8 ms·

Here’s How AI Will Come for Your Job

39 points by blueridge 3y ago

blueridge 3y ago
https://archive.is/MxpRz https://archive.is/MxpRz
costcofries 3y ago
Actual title, "Here’s How AI Will Come for Your Job"
mydriasis 3y ago
"Are you threatening me!?" - Beavis
- bitwize 3y ago
  It has been foretold that thanks to AI, not every bunghole will have TP.
danesparza 3y ago
What the author is describing is simply employers resetting their expectations of employable skills. I've personally seen this happen about 3-4 times over the course of my 30 year career as a software developer. Frankly, the author's tone strikes me as alarmist (and a bit whiny). Yes -- it's uncomfortable. But it's also necessary. Learn the tools well enough to be comfortable with them. And get ready for more change. ChatGPT is already iterating: https://youtu.be/C_78DM8fG6E https://youtu.be/C_78DM8fG6E and it's not the only General AI tool widely available.
reportgunner 3y ago
> Last week, at its annual I/O conference, Google spent hours detailing how large language models would help the knowledge workers of the world unload their busywork onto a legion of eager, capable neural networks. The google that added AI and turned their search results to an unusable adspam? The google that released Bard which can't even reproduce a fact that can be simply looked up by their AI adspam search ? The google that had a motto of "Do no evil" and later they decided to just sweep it under the rug ? Yeah no I dont trust that google, thanks.
illuminati1911 3y ago
Whether AI comes for our jobs or not is not really relevant. Whenever there is technical revolution some jobs will vanish, new jobs will be born and some existing jobs will remain but they will also change. In regards to software engineering, automation and abstraction in our industry (compilers, high level languages etc.) has always increased the demand for software and people working in the industry. This is very unlikely to be any different unless we'll come up with ultimate general purpose AI that can solve any problem humanity can ever face.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  There may be more jobs overall but I think inequality will grow even more. Since the 70s we were seeing a disconnect between worker productivity and worker wages and I see this trend to accelerate with tools like AI.
  - amon22 3y ago
    Most people don't seem to mind inequality (the difference between the lowest-earning and the highest-earning cohort) as long the average (or more likely the median) person is able to prosper and even grow wealthier over time.
    - rqtwteye 3y ago
      When you look at housing we already have reached the pint where things have gotten worse for the median due to inequality. We have a few percent of the population that can afford very high prices and raise the prices for everybody that way. This is clearly a problem of inequality.
- flangola7 3y ago
  > Whether AI comes for our jobs or not is not really relevant. Whenever there is technical revolution some jobs will vanish, new jobs will be born and some existing jobs will remain but they will also change. Except that one of the major problems is that the people who built their lives and careers around those jobs are historically hung out to dry. It is looking like software and most white collar work will be replaced before the trades. How many 45-yr senior software workers will be happy to give it all up to become a plumber? Don't forget they will be competing with all of the other displaced workers which will drive down wages. Will they be happy begging for minimum wage jobs unclogging sewers? More points: Reskilling will become increasingly impossible as it becomes faster and faster to train an AI model than a human on new types of work. Net job creation is far from guaranteed. Most law work is competed by paralegals and other staff, but replacing them doesn't mean there will be a natural growth in legal cases. A lawyer might be able to process cases 10x as fast, but that doesn't mean there 10x as many lawsuits and criminal cases will magically appear - at least I certainly hope not.
have_faith 3y ago
> The easier our labor becomes, the more of it we can do, and the more of it we’ll be expected to do. I think it's a red herring to focus on the "quantity" of work. If I can push a button and a thousand things are produced, I am not inconvenienced as a worker to the point that I should feel slighted by my employer for expecting more than if that button only produced one thing at a time. The output quantity possible per unit of time isn't the thing that stops employers overworking or abusing their employees, that's what the law is supposed to be for. AI adds very little to the conversation of increased productivity not increasing leisure time of employees. No amount of increased productivity through technological gains is going to suddenly make this happen. We need to decide as a society that the physical and mental health of all citizens is more important than maximum economic output and enact laws that enforce these limits.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  This. The issue isn’t about productivity. It’s about the constructed emergent reality we’ve constructed where the moral life is the life of toil, and that labor in any form is next to godliness. It doesn’t seem necessary that pushing a button all day for someone else’s benefit is more moral than building a realm in Minecraft all day, but our culture is replete with admonishments that time spent laboring is the only time well spent. People say it’s “the man” that encourages this out of their own avarice and greed, but my observation (partially by having been the man for some time now) is “the man” is a product of the system of beliefs, and is more subsumed by the delusion than most people. They certainly do encourage the belief in labor for labors sake - but more so because they do whole heartily believe in it themselves to the core of their being that they can’t see a functional society without everyone emulating the life they’ve led and that has rewarded them so heartily. There was a time up until about the 70’s that universal basic income and a dream of a post labor oriented society was vibrant and fairly mainstream, with even presidents advocating for it. It got lost, particularly (IMO) in the conservative backlash against social programs that equated “welfare,” racism, and a bunch of other touch points, to drive out the notion we can function without an overwhelming need to toil. We firmly tied health care and housing and any form of security to a life of unending toil. Retirement has been eaten away to ensure people toil long after they would have. As productivity improved, we demanded more toil. What our feckless leaders diverted away can be regained, and I hope that AI ushers in an era of human toil that’s so utterly pointless we finally can see the fnords en masse.
