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mozz @mbin.grits.dev

"We're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job." (Pl

64 comments

  • Another idiot writer missing how AI works... along with every other automation and productivity increase.

    I literally automate jobs for a living.

    My job isn't to eliminate the role of every staff member in a department, it's to take the headcount from 40 to 20 while having the remaining 20 be able to produce the same results. I've successfully done this dozens of times in my careers, and generative AI is now just another tool we can use to get that number down a little bit lower or more easily than we could before.

    Will I be able to take a unit of 2 people down to 0 people? No, I've never seen a process where I could eliminate every human.

    • Cory Doctorow is an idiot writer? Do you know of him and you've reached this conclusion, or you don't know who he is and just throwing shade?

      I am curious. How much follow-up do you do after your automations 1 year later to see how the profit and loss picture of the department has worked out after your work is done?

      (Not that that's the point; I think you'll get very little sympathy here for "I help the already-rich to keep more of the productive output of the world and make sure workers keep less" even if you can make an argument that you can do it effectively.)

    • I sat in a room of probably 400 engineers last spring and they all laughed and jeered when the presenter asked if AI could replace them. With the right framework and dataset, ML almost certainly could replace about 2/3 of the people there; I know the work they do (I'm one of them) and the bulk of my time is spent recreating documentation using 2-3 computer programs to facilitate calculations and looking up and applying manufacturer's data to the situation. Mine is an industry of high repeatability and the human judgement part is, at most, 10% of the job.

      Here's the real problem. The people who will be fully automatable are those with less than 10 years experience. They're the ones doing the day to day layout and design, and their work is monitored, guided, and checked by an experienced senior engineer to catch their mistakes. Replacing all of those people with AI will save a ton of money, right up until all of the senior engineers retire. In a system which maximizes corporate/partner profit, that will come at the expense of training the future senior engineers until, at some point, there won't be any (/enough), and yet there will still be a substantial fraction of oversight that will be needed. Unfortunately, ML is based on human learning and replacing the "learning" stage of human practitioner with machines is going to eventually create a gap in qualified human oversight. That may not matter too much for marketing art departments, but for structural engineers it's going to result in a safety or reliability issue for society as a whole. And since failures in my profession only occur in marginal situations (high loads - wind, snow, rain, mass gatherings) my suspicion is that it will be decades before we really find out that we've been whistling through the graveyard.

      • Yeah. This is something that to me isn't getting enough attention in the whole conversation. I'm trying to get myself up to speed on how to code effectively with AI tools, but I feel like understanding the code at a deep level is required in order to be able to do that effectively.

        In the future, I think the "earning" that gives you that type of knowledge won't be something that people are forced to go through anymore, because AI can do the simple stuff for them, and so the inevitable result is that very few people will be able to do more than rely on the AI tools to either get it right or not, because they don't understand the underlying systems. I'm honestly not sure what future is in store a couple generations from now other than most people being forced to trust the AI (whatever its capabilities or incapabilities are at that point). That doesn't sound like a good scenario.

      • that will come at the expense of training the future senior engineers until, at some point, there won't be any (/enough)

        Anything a human can be trained to do, a neural network can be trained to do.

        Yes, there will be a lack of trained humans for those positions... but spinning up enough "senior engineers" will be as easy as moving a slider on a cloud computing interface... or remote API... done by whichever NN comes to replace the people from HR.

        ML is based on human learning and replacing the "learning" stage of human practitioner with machines is going to eventually create a gap in qualified human oversight

        Cue in the humanoid robots.

        Better yet: outsource the creation of "qualified oversight", and just download/subscribe to some when needed.

    • He has literal examples of head count increasing due to this use of ai, he's not the idiot here.

    • As someone who works for a very large company, on a team with around 500 people around the world, this is what concerns me. Our team will not be 500 people in a few years, and if it is, it's because usage of our product has grown substantially. We are buying heavily into AI, and yet people are buying it when our leadership teams claim it will not impact jobs.

      Will I be able to take a unit of 2 people down to 0 people? No, I’ve never seen a process where I could eliminate every human.

      Socially speaking, this is also very concerning to me. I'm afraid that implementation of AI will be yet another thing that makes it difficult for smaller businesses to compete in a global marketplace. Yes, a tech-minded company can leverage a smaller head count into more capabilities, but this typically requires more expensive and limiting turnkey solutions, or major investment into developers of a customized solution.

      • I honestly have no idea what the solution is. To me the issue is that with technology where it is, only about 20% of us actually have to do any work to keep all the wheels turning and provide for everyone. So far, in the western world, the solution has been to occupy people with increasingly-bullshit jobs (and, for some reason, not giving a lot of people who do the actual work enough to live on), but as technology keeps getting more and more powerful we're more and more being faced with the limits of "you have to work to live" as a way to set things up.

  • In that case, the whole tech industry should, in solidarity, refuse to look for work and let the tech companies that just launched major layoffs feel the foolishness of their actions. Those tech workers need to wait long enough to allow Google, MSFT, Meta, Apple, etc. suffer the consequences of automation. If they managed this, when they finally do come crawling back, tech workers can get fat raises using this solidarity and collective action.

    • Pro tip: you can actually get organized in a union and strike just to get more money, no need for AI or getting fired. CEOs hate this trick!

      • tip: you can actually get organized in a union and strike just to get more money, no need for AI or getting fired. CEOs hate this trick!

        ✊🏼

    • They’d need to unionize first.

      It’s expensive to live in tech communities. All the workers would need to move their families to somewhere more affordable and demand to work from home, on top of everything else, and they’d need to have enough savings to afford that. Right now, tech workers tend to carry debt, which is the bane of collective action.

      • Sort of. But people in society CAN act in solidarity. It's obviously unlikely (something tech CEO's calculated in these layoffs).

        Obviously, capitalist exceptionalism is going to cause them not to do this. No one wants to loan their neighbor some money to weather a strike that WILL eventually lift ALL BOATS because of the whole "fuck you, got mine" vibe of EVERYONE in cutthroat capitalist societies. If I had the money, I'd certainly take part in this kind of collective action...and I'd also argue that many tech workers can because they were paid INCREDIBLY well in comparison to most trades....but you and I know they won't.

        I'm a member of a stagehand union that will NEED to strike during the summer (our busiest season) in order to gain some ground back from what price gouging, austerity, and inflation has taken from us. I can easily guess how likely the membership will be to endorse a strike when we will have been out of work for more than a year when negotiations start. That doesn't make what I said less true; just about as unlikely as a third power coming to power in the United States two party electoral system.

64 comments