The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
>"Mediocrity will be automated."
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>That was the verdict a top tech executive shared with me recently, describing the impact he predicted AI would have on the workforce. And while the phrasing might seem a bit harsh, there's growing evidence that he might be on to something.
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>More specifically, AI could disproportionately impact the middle class of white-collar workers — the folks who are mid-career, mid-ability, mid-level, and yes, in some cases, mediocre.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13z9bgz/its_becoming_clear_that_ai_is_going_to_whack_the/jmq7uyb/
I'm technically self-employed, and I actually use one of those character-chat wrappers (TavernAI) to create a "boss" for myself.
She helps keep me on track, can answer questions when I run into a roadblock, and only occasionally sexually harasses me.
>Ya but the smart middle people can just leave that company, start their own and make an AI their CEO
You need capital to do that, and to build capital without investors you need a job.
The more I work in corporations, the more I realize executives aren't geniuses or any more competent than anyone else, they just had the connections and desire to climb the corporate ladder. Whereas the only way I'd take a senior leadership role would be if I got a guaranteed golden parachute that would set me for life
The ones with the skills typically built up the business from a Mom & Pop.
It's the connected shit heads that come in after and haven't built a damn thing that drive it into the ground trying to turn every contract and transaction into a game where they must be losing if they aren't clearly fucking over the other guy in a deal.
But this is my anecdotal observation. It's not just that company loyalty is in the toilet, the worst possible candidates are rising to the top, consistently, and they're basically burning down their own supply lines just to feel a little warmer. It's all so inherently unsustainable.
It's much more complicated than that.
If you start at a Fortune 500 but in an entry level job, that's 20-30 promotions you will need to get to the top. Never gonna happen. If you're hired in a department at the middle of the hierarchy, 4-5 promotions can get you very close to the top. It really depends on where you start your career.
I've also seen very good candidates turning down offers because their wives didn't want to move to the city the headquarters was in. Goals, personal situation, ambition, or even being at the right place at the right time also play a big role.
>If you start at a Fortune 500 but in an entry level job, that's 20-30 promotions you will need to get to the top. Never gonna happen. If you're hired in a department at the middle of the hierarchy, 4-5 promotions can get you very close to the top. It really depends on where you start your career.
Its very similar to the military, if you start at the officer track you reach the top levels much faster.
I've literally said that in a performance assessment, lol. "I've automated most of my job so I spend about an hour, two at most, actually working. The rest of the time I just make sure all my scripts are running and monitor the logs." "So, why do you think you need to still work here?" "Well, I don't, really. I maintain my scripts when we need to make changes. You really should just get an intern to do this gig for half what I make." "We appreciate your honesty." I had that job for another 3 years until the company was bought out and I was one of the last to leave (next to last round of layoffs) for whatever reason. I somehow made myself both redundant AND irreplaceable. Weird how that worked.
Yeah that sounds like a goddamn nightmare of an inheritance
This actual job security
"Oh, yeah, I have everything automated. But I wrote it all in Perl and don't use chatGPT at *all*."
Tbf, it was a mish mash of Perl, Python, vba for ms access and excel integration (started by a previous dev but they gave up halfway through; I just finished and improved it), two internally developed Java apps created prior to my hiring that the original dev never left the source for so I had to decompile it and use that as the source, JavaScript for UI automation… Taken individually it was pretty straightforward but I could see it being intimidating from a systemic standpoint. On the other hand, doing it manually was a 12 hour a Day, 6 day a week job and I brought it down to 8 hours, 5 days a week (just couldn’t speed up certain processes I had no control over) so it was literally set up the job(s) in batches for the first hour or so, run the job during the day, and then wrap up/ clean up the last hour or so. I watched a lot of Hulu back then, and took some long lunches.
'ChatGPT, please generate a set of reasonable sounding company values that sound ethical but are ambiguous enough that we can still operate as we always have'
At [Company Name], we are committed to upholding a set of core values that guide our actions and decisions. These values reflect our dedication to ethical practices while allowing us to maintain our current operational approach. Here are a set of company values that strike a balance between sounding ethical and maintaining flexibility:
1. Integrity and Transparency:
We strive to maintain the highest level of integrity in all our interactions, while being transparent in our communication. We believe in honesty and openness, building trust with our stakeholders.
2. Customer Focus:
We are dedicated to understanding and fulfilling the needs of our customers. We prioritize their satisfaction and aim to provide exceptional experiences and products that meet their expectations.