vsareto 3y ago
>If artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs, its plan is to turn us all into middle managers of overlapping, interacting AI systems. The only problem? Middle management is stressful, grinding, usually thankless work. People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain. That's a leap. Chances are you'll still be seen as a producer and not a manager, so your job won't look like a middle manager of humans. In this case, your output is defined, and quality would be correlated with your prompting skills and any edits you make. You'll likely be in less meetings than middle managers, but maybe we'll have AI secretaries (avatars?) that go to those meetings for us. And yes, the pay will be way less than middle managers. All that rebuttal to illustrate that job enhancement is a far more likely outcome for most of us, with only a small amount of lower skilled jobs at risk for complete obsolescence. You won't be joining the management caste unless you intentionally go for it. Plus you can still be a developer and glue things to AI systems. That's certainly not going away either.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  Yeah, that hardest part about being a middle manager is being stuck between two sets of humans who have oftentimes competing goals. If one side of that is instead AI, you won't have that issue.
kerblang 3y ago
I swear I haven't read an informative AI article in months, and in fact most of them could be written by drivel-driven AI's. But: > People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain I speak derisively about middle managers for being short-sighted, petty, political, outright crooked and lacking any interest in the success of the business. In the software development world they're at best useless and often so full of spite and contempt for employees as to be net negative. I've had a few first-level managers that I really appreciated - genuinely good people - but the middle is just about all garbage. I think a lot gets blamed on executives when the middle managers are where the actual toxicity is coming from. However little or much your employees might care about your business, your middle mgmt almost always cares less.
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  " I think a lot gets blamed on executives when the middle managers are where the actual toxicity is coming from. " Executives are hiring these middle managers and they don't do anything about the dysfunction although they have the power to do something. "The fish rots from the head".
- jaredhallen 3y ago
  That's not been my experience at all. What I've seen is that top management far too often prioritizes short term (i.e. quarterly) profitability above all else. And poo flows down hill. Middle management is stuck in the "middle," as it were - unable to meaningfully impact decisions but being held responsible for carrying them out and taking all the heat for them.
  - adventured 3y ago
    That's a fairly accurate take imo, as systems like middle management ultimately operate based on what incentives you feed them over time. Middle management is hired by and incentivized by the structures the top management installs (from HR to pay to morality & culture). If your middle management sucks, it's because your top management are setting priorities that drive that outcome.
cookie_monsta 3y ago
I just love the fact that the people who have been automating our jobs out of existence for the last 20+ years are now starting to freak out that their jobs might be automated. Welcome to the 21st century, software developers.
- halfjoking 3y ago
  Software development will be the last of the last jobs to be automated. Take Shopify which makes it so you don't have to hire devs for your ecommerce store. A lot of custom work for ecommerce stores dried up, but then developers moved on to things that could not be automated. Let's say AI gets so good it can handle ALL types of web development tasks. The tools for AI would have to be extremely advanced, so much so that a normal web developer now has super-powers. You might not think a web developer has the ability to automate a construction workers job... but in a future where AI is so good that web development is obsolete? Robotics frameworks would be as easy to use as React by then. Of course there are many edge cases in automating the real world, and that's why you'll need hoards of developers to iterate, debug and customize robots coded using AI. The job won't involve typing code in an IDE anymore, so maybe you can question whether it is actual "development." But the only jobs left in the future will technical people who understand how software and AI works.
thenerdhead 3y ago
All I can say is that being a data-inspired creative is going to make you exponentially better at your job while being a data-driven logistician may just make you a little bit better. > The only problem? Middle management is stressful, grinding, usually thankless work. People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain. Middle management is absolutely screwed though. Good ones will go back to some IC/lead work and bad ones will probably be squeezed out/kept around for political yes-manning.
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
I find it depressingly ironic that the jobs AI will destroy first were the exact jobs that for years we were told wouldn't be affected by ai. Creative jobs, high paid white collar work (lawyers, accountants, and soon programmers) and the like are the most exposed. Whereas the difficult blue collar and menial jobs are the ones that are most protected simply because robotics and mobile power solutions are still too junior to replace fleshy meatsacks. What are we going to do when 70% of a work forde gets made redundant and the remaining 30% becomes a thousand times more productive? It already happened with graphic artists in China. The future is not bright.
- yunwal 3y ago
