Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 196 posts

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#71

Post by skydhash »

andy99 wrote: post #62
datakan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price. Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity. I'd love for these executives to s…

I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environm…

Good work environment is not coddling workers. It’s hard to discuss with people who believe taking care of your employees is catering to their caprices (or more likely, what YOU think they would like)

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#72

Post by smallnix »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #61
tunesmith wrote: post #30

Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "…

> "But only help, they can't come up with the idea." "Sure they can, we can just ask them." I've had multiple instances now where AI left to it's own devices has solved a tricky problem that I honestly didn't think it was capable of. I routinely have them design their own experiment loops, learn from each round and iterate on the process. Multiple times it has lead to a needle moving change with no need for human int…

> I routinely have them design their own experiment loops,

Exactly, so that's the person required in the dev loop. You directed it, a person.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#73

Post by heathrow83829 »

datakan wrote: post #45
tunesmith wrote: post #30

Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "…

It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price. Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity. I'd love for these executives to s…

i think it's more about cutting costs. Usually, cutting costs when there is opportunity to do so is a lot easier than growing revenue.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#74

Post by chrsw »

tunesmith wrote: post #30

Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "…

Companies only want to spend money on AI in order to save more money somewhere else. So if LLMs make some tasks easier but overall don't make a big dent on shipping dates because of all the friction points you mentioned, and more, then it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens. Even if the shipping timelines are the same but the quality goes up that still could be hard to justify token spend too.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#76

Post by an0malous »

blitzar wrote: post #7

They won't be trillionaires with that attitude. They could have kept saying the line "Ai will replace all the jobs by the end of the year " for another 20 years.

They're trying to pivot to something that would inspire the retail investor they need to pass the bag to as they gear up for IPO, something out of Elon's playbook like "AI will take us to Alpha Centauri by 2030" or "AI will cure cancer by the end of the year"

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#77

Post by fg3fg »

chrsw wrote: post #74
tunesmith wrote: post #30

Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "…

Companies only want to spend money on AI in order to save more money somewhere else. So if LLMs make some tasks easier but overall don't make a big dent on shipping dates because of all the friction points you mentioned, and more, then it will be difficult to justify buying all these tokens. Even if the shipping timelines are the same but the quality goes up that still could be hard to justify token spend too.

Earnings growth, cash flows and valuation.

Thats all the management at firms care about.

Sorry for all the dev's here who rant about productivity gains but forget what matters to who employs them in the first place!

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#78

Post by ravenstine »

datakan wrote: post #45
tunesmith wrote: post #30

Unfortunately it will take longer for our bosses to walk it back. I feel like I'm fighting the battle daily, telling execs what kind of work LLMs do not replace... it's very slippery, they keep on doing the rhetorical texas two-step - I don't think they even realize they're doing it. We communicate that LLM is amplifying, they hear it can replace. "No, we need humans to help with specs" "But AI can help with that." "…

It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price. Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity. I'd love for these executives to s…

They have no reason to care in globalized cultures that are morally bankrupt and have no sense of citizenry to feel any amount of allegiance to. Business leaders were never perfect, but things are at least different when you have a sense that when you treat your employees and customers unfairly that you are treating your extended friends and family unfairly. The atomization of everything means that sense that your business is a part of your own community is pretty much gone. In a society with a decreasingly coherent morality, nothing matters more than cash flow, and there are many ways to make cash flow besides making a good product at a fair price. In an immoral society, leadership benefits from attributed success but suffers not from its failures. Society has given up on accountability beyond a certain scale. The petite bourgeoisie might be punished for misleading the public or screwing its employees, but beyond that it seems we let leaders get away with quite a bit.

And why wouldn't they want to eliminate employees? That's their wet dream! Many business leaders don't see employees as their asset. To them, employees are a necessary evil. If anything, the employer-employee relationship is inherently adversarial. The idea that C-level execs could one day simply talk to an AI and, boom, there's a business with cash flow and no employees, is too attractive for them to pass up, even if the chance is high it doesn't work out. At a personal level, these people have already made their money and are merely there to make more of it. What happens when AI doesn't work out for them and they still need employees? Either they get a pay raise anyway or they get let go and keep their mansions. If they erroneously let a bunch of employees go, then great, they can replace those roles with cheaper workers overseas working remotely. If AI itself can't take the blame for domestic workers losing their jobs, then they can point the finger at Anthropic and OpenAI. Modern workplace hierarchy depends highly on the diffusion of blame, and AI fits into that paradigm by introducing an entirely new dimension to that blame diffusion.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#79

Post by ravenstine »

andy99 wrote: post #62
datakan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It tells you a lot about your execs and how little they care, either for their employees or their customers. The quarterly profits are their God and they will worship at the altar of the stock price. Instead of finding ways to make AI enhance their employees and make them more productive, they immediately jump to ways to eliminate employees. It's the opposite of a growth mentallity. I'd love for these executives to s…

I've never seen a company punished for doing the right thing, caring for humans and providing a good work environment. We’ll see how this goes over but I disagree. You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little or at least doing what they want instead of what a business and customers want. This paradoxically ended up creating toxic work environm…

> You don’t have to look hard in tech, especially a few years ago, to find groups of coddled “workers”, doing very little

And whose fault is that? When employers create "fun" workplaces, value optics over excellence, disempower management, and maintain the status quo by the diffusion of blame, what sort of employees should they expect to have? I argue that it is not the fault of lazy workers but employers who encourage and tolerate lazy workers who are getting away blame-free. But the message is that it's always the fault of peons rather than the higher rungs of the hierarchy.

Re: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions

#80

Post by SequoiaHope »

eloisius wrote: post #43
blitzar wrote: post #7

They won't be trillionaires with that attitude. They could have kept saying the line "Ai will replace all the jobs by the end of the year " for another 20 years.

“Companies that use AI well will replace the ones that don’t” I’d type that in alternating caps but I’m on mobile.

Ah you just gotta google for such things https://www.textartie.com/alternating-case/
Post reply on HN