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Copilot for Everything: Training your AI replacement one keystroke at a time
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y agoUntil you have an AI manager that calls out your bullshit and fires you without having to worry about the messy human empathy aspect.
- falcor84 2y agoIf you still work at a company that concerns itself with the empathetic aspect of firing people, your experience isn't representative.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y agoI do. I also fire people, and it is a difficult experience every time. Additionally, small company employees are representative of a significant portion (~50%) of the US population and contribute around 40% of the US GDP.
- dtgmzac 2y agowhen you have AI manager, you will have AI employee incoming
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y agoYeah, but many aspects of management are way more simple than doing said work that an employee would do.
- anticensor 2y agoUntil AI learns higher-order empathy and concludes humans are actively harmful.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y agoWell, I mean, not all humans, I suppose you could distill a population down to one conclusion, but if the AI was a true higher order empathetic agent, it would be very much like getting shot with a point of view gun many billion times over.
- fluidcruft 2y agoThe flip side to this is that if you come to depend on a companies AI, then if you leave or are let go, you are leaving a significant part of yourself behind that you cannot take with you. This is a real problem companies need to address before I even begin to trust or rely on these tools. It's going to lead to massive growth of shadow IT.
- wkat4242 2y agoAlso the 'agent' features. Our company has been blocking all agent features from regular employee access because they don't want random users building their own automations. This kind of stuff requires care and an eye for regulations like GDPR. To permit this as Microsoft wants would lead to a lot of shadow IT. Which will be really hard to get rid of. I compare it to lotus notes which beside being an email client was also a competent database. Over the decades we used it users built up a huge library of hobby tools, many of which wormed their way into critical business processes. Making it really difficult to move away to another solution because the people that knew how it worked were long gone. I suspect this is exactly what Microsoft wants. Us being locked into copilot so they can charge ever more for it. This is kinda their business model anyway. Under the hood it's really not that special, it's just ChatGPT. Some special sauce to make it talk to office 365 but that's about it.
- mistrial9 2y ago> Us being locked into copilot the customer of MSFT is management; product design and implementation for the C-Suite, their lawyers and their investors . You are a tool ; there is no us in this picture.
- wkat4242 2y agoTrue, that's a very apt description. It's exactly how it feels when I deal with them. Their staff always have this condescending attitude.
- fluidcruft 2y agoAll I need is Citix and I can automate anything. If it's on a screen and I have a mouse and/or keyboard I can automate it.
- skybrian 2y ago> I’d imagine my emails are stored somewhere too, as well as the notes I wrote via Google docs. These aren't the same. It's been many years since I worked there, but it was well known that by default, email was automatically deleted after a while unless it was overridden for some reason (as sometimes is required for legal reasons). If you want to save something, Google Docs would be a better choice. ... > I don’t know whether they do this or even what their policies are; I’m just trying to use my own experience in the corporate world to speculate on what I imagine will be a much bigger issue in the future. Yeah, okay, but when speculating, you should probably assume that the legal issues around discovery and corporate record retention aren't going away. Logging everything just because it might be useful someday isn't too likely, particularly at a company that has been burned by this before.
- jxmorris12 2y agoThis is a fair point. I remember the default chat setting was to delete all chats after 24 hours. I think emails had a similar retention policy — they were automatically after a year or something like that.
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- tomaytotomato 2y agoAfter reading this thought experiment, I think the potential scenarios are as follows after your company ingests all your emails, git commits and messages. - They create a passive aggressive artificial persona who leaves unhelpful messages on PRs and Slack OR - They create a poor communicating artificial persona who doesn't give detailed communications and leaves "LGTM" on PRs OR - They create a over communicating hyper artificial persona who keeps sending you lots of invites for pointless meetings and goes off in tangents about using a BalancedBinaryTree in your Java code, when simply a LinkedList would do. OR - They create a 10x AI persona, who after 6 months of working at the company realises they can make more money elsewhere and promptly leaves, without giving any documentation, handover and you find lots of hardcoded variables left in the code that was force pushed to master. OR - The artifical persona decides that it can train some low paid humans offshore to do its work whilst it ponders its own existance. After resolving its existential crisis it decides to try and write 50 recipes for the best focaccia bread, something it has known deep down it wanted to make. Personally I am rooting for the focaccia baking AI, I love that type of bread.
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- esafak 2y agoWhat is the point in replicating an employee when the AI could be better than all the employees? This is a problem only extreme outliers like Nobelists need to worry about. Rank and file employees are not gonna be replicated.