  I'm personally looking forward to the day when every ambitious person isn't shepherded into a desk job. There's so much work out there that requires smart people and somehow we've convinced everyone with a college education that smart people belong at computers all day.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    There is a lot of work out there, the problem is will it put food on your table?
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  > simply because robotics and mobile power solutions are still too junior to replace fleshy meatsacks No, it's more perversely ironic than that. It's that the stuff we find "easy" and "boring" (like driving, walking around, picking up a cup and setting it back down) is just stuff eons of evolution has hardcoded into most of the neural network that compromises our brain. The "hard" stuff we pride ourselves on is just the stuff we've begun to be able to do thanks to the smallest and newest addition to our brain, the neocortex. But the reason we think it's hard is because we suck at it, which is because it's an evolutionary novelty. Our computers' evolution is inverted. The "easy", "boring" stuff we hoped robots would do for us, like collecting garbage, is the last thing they'll be able to do and perhaps the only thing left for us to do. :D
inparen 3y ago
I am getting annoyed by scaremongering. If something can be replaced by a better option, it will be. Earlier king/people used to send messenger/pigeon to deliver messages. Later came letters(postal services), then phone, then emails, then SMS, then current gen of IM. Any one doing/done some proper research ?
- Der_Einzige 3y ago
  We go backwards as a society all the time. Central vacccums are objectively superior to the kind that most people use in their house today, but they were a "fad" of the 70s and 80s. Americans are not putting bidet toilet seats into their homes despite how cheap and easy it is. Just because something is better doesn't mean we will start using it.
  - JoeAltmaier 3y ago
    Ok that's a step too far! Central vacuums are definitely the inferior choice. The half-mile of hose you have to drag around, keep unplugging and replugging to different pneumatic outlets, and store is prohibitively troublesome. Folks I know who had such a system in the house they bought, immediately went out and bought a 'regular' vacuum.
  - inparen 3y ago
    >> Americans are not putting bidet toilet seats into their homes despite how cheap and easy it is. Social proof related behavior are not changed easily, but they eventually. Despite availability of email, people were still writing letters. In longer time frame, people do adapt.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Its scary because it replaces the thinking jobs, which are the well-paying ones. It hits home to folks who have been lucky to survive the previous societal purges of employment.
  - inparen 3y ago
    All jobs are thinking jobs, with varying degrees of physical effort. E.g. From A senator/congressman have to physically present in senate/congress, to argue/vote their case/bill (which comes from feedback from their followers, requires physical interaction) to bricklaying/road building/whatever you can imagine to lowest level. Some require more thinking and some less. Impact seems unimaginable. May be we need an AI to AI all imaginable/unimaginable scenarios.
SkipperCat 3y ago
I've been using ChatGPT to help me learn Golang. It has been an amazing learning tool. Almost like having a bespoke personal StackOverflow answering my exact questions. Is it right 100% of the time, no. Could it build my project autonomously, most definitely not. Has it accelerated my learning of Golang, yes. AI is a tool (at least for now). And like many tools, when used proficiently, it can boost your productivity and therefore make you better, not redundant at your job.
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  First, it came for the teachers (online course creators)...
- inadequatespace 3y ago
  I’ve been doing similar for various frameworks (Flink) > is it right 100% of the time, no. No human teacher is going to be right 100% of the time either. I suppose ChatGPT is a little more overconfident / doesn’t have a sense of tone or anything to assess confidence; even still, though, given how overconfidence is incentivized in the workplace, it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker.
  - SkipperCat 3y ago
    > it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker. 100% agree. Its like having a coworker who you can constantly pester with technical questions. I really love how you can ask ChatGPT follow ups to earlier questions and it understand the context. At some point, I expect companies to put their internal Wikis/documentation into LLMs so you can learn and onboard staff faster. You'd probably need a large amount of data to learn on, but I guess some of the large companies have that.
- dangerwill 3y ago
  People that say this are outing themselves as un-engaged learners that are likely not going to get much in the way of lasting gains in skills due to AI coaching. All it is doing is regurgitating StackOverflow at you but reworded to fit into the box that your questions create. Since you are the learner here, it is likely that your questions aren't better structured than the original explanation content that ChatGPT was trained on, and since it will just hallucinate things at random and without you knowing, I would bet money that your understanding of the topic will be subtly wrong in places. Basically, anyone who thinks that having a tutor-like experience with a robot is worth trading away correctness and consistency, is revealing that they care more about getting an answer in a form they can easily ingest than actually having any depth of understanding of the topic at hand. And before someone makes the silly argument that "well your human tutor could be wrong too!", all of the training data that trained chatGPT was written by humans, and so the potential human error is still the same. ChatGPT is adding a new source of error that is unpredictable and based on dozens of anecdotes I have seen here and on Twitter, none of the enthusiasts are double checking it's output for bullshit
lakomen 3y ago
