2y ago

"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

"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." (Pluralistic) - Technology - Mbin

Technology @lemmy.zip

Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.zip

2y ago

pluralistic.net /2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/

Technology @beehaw.org

mozz @mbin.grits.dev

2y ago

pluralistic.net /2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/

48 comments

I couldn't have said it better myself. All of these companies firing people are doing it because they want to fire people. AI is just a convenient excuse. It's RTO all over again.
- 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.
  
  Break the AI session, and post the screenshots to Twitter.
  For example, get it to detail the ways the company screws over customers, or why it will become a great ally in the genocide yet to come.
  At minimum, you'll get your refund.
  
  Face it man, we haven’t been able to speak to anyone remotely useful for the last 10 years. They have scripts, and procedures.
  The job was deskilled years ago. Automation wont make it much worse.
  
  An AI like that might have some spicy exploits.
  If you convince a human to give you the password, that’s called social engineering. If you convince an AI send you free stuff, what kind of engineering is that?
- 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.
  
  The irony is that AI will probably be able to do the jobs of the c-suite before a lot of the jobs down the ladder.
- I feel like a large majority of AI problems are really just systemic economic problems below the surface. Not all, but most.
I just hired an employee who managed things as I was on a leave of absence and things went fine without me. Getting a little pushback from MY boss now because you know, this cheaper employee just did my job.
Of course, he did it for a portion of the year after I managed to complete 3 major projects early so he didn't have to deal with them and I left a month-by-month explanation of how to do everything he had to do. And the one problem that popped up went unresolved until I returned.
That is basically the situation with AI too. You still need someone knowledgeable in the loop to describe the things it needs to do, and handle exceptions.
- "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?"
- 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.
  
  I had to rewrite our entire scheduling system at work to use Outlook instead of Google Calendar. The guy who wrote the Google Calendar scheduling system made it so unmaintainable that it was faster to just rewrite the entire thing from scratch (1000+ line lambda function with almost 0 abstraction).
  At least 90% of what I wrote is just exception handling. There's ~15 different 4xx/5xx errors that can be returned for each endpoint, but only 1 or 2 200 responses.
- 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.
The thing about AI is, it makes a terrible scapegoat and absolutely doesn't give a shit if you fire it.
Hence, my job is safe for the foreseeable future.
rewind 40 years
replace ‘ai’ with ‘computers’
Exactly , and I mean exactly, the same thing was said back in the 80s
Edit: formatting
- 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.
- Well this isn’t quite true, automation and computers have replaced many jobs. They just haven’t been skilled labour.
  Now AI is catching up with skilled labour, whether it’s CNNs for loss prevention, LSTM/1DCNN for anomaly detection in Time Series (e.g. biosignal, finance) or more recently llms explaining and adapting code.
  In one way or another, that work, at least in part, would have been done by a person, even if it’s an intern for example.
- 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.
AI is the new outsourcing, and is even more problematic.
No kidding huh. I'm glad we're finally having the discussion about AI and what that means for employment and things like UBI, but this is far from actual AI.
- 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.
Don't get this mistaken with the fact that a lot of people know their job is bullshit. People like to sit there thinking 'an AI can't take my job' while at the same time thinking 'a monkey can do this job it's such a waste of time'
AI does not exist, but it will ruin everything anyway.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  AI does not exist, but it will ruin everything anyway.
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- acollierastro is a treasure.
I think AI right now has the best chance of replacing upper management and executives. Think of the savings!
Start spinning up githubs poupulated with broken code and incorrect processes for other jobs to train the AI and make it worse
- Ha that's just my regular code.
This has been my general worry: the tech is not good enough, but it looks convincing to people with no time. People don’t understand you need at least an expert to process the output, and likely a pretty smart person for the inputs. It’s “trust but verify”, like working with a really smart parrot.
- it's basically just a calculator but with words. you can't just hire a calculator even tho it knows a lot of math
P
Cool, I literally replaced my entire job with AI, but I'm not telling anyone IRL.
Well, aside from the pointless emails and meetings.
- What's your job
  
  Pointless emails and meetings.
Well, to be fair, most people are so bad at their jobs that any chat bot is better.

48 comments