a large percentage of incoherent mistakes. Which isn't all that many.

So you can keep your 10x better and 100x cheaper models because they are of limited usefulness let alone being a turning point for anything.

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

#562

Post by snackernews »

randomname4325 wrote: post #473

Only way to know for sure you're safe from replacement is if your job is a necessary part of something generating revenue and your not easily replaceable. Otherwise you should assume the company won't hesitate to replace you. It's just business.

Anyone who thinks an executive considers them necessary or irreplaceable in the current environment is fooling themselves.

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

#563

Post by atleastoptimal »

intended wrote: post #536
elif wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

Why couldn’t an autonomous vehicle adapt to different cultures? American driving culture has specific qualities and elements to learn, same with India or any other country.

Do you really think Waymos in SF operate solely on physics? There are volumes of data on driver behavior, when to pass, change lanes, react to aggressive drivers, etc.

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

#564

Post by threeseed »

directevolve wrote: post #551
digitcatphd wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of now yes. But we are still in day 0.1 of GenAI. Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and 100x cheaper? There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.

We’re already heading toward the sigmoid plateau. The GPT 3 to 4 shift was massive. Nothing since had touched that. I could easily go back to the models I was using 1-2 years ago with little impact on my work. I don’t use RAG, and have no doubt the infrastructure for integrating AI into a large codebase has improved. But the base model powering the whole operation seems stuck.

> I don’t use RAG, and have no doubt the infrastructure for integrating AI into a large codebase has improved

It really hasn't.

The problem is that a GenAI system needs to not only understand the large codebase but also the latest stable version of every transitive dependency it depends on. Which is typically in the order of hundreds or thousands.

Having it build a component with 10 year old, deprecated, CVE-riddled libraries is of limited use especially when libraries tend to be upgraded in interconnected waves. And so that component will likely not even work anyway.

I was assured that MCP was going to solve all of this but nope.

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

#565

Post by lurk2 »

aianus wrote: post #414
absurdo wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically yeah. You live in a world of layered servitude and, short of a financial windfall that hoists you up for some time, you’re basically guaranteed to work your entire life, and grow old, frail and poor. This isn’t a joke, it’s reality for many people that’s hidden from us to keep us deluded. Similar to my other mini-rant, I don’t have any valid answers to the problem at hand. Just acknowledging how fucked thin…

No, it's quite easy to make $1mm in a rich country and move to a poorer country and chill if you so desire.

> No, it's quite easy to make $1mm in a rich country and move to a poorer country and chill if you so desire.

On an aggregate level this is true and contrary to the prevailing sentiment of doomer skepticism, the developed world is usually still the best place to do it. On an individual level, a lot of things can go wrong between here and a million dollars.

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

#566

Post by leoedin »

drodgers wrote: post #537
jaggederest wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Biological muscles are proof that you can make incredibly small and forceful actuators. But the state of robotics is nowhere near them, because the fundamental construction of every robotic actuator is completely different.

We’ve been building actuators for 100s of years and we still haven’t got anything comparable to a muscle. And even if you build a better hydraulic ram or brushless motor driven linear actuator you will still never achieve the same kind of behaviour, because the technologies are fundamentally different.

I don’t know where the ceiling of LLM performance will be, but as the building blocks are fundamentally different to those of biological computers, it seems unlikely that the limits will be in any way linked to those of the human brain. In much the same way the best hydraulic ram has completely different qualities to a human arm. In some dimensions it’s many orders of magnitudes better, but in others it’s much much worse.

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

#567

Post by notepad0x90 »

bawolff wrote: post #483
simonsarris wrote: post #465

I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 lev…

Honestly, if anything i think AI is going to reverse the trend. Someone is going to have to be hired to clean up after them.

I think they said that about outsourcing software dev jobs. The reality is somewhere in the middle. extreme cases will need cleanup but overall it's here to stay, maybe with more babysitting.

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

#568

Post by leoedin »

pmlnr wrote: post #513
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 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.

Clearly you don’t have children!

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

#569

Post by JanisErdmanis »

brokegrammer wrote: post #560

We don't need AI to wipe out entry-level office jobs. David Graeber wrote about this in Bullshit Jobs. But now that we have AI, it's a good excuse to wipe out those jobs for good, just like Elon did after he acquired Twitter. After that, we can blame AI for the deed.

The productivity gains in activities will be countered by the same gains in counter activities. Everything is going to become more sophisticated, but bullshit will remain.

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

#570

Post by Flemlo »

threeseed wrote: post #561
digitcatphd wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of now yes. But we are still in day 0.1 of GenAI. Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and 100x cheaper? There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.

How are we in 0.1 of GenAI ? It's been developed for nearly a decade now. And each successive model that has been released has done nothing to fundamentally change the use cases that the technology can be applied to i.e. those which are tolerant of a large percentage of incoherent mistakes. Which isn't all that many. So you can keep your 10x better and 100x cheaper models because they are of limited usefulness let al…

A decade?

The explosion of funding, awareness etc only happened after gpt-3 launch

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