Yeah yeah we're all going to die... The question is, we know AI is going to do take over doing work, how will that change the system when like 80% of people have no means of earning their income. How will those people abusing those machines earn theirs and who will generate input for those machines. Will those machines be able to solve genuinely new problems? Their knowledge comes from whqt people created. When people are no longer creating because they can't afford to live, who will feed the machines? And who will those few abusing those machines sell their machine generated products to? It will lead to a revolution and it will be bloody. Already the 99% are discontent and it's brewing. With the artificial price increases for the cost of living more will fall into social security. AI replacing workers means the bloat in the IT sector will be reduced and a lot of unemployed people on social security will be left. With steadily less money being available for the 99% they will either turn on themselves or, more likely cut the head off the 1% boiling their water steadily but surely. There will always be people trying to defend their salve masters, if we learned anything from WW2 and even the invasions on Iraq and Afghanistan, it's people suck and want someone they can feel superior to. Add to that the climate disaster...
- dv_dt 3y ago
  To rephrase the question a little: What if technology (AI just being a recent addition) can produce enough value for everybody to live but the system we live in refuses to provide for them in even the most minimal way? The lower threshold of minimal to zero seems what be what our system seems to be optimizing for - that's what is causing unrest. Does anyone think we couldn't right now, with our current tech, even without AI, provide food, shelter, and healthcare to everybody with everyone only working four or even three day weeks?
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    I'm skeptical we're there yet. But the worse thing is that it's never rational for economic actors (e.g., employers) to pay out a "social dividend" by cutting everyone's hours but paying them the same. 30 workers got replaced by 1 worker at a computer? Cool, but are you gonna pay that 1 worker 30 times the wages of a laid off worker? No; otherwise, why lay the 30 off to begin with? Conversely, are you gonna NOT lay off the 30, pay them the same, but have them work 1/30th of their regular 8 hours because their base productivity just got achievable in 1/30th of the time by computerization? Economically, that's absurd. The only thing that can force those economic absurdities is the government. (Not having slavery is also economically absurd. Voluntarily refuse to have literal, self-replicating, AGI automata working for you? That's crazy! But it's enforced by the government and international norms, so the absurdity is now normal.) The scary thing about that is how hard it would mess with the economy, having the government tell you how many people you can fire and how much to pay them based on some measure of productivity or just business profits. In a future of "AI, math PhDs, and serfs", though, we really need to figure it out. If we're headed toward that, it's going to be insanely asymmetric cyber-feudalism where 9.9/10 people are GrubHub peasants OR The Culture's post-scarcity luxury space communism. The latter seems way better. On the plus side, I think we'd only be GrubHub peasants for like 15 years, max, before that kind of AI ignites the Singularity, at which point who knows what happens? GrubHub would probably be gone though.
photochemsyn 3y ago
It's somewhat amusing how these "big scary AI' articles never address the likelihood of AI replacing a good chunk of upper management and shareholder representatives on corporate boards (and these are the people most likely to be massively overpaid in comparison to their contribution to the bottom line). I think this possibility accounts for a good deal of the overblown hysteria about AI's potential impacts in the corporate media world. I wonder if any of these outfits (The Economist, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times) would ever explicitly discuss this, e.g. "Here's How AI Will Come for Your Executive Bonus and Dividends"
- fnord77 3y ago
  why would executives do this to themselves? they're the ones ultimately deciding how AI gets used in a company. As per The Dictators Handbook, I doubt a CEO with an inner circle replaced by AI could effectively direct a company.
- Avshalom 3y ago
  AI might be able to do that in a is-it-capable sense, but upper management and board members are the ones that have the final say on who gets replaced so...
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  https://clickhole.com/efficiency-win-heinz-has-eliminated-all-their-executiv-1834414265/ https://clickhole.com/efficiency-win-heinz-has-eliminated-al...
czbond 3y ago
Context never mentioned in the "AI doom gloom" articles are that demographic trends lend this to being a good thing since the productive working age population will seriously decline. So in effect, we need less people to do more. We also need to, in effect, generate more tax revenue per productive working age person to support the aging population. AI helps that (from a government standpoint) by essentially "1:Many" multiplying the work 1 person can do, and be paid, and taxed. Link to UN graphic on business insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/6-charts-explain-worlds-demographic-crisis-2016-4#working-age-populations-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/6-charts-explain-worlds-demo...
- pixl97 3y ago
  It is important to note this... but it's also important to note that AI is apt to gut the 'middle pay range' jobs. The very top tier paying jobs are apt to remain human because of the deep knowledge and skill needed that AI has not achieved yet, along with the human contact capabilities. At the low end of jobs there is a lot of physical labor that it will be very expensive to build a robot to do and not worth while putting an expensive robot in place. Then you have the middle ground of expensive enough to replace with a robot and AI, overlapping a skill range that an AI and robot can replace. This middle ground is what we commonly call middle class and further gutting it presents many risks to an economy.
darepublic 3y ago
For software devs some company will release a popular app and announce it was made most entirely via AI. Then the startup dev jobs will start vanishing. Transition for big corps may look a little different, relying on AI integration to be set up.

