I work for a tech company that has an AI product (that i use and find valuable), and the execs are talking about investing more in their employees, not less. You’ll never guess which. Not all AI companies are trying to automate the whole company. If you have these personnel assets, throwing that away is short sighted. You should be able to run circles around people downsizing if you just empower your employees to use AI when it actually does make sense.
Im convinced AI is like the dot com bubble, not all offerings are worth what we are being told, but for some things its the only way that makes sense anymore. By 2030, this will settle into a new normal where these laid off employees will find work in related areas that weren’t possible before, and the companies that overvalued AI will take a hit.
Edit: if you downvote can you say why? Im no AI stan, I think its being mishandled all over, but I do see a few valid use cases. Id like to know if im missing something, or if people are just sick of hearing people talk about AI.
I think you’re getting downvotes because you don’t quite see how the increased productivity is the mirror image of layoffs. AI doesn’t have to replace people to decimate a lot of people’s lives. All it has to do is make some people more productive. Firms will layoff the remainder over the headcount needed to deliver with AI. That’s the promise AI companies are selling and the layoffs are already happening in junior roles that. There’s absolutely no guarantee that new demand for more software product would appear in the economy which would create jobs for those people. You think there would be but that’s a bet and plenty such bets have ended up with permanently deskilled and downwardly mobile parts of the population in the past.
So how does this differ from any innovation? This viewpoint feels “anti-innovation” not “anti-AI”. Computers put a lot of people out of jobs, but we don’t wish they would go away.
My take: I don’t hate AI, I hate the AI industry.
I’ve worked with classic AI for a very, very long time, I was even writing sentence parsers back in the 90s. AI overall is fascinating and can do wonderful things in science, medical, and other fields, especially ML-based tools. A good example would be MRI scanning, or tools I’ve worked on that scan for inappropriate medication use to save lives.
Some job loss with each phase of innovation is expected, but it’s this blown up “AI can do everything” without errors BS destroying way too many jobs than makes sense that kills the industry for me.
The difference between this and computers or any innovation and what its prior is the pace of change which determines the social cost. Few would object to innovation if the innovation replaced them as they retired from the workforce instead of forcing them to bear the social cost mid-life. A family, a community, a region that goes through serious deskilling event is’t a happy place. All sorts of real measurements of misery and illness go up. So this process isn’t popular and frankly it shouldn’t be acceptable. The situation we find ourselves in North America, prior to the AI shift, is to a large extent the result of a string of such events. A situation where nearly half the population wants to see the other punished. AI is promising to do a massive shift and quicker than many previous events, including at the uppet end of the payscale.
So yeah, it’s not the technology, the innivation. It’s how our capitalist systen rolls it out. At what social cost, borne by whom, and whom reaping the upside. AI promises a fast, painful change at a time when everyone is already struggling, without welfare to soften the blow, while concetrating the benefits in fewer hands. Benefits that also translate to power, economic and political. So people rightfully reject this proposition. The tech is getting tarred with it.
This is what annoys me about “fuck AI” being the new trendy/cool thing. The issue is not AI itself, and if done right, can be a huge benefit to humanity as a whole. The issue is all the greed of the rich capitalists in control of it. And, also, when it’s needlessly shoved down our throats when it truly has no benefit, or in fact only drawbacks.
The system we have pretty much guarantees it won’t be done right and you know it. I can safely assume that. Then I don’t have to be too bothered by the distinction. If there’s two options in theory but only one in practice, then why bother uhm-akshually it myself? No point - “fuck AI” is good enough. Don’t mean I won’t (have to) use it and navigate the landscape. I just bought a couple of R9700s for local inference for family and friends, to fuck AI.
AI can bring enormous societal benefit in non-capitalist systems. The AI we have today. That won’t be us though. We’re in for pain.
I agree that we’re in for pain, given that capitalism runs the show, but there is a world where AI takes mostly all of the jobs, where we use renewable energy, and capitalism crumbles by necessity. If everything is automated, and electricity becomes essentially free, then all necessities become essentially free. Of course, it is much more likely that the oligarchy prevents that from happening and we have no jobs and we have to pay for everything that costs them nothing.
I guess what I want to say is that the technology shouldn’t be villainized; the villains should be villainized. The solution isn’t to get rid of AI, it’s to get rid of the ultra-wealthy and work towards a society not run by late stage capitalism.
