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I use Copilot on a daily basis and I think it's a fantastic product. It isn't particularly exciting, but I don't think it's supposed to be exciting - it just ta

I use Copilot on a daily basis and I think it's a fantastic product. It isn't particularly exciting, but I don't think it's supposed to be exciting - it just takes a lot of the tedium out of routine business tasks. It writes boring reports and boring memos to a perfectly acceptable standard. It saves me from having to skim-read through a long document to find one salient fact. It does for office workers what a belt sander or a table saw does for carpenters. It's integrated incredibly well into the rest of the 365 suite and Microsoft provide really good onboarding and training resources. It Just Works, even for non-technical users who don't have the first idea about LLMs. Zvi Mowshowitz spends a lot of time talking about the mundane utility of AI and I think Copilot is currently the best example. It isn't something that promises to change the world, it's something that makes life marginally easier for a big cohort of people. Saving the average office worker an hour or so a week isn't revolutionary, but it delivers a very respectable ROI.

Arainach 2y ago
>It isn't something that promises to change the world, it's something that makes life marginally easier for a big cohort of people. ....and life miserable for a far larger cohort. The number of jobs replaced, the number of jobs where the only parts capable of bringing joy will be automated away, and the number of people subject to ever-finer micromanagement as streams of more and more data are fed into authoritarian matrix multipliers will skyrocket. The amount of human interaction, personal connections, and actors capable of sympathizing and working within the intent of the rules rather than the letter will plummet. The ability to trust anything, to enjoy most things, and to believe that something is a real thing someone created to bring joy instead of a hypertargeted psychological adworm will disappear entirely. A few people will get stunningly rich; a small cohort will make things easier. Many, MANY will be far worse off.
- esperent 2y ago
  > the number of jobs where the only parts capable of bringing joy will be automated away I've seen this claimed several times, but it goes against my personal experience using it in business and software development where AI tools remove a lot of boring rote work. Can you give some examples of the parts of these or other jobs that bring joy which AI will replace?
  - Arainach 2y ago
    All of content creation jobs are gradually evolving from replacing an artistic task with writing prompts. Even programming - oh, good, LLMs are approximately as good at a fresh college graduate as spewing out a bunch of code that isn't quite right and I have to go debug and review. Except at least I can get joy teaching the new grad and seeing them grow.
  - Yizahi 2y ago
    Voice actors for example. Stealing one's voice patterns for training data and then replicating said voice indefinitely is now a possibility. Writers can be replaced too. The job is paying abysmally (from a hearsay) for almost all writers except for top tier ones. By automating writing and flooding all markets and niches with generated drivel this profit will be eliminated, then medium tier (for a lack of a better term) writers will be broke and switch careers, then the whole selection process which produces top tier writers will collapse since there are not enough people doing this in total, and then generated drivel will replace whatever writing jobs will remain. A few select authors will survive on Patreon style payments, but donations even today are famously concentrated to the very small number of top performers.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      > Writers can be replaced too. The job is paying abysmally I've seen this for "journalism" when the AI is inventing credible propaganda pieces. In real engineering work you cannot go with thumb feelings (except FAANG, but that is another story). AI has no bloody idea how to qualify a test result.
- turbojet1321 2y ago
  > The number of jobs replaced, the number of jobs where the only parts capable of bringing joy will be automated away This assumes that people are employed only because of their productivity, and that productivity can be replaced with AI. You can't AI-away bureaucracy, because a bureaucracy's incentives are not efficiency or productivity, but the perpetuation of bureaucracy. Sure, in the future a lot of the "actual" work might be done by AI - but right now a lot of that "actual" work is done by a relatively small number of employees.
drewcoo 2y ago
> It does for office workers what a belt sander or a table saw does for carpenters. Jobsite table saws are a thing as are portable belt sanders, but those aren't the most common carpentry tools. Or is that what you meant?
hulitu 2y ago
> Saving the average office worker an hour or so a week isn't revolutionary, but it delivers a very respectable ROI. Tell that to Windows Update team. /s

Arainach 2y ago

>It isn't something that promises to change the world, it's something that makes life marginally easier for a big cohort of people. ....and life miserable for a far larger cohort. The number of jobs replaced, the number of jobs where the only parts capable of bringing joy will be automated away, and the number of people subject to ever-finer micromanagement as streams of more and more data are fed into authoritarian matrix multipliers will skyrocket. The amount of human interaction, personal connections, and actors capable of sympathizing and working within the intent of the rules rather than the letter will plummet. The ability to trust anything, to enjoy most things, and to believe that something is a real thing someone created to bring joy instead of a hypertargeted psychological adworm will disappear entirely. A few people will get stunningly rich; a small cohort will make things easier. Many, MANY will be far worse off.

esperent 2y ago
> the number of jobs where the only parts capable of bringing joy will be automated away I've seen this claimed several times, but it goes against my personal experience using it in business and software development where AI tools remove a lot of boring rote work. Can you give some examples of the parts of these or other jobs that bring joy which AI will replace?
- Arainach 2y ago
  All of content creation jobs are gradually evolving from replacing an artistic task with writing prompts. Even programming - oh, good, LLMs are approximately as good at a fresh college graduate as spewing out a bunch of code that isn't quite right and I have to go debug and review. Except at least I can get joy teaching the new grad and seeing them grow.
- Yizahi 2y ago
  Voice actors for example. Stealing one's voice patterns for training data and then replicating said voice indefinitely is now a possibility. Writers can be replaced too. The job is paying abysmally (from a hearsay) for almost all writers except for top tier ones. By automating writing and flooding all markets and niches with generated drivel this profit will be eliminated, then medium tier (for a lack of a better term) writers will be broke and switch careers, then the whole selection process which produces top tier writers will collapse since there are not enough people doing this in total, and then generated drivel will replace whatever writing jobs will remain. A few select authors will survive on Patreon style payments, but donations even today are famously concentrated to the very small number of top performers.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > Writers can be replaced too. The job is paying abysmally I've seen this for "journalism" when the AI is inventing credible propaganda pieces. In real engineering work you cannot go with thumb feelings (except FAANG, but that is another story). AI has no bloody idea how to qualify a test result.
turbojet1321 2y ago
> The number of jobs replaced, the number of jobs where the only parts capable of bringing joy will be automated away This assumes that people are employed only because of their productivity, and that productivity can be replaced with AI. You can't AI-away bureaucracy, because a bureaucracy's incentives are not efficiency or productivity, but the perpetuation of bureaucracy. Sure, in the future a lot of the "actual" work might be done by AI - but right now a lot of that "actual" work is done by a relatively small number of employees.

drewcoo 2y ago

> It does for office workers what a belt sander or a table saw does for carpenters. Jobsite table saws are a thing as are portable belt sanders, but those aren't the most common carpentry tools. Or is that what you meant?

hulitu 2y ago

> Saving the average office worker an hour or so a week isn't revolutionary, but it delivers a very respectable ROI. Tell that to Windows Update team. /s