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Labor is the single biggest cost component for most white collar industries. Training a model once and then putting it to work will be vastly cheaper than hiri
by spaceman_2020 4y ago
Labor is the single biggest cost component for most white collar industries.
Training a model once and then putting it to work will be vastly cheaper than hiring thousands of employees.
Accenture had 750k employees last I checked. A 10% reduction in headcount would mean saving billions annually.
How much compute does an annual $3B budget buy?
- jfghi 4y agoI think the pricing would converge to a point where the adoption decision wouldn’t be so clear.
- NicoJuicy 4y agoI think in the ones that researched that, they could claim people become more efficient. But that's not the same as reducing headcount.
- enjo 4y agoReducing headcount is a pretty common outcome of increasing efficiency tho. It's why productivity is far higher today than 30 years ago but wages have decreased. Those increases in efficiency means fewer people are required to do a job which means the market for said job becomes more competitive.
- NicoJuicy 4y agoI meant: 10 % more efficient != 10% less headcount Perhaps it's 1-2% in a large org and 0% an a small org. But if everyone has too much work all the time, it won't make much difference either.
- boppo1 4y agoAt what point does reducing white collar labor headcount begin to reduce aggregate demand for the kind of products and services produced by said labor? At some point, if all firms participate in this, the decrease in demand would cause the benefits of white collar labor replacement to diminish to 0, no? Or, perhaps, firms with goods broadly consumed by (relatively) irreplaceable blue collar labor would have a competitive advantage in such an environment and would be able to benefit more from white collar labor replacement. Hmm.
- Garlef 4y agoThat's a good thing. Less BS jobs. But we'll have to invent new means to entertain and subjugate each other.
- tempaccount420 4y agoThat sounds a lot like the broken window parable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- spaceman_2020 4y agoFirms are headed by individuals, and said individuals take home pay is directly tied to stock performance. And stock performance is directly tied to how much money you can make while cutting costs. Bonus points if you tie your firm to a dominant narrative. CEOs have all the incentive in the world to overspend on AI adoption.
- yoyohello13 4y agoThis will probably be awesome for CEOs for the next 5-10 years. Until the teaming masses of starving poor start a violent uprising.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoNothing that more circus can't fix, even if the bread becomes too expensive :)
- ChatGTP 4y agoObviously shareholders can replace CEO’s with AI too? So yeah, doesn’t really matter. If we adopt more AI , we replace ourselves totally.
- EGreg 4y agoWhen A and B make a deal, it can negatively affect C. Over time, this builds up and can also hurt A and B later when they are “the C”. But most decision makers are pushed and don’t understand that everyone acting in their own individual self-interest gets them short-term wins but can create a downward spiral systemically for everyone. Example: the Great Depression as farmers all were in a race to the bottom due to automation, laying off farmhands and producting a glut of products. The US government had to step in and pay them not to plant, thereby breaking the downward spiral of everyone acting in their own individual self-interest.
- blibble 4y agoI suspect if you replaced Accenture's consultants with a random number generator you'd get better results LLMs would be an overkill