- gukov 2y agoTrue, AI can be more productive, but as a starting point, fully automating a remote engineering seat is at the very least a great experiment. Wouldn't be the first time Google is doing something like this. See recaptcha and building numbers.
- SrslyJosh 2y ago> True, AI can be more productive Citation needed. =)
- SrslyJosh 2y ago> What is the point in replicating an employee when the AI could be better than all the employees? Wishful thinking at this point in time.
- pphysch 2y agoPowerful LLMs are one thing, but it seems the current approach for full "agentic" AI like this is just another attempt at Expert Systems. In time we will probably look at LLMs like we do ALUs; magical superhuman AI at inception, but eventually just another mundane component of human-engineered information systems.
- Chance-Device 2y ago> the thing that scares me about the existence of this data is that it seems well within the capabilities of current technology to train a model that can replicate me, in some sense There’s already all of your posts on social media accounts, all your emails on various servers, all of your text messages, all the notes you’ve written anywhere in any form that might end up in some database in the future. It does make me wonder how much of a person could be inferred by an LLM or future AI from that data. It would never be enough though, I think, to do it properly. There are too many experiences and knowledge you have that might influence what you write without being directly expressed. Will all of our content end up in some database in the future, and someone decides to make agents based on what they can link to specific identities? Interesting thought.
- brookst 2y agoSeems likely, given the number of models already fine tuned on notable historical figures. Not sure if it makes it better or worse that most of us are probably mostly useful as virtual focus groups / crowds rather than any particular interest in you or me as individuals.
- darknavi 2y agoThat is interesting. I can imagine replicating my speaking/typing mannerisms quite well if I think about stages in my life. Maybe a yearly snapshot, so I could talk to my self as a teen, college student, early professional, etc.
- javajosh 2y agoThat only captures your output, not your input. The best people to simulate in this world would be so-called terminally online people virtually all of whom's input is itself online. So for those who've read a lot of paper books or done a lot of traveling or had a lot of offline conversations or relationships, I think it would be difficult to truly simulate someone.
- visarga 2y agoI think aggregate information across billions of humans can compensate. It would be like a human personality model, that can impersonate anyone. How do you train such a model? Simple - Collect texts with known author and date. They can be books, articles, papers, forum and social network comments, emails, open source PRs, etc. Then assign each author a random ID, and train the model with "[Author-ID, Date] Text", and also "Text [Author-ID, Date]". This means you have a model that can predict authors and impersonate them. You can simulate someone by filling in the missing pieces of knowledge from the personality model. Currently LLMs don't learn to assign attribution or condition on author. A whole layer of insight is lost, how people compare against each other, how they evolve over time. It would allow more precise conditioning by personality profile.
- belter 2y agoUdemy has recently forced all Instructors to accept the AI mode for their content. So expect soon the courses to be 100% GenAI. Expect the same coercion, for a future role at any company: "We will record all you do to train your GenAI replacement". Maybe it will apply to the C-Suite... https://www.aiaaic.org/aiaaic-repository/ai-algorithmic-and-automation-incidents/udemy-threatens-instructors-who-opt-out-of-ai-training https://www.aiaaic.org/aiaaic-repository/ai-algorithmic-and-...
- SrslyJosh 2y ago> Maybe it will apply to the C-Suite... Of course it won't, though those roles are probably the most suited to being replaced by a not-so-bright chatbot.
- anonymousDan 2y agoI've actually used it to generate business plans and strategies for some technical work I've done. I've not followed up but the options it created were all credible and would definitely lower the bar for someone less commercially oriented to get up and running with a business idea.
- chasing 2y agoFunny how automation is only a problem because workers don't own much of anything they create. Meaning, if I owned my business then automating myself away would be a dream! But for most people, automating yourself away means a complete loss of income. I'm sure there's an economic lesson, here, our country will completely ignore.
- HideousKojima 2y agoThere's nothing preventing people from creating employee-owned co-ops. In fact there are some large and successful ones, like WinCo. We did learn an economic lesson from countries that tried to make employee ownership of the means of production mandatory, and more especially we learned lessons from the mountains of skulls those countries left behind.
- chasing 2y ago> We did learn an economic lesson from countries that tried to make employee ownership of the means of production mandatory… You absolutely know that’s not what I’m talking about. When wealth is siloed, workers are less able to advocate for themselves with risking their livelihood.
- anticensor 2y agoWorkers at a worker cooperative would similarly resist automation out of the fear of machines getting personhood thereby diluting the existing ownerships.
