4 ms·

It's rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and

by nilkn 1y ago

It's rarely (maybe never) a direct one-to-one elimination of jobs. Most attempts to replace a single complete human job with an AI agent are not successful (and large companies, generally, aren't even attempting that). Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc.

tristor 1y ago
> Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc. My observation so far has been that executive leadership believes things that are not true about AI and starts doing the cost-cutting measures now, without any of the productivity gains expected/promised, which is actually leading to a net productivity loss from AI expectations based on hype rather than AI realities. When you lose out on team size, can't hire people for necessary roles (some exec teams now won't hire unless the role is AI related), and don't backfill attrition, you end up with an organization that can't get things done as quickly, and productivity suffers, because the miracle of AI has yet to manifest meaningfully anywhere.
visarga 1y ago
> the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization AI alone can't do that, even if you make the weakest link in the chain stronger, there are probably more weak links. In a complex system the speed is controlled by the weakest, most inefficient link in the chain. To make an organization more efficient they need to do much more than use AI. Maybe AI exposes other inefficiencies.
torginus 1y ago
I mean one of the services at work had a custom HTML dashboard. We eliminated it and replaced it with Grafana. I worked on both - my skillset went from coding pretty bar charts in SVG + Javascript to configuring Grafana, Dockerfiles and Terraform templates. There's very little overlap between the two, other than general geekiness, but thanks I'm still doing OK.
- patrick451 1y ago
  Seems like a bad decision. Grafana is awful compared to a bespoke solution.
  - torginus 1y ago
    I don't get the hate - Imo it's one of the better working tech products I've had the chance of using.
LeifCarrotson 1y ago
When my father joined an attorney's office as recently as the 80s, there was a whole team of people that worked with: Of course, there were the attorneys who actually argued the cases, but also legal assistants who helped create various briefs, secretaries who took dictation (with a typewriter, of course) to write those documents, receptionists who managed the attorney's schedules and handled memos and mail, filing clerks who helped keep and retrieve the many documents the office generated and demanded in a giant filing room (my favorite part of visiting as a kid: row after row of rolling shelves, with crank handles to put the walkways where they were needed to access a particular file), librarians who managed a huge card catalog and collection of legal books and acquired those that were not in the collection as needed... it was not a small team. When he retired a few years ago, most of that was gone. The attorneys and paralegals were still required, there was a single receptionist for the whole office (who also did accounting) instead of about one for each attorney, and they'd added an IT person... but between Outlook and Microsoft Word and LexisNexis and the fileserver, all of those jobs working with paper were basically gone. They managed their own schedules (in digital Outlook calendars, of course), answered their own (cellular) phones, searched for documents with the computers, digitally typeset their own documents, and so on. I'm an engineer working in industrial automation, and see the same thing: the expensive part of the cell isn't the $250k CNC or the $50k 6-axis robots or the $1M custom integration, those can be amortized and depreciated over a couple years, it's the ongoing costs of salaries and benefits for the dozen humans who are working in that zone. If you can build a bowl screw feeder and torque driver so that instead of operating an impact driver to put each individual screw in each individual part, you simply dump a box of screws in the hopper once an hour, and do that for most of the tasks... you can turn a 12-person work area into a machine that a single person can start, tune, load, unload, and clean. The same sort of thing is going to happen - in our lifetimes - to all kinds of jobs.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  It already happened to all kinds of jobs. I recall the mine water pump had a boy run up and down a ladder opening and closing steam valves to make the piston go up and down. The boy eventually rigged up a stick to use the motion of the piston to automatically open and close the valves. Then he went to sleep while the stick did his job. Hence the invention of the steam engine.

by nilkn 1y ago

tristor 1y ago

> Rather, the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization that results in a smaller headcount need over time as its final net effect. In practice, this materializes as backfills not approved as natural attrition occurs, hiring pipelines thinned out with existing team member workloads increased, management layers pruned, teams merged (then streamlined), etc. My observation so far has been that executive leadership believes things that are not true about AI and starts doing the cost-cutting measures now, without any of the productivity gains expected/promised, which is actually leading to a net productivity loss from AI expectations based on hype rather than AI realities. When you lose out on team size, can't hire people for necessary roles (some exec teams now won't hire unless the role is AI related), and don't backfill attrition, you end up with an organization that can't get things done as quickly, and productivity suffers, because the miracle of AI has yet to manifest meaningfully anywhere.

visarga 1y ago

> the phenomenon is more like a diffuse productivity gain across a large team or organization AI alone can't do that, even if you make the weakest link in the chain stronger, there are probably more weak links. In a complex system the speed is controlled by the weakest, most inefficient link in the chain. To make an organization more efficient they need to do much more than use AI. Maybe AI exposes other inefficiencies.

torginus 1y ago

I mean one of the services at work had a custom HTML dashboard. We eliminated it and replaced it with Grafana. I worked on both - my skillset went from coding pretty bar charts in SVG + Javascript to configuring Grafana, Dockerfiles and Terraform templates. There's very little overlap between the two, other than general geekiness, but thanks I'm still doing OK.

patrick451 1y ago
Seems like a bad decision. Grafana is awful compared to a bespoke solution.
- torginus 1y ago
  I don't get the hate - Imo it's one of the better working tech products I've had the chance of using.

LeifCarrotson 1y ago

When my father joined an attorney's office as recently as the 80s, there was a whole team of people that worked with: Of course, there were the attorneys who actually argued the cases, but also legal assistants who helped create various briefs, secretaries who took dictation (with a typewriter, of course) to write those documents, receptionists who managed the attorney's schedules and handled memos and mail, filing clerks who helped keep and retrieve the many documents the office generated and demanded in a giant filing room (my favorite part of visiting as a kid: row after row of rolling shelves, with crank handles to put the walkways where they were needed to access a particular file), librarians who managed a huge card catalog and collection of legal books and acquired those that were not in the collection as needed... it was not a small team. When he retired a few years ago, most of that was gone. The attorneys and paralegals were still required, there was a single receptionist for the whole office (who also did accounting) instead of about one for each attorney, and they'd added an IT person... but between Outlook and Microsoft Word and LexisNexis and the fileserver, all of those jobs working with paper were basically gone. They managed their own schedules (in digital Outlook calendars, of course), answered their own (cellular) phones, searched for documents with the computers, digitally typeset their own documents, and so on. I'm an engineer working in industrial automation, and see the same thing: the expensive part of the cell isn't the $250k CNC or the $50k 6-axis robots or the $1M custom integration, those can be amortized and depreciated over a couple years, it's the ongoing costs of salaries and benefits for the dozen humans who are working in that zone. If you can build a bowl screw feeder and torque driver so that instead of operating an impact driver to put each individual screw in each individual part, you simply dump a box of screws in the hopper once an hour, and do that for most of the tasks... you can turn a 12-person work area into a machine that a single person can start, tune, load, unload, and clean. The same sort of thing is going to happen - in our lifetimes - to all kinds of jobs.

WalterBright 1y ago
It already happened to all kinds of jobs. I recall the mine water pump had a boy run up and down a ladder opening and closing steam valves to make the piston go up and down. The boy eventually rigged up a stick to use the motion of the piston to automatically open and close the valves. Then he went to sleep while the stick did his job. Hence the invention of the steam engine.