Technology

It’s not going to be a convenient excuse. There are swaths of C-Suites who genuinely believe they can replace their workforce with ai.

They’re not correct but that won’t stop them from trying.

My dad accidentally bought 2 chargers a few weeks ago. He tried refunding it, and what do you know, the company fired their support staff and replaced them with chat bot AIs. Anyway, the AI looked at his order and helpfully told him he had already returned the product and it had already been refunded so there was nothing left to do.

It kept doing this to him every time he tried to return the second charger, and there wasn't any other way to contact them on their site, so he ended-up leaving a 1-star review on their site complaining about the issue. Then an actual person contacted him to get it sorted-out.

This whole AI trend is so fucking stupid.

still need someone knowledgeable in the loop to describe the things it needs to do, and handle exceptions

And any engineer or technician will tell you, exceptions are 80% of their job.

"You're 100% right, you should promote me so I can train more people to be able to run things. Things falling apart whenever someone goes away is a key sign of a bad leader, not a good one. I think I've demonstrated that I've managed this department into where it can function smoothly without me needing to put full time into it and I'd do well with an opportunity to move some other things in the company forward."

"Hey, unrelated question, what's your boss's contact info?"

The issue is that one specialist can oversee how many AI job holders? How many jobs are we getting rid of that will supposedly be bolstered by the new jobs created in the fields of manufacturing and AI hosting/training?

Now how many of those jobs have or will actually materialize?

That's my issue, it'll just get placed on IT's shoulders without any additional support.

Ha that's just my regular code.

they've already trained on stack overflow, if you want an AI that recommends a complete change of technology stack in preference to solving the problem at hand.

I don't know if it can also insult you for wanting to solve the problem?

Ya what’s your point? Are you saying that the invention of computers didn’t displace a lot of jobs?

If you’re saying that AI is going to disrupt the market and displace a large number of jobs just like computers did then you’re 100% right.

Nothing is finite. AI isn’t going to be the first or last thing to shake up the world.

Eventually your skills are going to become less valued and you’ll have no choice but to retool. Either you figure out how to retool or you get left behind.

The latest iteration of this kind of technology is always called AI until the next iteration comes along.

The Segway was sold at the time as a "revolution in transportation". Ditto for the Hyperloop, by the way.

Then there's the Theranos' "revolutionary" Tech as mentioned in the article.

And don't get me started on how Pets.com (which famously went bust in the .Net Crash) was also revolutionary.

There are way more situations of Tech snakeoil being peddled to the masses as "revolutionary" than there are of trully revolutionary Tech being sold as such (I can only think of 3 trully revolutionary Technologies in the last half a century: the Personal Computer, the Internet and Smartphones, and one of those was a surprise revolution whilst another was only hyped after it was actually starting to show revolutionary results, and only smartphones were hyped from the start), so the logical default position for anybody but the snakeoil salesmen trying to swindle the masses is to suspect of tall tales in Tech, the taller the tale the greater the suspicion.

(I keenly remember the early days of the Internet, and it was incredibly low-key compared to the present day hype-spectables for bullshit that never even works).

Believing such claims by default is either incredibly naive or the product of a vested financial interest in getting people to put money into it.

it's basically just a calculator but with words. you can't just hire a calculator even tho it knows a lot of math

AI can't replace a person just yet, but it can easily augment a persons output so only a quarter as many workers are needed. Yes, this has happened throughout history, but AI is poised to displace workers across almost every industry.

For software, it's like working with an intern who's really good at searching StackOverflow.

But all the self checkouts around me have been ripped out and replaced with cashiers again. For some reason having someone paid 30 cents over minimum wage watching a bunch of people shop on the honor system with a bunch of finicky machines didn't work.

What's your job

My job isn't bullshit, but management has no concept of the true amount of time it takes to do my job. Depending on projects I can go from 2 hours of work a week up to around 60 hours of work a week. With the majority of weeks being under 40 hours. And yet management somehow thinks that they're giving me 8 hours of work to do every day despite them regularly being the blocker to new work.

Are we actually having that discussion? All I see is people concerned about being replaced by AI asking to put constraints on it and people wanting to replace their employees with AI ignoring them. No one will get UBI or anything like it until the latter group is more concerned about a mob with pitchforks showing up at their door than they are with giving their stock price a small bump.