921–930 of 1001 posts
From the article it seems like this is mostly corporate side - fulfillment appears to be OK as long as consumers continue consuming... or until Amazon pushes robotics side of fulfillment to its logical conclusion - getting rid of those pesky humans that require toilet breaks and dare to talk about unionization.
All functions in Amazon are heavily impacted - especially AWS and WWOps.
This summer I went camping and at the campground next to me was a middle manager at Amazon. I’ve been out of the workforce for about a year, so I asked him how much of an impact AI was having in his role. He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would replace effectively all of the middle management function that he was responsible for: gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and re…
I'm super sympathetic that losing your job sucks. I lost mine once. At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators. Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the onl…
But what will happen when there is no job that can't be automated anymore ?
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I'm super sympathetic that losing your job sucks. I lost mine once. At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators. Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the onl…
IMO, this is one of the better takes in this thread. I'm a big fan of Hazlitt's book Economics in One Lesson, which gives a very condensed version of some economic ideas - one of them being automation, with really good examples in the past of labor saving machines like the printing press being created. When I first read it a decade ago I didn't think my profession might be like the printing press, but it's definitely…
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Unless I'm mistaken, isn't it illegal to base layoffs on individual performance? My understanding was that it can't legally be considered a layoff unless it meets pretty strict selection requirements at the group level (cutting orgs, cutting a "random" % of a role or org to reduce headcount, etc).
Not sure why that would illegal? Your own performance isn’t protected in anyway as a class that you can’t control. I know Lyft 100% laid off people not hitting meets expectations in 2020 first
As far as I'm aware, there's a fine line between layoffs or reductions in force and firing for poor performance. Its legal to cut an entire division, or to cut some percentage of a division's head count and come up with some way of distributing it across the org. It is not legal to find your worst performers, fire them all at once, and call it a layoff.
Happy to be wrong here though, just trying to be clear with the line as I understand it. Someone coming by may know for sure.
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It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however. The majority don't care so long as they have enough food and shelter and healthcare. The whole scoreboard based on bank accounts is all made up wankeroo. Let's just have AI avatars fight for gloating rights; Goku beat Superman on PPV so Japan gets to host the inter dimensional cable world cup! And otherwise keep the biologically essential logistics flowing cause that c…
> It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however I'd like to see a serious study about the word "fiat" and whether it has been used to make a single valid economic argument in the last 30 years (auto maker excluded) Just kidding, I know it has not.
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> It's fiat wealth so... write the ledger however I'd like to see a serious study about the word "fiat" and whether it has been used to make a single valid economic argument in the last 30 years (auto maker excluded) Just kidding, I know it has not.
Well, history has those uniquely medieval (or early modern) situations where kingdoms adopt fiat currencies just before they fail. I dunno how much academics discuss those.
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Ok, Ok, I get the disdain for middle management. It's basically exactly like you described, but middle management didn't come about for no reason. There really is a value and the idea of automating it away with AI is extremely dubious. One could even argue that middle management is THE most critical role in corporations over a certain size. In that it is the glue that allows them to get to that size. But it's also wh…
This is most definitely an overgeneralization, but in my experience, engineers that constantly talk shit about management are either shitty engineers themselves or they're incredibly difficult to work with and blame everyone else for their shortcomings. Middle management is playing a completely different game. I don't envy them one bit. Sure, there are toxic cultures created by bad management, but that can be said ab…
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This is the crux of it. The digital world doesn't produce value except when it eases the production of real goods. Software Development as a field is strange: it can only produce value when it is used to make production of real goods more efficient. We can use AI to cut out bureaucratic work, which then means that all that is left is real work: craftsmanship, relationship building, design, leadership. There are plent…
> Software Development as a field is strange: it can only produce value when it is used to make production of real goods more efficient. We can use AI to cut out bureaucratic work, which then means that all that is left is real work: craftsmanship, relationship building, design, leadership. Thats a really odd take. Software is merely a way of ingesting data and producing information. And information often has intrins…
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I'm super sympathetic that losing your job sucks. I lost mine once. At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. We no longer have liveries for holding horses nor horse shoe makers (not at the level we used to). We no longer have telephone operators. Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. Supporting them in some way (re-training, UBI, service work, ...) seems like the onl…
> At the same time, what's the alternative? Progress happens. I actually wonder if solving this problem - this feeling of powerlessness in the face of progress is an interesting problem to solve in our time. Plenty of people have figured this out. The Amish, people move to islands and other countries to not be part of modern progress. "Making up jobs to keep people employed isn't a viable solution to me. " Why not? I…
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Would you like to elaborate why the math doesn't work out? An article explaining your position would be nice, but I'd settle for some broad gestures.
342,000,000 people in the US. Multiply by $10,000/yr. Cost of UBI: 3,420,000,000,000 Where is $3.5 trillion going to come from?