5 ms·

A good model for understanding what happens to people as they delegate tasks to AI is to think about what happens to managers who delegate tasks to their subord

• causal 2y ago
  I think this is a really good analogy. Delegating problems to others is nothing novel or new to human experience. Perhaps the biggest difference is the lack of feedback AI gives that humans can give: a subordinate can communicate if they feel like their manager is being too hands off. AI never questions management style.
  • natebc 2y ago
    It's also like trying to manage the most prolific bullshit artist the world has ever produced.
• mattgreenrocks 2y ago
  I think this is the primary reason I have difficulty with management: my brain simply doesn't really work out (in the fitness sense) in the cognitive way it is used to, but instead has to track all sorts of problems, many of which are emotional/political. Those problems are often emotional/political and thus not really something I can readily solve by thinking real hard about things.
  • farts_mckensy 2y ago
    That's what the money's for!
• farts_mckensy 2y ago
  What if you use it to handle boring BS work you don't care about and focus on what you actually want to do? I offload my work tasks to GPT and do other stuff during work hours. Play with my dog. Stretch. Paint. Work on other creative projects. I don't give a fuck about work as long as they keep sending me a paycheck. Oh no! My brain is going to atrophy from not manually synthesizing info from this report that no one reads anyway.
  • balamatom 2y ago
    real
  • gotoeleven 2y ago
    Startup idea: Farts_Mckensyly Do all the work Farts_Mckensy does at half the price using AI.
    • farts_mckensy 2y ago
      I assure you, it wouldn't be very lucrative.
• mullingitover 2y ago
  > Ie. most managers can't help their team find a hard bug that is causing a massive outage. Strategy vs tactics. Managers aren't there to teach their reports skills, they hire them because they already have them. They're there to set priorities and overall direction.
  • BeetleB 2y ago
    He's not disputing that. The difference, though, is that if you're using LLMs as code assistants, your skills will atrophy the way the manager's skills will, but you are still a SW engineer. While the manager doesn't need those skills, you still do.
    • mullingitover 2y ago
      LLMs and agents are going to make labels like 'sw engineer', 'qa tester', marketer, CFO, and CEO very squishy. I think in the coming decade if you put yourself in a box and do a specialized task, and nothing more, you'll have a bad time. This is going to be an era where strategy is far more important than tactics.
      • Applejinx 2y ago
        This assumes all specialized tasks are fungible. I can't disagree more strongly. If you're a specialized person with expertise and ability to perform outside the knowledge of all possible interns because you're developing something novel and not covered by standard materials, you'll be hard to compete with using AI because AI will direct people to standardized methods. Granted, if you do a specialized task that is taught in schools and that anyone can do, that's trouble. But that's not tactics either, that's clock-punching. That's replaceable. You can talk 'strategy' all you like but if you're only exploiting the AI's ability to do what people already know, that's another box to be stuck in.
        • mullingitover 2y ago
          I think we're in agreement then, I'm saying the specialists of this stripe: > if you do a specialized task that is taught in schools are in trouble, and so are you. > perform outside the knowledge of all possible interns This is the strategic level thinking I'm referring to. Frankly this role might not be safe either, but if that's the case then we're probably headed for fully automated luxury communism no matter what we do.
• BeetleB 2y ago
  Indeed. I started using Sonnet for coding only about a month ago. It's been great in that I've finally written scripts I had floating around my brain for years, and very rapidly. But the feeling of skill atrophy is very real. The other day I needed to write a function that recursively traverses a Python dictionary, making modifications along the way. It's the perfect task to give an LLM. I can easily see that if I always give this task to an LLM, a few years down the road I'll be really slow in writing it on my own, and will fail most coding interviews. Also, while there is a high in producing a lot in a short amount of time, there is no feeling of satisfaction that you get from programming. And debugging its bugs is as much fun as debugging your coworkers' bugs - except at least with the coworkers you can have a more intelligent conversation on what they were trying to do.
  • hosh 2y ago
    This is exactly why I still play Go, practice martial arts, archery and use the command line for my dev workflow. Those are all arguably less efficient and obsolete. The AlphaGo series can defeat the strongest human Go players and firearms are more effective than unarmed martial arts and archery. GUI is easier for most people than the command line. Yet, I practice all these to develop my mind and body. I don't have to be a world-class Go player to benefit from learning to play Go. This happens a lot in the natural world in ecosystems. For example, many people plant trees and add a drip system. The trees grow to depend on the drip system, and never stretch and develop their roots -- and the relationship they have with the soil microbiome. They make the trees prone to get knocked down when an unusually strong gust of wind come through.
    • MrMcCall 2y ago
      You might have my favorite profile page here, with the exception of DonHopkins. Just beautiful concepts, inspiring, and well-represented in this comment. Peace be with you, my friend.
    • BeetleB 2y ago
      > This is exactly why I still play Go, practice martial arts, archery and use the command line for my dev workflow. And this is what worries me. Pre-LLM, I'd get all my practice done during work hours. I fear that with LLMs, I'll need to do all this practice on my free time, effectively reducing my truly "free" time.
• balamatom 2y ago
  Fellow manager, it will do you good to realize that we are not in an "age of AI". Out there it's the age of disinformation.
• w10-1 2y ago
  This is a good analogy, and not just because of skills atrophy. Managers grow the skills needed for their organization. Their team affects them. A process-oriented team with quality/validation mindset has replaceable roles; the action is in the process. An expert team has people with tremendous skills and discretion doing what needs doing; the action is in selection and incentives. Managers adapt to their team requirements, in ways positive and negative: becoming rule-bound, privileging favorites, etc. With AI this might be a positive insofar as it forces people to state the issues clearly, identifying relevant context, constraints, objectives, etc. Agile benefitted software development by changing the granularity of delivery and planning -- essentially, helping people avoid getting lost in planning fantasies. Similarly, I believe that the winner of the AI-for-development race (copilot et al) will not just produce good code, but build good developers by driving them to state requirements clearly and simply. A good measure here is the number of iterations to complete code. An anti-pattern here, as with agile, is where planning devolves into exploring and exploring into incremental changes for no real benefit - polishing turds. Again, a good measure is the number of sessions to completion; too many and you know you don't know what you're doing, or the AI cannot grasp the trees for the forest.