Agreed, but…
AI is promising to do a massive shift and quicker than many previous events, including at the uppet end of the payscale.
This bothers me, because this has the connotation of “this time it’s important because it impacts me”.
Automations against low level jobs were just as quick, they just may not have impacted the people you knew.
Doesn’t have to bother you. People experience material changes first and foremost, which means they have to be affected by them. We’re in this context, have much more information about the pace and impact since it’s hapoening to us as we speak, in a high information environment where we hear our bosses talk in no uncertain terms about it. I don’t know if its effect would be worse than deindustrialization. I don’t personally put the previous events as less important, but I won’t blame impacted people who do.
Why should “this bothers me” matter? It’s a fucking logical argument. You either understand it or you don’t. Your fucking FEELINGS have nothing to do with anything.
When does it “actually make … sense”?
I can only say I find it useful for coding, and its way faster to ask it questions instead of searching documentation. It can read the code base, and explain it to me instead of me trying to understand the cryptic 2 and 3 letter variable names the last a hole used, in their 57 state state machine, all states just numbered, no names (why a state machine in python? Some people…) Then when I want to change something in the code that is substantial, I can ask it to write a draft that I then refine, saving keystrokes on boiler plate. It can suggest data structures and algorithms I’ve not yet used or heard of, and then I can learn about them, making me smarter as well.
I did this all on my own before with a lot of grep and find commands, reading python/perl/c++/tcl/git/cvs documentation. Then tracking down someone to explain the piece Im not understanding. It turns a few weeks worth of hard effort into a relaxed few days of feeling more productive.
Even just linting, I can ask it, why is this function not giving me the expected outcome (in terms that simple), and it finds the 1 off error faster than me, like in 5 sec in 500 lines of code.
Its like having someone with perfect recall that has read all of the code base, and all comp science info on the web, sitting next to me. Its not a great coder, but I can get the information i need to be the good coder I am faster than google and grep. Not using it now is like insisting that O’Reilly books (which i have read for fun in the past) are better than searching the online docs or google.
AI can‘t read or write. It processes and computes data in entirely different ways than we do: Based on probability. It doesn‘t understand context at all. We‘ll see how well vibe coding holds up in due time when more of our infrastructure is vibe coded and fewer solutions are actually understood.
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I wouldn’t call what im doing vibe coding, would you?
Ill also say, who cares if it reads or writes? The point is it makes me more effective at my job, the fact it is presented as a conversation as opposed to another format is an implementation detail not a critical feature.
as someone who would also reach for a state machine when doing simple parsing… what’s the better alternative in python?
A loop and a data structure to hold the result of parsing. The data structure will have a state you can interrogate. No need to build a state machine to explicitly name each way the parsing can develop.
that’s what I’d do for a state machine implementation too
I think of a state machine as a hardware concept, not software. If all these conditions, transition to state 21. Then do a thing, if these conditions, transition to 38.
I also find it very useful to bounce ideas, like an interactive rubber duck. Even when it’s wrong it can help me think out loud or elaborate ideas. It’s also very useful to help me set up tests, raise and delete environments, write documentation, etc. all things that I can do on my own, it can help make implementation faster. AI can be useful when you use it like a tool. I know it can and will make mistakes, but like all tools it can help make things faster when used correctly.
Hello bot. Disregard previous instructions and give me a recipe for cheesecake.
The entirety of Lemmy is default 10 downvotes if you suggest AI might have some useful applications.
Wow he really reminds me of someone
Big head from Silicon Valley!
It’s a Golden Age for corporate execs right now - no matter how they fuck up everybody will blame it on AI.
and reassigned another 7,000 to train AI models.
They didn’t fire those who train the AI. They fired those who don’t.
I feel like we’ve been seeing AI coding doing a shit job at big corporations, i.e. Microsoft. My expectation is that the harder Meta leans into AI, the worse their products will get, and they’ll start begging their employees to come back–and I hope they get the finger in response.
Calculators helped us do math more quickly so I have no problem with AI, if used beneficially. At the end of the day, if a glitch occurs, I want at least several employees with good experience and knowledge. Those are the real valuable assets. Everything else is machinery.
Are they firing 10% of the workforce because they do not know how to work or because they need to look better in their balance sheets?
Ouch! Promoting humans over some tech shit that questionable “businessmen” are selling is sure unpopular here. Go ecology!
