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AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies Are Organized
- dtagames 2y agohttps://archive.ph/jowpM https://archive.ph/jowpM
- dtagames 2y agoGood stuff. No one asked farmers to do less work after tractors were invented. I agree with this author after my own experiments with AI tools over the last three years. They're here to help people execute more work, faster. The human work will become deciding and controlling what they do.
- giantg2 2y agoJust like with farms, success will be consolidated with a much smaller number of big companies vs the current staus quo.
- GPerson 2y agoUnlike with farms, there’s not an alternative way of life in the city to run to.
- kridsdale1 2y agoSure there is. When your knowledge work is automated, go farm.
- throwaway290 2y agoYou mean the big cos that develop all those LLMs and robots that we give free pass for profiting by slowly killing programming/intellectual/creative jobs with ML trained on our work, you will be totally safe from them if you do farming? Why? If farming is safe from it then why intellectual/creative work isn't?
- giantg2 2y agoWhat alternate does farming have?
- GPerson 2y agoIn the 20th century American farmers moved to cities as their jobs were displaced by increasing mechanization.
- whatshisface 2y agoThat's not tractors so much as the benefit of owning a lot vs. a few risks.
- giantg2 2y agoOne benefit of owning a lot is that we see the big players using self driving tractors, bigger machines, etc. The point was that farming has consolidated over and over during the past 100 or so years. The point was that "no one asked farmer to do less work", but now you need fewer farmers to do it. That means those jobs need to go somewhere. That's going to be true of the jobs supplemented by AI - they aren't going away, but you'll need fewer and they will likely be concentrated with the big players.
- samstave 2y agoIf you boil to the essence; AI will reveal true desire, passion, resolve in any cluster of conscience. Meaning... either an individual or group or organization will thrive... (and thats it) (but the good, bad and ugly... at min it is the litmus of our current time)
- bluefirebrand 2y ago> No one asked farmers to do less work after tractors were invented I'm so tired of this sort of take because it isn't the whole picture Yes, an individual farmer still works just as many hours. Thanks to modern equipment they accomplish much more and can manage much larger properties As a result there are fewer farmers "No one asked farmers to do less work" isn't the problem The problem is that there are less farmers and we don't know what to do with the former farmers that we don't need anymore
- Animats 2y ago> The problem is that there are less farmers and we don't know what to do with the former farmers that we don't need anymore The US is way past that point, being down to under 2% farmers. China is mostly past that point, at 17% farmers as of 2017 and dropping. India is being hit hard by that, with 43% farmers. Their farmers are fighting farm mechanization.
- bluefirebrand 2y agoKeep in mind we're not actually talking about farmers right now We are talking about every industry that will have "productivity increases" due to AI tools Which it seems might be every industry It sure seems like we might be looking at a massive "productivity gain" across a ton of industries that is going to leave a whole shitload on people unemployed and franky I'm a little worried about what that is going to mean
- danaris 2y ago...And also leave the people who own companies that see those "productivity gains" massively richer, explicitly at the expense of the people who are now unemployed. We are seeing in real time right now what happens when inequality grows too stark. The people at the top abuse their disproportionate financial power to capture the government, and then start ensuring that the government can never threaten their economic dominance, regardless of the consequences for the 90% of people who do not share in it. There are a number of potential solutions to this. Many of them involve violence. Among the least violent are various forms of UBI.
- jclulow 2y ago"When I was a child, researching a new topic meant walking to the local library with a list of subjects, an effort that could consume half a day. Back then, knowledge wasn’t cheap or easily accessible." It was literally a free library, open to every member of the public.
- giantg2 2y agoYou're forgetting opportunity cost.
- SoftTalker 2y agoAlso that the child who spent half a day at the library researching a subject probably learned something. Having an AI simply do all that for you teaches you nothing.
- noobermin 2y agoI read up till the "realisation moment" of something he could have easily found by using a notepad and some google searches. No, that wouldn't take weeks, it would likely take the same 2 to 3 hours that they felt "exhausted by" typing things into a textbox and reading.
- pitched 2y agoKnowing what question to ask is always the hardest part of research. Getting there take a bit of creativity and it’s hard to compare one creative process with another. It can be very beneficial to swap between them when you get stuck though. Knowing that there is this Google alternative that produces similar results in similar times is a boon.
