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

White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

martynasm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 109 posts

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#81

Post by rspoerri »

jaen wrote: post #47
rspoerri wrote: post #32

People tend to forget how fast technological development advances. Even if you lived trough it you tend to forget how recently the world looked very different. - before 2012 there was no smartphone - before 2001 there was no wikipedia - before 1995 less then 10 percent of the rich country home users had internet - before 2023 there was no ai available to home users. Hardware has been getting faster by a factor of 100…

Not quite, the Earth Simulator in 2003 had 35.86 Linpack TFLOPS, 10TB of RAM and 700TB of disk. That's still almost three orders of magnitude from the iPhone 12 (0.02 Linpack TFLOPS, 4GB RAM, 256GB storage).

https://www.tnhh.net/posts/phone-power.html

edit: you are right, this source is wrong, but we are getting closer fast.

A19 seems to be getting 2.3 tflops (still only 10%, but still a whole floor of computers vs a smartphone is crazy!).

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#82

Post by guzfip »

aurareturn wrote: post #15

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was str…

> who could then use AI agents to provide the top quality customer service

I’m actually ROFL. Are you brain damaged? Or have you simply been in a coma over the past decade when businesses have outsourced their support to automation.

Hint: the result nearly universally has been closer to bottom quality support, if it even exits.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#83

Post by franktankbank »

odyssey7 wrote: post #48
n4r9 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a recent AI workshop management made clear that they see AI as rendering sprints and scrums obsolete, that Kanban makes a lot more sense, and that estimating effort/story-points is also becoming meaningless. Which is a strong silver lining if you ask me.

I want to understand how AI leads to this outcome.

Its a good excuse to move away from a shitty process, I'll take it! Fuck SCRUM, fuck Agile. No one was doing it anyway. I had to quit an Agile job because I was shipping shit without ever getting a lick of feedback, and this was not some webdev low stakes work, it was for planning expensive real world installations.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#84

Post by exitb »

Madmallard wrote: post #77
exitb wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most support agents lack... well, agency. If you connect a chatbot to an FAQ, that's exactly what you get. Just another instance of enterprise software being badly designed, badly written etc. It doesn't mean that it's actually an impossible problem.

They won't ever give agents the ability to actually do things for customers that can impact the company in some kind of negative fashion. At least not willingly. That's sort of the whole point of talking to customer service though. Getting something done that you want that involves them having to do work for you. AKA you taking value from the company. So yeah they're basically always going to be useless garbage if pu…

They'll do the same thing we do in software development - proper sandboxing, context curation, reviews on high impact actions. I presume real customer service is really expensive, as I've seen many companies prefer to just quickly refund, or drop you as a customer entirely, rather than fix your problem. It can't get much worse than that.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#85

Post by ForHackernews »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #79
ForHackernews wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly dispute this. Compute very depreciates rapidly. Inference is cheaper than training. DeepSeek was the warning shot across their bow, but the big AI firms can't afford to change course without jeopardizing their "Wile E. Coyote off the cliff" economics. LLM performance is already plateauing; models will get more efficient. Good-enough models will be deployed on chips, the same way H.264 is a good-enough video…

More than your points, I'm very curious how these AI companies are going to turn profit without making using AI insanely expensive. Some time ago, each prompt was highly subsidized, I doubt the picture has changed much. Edit: maybe the model efficiency you mentioned is the key, we'll see.

I suspect they just won't. First-mover disadvantage is real for many markets. Everyone knows Amazon, but how many remember Kozmo.com?

My assumption is that OpenAI, Anthropic, etc will go bankrupt and eventually be subsumed into Microsoft/Google/ByteDance & friends. New entrants will take their pioneering work and sell inference for pennies on the dollars without investing in massive R&D spend.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#86

Post by thrance »

intellectronica wrote: post #4

Every morning the turkey rejoiced and said to himself "oh joy, I'm such a lucky turkey, I don't have to do anything, the food is plentiful, I just eat and shoot the breeze the whole day long, what an awesome life!" Until one morning, the day before thanksgiving, the turkey rejoiced about the awesome day he's about to have ... just to be picked up 5 minutes later and dragged to the slaughterhouse.

The good thing with stories is you can make them say anything you like.

