I was just talking to a colleague about the AI bubble.
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Nonsense. All AI has to do is increase the frequency of discovery. One leap in medical cures or energy production will have everyone worshipping at the AI alter.
Cost of doing business. -
TeflonTrout :bc: he/himreplied to RememberUsAlways last edited by
@RememberUsAlways @nullagent spicy chatbot isn't gonna do any of that. The people who are actually doing good things with it are using it to pore through gigantic datasets, like astronomy, biology, and physics.
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I was explaining to a non-tech friend how "AI" works - ie what an LLM is, and does, including hallucinations and the fact that it's basically spicy autocomplete.
Once he understood, he was open-mouthed, aghast. "But all the media articles saying its going to replace 80,000 jobs, and make our lives easier? Is that all BS?"
It was depressing watching it sink in how deep the lie was that's been sold by all these huge corps.
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Brocklehurst's Wallabyreplied to Mark Otway last edited by
@markotway @nullagent @cstross
Oh it might well replace those jobs. And it'll be absolute dogshit at doing it.
The management class are dumb as fuck.
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0xC0DEC0DE07E8replied to Brocklehurst's Wallaby last edited by
@drunkenmadman
This is a common refrain over on @pluralistic’s blog: AI might not be able to do your job, but that doesn’t mean they can’t convince your boss of that. -
William Pietrireplied to Brocklehurst's Wallaby last edited by
@drunkenmadman And I think part of the problem is that the management class is dumb in a similar way to LLMs. Both are disconnected from the actual work and the real-world impact of that work. Both partly owe their success to the production of plausible-sounding words. Both often escape consequences when the words are wrong. In short, bullshitters have a hard time seeing the problems with bullshit machines.
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@markotway @Rob_T_Firefly @nullagent @cstross I dunno. I definitely see low/early skill knowledge workers being tossed. Which means there will be no senior people sometime in my lifetime. Which means more AI to counter that. Which means less jobs. I think you did your friend a real disservice by dismissing AI as “spicy auto complete”. It’s taking jobs today, even in its infancy.
I don’t have a position on whether that’s good or bad, though. Throughout history jobs have fallen by the wayside due to progess and new jobs show up to support that progress.
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@jdw @markotway @Rob_T_Firefly @nullagent You need to distinguish between generative AI (spicy autocomplete) and analytical/pattern recognition AI (which works surprisingly well). And also remember it's not "intelligence" in any human sense, it's just statistical modelling on a huge scale.
The term "AI" is pure sales hype, to extract money from private equity and sell the tech to oligarchs who can use it to attack their work force.
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@c0dec0dec0de And I think one of the major lessons in the recent Hollywood writers' strike is that in many instances AI won't really replace humans but will be an excuse to pay them less. (You're not the screenwriter anymore; you're revising the AI's script.) @drunkenmadman @pluralistic @markotway @nullagent @cstross
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@Thad @c0dec0dec0de @drunkenmadman @pluralistic @markotway @nullagent @cstross
Women have experienced this process over and over.
Male manager retires or quits, woman gets the job but it's now called a "coordinator" job at 40% less, because a typewriter & secretary was replaced by a laptop & word processor.
Same job responsibilities, different title, less money.
Wage suppression tactics using titles and tech is an old old technique.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html
I was paid less than the men I was managing. Here’s what happened next.
Two years into my last staff job in a media corporation’s newsroom, I found out that the men I was managing were getting paid significantly more than me.
MSNBC.com (www.msnbc.com)
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@cstross @jdw @markotway @Rob_T_Firefly @nullagent @lavaeolus in their recent book “AI snake oil”, Narayanan and Kapoor actually advocate the *exact opposite*: genAI is surprisingly useful and promising, predictive AI is dangerous, overhyped, and fundamentally limited
AI Snake Oil | Sayash Kapoor | Substack
Debunking AI hype. The book gives you foundational knowledge and the newsletter covers new developments. Click to read AI Snake Oil, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
(www.aisnakeoil.com)