- champdebloom 2y agoSomeone recently tweeted that we use so much software because we’re now expected to do more work than is reasonably to be expected of humans and I’d have to agree. There’s too much information to manage and too many tasks to juggle to keep up without good tools. AI just extends the range of what a person can take on.
- bruce511 2y agoAI is a big change, which will permeate life. This kind of change can be scary. Stories trying to predict how things will change is both meaningless and also thought provoking. History is full of big changes. We've all grown up with grandma's stories of indoor plumbing or electricity coming, or TV or whatever. Many of us now would sound insane describing a rotary dial phone to our grandkids. So yeah, change is coming, but to be fair it's always been here. And the effects of the change can be surprising or predictable. But we'll figure it out as we go. When I went to school there were no mobile phones. Computers at home were very niche. There was no internet. No email. Crumbs, when away from home we'd write, you know, letters! Being a typist was a job. Secretaries took dictation and wrote in shorthand. If we wanted a meeting we got together in the same room. Will AI change things? Surely it will. Welcome to my world.
- onemoresoop 2y agoIm not worried with AI as much as who will be controlling it. It could be a powerful tool for the wealthy to get wealthier and supress discontent if they’re the ones who leverage it. Yeah, of course nobody knows how things will eventually turn out but we ought to keep a tab on it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bruce511 2y agoSo you mean like just about every other change ever?
- onemoresoop 2y agoSome changes are small, AI is a big one and
- runako 2y agoThe author non-ironically cites Klarna's year-old announcement around their pivot to letting AI do their customer support. Unmentioned is Klarna's announcement[1] from last month, after a full year the AI-first support, where they realize that people are the secret ingredient. There's definitely some "there" there, but there is also a reason nobody is replacing their most expensive layer of staff (senior management) with much cheaper AIs. 1 - https://www.conversationalainews.com/klarnas-ceo-just-had-an-epiphany-about-ai-and-human-support/ https://www.conversationalainews.com/klarnas-ceo-just-had-an...
- daveFNbuck 2y agoWhy do you think senior managers would replace themselves if they could? Given the choice between saving a company and giving a senior manager slightly more money or power, the senior manager will always win.
- noosphr 2y agoThe ultimate authority in any public company is the board. The majority of employees will never have to think about it, but everyone from the CEO down is ultimately hired at their discretion. To see how things normally operate read up on the OpenAI drama. If Sam Altman wasn't as politically savvy as he was the board would have fired him in a Friday announcement and by Monday a new CEO would have been in charge.
- xyzzy123 2y agoEven the board can be replaced.
- danaris 2y agoAnd boards are largely made up of senior management of other companies, scratching each other's backs. If it ever became clear that an LLM or other AI of some sort could genuinely replace senior management, I guarantee you'd see two things: 1) The price for access to that level of AI (assuming it wasn't possible with an open model on commodity hardware, which seems like a safe assumption for the foreseeable future) would quickly rise to be merely competitive with the cost of hiring senior management. 2) Boards would (nearly) all quickly agree that the human factor is very important, and regardless of what statistics you might have seen on the decisions made by these AIs in completely fabricated scenarios, or even a few _obviously_ rigged "real-life tests", there's no way these so-called "AIs" could ever really replace a human where it matters (ie, at the senior management level).
- hapless 2y agoAzeem Azhar never has to worry about employment in an AI-obsessed world -- no executive worth his salt will ever be satisfied with an AI-based lickspittle. You need the genuine human article for that.
- keybored 2y ago> One surprising feature about all this tech is that I crunch through more work, more quickly than before — with a startling and happy result that I spend less time in front of a screen than I have in years. I sit back in my chair with my vending machine cocoa. The 100K word report is done. Five years ago it would have been a 20K report. But still my AI assistants helped me get this work done in half the time that the 20K report would have taken. The research justifying the narrative that AI will free up time instead of causing more work to fill up the time (if it works; if not it doesn’t matter) is done. Meaning I can take the rest of the day off. Tomorrow I have 2M words to research. Five years ago that would have been 300K. But my AI assistants will summarize it for me. Meaning it still only will take half the time.