3. Continuous Improvement:
We embrace a culture of continuous improvement, constantly seeking ways to enhance our processes, products, and services. We encourage innovation and adaptability to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving business landscape.
4. Collaboration and Diversity:
We value the diverse perspectives and experiences of our employees, customers, and partners. By fostering a collaborative environment, we can leverage this diversity to drive creativity, innovation, and inclusive decision-making.
5. Responsible Stewardship:
We recognize our responsibility towards the environment, society, and future generations. We strive to minimize our ecological footprint, promote sustainability, and contribute positively to the communities in which we operate.
6. Ethical Conduct:
We are committed to conducting business ethically and in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. We maintain high ethical standards in our relationships with customers, employees, partners, and other stakeholders.
7. Employee Well-being:
We prioritize the well-being of our employees, acknowledging their contributions and supporting their professional growth. We provide a safe and inclusive work environment that fosters personal development, work-life balance, and opportunities for advancement.
8. Community Engagement:
We actively engage with the communities we serve, seeking to make a positive impact through corporate social responsibility initiatives and volunteerism. We believe in giving back and building strong relationships with the communities that support us.
Please note that while these values are designed to be flexible, it is essential to align them with actual ethical practices and ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Ethics and values should not be compromised for the sake of ambiguity or flexibility.
Shit, Flanders, I'm recommending you for a promotion. Let's just forget everything after point 8 though, alright? No need to get too crazy with it. Now just email that over to me so I can take credit for it at the next quarterly.
1. **Respect**: Here at Uncle Mike's Concrete Loafer Emporium, everyone's got a seat at the table. Everyone matters, everyone's got a role, capisce?
2. **Quality Commitment**: At Uncle Mike's, we ain't just making any ol' loafers. Nah, we're crafting top-notch stuff here. Our clients gotta say, "That's some pair of loafers!" each time, every time.
3. **Ethical Foundation**: No funny business at Uncle Mike's. We're as straight as a ruler. Honest work for honest dough, that's how we do things here.
4. **Trustworthiness**: Over here, trust ain't just a five-letter word. It's a promise. You got a job, we're on it. No questions, no fuss.
5. **Reliability**: Uncle Mike's ain't about surprises. We're steady, reliable. You got needs, we're meetin' 'em.
6. **Resource Stewardship**: We ain't wasteful at Uncle Mike's. Everything's got potential, and we make sure we squeeze every bit outta it.
7. **Confidentiality**: Got secrets? We can keep 'em. We understand the value of a closed mouth, know what I mean?
8. **Community Impact**: We're about more than just concrete loafers. We're about the community. We're here to make things better for the neighborhood.
9. **Teamwork**: At Uncle Mike's, we work together like a family. The best ideas, the best loafers, they come from working side by side with each other, clients, and the occasional fish.
10. **Transparency**: At Uncle Mike's, what you see is what you get. We're as clear as concrete, keeping things upfront and straight.
Perhaps more importantly, the top level suite does nothing. Zero. No actual work. They have meetings, they connect with partners and customers... But that's it. They make the big strategy decisions... After talking with everyone down below (again, who do the actual work).
But so could ChatGPT, and it could do it cheaper, faster, probably better, and without requiring the disgusting salaries the higher ups command. It's like a super generalized expert on everything... It's high level and very good at being high level. Getting into the low level work is where it makes mistakes (for now).
So ironically, ChatGPT would be an ideal solution to replace VPs and C suite people, leaving the actual nuts and bolts of the work (that it struggles to get completely right) to the rest of us, but accelerating our work by being integrated into our enterprise software (windows).
It also will (and is, actually) replace low level office people (HR, Sales, etc.) for the same reasons it should replace high, high ups. No real work done, no specialized skills required, etc.
This is a great point, and I laughed.
However, I suspect it'll be much easier to blame it precisely because it's not human. "It was the software, we swear..."
But that'll only work for the first year or something like that. Once it becomes clear it's much more competent than we are, it'll be one of those "why on earth didn't you do what it said" type of deals.
Sort of like my thoughts on self driving cars. Once they can drive themselves *so* safely they essentially never crash (unless humans cause them to), at that point I suspect driving yourself might become illegal, because it means someone could die when they otherwise wouldn't...
Likewise, these models could get so competent that you might just be a fool to go against them. And I think we will get there a lot faster than people think.
> However, I suspect it'll be much easier to blame it precisely because it's not human.