Every morning the dog rejoiced and said to himself "oh joy, I'm such a lucky dog, I don't have to do anything, the food is plentiful, I just eat and shoot the breeze the whole day long, what an awesome life!". And the dog went on to have an awesome life of plentiful food, shooting breeze and leasure. The end.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#87

Post by wilkystyle »

rspoerri wrote: post #32

People tend to forget how fast technological development advances. Even if you lived trough it you tend to forget how recently the world looked very different. - before 2012 there was no smartphone - before 2001 there was no wikipedia - before 1995 less then 10 percent of the rich country home users had internet - before 2023 there was no ai available to home users. Hardware has been getting faster by a factor of 100…

Technology advances quickly, but the apocalypse narrative is still bullshit. The reality is much closer to what it has always been: technological advances are a way to enhance what humans can do, not replace them. Being adaptable and adopting a spirit of learning and growth is (as it always has been) a key factor in a successful career trajectory.

Through a sufficiently narrow lens, any technological advancement can be perceived as a threat. If your job was to perform calculations for your company using a microscope and calculator (computer, the job title) then the invention of the computer (the machine) was absolutely a threat to your job security. That's not to say that there aren't challenges to adapting or considerations for how to do it well, but it has always been the case that the old way is a casualty of the new way.

I am neither anti-AI nor an AI evangelist but I think a more productive viewpoint is to think about how these advancements could open the door to new opportunity. For example, democratization of learning. It has never been easier for anyone in the world with an Internet connection and a computing device to have access to a personal math tutor or nutrition coach.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#88

Post by mjd »

lelanthran wrote: post #69
mjd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company I have ever worked for has wanted to produce more better stuff to sell for more money. Some couldn't because they were resource constrained. Where are these businesses that only ever want to sell the same amount of the same stuff forever?

> Every company I have ever worked for has wanted to produce more better stuff to sell for more money. So has every company I've ever been in, but at the same time, there problem was never production, it was always sales. No company I have ever been in had the problem of "demand is so large that even if we double output we still cannot satisfy it". Both things are true at the same time - companies want to produce mor…

In companies I've worked for, Sales has often come to management saying things like:

* I couldn't sell our product because our competitor's has a certain feature. How soon can we have that feature? * I can't make any new sales, but prospective customers keep telling me they need a solution for a similar problem. Could we expanded our product line? * Some customers could be using a certain feature of our product, but they find it too confusing. What could we do about this? * A big customer told me they have a problem our current product doesn't solve, so I told them we would be able to solve it by the beginning of next month

As you say, the sales department is the driver of development work, not vice versa.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#89

Post by senordevnyc »

truetraveller wrote: post #18
aurareturn wrote: post #15

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was str…

"Top customer service" and AI do not mix. People hate an AI response more than a late, real response.

I run a small SaaS business that both sells a super niche AI product to a non-technical audience of small businesses, and also is built and run by AIs, managed by me. I'm the only human in the mix.

I do all the sales and customer service myself, because it's a genuine selling point for my customers that they can talk to the owner if they have issues, and because these customers are the lifeblood of my company, and I want to stay as close to them and their needs as I can.

But it's still time-consuming.

On the customer service side, my next crack at automation will just be having an agent triage inbound requests, queuing up the actions that need to be taken in response (cancel account, upgrade, split team, whatever), and then giving me the whole thing for approval and replying to customer. That alone should easily cut my time spent on CS by 80%, while keeping a more personal touch. I should also note that some of the customer support burden will be lifted by having more self-serve options to do things, better docs, etc. But given that my customers are non-technical, there are always going to be some of them that just want to dash off a text or email because they hate tech and don't want to hassle with it.

On the sales side, I've thus far been 100% sales driven, but I'd like to introduce a self-serve signup flow that targets the 80% of customers who have simpler needs and could probably sign up on their own, and save the sales calls for bigger or more complicated deals.

Re: White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit

#90

Post by jaen »

rspoerri wrote: post #81
jaen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite, the Earth Simulator in 2003 had 35.86 Linpack TFLOPS, 10TB of RAM and 700TB of disk. That's still almost three orders of magnitude from the iPhone 12 (0.02 Linpack TFLOPS, 4GB RAM, 256GB storage).

https://www.tnhh.net/posts/phone-power.html edit: you are right, this source is wrong, but we are getting closer fast. A19 seems to be getting 2.3 tflops (still only 10%, but still a whole floor of computers vs a smartphone is crazy!).

Those TFLOPS numbers are quite useless as they are "marketing peak TFLOPS". There's usually a 10-100× difference between that and actual computational capabilities in meaningful general workloads.

It only makes sense to compare specific, well-calibrated benchmarks, such as Linpack, which is what I did.

Post reply on HN