> Expect the Starbucks in your local suburb to become occupied with middle-aged former office workers who want to get out of the house. That’s a benign portrait,
Surprisingly positive thought. People barely go out because they're stuck in their pavlov ass routine. Go get a coffee, king.
Just commenting so I can come back in 12-18 months and laugh at this. Or, you know, reflect on why I didn't believe him in the unlikely event that he's correct.
At worst, this would only be temporary. Yes, it will cause hardship, but once it trickles down to regular companies, that an LLM is a word predictor, workers will be back. Seems Andrew Yang has never used an LLM to the lengths we do as software developers.
The thing we have to worry about is what's after the LLM.
Referring to another article ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037628 ): "But Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. And Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, 'kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people'. This isn’t just a strange way of marketing a product, it is a completely psychotic one."
So if the psychopathic AI overlords succeed in making us destitute, no problem. They'll have about the same level of success selling Meta glasses and Netlfix subscriptions as currently in Africa, who's ahead of us in terms of AI disruption of jobs and life standard, that is, they are already there :)
Bubble will have burst. Tech co stocks will be way down and job market will be rough but starting to improve. Overall employment in tech jobs will be down slightly but starting to improve. Employment in other job functions will be more or less unchanged by AI. Let's see!
It is not as bad, but it is happening. Most people on HN if not All, as I haven't read a single comment hinting otherwise, looks at it as some coding / tech scenario. And do not realise how many Bull Shit Job [1] there are within a large organisation, especially in Government. Nearly all Western Government are actively trailing AI/ LLM to replace certain task or job. This roll out is faster than what I have seen before, from PC, Internet to Smartphone. And it is yielding decent results. Some departments are planning 50% head count reduction over next 2 - 3 years. They will of course rehire some for different role of task, but in net numbers it will still be 30%+.
One could argue the more bureaucratic it is, i.e Government organisation, the more apparent this will be.
There are some Bull Shit jobs where LLM still haven't figure it out, mostly due to work flow and inter department / government working together. Once this could be solved I would not be surprised if we could get another 20%. The rest of it will be people much more productive and people who specialise in human interaction and relationship skills.
But even if this isn't end of office, it will be much smaller office. And huge number of people made redundant. Those who claims blue collar jobs are safe dont realise some of these group of people will have to flow into their industry. And that is ignoring robotics. Just look at Unitree recent Lunar new year demonstrations.
It may not be "the end", but it certainly feels like it.
I'm not sure the people writing these articles actually use AI outside of trivial benchmarks. Sure, it can create "a website" in minutes, but what does that website do? I've found (I'm working on vehicle routing and maintenance scheduling) that you very much have to have a plan in your head and an understanding of what's going on in order to build towards reasonable results effectively. There is no replacement for knowing what you want, how to ask for it, and how to verify the implementation. That takes expertise. You cannot tell AI, "We fired the engineers. Take over their jobs and do them better." That's a non-starter.
It sounds like you are an Operations Researcher. I am too friend. The talks I've seen on people using AI for Operations Research have been ... underwhelming. I wonder if the vast majority of us are just in niches narrow enough that AI just isn't that helpful.
Lack of training data in narrow domains is definitely true. I'm hopeful though, AI seems like it should mesh well with the problem. One of the biggest wins for me so far is just how quickly I can build and iterate on visualizations of the data. It has cut down enormously on the amount of time that I'm asking myself, "but why is this the schedule?".
Correctness like this doesn't really matter, if you are some EVP at BigCorp: you don´t really need AI to be genuinely superior to your human workers. You need AI to appear to be useful enough for two or three quarters, max. It gives you cover to justify eliminating jobs and still have the stock price rise. It gives you exposure to the people who might hire you for your next golden gig ("thought leader", "visionary" etc). And you'll be bailing shortly anyway, before reality comes knocking.
Something I never see answered in articles like this: What are all these corporations going to do when the AI companies who are handling all their operations raise rates by 10x, 20x, 100x? Outside of "pay up", of course.
Also, shouldn't they be worried about AI providers launching competitors? If these predictions come true, and AI handles most of a company's workload, wouldn't the company itself be something that could be automated away by AI?
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[ 1316 ms ] story [ 1905 ms ] threadSurprisingly positive thought. People barely go out because they're stuck in their pavlov ass routine. Go get a coffee, king.
Ok cool, so in a single year when this hasn't happened, we know never to listen to any grand claims he makes ever again.
The thing we have to worry about is what's after the LLM.
So if the psychopathic AI overlords succeed in making us destitute, no problem. They'll have about the same level of success selling Meta glasses and Netlfix subscriptions as currently in Africa, who's ahead of us in terms of AI disruption of jobs and life standard, that is, they are already there :)
I dont think it will be as dramatic as he is predicting.
As the saying goes, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
One could argue the more bureaucratic it is, i.e Government organisation, the more apparent this will be.
There are some Bull Shit jobs where LLM still haven't figure it out, mostly due to work flow and inter department / government working together. Once this could be solved I would not be surprised if we could get another 20%. The rest of it will be people much more productive and people who specialise in human interaction and relationship skills.
But even if this isn't end of office, it will be much smaller office. And huge number of people made redundant. Those who claims blue collar jobs are safe dont realise some of these group of people will have to flow into their industry. And that is ignoring robotics. Just look at Unitree recent Lunar new year demonstrations.
It may not be "the end", but it certainly feels like it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Also, shouldn't they be worried about AI providers launching competitors? If these predictions come true, and AI handles most of a company's workload, wouldn't the company itself be something that could be automated away by AI?