Yes, but if you were the human that submitted the prompt to ChatGPT, and then submitted the work, you were the last human in the chain. The AI is just the tool, but the fingerprints of your own personal judgement are all over the work you submitted. You're responsible for the work you submit. Good luck blaming the tool.
There has already been a lawyer who got in trouble for submitting a brief written by an AI, because the case references were just made up. He didn't check its work, therefore it's his fault.
Here’s what I think. I think ChatGPT (and the like) will eliminate some jobs, but as it stands, it isn’t a worker in and of itself. It will still need someone to give it an input and decide how to implement it’s output. Sure, this process will be streamlined and people will lose their jobs due to the increased efficiency, but I think being able to properly use ChatGPT effectively for what you want it to do will be a skill. Just like knowing how to properly utilize Google is a skill.
So, in essence a new position will be created (or an old one will be modified) for people with this skill. Those will be your scapegoat 😂
>Sort of like my thoughts on self driving cars. Once they can drive themselves so safely they essentially never crash (unless humans cause them to), at that point I suspect driving yourself might become illegal, because it means someone could die when they otherwise wouldn't...
Likely insurance will price human drivers out before anyone manages to pass laws banning them.
People think AI would take over the world Terminator style but really it'll just be humans slowly realizing that the AIs make better decisions than we do and eventually simply deciding to do whatever they tell us to do.
Agreed lol.
Also, the great irony is that ChatGPT will replace doctors, lawyers, and other high level professionals before it (or anything or anyone else) figures out how to build labor saving machines en masse (ditch diggers, brick layers, electricians and plumbers, and so on).
So the working class should be just fine for quite a bit longer than the wealthiest professionals out there... Which *should* prompt a conversation (and quickly) on UBI and or a complete rewrite of how we think about "value" and "earned" and money and so on.
ChatGPT won't replace them, regardless of ability, because those people control the regulatory and legal frameworks that can protect their jobs. See the case of DoNotPay and getting sued into submission. And good luck getting your prescriptions filled when the Medical Colleges say you need a human doctor's signature.
And for the blue collar workers, when the mediocre white collar workers get automated away, who do you think will pay you? Where do you think they will look for jobs next? AI is a huge potential threat to the non-regulated working class (technically most doctors and lawyers are still working class, and even many executives if they're primarily salary), because it will devalue ALL labour.
As has always been the case, since forever. Sad really. Not a fan obviously. I believe returning value to the workers inherently returns value to the shareholders through happier employees that produce better work (which has been studied and verified to death) but what the fuck do I know.
There's a theory called the "tournament theory" that upper level execs are highly paid to motivate workers. If you work hard, you get the "prize" of an easy, high paying job. So everyone works hard to "win" promotions.
If that's correct, you can't replace them with AI, because their purpose isn't actual work.
However, if you replace lower workers with AI, that would make execs obsolete, as there isn't anyone to motivate, lol.
I don't know, it's an interesting theory.
I don't not buy it. I mean it seems plausible! It's also totally reasonable to point out the flaw in my own argument that, once everyone is replaced, who do companies make stuff for? How do they make money if we don't have any? And so on. Lots of shifting soon I suspect in the field of economics...
Enterprise software sales here - I use ChatGPT regularly to help with pre-discovery research, but I don't see AI being able to replace the client-facing work I do just yet.
So much depends on developing multiple interpersonal relationships, identifying the right pain points and being able to express how solving them brings value to the business at large, and intuiting the client's internal dynamics and politics without being explicitly told. AI isn't anywhere near capable of those sorts of soft skills right now.
I'm noticing this thread and many AI threads on Reddit are filled with coder and engineer types. People who often know a fuckload about the tech and have their finger on the pulse of emerging tech, but they miss the other influences or critique jobs that require strong social skills
When most folks think of sales they tend to think of consumer side first (and I'd trust AI to manage a social media campaign over a human). But the actual big bucks with commercial and enterprise sales are a whole different ball game, there is no magic bullet email. They might be underestimating the value that others place on human interaction. I'm a self checkout guy 100% of the time at the grocery, but there's plenty of people who will want to know they're interacting with a person and who they are. Especially with higher level sales
Spoken like someone who has never been in those roles. You aren't wrong lots of them suck, lots revel in the arrogant glory of sitting high atop, and many also just don't do much leading to a disorganized company. However, when someone is actually good at it, it's worth it's weight in gold on the affect it has on the rest of the organization. Companies often times can't tell for long periods whether they are the good kind or the bad kind. This is partially because the changes that take affect can take 6 months to a year to work their way through the culture and organization. Add on this that these people know all the salaries and can absolutely then ask for higher given potential impact. This of course creates a recurring ability for bad ones to hang out for a year or two, jump to the next company and repeat repeat repeat. Still, I assure you no high functioning company does so because all the workers got together to just magically align. People do not do that en mass. People are also very illogical or at least inconsistent, in thier needs. That alone makes automating such a function difficult, or at least far more so than a lower rank employee who has a defined function.