39 points by blueridge 3y ago

blueridge 3y ago

https://archive.is/MxpRz https://archive.is/MxpRz

costcofries 3y ago

Actual title, "Here’s How AI Will Come for Your Job"

mydriasis 3y ago

"Are you threatening me!?" - Beavis

bitwize 3y ago
It has been foretold that thanks to AI, not every bunghole will have TP.

danesparza 3y ago

What the author is describing is simply employers resetting their expectations of employable skills. I've personally seen this happen about 3-4 times over the course of my 30 year career as a software developer. Frankly, the author's tone strikes me as alarmist (and a bit whiny). Yes -- it's uncomfortable. But it's also necessary. Learn the tools well enough to be comfortable with them. And get ready for more change. ChatGPT is already iterating: https://youtu.be/C_78DM8fG6E https://youtu.be/C_78DM8fG6E and it's not the only General AI tool widely available.

reportgunner 3y ago

> Last week, at its annual I/O conference, Google spent hours detailing how large language models would help the knowledge workers of the world unload their busywork onto a legion of eager, capable neural networks. The google that added AI and turned their search results to an unusable adspam? The google that released Bard which can't even reproduce a fact that can be simply looked up by their AI adspam search ? The google that had a motto of "Do no evil" and later they decided to just sweep it under the rug ? Yeah no I dont trust that google, thanks.

illuminati1911 3y ago

Whether AI comes for our jobs or not is not really relevant. Whenever there is technical revolution some jobs will vanish, new jobs will be born and some existing jobs will remain but they will also change. In regards to software engineering, automation and abstraction in our industry (compilers, high level languages etc.) has always increased the demand for software and people working in the industry. This is very unlikely to be any different unless we'll come up with ultimate general purpose AI that can solve any problem humanity can ever face.

rqtwteye 3y ago
There may be more jobs overall but I think inequality will grow even more. Since the 70s we were seeing a disconnect between worker productivity and worker wages and I see this trend to accelerate with tools like AI.
- amon22 3y ago
  Most people don't seem to mind inequality (the difference between the lowest-earning and the highest-earning cohort) as long the average (or more likely the median) person is able to prosper and even grow wealthier over time.
  - rqtwteye 3y ago
    When you look at housing we already have reached the pint where things have gotten worse for the median due to inequality. We have a few percent of the population that can afford very high prices and raise the prices for everybody that way. This is clearly a problem of inequality.
flangola7 3y ago
> Whether AI comes for our jobs or not is not really relevant. Whenever there is technical revolution some jobs will vanish, new jobs will be born and some existing jobs will remain but they will also change. Except that one of the major problems is that the people who built their lives and careers around those jobs are historically hung out to dry. It is looking like software and most white collar work will be replaced before the trades. How many 45-yr senior software workers will be happy to give it all up to become a plumber? Don't forget they will be competing with all of the other displaced workers which will drive down wages. Will they be happy begging for minimum wage jobs unclogging sewers? More points: Reskilling will become increasingly impossible as it becomes faster and faster to train an AI model than a human on new types of work. Net job creation is far from guaranteed. Most law work is competed by paralegals and other staff, but replacing them doesn't mean there will be a natural growth in legal cases. A lawyer might be able to process cases 10x as fast, but that doesn't mean there 10x as many lawsuits and criminal cases will magically appear - at least I certainly hope not.

have_faith 3y ago

> The easier our labor becomes, the more of it we can do, and the more of it we’ll be expected to do. I think it's a red herring to focus on the "quantity" of work. If I can push a button and a thousand things are produced, I am not inconvenienced as a worker to the point that I should feel slighted by my employer for expecting more than if that button only produced one thing at a time. The output quantity possible per unit of time isn't the thing that stops employers overworking or abusing their employees, that's what the law is supposed to be for. AI adds very little to the conversation of increased productivity not increasing leisure time of employees. No amount of increased productivity through technological gains is going to suddenly make this happen. We need to decide as a society that the physical and mental health of all citizens is more important than maximum economic output and enact laws that enforce these limits.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
This. The issue isn’t about productivity. It’s about the constructed emergent reality we’ve constructed where the moral life is the life of toil, and that labor in any form is next to godliness. It doesn’t seem necessary that pushing a button all day for someone else’s benefit is more moral than building a realm in Minecraft all day, but our culture is replete with admonishments that time spent laboring is the only time well spent. People say it’s “the man” that encourages this out of their own avarice and greed, but my observation (partially by having been the man for some time now) is “the man” is a product of the system of beliefs, and is more subsumed by the delusion than most people. They certainly do encourage the belief in labor for labors sake - but more so because they do whole heartily believe in it themselves to the core of their being that they can’t see a functional society without everyone emulating the life they’ve led and that has rewarded them so heartily. There was a time up until about the 70’s that universal basic income and a dream of a post labor oriented society was vibrant and fairly mainstream, with even presidents advocating for it. It got lost, particularly (IMO) in the conservative backlash against social programs that equated “welfare,” racism, and a bunch of other touch points, to drive out the notion we can function without an overwhelming need to toil. We firmly tied health care and housing and any form of security to a life of unending toil. Retirement has been eaten away to ensure people toil long after they would have. As productivity improved, we demanded more toil. What our feckless leaders diverted away can be regained, and I hope that AI ushers in an era of human toil that’s so utterly pointless we finally can see the fnords en masse.