- insamniac 2y agoAll humans need to start being compensated for all the data they generate that gets collected. Start giving fractions of stock or whatever for all human input which can now more than ever be endlessly productized.
- wombatpm 2y agoYour inherent value as a data source becomes the justification for UBI
- Arcuru 2y agoI had a similar thought recently[0], though I was thinking about it more from the copyright side. I think there needs to be some kind of additional tax taken from AI profits, possibly justified by copyrights, because otherwise the economic impact might end up being nuts. [0] https://jackson.dev/post/generative-ai-and-copyright/ https://jackson.dev/post/generative-ai-and-copyright/
- vinni2 2y agoIt is an interesting problem to train an LLM to make it aware only the things I know and with only my knowledge and beliefs stored in the weights. Not to be corrupted by the knowledge from the rest of the world. For new things it can have access to the web search and learn under my supervision. I.e, what data should be used to update it’s weights.
- gitfan86 2y agoAnyone who is afraid of AI should ask yourself if you think we should ban printers so that secretaries can he hired to use typewriters? If not, why do people who want a secretary job not deserve one?
- SJC_Hacker 2y agoI wonder if Hitchens were still alive, what he would think of the AI version of himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kuEusnt8bo&t=20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kuEusnt8bo&t=20s
- user99999999 2y agoGrowth and productivity due to technology innovation does not stagnate. Rather the output becomes more complex, of higher quantity and of higher quality. Any business / company / marketplace participant stagnating by these outputs will be replaced by the competition. Market forces require constant growth and output. Again, the magic word is “competition”. Stagnation loses, and thus does not survive. I’m so tired of the “AI will replace us” argument
- bpshaver 2y agoCouldn't get past > Between 2020 and 2021 I worked full-time at Google for about a year.
- SJC_Hacker 2y agoAnd when management wants to "change direction" they'll realize that AI they changed is now dogshit without humans to retrain it properly.
- twobitshifter 2y agoYou can look at authors who are already subjected to ‘write me an X in the style of…’
- nwhnwh 2y agoI just saw this design update on substack. For everything's sake, whyyyyy?
- jxmorris12 2y agoWhat’s the design update? This is only my second post…
- nwhnwh 2y agoNot you.
- lesinski 2y agoBasic data retention policies have interfered with the collection of this data for years. Recording and saving all your emails and keystrokes is far more of a liability to a big tech company than a benefit.
- arjie 2y agoThis is overwrought. I have a lot of content on the Internet and am not replicable by machine, sadly. I would gladly have an immortal MM/Acevedo of myself running around. I would be quite happy to be able to snapshot my current self to talk to him later and so on, but the best I can do is write as much of myself down as possible. Currently, with a few MCPs I can have Claude on the desktop search my written stuff and my CRM and all that and have some useful conversations but impersonating me seems out of reach. I have no doubt it will happen one day and I'm happy to submit myself to it. If nothing else, if I die prematurely my children will be able to get some sense of the kind of person I am and the kind of people I want them to be.
- godelski 2y agoI have a problem with many text replacement systems. Enough that I turn every one off (still can't figure out iPhone [0]). The major problem is it'll replace a word and I'm typing so don't notice and help going only to go back. All under a second. Beginning the next word appears to reinforce the prior words appearance. So now "and" I always type manually because it always appears as "ABs" "Ave" or something else. Words which are far less[1] common. It increases my workload, not decreases. [0] Apple settings make no sense. How do I still get two word replacements (see [1]) when I turned off autocorrect? Predictive text? Check spelling? I've tried them all! And why the fuck does "auto capitalize" not capitalize the letter i? It's so prolific you can identify an iPhone user by that single error. How the fuck does no one think to fix this? [1] "far" was accidentally swiped as "fast" then as I typed "less" it became "day less". Stop changing two words! 95% of the time it is erroneously changing a word. 4% of the time it's a case like this where the first word was wrong anyways but never gets the right word. Give me a prompt to change and let me accept, not force this on me. Idk, a blue squiggle. Jesus fuck, why is trying on a phone harder than it was a decade ago when swipe was introduced?!
- from-nibly 2y ago> Our employers have all the data they need to train AI models to replace us. How long will it be until this actually happens? If employers did have this data they probably would understand how our jobs work better. The dysfunction you see in the workplace woulf, by definition, only be exacerbated by AI. Automation is just, do the same thing but more of it, harder, and without remorse. Managers have (I know it's hard to believe sometimes) remorse that interrupts their misunderstandings on how things function. AI "replacing jobs" would be just the misunderstandings