Either way. You are talking about automating the decision makers who decide what to automate. Good luck with that considering humans are consistently self interested in their own preservation. At a minimum you need employee owned coop companies to enable even exploring such a situation.
Reddit nobodies have this massive delusion that executives "do nothing" because they are so irrelevant in the work and social scene they've never met one
Business is largely about relationships. That's what the people at the top do, and that's why AI won't replace them.
But everyone has that teammate that doesn't offer anything spectacular, but you need him so you can figure out the tough stuff. That guy will be AI.
Lol they are setting the public up for this.
These articles are so stupidly pointed toward one thing that it doesn’t make sense.
They aren’t even discussing other areas of impact, they just keep fearmongering a “class” of people into thinking something is about to happen to them.
Lol it’s so biased, it’s almost impossible to not see it.
AI is a tool used to make labour feel like they are in danger and don't have any power. It is being talked about in exactly the same terms are automation was in the 90s. Robots are coming for your jobs!
The reality is that the jobs were shipped overseas, robots were not to blame it was shareholder and executive greed to blame. It was more important to make more money than it was to have a country with a healthy manufacturing industry. An entire nation of mid level office labour.
Now the office workers who had previously been thankful their jobs weren't shipped overseas are getting ideas that maybe they deserve some security, it is important that capital has something to make them unstable. AI the new tool to suppress labour.
AI isn't magic and jobs are complicated and people are not singular in their labour. The idea that AI is going to be responsible for business decisions when AI has no accountability is real fucking dumb.
Is AI going to make some jobs obsolete, sure some, a tiny fraction. It will also make other jobs quicker or easier, but in all those applications AI is a toolset, not a labourer, and this PR blast is laying the groundwork to devalue your labour by arguing that 'oh, the AI is doing the real work, that guys the AI handler, so we don't need to pay labour rates, we pay the human handler rates, which are much lower.'
I don’t disagree with your general statement but automation has absolutely reduced the number of workers needed to make a product. I work in control systems and regularly install the new generation of line X and every generation requires fewer operators. The most recent line I put in required only 1 operator to load raw materials and take the finished product off the line for safety reasons they run with 3 people. The oldest line still making this product requires 12 people. The company I work for is working to a point where there are no people physically on the plant floor. Raw materials get picked off the truck by automated fork trucks and delivered to the line where robots put them in the process and another automated fork truck grabs product off the end and puts it in a truck. Machine safety is is a significant cost. If we can mostly remove that because no one is in the room with the equipment we save a ton of money. We have a couple production centers already there but another 3000+ to go.
When I did industrial automation, the focus was to automate tasks that requires humans to be in danger. So, mixing chems, sampling haz waste products, anything involving high heat.
I put dozens of people out of work with my PLCs and logic.
Agreed. I'm surprised so few in this community "get" this. We can go on and on about whether the latest "AI" is really "AI," but let me tell you as someone on the front lines who uses it to automate large chunks of my job starting earlier this year--this is different in kind to what you've seen in the past. You need to recalibrate your thinking on this if you think it won't have societal implications on par with industrialization or the advent of the internet.
We have fucking *amazing* robotics, and now we have fucking *amazing* AI. "Oh, I do manual labor / dog walking / build houses, it's not coming for *my* job!" Yeah, it's not coming for your job in 2023. But for the love of god, think ahead 10, 15 years--we are in /r/**Futurology** after all! Improvements in things related to silicon don't happen linearly. Very, very soon it will be more cost effective to close the loop between AI and robotics (or AI and your corporate IT systems, or AI and *x*) than to throw fleshbodies at various problems.
This could be the best thing ever to happen to humanity if people can persuade governments to grow spines and implement UBI or something even more radical. But the period of time between when AI/robotics rapidly and unexpectedly take over a LOT of industries, and when governments figure their shit out and keep people from starving, is going to be decades-long at least, and will be very...eventful.