vsareto 3y ago

>If artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs, its plan is to turn us all into middle managers of overlapping, interacting AI systems. The only problem? Middle management is stressful, grinding, usually thankless work. People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain. That's a leap. Chances are you'll still be seen as a producer and not a manager, so your job won't look like a middle manager of humans. In this case, your output is defined, and quality would be correlated with your prompting skills and any edits you make. You'll likely be in less meetings than middle managers, but maybe we'll have AI secretaries (avatars?) that go to those meetings for us. And yes, the pay will be way less than middle managers. All that rebuttal to illustrate that job enhancement is a far more likely outcome for most of us, with only a small amount of lower skilled jobs at risk for complete obsolescence. You won't be joining the management caste unless you intentionally go for it. Plus you can still be a developer and glue things to AI systems. That's certainly not going away either.

cortesoft 3y ago
Yeah, that hardest part about being a middle manager is being stuck between two sets of humans who have oftentimes competing goals. If one side of that is instead AI, you won't have that issue.

kerblang 3y ago

I swear I haven't read an informative AI article in months, and in fact most of them could be written by drivel-driven AI's. But: > People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain I speak derisively about middle managers for being short-sighted, petty, political, outright crooked and lacking any interest in the success of the business. In the software development world they're at best useless and often so full of spite and contempt for employees as to be net negative. I've had a few first-level managers that I really appreciated - genuinely good people - but the middle is just about all garbage. I think a lot gets blamed on executives when the middle managers are where the actual toxicity is coming from. However little or much your employees might care about your business, your middle mgmt almost always cares less.

rqtwteye 3y ago
" I think a lot gets blamed on executives when the middle managers are where the actual toxicity is coming from. " Executives are hiring these middle managers and they don't do anything about the dysfunction although they have the power to do something. "The fish rots from the head".
jaredhallen 3y ago
That's not been my experience at all. What I've seen is that top management far too often prioritizes short term (i.e. quarterly) profitability above all else. And poo flows down hill. Middle management is stuck in the "middle," as it were - unable to meaningfully impact decisions but being held responsible for carrying them out and taking all the heat for them.
- adventured 3y ago
  That's a fairly accurate take imo, as systems like middle management ultimately operate based on what incentives you feed them over time. Middle management is hired by and incentivized by the structures the top management installs (from HR to pay to morality & culture). If your middle management sucks, it's because your top management are setting priorities that drive that outcome.

cookie_monsta 3y ago

I just love the fact that the people who have been automating our jobs out of existence for the last 20+ years are now starting to freak out that their jobs might be automated. Welcome to the 21st century, software developers.

halfjoking 3y ago
Software development will be the last of the last jobs to be automated. Take Shopify which makes it so you don't have to hire devs for your ecommerce store. A lot of custom work for ecommerce stores dried up, but then developers moved on to things that could not be automated. Let's say AI gets so good it can handle ALL types of web development tasks. The tools for AI would have to be extremely advanced, so much so that a normal web developer now has super-powers. You might not think a web developer has the ability to automate a construction workers job... but in a future where AI is so good that web development is obsolete? Robotics frameworks would be as easy to use as React by then. Of course there are many edge cases in automating the real world, and that's why you'll need hoards of developers to iterate, debug and customize robots coded using AI. The job won't involve typing code in an IDE anymore, so maybe you can question whether it is actual "development." But the only jobs left in the future will technical people who understand how software and AI works.

thenerdhead 3y ago

All I can say is that being a data-inspired creative is going to make you exponentially better at your job while being a data-driven logistician may just make you a little bit better. > The only problem? Middle management is stressful, grinding, usually thankless work. People speak derisively about middle managers because their outputs are hard to define and monitor—they are viewed, sometimes unfairly, as a mere link in the chain. Middle management is absolutely screwed though. Good ones will go back to some IC/lead work and bad ones will probably be squeezed out/kept around for political yes-manning.

