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

OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 238 posts

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#81

Post by nicce »

BeetleB wrote: post #68
ryanackley wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a comment on the ethics of replacing jobs but the hypocrisy of companies using "ethics" as reasoning for restricting content. They are pursuing profits. Their ethical focus is essentially a form of theater.

Replacing jobs is not an ethical issue. Automation and technology has been replacing jobs for well over a century, almost always to better outcomes for society. If it were an ethical issue, then it would be unethical not to do it. In any case, which jobs have been replaced by LLMs? Most of the actual ones I know were BS jobs to begin with - jobs I wish had not existed to begin with. The rest of the ones are where CEO…

Yeah, the issue is that there is no common benefit if the private company is the only one doing the replacement. Are we ready for AGI before we solve issues of capitalism? Otherwise, the society may get a harsh reset.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#82

Post by gjsman-1000 »

jajko wrote: post #78
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's oppressive and nightmarish because we are at the mercy of large conglomerates tracking every move we make and kicking our livelyhoods out from under ourselves, while also censoring AI to make it more amenable to pro-corporate speech. Imagine if ChatGPT gave "do a luigi" as a solution to walmart tracking your face, gait, device fingerprints, location, and payment details, then offering that data to local police f…

Yeah but what we are all whining here about (apart from folks working on llms and/or holding bigger stocks of such, a non-trivial and a vocal group here) has hit many other jobs already in the past. Very often thanks to our own work. It is funny, in worst way possible of course, that even our chairs are not as stable as we thought they are. Even automation can be somehow automated away. Remember all those posts stati…

There’s two kinds of programmers:

0. The people who got into it just as a job

1. The people who thought they could do it as art

And #1 is getting thrashed and thrown out the window by the advent of AI coding tools, and the revelation companies didn’t give a darn about their art. Same with AI art tools and real artists. It even begs the question if programming should ever have been viewed as an art form.

On that note, programmers collectively have never minded writing code that oppresses other people. Whether with constant distractions in Windows 11, building unnecessarily deadly weapons at Northrop Grumman, or automating the livelihoods of millions of “inferior” jobs. That was even a trend, “disrupting” traditional industries (with no regard to what happens to those employed in said traditional industry). Nice to see the shoe just a little on the other foot.

For many of you here, keep in mind your big salary, came from disrupting and destroying other people’s salaries. Sleep well tonight and don’t complain when it’s your turn.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#83

Post by patrick451 »

torginus wrote: post #55
nilkn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and large companies, generally, aren't even attempting that). Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materia…

I mean one of the services at work had a custom HTML dashboard. We eliminated it and replaced it with Grafana. I worked on both - my skillset went from coding pretty bar charts in SVG + Javascript to configuring Grafana, Dockerfiles and Terraform templates. There's very little overlap between the two, other than general geekiness, but thanks I'm still doing OK.

Seems like a bad decision. Grafana is awful compared to a bespoke solution.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#85

Post by muldvarp »

bgwalter wrote: post #46

"AI will be disruptive. Jobs will look different, companies will have to adapt, and all of us – from shift workers to CEOs – will have to learn how to work in new ways," she said in a blog post. We don't have to do anything. People always listen to this propaganda from the wealthy and think the latest gadgets are inevitable. We can go on a general strike until copyright is restored and the "AI" companies go bankrupt.…

This won't happen. Even if western countries will outlaw LLMs (they won't, people care about unemployed software developers just as much as most software developers cared about unemployed translators), China won't. And why would we even do that? Because software developers like their cushy job and don't want to do blue-collar jobs?

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#86

Post by an0malous »

ryanackley wrote: post #38

There is something kafkaesque about these giant tech companies restricting what you can talk to the AI about under the name of ethics while at the same time openly planning to replace you in the workforce.

While training their models on pirated and scraped content

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#87

Post by SwtCyber »

ryanackley wrote: post #38

There is something kafkaesque about these giant tech companies restricting what you can talk to the AI about under the name of ethics while at the same time openly planning to replace you in the workforce.

It's like being lectured on ethical behavior by the thing that's actively eating your lunch

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#88

Post by esafak »

colesantiago wrote: post #35

Nice tongue and cheek from the Register and OpenAI to tickle the 'doomer' narrative. But reality is that there will be new high skilled jobs from AI thanks to Jevons' Paradox, the more companies using AI will lead to a huge demand for highly skilled people who can use AI in more ways than we are today. Not so much about being replaced, but there will be new jobs for people to do. I guess for those people being 'repla…

What kind of new jobs?

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#89

Post by LargeWu »

Spooky23 wrote: post #20
x187463 wrote: post #7

How many jobs have they actually 'eaten'? For now, we mostly have AI labs and those in proximity claiming some number of jobs will be obsolete, but the actual job loss has yet to manifest.

It’s going to ramp. I have a team where 60% of the staff (6/10) is retiring in a year. Their function is around reconciling utilization and bills from multiple related suppliers with different internal stakeholders. They do a bunch of analysis and work with the internal stakeholders to optimize or migrate spend. It is high ROI for us, and the issue is both finding people with the right analytical and presentation ski…

If LLM-based tools were such a money printing machine with a big ROI, why would you ever want to downsize? Keep redirecting that excess human capacity into building bigger and better capabilities to generate more revenue. Hire cheap grads to do the work.

Except it seems like the opposite is happening. CS grads have high unemployment. Companies laying off staff.

The rhetoric doesn't seem to add up to the reality.

Re: OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart

#90

Post by Printerisreal »

ryanackley wrote: post #38

There is something kafkaesque about these giant tech companies restricting what you can talk to the AI about under the name of ethics while at the same time openly planning to replace you in the workforce.

"Rules for thee, but not for me"
Post reply on HN