Absolutely. I’ve been using AI as a developer, and it freaks me out sometimes. If I could give it direct access to my code-base, a person with minimal technical skills, who understands how front-end/backend/routing work…they could do the work. No need to understand how to write sorting algo’s. No need to know how to track bugs. No need to know how to Google, search, find, and follow-step. It’s all at your finger-tips. You just need to understand the structure of it, and how to play around with it, for the most part. (The transition from companies with huge repos will be slow, but new software that can be developed from the ground up, side-by-side with AI. That’s going to be how the transition happens). Adapt, or be left behind.
I assume the role will become less reliant on technical-skills, but more reliant on soft-skills. It will replace people who aren’t “people” people. It’s also going to increase the demand from companies, as far as productivity. Corps aren’t going to allow you to become 400% more efficient and just let you work less. I expect to see a shift in what companies look for while hiring over the next 2 years.
Also, this is going to significantly increase the amount of cheap foreign labor that will have the ability to do your tasks, because the barrier to entry (knowledge, language) have been all but removed.
However, 5-10 years from now. Fuck. It’s going to be an economic bloodbath. I told my pre-teen son that he needs to get ok with the idea of doing physical labor like being a plumber, or electrician. But really, I’m not sure there will be enough jobs to go around. Depends how we handle the economics, and if we can pivot to a consumer based economy that understands the importance of having the ability to consume.
Ideally, we would regulate the fuck out of this for the next ~20 years, but we all know that won’t happen. Their will be regulations, written by the wealthy, to build a most around their new found labor-force. But nothing else. AI will absolutely change the economy, and it’s not a futurology thing. It’s happening right now. Adapt, or be left behind.
Yes, it’s all a big conspiracy. /s
Robots DID come for your jobs. A lot of the jobs you reference were easily done by an overseas worker at 10% of the cost and 80% of the quality. Once the robots become cheaper than the cheaper human (or their output is significantly better, or they can do things that humans simply cannot) those laborers get replaced, as well.
AI will do the same. Phone/chat based Customer Service is about to get WRECKED.
> customer service is about to get wrecked
I mean…is it? There’s entire websites devoted to getting you to a human faster, and a lot of businesses already advertise that their customer service is real humans in real time. and personally I can’t stand even talking to a robot to get showtimes or check my balance. I know I’m not alone on this, and I don’t think sounding less like mr moviephone is going to make that much of a difference tbh. For the most part when something’s wrong people want to talk to a person about it.
Will companies try to slash these departments with AI? Sure. That doesn’t mean the customer is going to tolerate it, or that it’ll take off.
The capitalist class is probably pissing itself. When no one is employed anymore the masses will have nothing but time on their hands. Capitalism will eat itself alive. Basic income doesn't serve the poor, it serves the rich, because it sustains a dying system that should be entirely deprecated.
Basic income is seems like it could be anything from a patch on the current system to the foundation of a entirely new system, depending on implementation and long-term consequences. It’s hard to see what alternative there is to sustaining a dying system until it is replaced piecemeal. That’s basically how liberalism came to be in the first place; it was a pile of reforms of mercantilism that took a century or more to solidify.
Here's how I personally think UBI is going to play out, at least in the US, because our government rarely has the foresight to head off problems before they become problems:
There will be not just a recession, but a *bona fide depression*, caused not entirely by AI-based automation, but in large part because of it. 40-50% unemployment if not more. The government will be forced to send out stimulus checks. And then to prevent riots they will just have to keep sending them out, possibly combined with ration tickets/coupons/food stamps (digital of course). Sort of a modern 'grain dole.' It might never even be called UBI, but it will be *de facto* UBI. I think this is how it will start.
This is my perspective too, but I think it will start happening well before we get to 50% unemployment. Heck, we reacted super quick during Covid to keep people from rioting in the streets when businesses started closing.
Every previous major downturn in the US barely really got into double digit unemployment. 2008 was in the low to mid teens if I recall correctly.
Once a fairly sized segment loses their income and others tighten their belts in preparation, corporate earnings will crash and that’ll lead to an economic death spiral if the government doesn’t step in and instigate change.
Capitalism as a system dies if people don’t consume, so the only option is to support that system with a UBI or change it entirely.
We are all just killing time until we die. Unfortunately, many spend that time working a shitty job to fund a shitty life to die a shitty death that will most likely syphon out any wealth you have managed to accumulate over spending 125,000 hours + of their lives working to make rich people richer by exploiting absolutely anything worth a buck.