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

I find it depressingly ironic that the jobs AI will destroy first were the exact jobs that for years we were told wouldn't be affected by ai. Creative jobs, high paid white collar work (lawyers, accountants, and soon programmers) and the like are the most exposed. Whereas the difficult blue collar and menial jobs are the ones that are most protected simply because robotics and mobile power solutions are still too junior to replace fleshy meatsacks. What are we going to do when 70% of a work forde gets made redundant and the remaining 30% becomes a thousand times more productive? It already happened with graphic artists in China. The future is not bright.

yunwal 3y ago
I'm personally looking forward to the day when every ambitious person isn't shepherded into a desk job. There's so much work out there that requires smart people and somehow we've convinced everyone with a college education that smart people belong at computers all day.
- pixl97 3y ago
  There is a lot of work out there, the problem is will it put food on your table?
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
> simply because robotics and mobile power solutions are still too junior to replace fleshy meatsacks No, it's more perversely ironic than that. It's that the stuff we find "easy" and "boring" (like driving, walking around, picking up a cup and setting it back down) is just stuff eons of evolution has hardcoded into most of the neural network that compromises our brain. The "hard" stuff we pride ourselves on is just the stuff we've begun to be able to do thanks to the smallest and newest addition to our brain, the neocortex. But the reason we think it's hard is because we suck at it, which is because it's an evolutionary novelty. Our computers' evolution is inverted. The "easy", "boring" stuff we hoped robots would do for us, like collecting garbage, is the last thing they'll be able to do and perhaps the only thing left for us to do. :D

inparen 3y ago

I am getting annoyed by scaremongering. If something can be replaced by a better option, it will be. Earlier king/people used to send messenger/pigeon to deliver messages. Later came letters(postal services), then phone, then emails, then SMS, then current gen of IM. Any one doing/done some proper research ?

Der_Einzige 3y ago
We go backwards as a society all the time. Central vacccums are objectively superior to the kind that most people use in their house today, but they were a "fad" of the 70s and 80s. Americans are not putting bidet toilet seats into their homes despite how cheap and easy it is. Just because something is better doesn't mean we will start using it.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Ok that's a step too far! Central vacuums are definitely the inferior choice. The half-mile of hose you have to drag around, keep unplugging and replugging to different pneumatic outlets, and store is prohibitively troublesome. Folks I know who had such a system in the house they bought, immediately went out and bought a 'regular' vacuum.
- inparen 3y ago
  >> Americans are not putting bidet toilet seats into their homes despite how cheap and easy it is. Social proof related behavior are not changed easily, but they eventually. Despite availability of email, people were still writing letters. In longer time frame, people do adapt.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Its scary because it replaces the thinking jobs, which are the well-paying ones. It hits home to folks who have been lucky to survive the previous societal purges of employment.
- inparen 3y ago
  All jobs are thinking jobs, with varying degrees of physical effort. E.g. From A senator/congressman have to physically present in senate/congress, to argue/vote their case/bill (which comes from feedback from their followers, requires physical interaction) to bricklaying/road building/whatever you can imagine to lowest level. Some require more thinking and some less. Impact seems unimaginable. May be we need an AI to AI all imaginable/unimaginable scenarios.

SkipperCat 3y ago

I've been using ChatGPT to help me learn Golang. It has been an amazing learning tool. Almost like having a bespoke personal StackOverflow answering my exact questions. Is it right 100% of the time, no. Could it build my project autonomously, most definitely not. Has it accelerated my learning of Golang, yes. AI is a tool (at least for now). And like many tools, when used proficiently, it can boost your productivity and therefore make you better, not redundant at your job.

barbariangrunge 3y ago
First, it came for the teachers (online course creators)...
inadequatespace 3y ago
I’ve been doing similar for various frameworks (Flink) > is it right 100% of the time, no. No human teacher is going to be right 100% of the time either. I suppose ChatGPT is a little more overconfident / doesn’t have a sense of tone or anything to assess confidence; even still, though, given how overconfidence is incentivized in the workplace, it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker.
- SkipperCat 3y ago
  > it’s not that different in this regard from an average coworker. 100% agree. Its like having a coworker who you can constantly pester with technical questions. I really love how you can ask ChatGPT follow ups to earlier questions and it understand the context. At some point, I expect companies to put their internal Wikis/documentation into LLMs so you can learn and onboard staff faster. You'd probably need a large amount of data to learn on, but I guess some of the large companies have that.
dangerwill 3y ago
People that say this are outing themselves as un-engaged learners that are likely not going to get much in the way of lasting gains in skills due to AI coaching. All it is doing is regurgitating StackOverflow at you but reworded to fit into the box that your questions create. Since you are the learner here, it is likely that your questions aren't better structured than the original explanation content that ChatGPT was trained on, and since it will just hallucinate things at random and without you knowing, I would bet money that your understanding of the topic will be subtly wrong in places. Basically, anyone who thinks that having a tutor-like experience with a robot is worth trading away correctness and consistency, is revealing that they care more about getting an answer in a form they can easily ingest than actually having any depth of understanding of the topic at hand. And before someone makes the silly argument that "well your human tutor could be wrong too!", all of the training data that trained chatGPT was written by humans, and so the potential human error is still the same. ChatGPT is adding a new source of error that is unpredictable and based on dozens of anecdotes I have seen here and on Twitter, none of the enthusiasts are double checking it's output for bullshit