- luccasiau 2y agoIt's a little amusing to me that we ended up in a loop of (i) write bullet points, (ii) ask AI to expand bullet points into a long text, (iii) reader gets long text, (iv) reader uses AI to condense the long text into bullet points
- rriley 2y agoThe article assumes the future of work will remain digital, but AI won’t just change how we work, it will orchestrate everything transparently in the background, eliminating the need for digital workflows and automating knowledge work entirely. The real economic shift will be toward non-digital, real-world human experiences, things AI cannot replicate, like hands-on service, emotional connection, and physical interaction, making them the most valuable assets in the AI-driven era.
- analog31 2y agoA younger engineer at a place where I worked observed: "All of our processes are held together by human glue." This was after he discovered that there were individual people within the organization who possessed exclusive knowledge about how the business's products and processes worked, and even of who those people were. This is despite the fact that the organization has clear procedures for every operation. I think it was John Gall who pointed out that all sufficiently complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time, meaning that some of the controls have been bypassed, or are being operated manually. Because the automatic controls operate invisibly, the only visible work is that of humans overriding the manual controls, which will always seem chaotic and inefficient. In fact this could already be the status quo today in many organizations such as bureaucracies. If this remains the case, then the AI-orchestrated workplace of tomorrow will look like the highly computer orchestrated workplace of today, with the computers operating invisibly in the background, and humans manually correcting the errors. To overcome this stage in our development as a civilization, the controls don't just have to be automatic, but error-proof.
- noosphr 2y agoAll the names and places have been changed to protect the guilty: When I was a young data engineer in 2014 at a very large telco in Canada the real time resource allocation of network bandwidth would work flawlessly from 6am to 11pm, but would have a random panic every day at 11.25 pm, where the cluster would enter a degraded mode until just after 6am the next day. This was very weird, but I trace the issue to a bunch of NFS drives which started being used after 11pm. We figured some job somewhere needed to run then and there was nothing to do about it but migrate the hardware. After a couple of months, a lot of planning and tens of millions we moved the data from those drives to some shiny new beefy servers and the problems went away. Years later I worked with someone else from that telco. Turns out he was in a team that did nothing but monitor the allocation of jobs on the compute cluster in real time and decide which machine each job ended up on. Their work hours were from 6am to 11pm.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoFor most of history, hiring a dozen PhDs meant a massive budget and months of lead time. Today, a few keystrokes in a chatbot summon that brainpower in seconds. Lol. Poor Azeem Azhar who is a Freelance Contributor.
- digitalnomd 2y agoThe author basically tries to argue that not only corporate talent with low pay (e.g. customer service), but high impact talent pools will go from being scarce to being replaced by AI agents (e.g. PhD level researchers discovering new pharmaceuticals). I don't think this has played out thus far. It still takes a qualified individual to ask the right questions of an LLM or Agent and then refine the results. What I do agree with is that it's made talented individuals more productive, but that's less eye catching than claiming that it will cause companies to entirely restructure because educated labor will be replaced by LLMs.
- EigenLord 2y agoI'm of two minds about all this. As someone who has become obsessed with seeing what these models are capable of, I can confirm that they can be used to achieve unprecedented things. But you get out what you put in. The most interesting results of these models are human-AI collaborations. If the "knowledge economy" just becomes bots passing generated outputs back and forth between each other, I think we're in for a rude awakening. I can think of many AI generated outputs, perhaps with many quality suggestions, that I skimmed over or didn't fully appreciate. Did the sum of knowledge increase in the world? No, because knowledge has to be received by a mind. It's only the ones that I engaged with, influenced and ultimately made my own, that left an impression and added to the sum of knowledge in the world, often though a kind of alchemy of me and the model interacted in a "mind-meld" greater than the sum of its parts. Human minds-minds in general, which these models don't have-stand for something. They're the glue that stitches things together, that makes important decisions and judgement calls, that forms the integration point where everything comes together. We can't remove that from the equation without losing something in return. I've also caught myself making embarrassingly lazy queries for coding problems that would have taken me 10 minutes to fix, but I prompt for them anyways because I've already been through that song and dance and want those 10 minutes back. If I kept doing that, if that was all I ever did, my brain would wither to the size of a walnut. I genuinely worry how LLMs are going to deprive an entire generation of youths of the use of their minds.