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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The explicit and only goal at my company is to produce 100% of code with ai. They don’t care if it’s crap. Neither do I.
The more you use it for coding, the worse you get at coding skills. I can feel it already. I’m not a programmer any more. I’m a manager of a hyperactive mid level developer who’s overly confident and doesn’t ask enough questions.
My favorite is when the ai reviewer in the pr criticizes the code the ai agent wrote. Like ok? It’s trash and I don’t care. Ignore and hit resolve.
AI could make sense one day if it comes with UBI to compensate its social impact and if it optimizes enough processes to compensate for its ecological footprint. We are far* from this and there’s nowhere enough political pressure to make it happen.
You’re assuming AI will successfully replace enough jobs to have a social impact. You’re buying into the hype. I can’t think of a single job it can replace.
Me either and I don’t think it ever will reach that. We’re already seeing diminishing returns.
The thing is it doesn’t need to replace a full job. If it improves productivity by 10% then that’s the number that will either lose their job or just not get hired in the first place.
I’m sure these are very worrying times for folks in college, especially computer science and the arts.
My insurance provider has already replaced all of its customer service staff with AI. As I found out when I tried to ask them a question the other day. I’m changing insurance companies.
If you’re talking about the automated phone thing, they’ve been trying to do that since the 90s. In the past the secret “get me a human” trick was to keep mashing zero till you got a human. Today, you can just keep saying “human” or “I need to speak to a human”.
It’s going fully replace a LOT of jobs, and as future iterations learn more and more, it will replace even more complex jobs. You are underestimating the Ferengi’s compulsion for more wealth. They will let quality slip significantly, if it means higher profits.
In a few years, they be gaslighting us that double digit unemployment is perfectly normal in a healthy, high-tech society.
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.
Agreed, but…
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
When does it “actually make … sense”?
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.
i have colleagues for that
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.
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.
The explicit and only goal at my company is to produce 100% of code with ai. They don’t care if it’s crap. Neither do I.
The more you use it for coding, the worse you get at coding skills. I can feel it already. I’m not a programmer any more. I’m a manager of a hyperactive mid level developer who’s overly confident and doesn’t ask enough questions.
My favorite is when the ai reviewer in the pr criticizes the code the ai agent wrote. Like ok? It’s trash and I don’t care. Ignore and hit resolve.
What’s the use case for this code? Im wondering if there’s a particular industry trying to use AI this way or just your workplace.
We’re a Saas company.
It’s not just us. My friend at Microsoft says it’s the same there, except they have to use copilot.
Thats the goal? And you guys are like 20% there? Or you are only accepting AI code?
It’s the mandate. We’re required to log our “ai savings” time too. If it’s not 100% they question it and just edit the numbers anyway.
My favorite is when I copy paste the ai reviewer comments back to the ai author. I really feel like I’m earning my salary then.
@wbrianwhite That sounds like fraud to me.
Good point. Tech corporations never lie to their employees
I could get into a complex and somewhat pessimistic argument over economics and the scale of the AI bubblr on top of other financial time bombs.
But instead I cast PALANTIR!
AI could make sense one day if it comes with UBI to compensate its social impact and if it optimizes enough processes to compensate for its ecological footprint. We are far* from this and there’s nowhere enough political pressure to make it happen.
You’re assuming AI will successfully replace enough jobs to have a social impact. You’re buying into the hype. I can’t think of a single job it can replace.
Me either and I don’t think it ever will reach that. We’re already seeing diminishing returns.
The thing is it doesn’t need to replace a full job. If it improves productivity by 10% then that’s the number that will either lose their job or just not get hired in the first place.
I’m sure these are very worrying times for folks in college, especially computer science and the arts.
UBI seems like the only long term solution to me.
My insurance provider has already replaced all of its customer service staff with AI. As I found out when I tried to ask them a question the other day. I’m changing insurance companies.
If you’re talking about the automated phone thing, they’ve been trying to do that since the 90s. In the past the secret “get me a human” trick was to keep mashing zero till you got a human. Today, you can just keep saying “human” or “I need to speak to a human”.
It’s going fully replace a LOT of jobs, and as future iterations learn more and more, it will replace even more complex jobs. You are underestimating the Ferengi’s compulsion for more wealth. They will let quality slip significantly, if it means higher profits.
In a few years, they be gaslighting us that double digit unemployment is perfectly normal in a healthy, high-tech society.
The entirety of Lemmy is default 10 downvotes if you suggest AI might have some useful applications.
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