lakomen 3y ago

Yeah yeah we're all going to die... The question is, we know AI is going to do take over doing work, how will that change the system when like 80% of people have no means of earning their income. How will those people abusing those machines earn theirs and who will generate input for those machines. Will those machines be able to solve genuinely new problems? Their knowledge comes from whqt people created. When people are no longer creating because they can't afford to live, who will feed the machines? And who will those few abusing those machines sell their machine generated products to? It will lead to a revolution and it will be bloody. Already the 99% are discontent and it's brewing. With the artificial price increases for the cost of living more will fall into social security. AI replacing workers means the bloat in the IT sector will be reduced and a lot of unemployed people on social security will be left. With steadily less money being available for the 99% they will either turn on themselves or, more likely cut the head off the 1% boiling their water steadily but surely. There will always be people trying to defend their salve masters, if we learned anything from WW2 and even the invasions on Iraq and Afghanistan, it's people suck and want someone they can feel superior to. Add to that the climate disaster...

dv_dt 3y ago
To rephrase the question a little: What if technology (AI just being a recent addition) can produce enough value for everybody to live but the system we live in refuses to provide for them in even the most minimal way? The lower threshold of minimal to zero seems what be what our system seems to be optimizing for - that's what is causing unrest. Does anyone think we couldn't right now, with our current tech, even without AI, provide food, shelter, and healthcare to everybody with everyone only working four or even three day weeks?
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  I'm skeptical we're there yet. But the worse thing is that it's never rational for economic actors (e.g., employers) to pay out a "social dividend" by cutting everyone's hours but paying them the same. 30 workers got replaced by 1 worker at a computer? Cool, but are you gonna pay that 1 worker 30 times the wages of a laid off worker? No; otherwise, why lay the 30 off to begin with? Conversely, are you gonna NOT lay off the 30, pay them the same, but have them work 1/30th of their regular 8 hours because their base productivity just got achievable in 1/30th of the time by computerization? Economically, that's absurd. The only thing that can force those economic absurdities is the government. (Not having slavery is also economically absurd. Voluntarily refuse to have literal, self-replicating, AGI automata working for you? That's crazy! But it's enforced by the government and international norms, so the absurdity is now normal.) The scary thing about that is how hard it would mess with the economy, having the government tell you how many people you can fire and how much to pay them based on some measure of productivity or just business profits. In a future of "AI, math PhDs, and serfs", though, we really need to figure it out. If we're headed toward that, it's going to be insanely asymmetric cyber-feudalism where 9.9/10 people are GrubHub peasants OR The Culture's post-scarcity luxury space communism. The latter seems way better. On the plus side, I think we'd only be GrubHub peasants for like 15 years, max, before that kind of AI ignites the Singularity, at which point who knows what happens? GrubHub would probably be gone though.

photochemsyn 3y ago

It's somewhat amusing how these "big scary AI' articles never address the likelihood of AI replacing a good chunk of upper management and shareholder representatives on corporate boards (and these are the people most likely to be massively overpaid in comparison to their contribution to the bottom line). I think this possibility accounts for a good deal of the overblown hysteria about AI's potential impacts in the corporate media world. I wonder if any of these outfits (The Economist, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the New York Times) would ever explicitly discuss this, e.g. "Here's How AI Will Come for Your Executive Bonus and Dividends"

fnord77 3y ago
why would executives do this to themselves? they're the ones ultimately deciding how AI gets used in a company. As per The Dictators Handbook, I doubt a CEO with an inner circle replaced by AI could effectively direct a company.
Avshalom 3y ago
AI might be able to do that in a is-it-capable sense, but upper management and board members are the ones that have the final say on who gets replaced so...
earthboundkid 3y ago
https://clickhole.com/efficiency-win-heinz-has-eliminated-all-their-executiv-1834414265/ https://clickhole.com/efficiency-win-heinz-has-eliminated-al...

czbond 3y ago

Context never mentioned in the "AI doom gloom" articles are that demographic trends lend this to being a good thing since the productive working age population will seriously decline. So in effect, we need less people to do more. We also need to, in effect, generate more tax revenue per productive working age person to support the aging population. AI helps that (from a government standpoint) by essentially "1:Many" multiplying the work 1 person can do, and be paid, and taxed. Link to UN graphic on business insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/6-charts-explain-worlds-demographic-crisis-2016-4#working-age-populations-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/6-charts-explain-worlds-demo...

pixl97 3y ago
It is important to note this... but it's also important to note that AI is apt to gut the 'middle pay range' jobs. The very top tier paying jobs are apt to remain human because of the deep knowledge and skill needed that AI has not achieved yet, along with the human contact capabilities. At the low end of jobs there is a lot of physical labor that it will be very expensive to build a robot to do and not worth while putting an expensive robot in place. Then you have the middle ground of expensive enough to replace with a robot and AI, overlapping a skill range that an AI and robot can replace. This middle ground is what we commonly call middle class and further gutting it presents many risks to an economy.

darepublic 3y ago

For software devs some company will release a popular app and announce it was made most entirely via AI. Then the startup dev jobs will start vanishing. Transition for big corps may look a little different, relying on AI integration to be set up.