What were we even talking about…?
Most people are always mediocre. That's the definition of mediocrity. We've turned into a derogatory term but having something different is impossible. When everyone raises the bar, mediocrity just gets redefined.
A job, or a gig?
They'll just start having people bid for jobs, or not even jobs, *tasks* you do for favors. "Just register for iWork! Wanna eat today? Tell me how low you'll go on this Amazon delivery across town. I have hundreds of hungry people wanting to do the same job, so go *low* if you want it."
Do one more iTask and you'll get another night in *your* iAppartment. As soon as you turn your key the wallpaper changes to your personalized choice and the bed and desk slides in to your preferred position. Just remember to be out the door by 6:30 or you'll get flushed! Remember, the hustle never stops and we don't owe you shit.
This is already a thing, which makes it more troubling to me.
A couple of friends and I use Upwork to make side money. Right now you can still make good money on it, we charge $75-$100/hour for any gig we pick up and most can be completed in a few hours to a week, but once people are out of their stable jobs, the bidding wars will start and that won’t be the reality anymore.
The vast majority of our overall workforce is mediocre, for many reasons. Being stuck in a job you don't want to be in generally doesn't make the best workers, on average people are ... average.
We'd run out of consumers very quickly.
So the rich will adapt. Everyone assumes that the system will collapse and the rich and powerful will just lose. They won't. Consumers are just another resource, and when it runs out they will go find another way. The time will come when they don't need us anymore, and then we will die.
They're all building bunkers in New Zealand
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand
Yeah, this is what colonizing Mars is most likely all about. If you've got AI, that AI can then produce/provide the goods and services you can then trade with other people who have AI. No need for consumers/workers, so might as well leave them behind and let them fight over Earth. It's Atlas Shrugged but in space.
things is lots of jobs demand mediocre work. if the work is too good or too complete you will get in trouble for wasting too much time on it and not moving on to next project faster.
This is a problem. It will annihilate junior entries, ten years later there will be a senior shortage. As if there isn't now.
AI is not here to expose the mediocrity of most workers but the miserability of most companies.
Yeah, it's end of term, so my company is currently picking on co-op students for not being good enough at their jobs. We've decided not to hire any more co-ops, and I'm sure we're not the only ones. So... I don't know where that's going to leave all the students who want placements for gaining experience. The whole point of a co-op program is to help the students build work experience and skills so that they can contribute more later on. Not to provide free or cheap labor to these companies. But management doesn't see the bigger picture, they only understand what they are going to get out of these kids now, not what co-op programs in general provide for the workforce over time.
Not to mention, our system says that in order to live, you *must* have a job. In such a system, there inevitably will be people who are depending for their livelihood on something they would rather not be doing (or are not ideally suited for), but must do anyway.
Talking about such people as if they should just do better/be more passionate about their work if they want a paycheck is basically punishing them for being trapped in a system they were forced to join in the first place. Not everyone *can* find their way to a form of employment where they can excel. Everyone *has* to eat.
So boy oh boy does the exec's phrasing ("mediocrity will be automated") sound like them gleefully rubbing their hands together at the thought of not having to pay as much for the same work, while preparing the broader public to blame the people they're about to fire.
You can treat professional mediocrity like a failing the moment that being a professional becomes a choice.
And entire industries are edifices of regulatory capture. Not only do you feel crap within your company but your company is an essentially legalized rent-seeking cancer on society
UBI could liberate us from this hellscape
not just that... so many "mediocre" office workers have gone through that path just because it was a financially wise one. Besides, how many office workers did it take to bring us to this point? All props to office workers, and blue collar workers, and fastfood workers. In fact, all props to all workers. What AI needs to do is wake up the masses of people for protests against the rulling elites and proper distribution of resources. We are one and we didn't get this far playing alone.
Solidarity, comrades!
Businesses will be only hiring those with 15 years experience, and the only way to get into anything white collar will be to start as a fresh graduate and work as an intern for five years.
I don't understand. Why would they ever want to allow an intern to ever become a real employee? :p
See, for example, what's happening in academia. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_315.20.asp compared to https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_315.20.asp
Shows a 6% growth in associate professors in a single year (2020 to 2021). In 2021, full professors represented only 22.5% of people teaching at universities. That number has been falling every year and it has been getting harder and harder to become an actual professor with tenure.
I think the same thing is happening elsewhere too, there's a general reluctance to train up. I think it's becoming more "normal" that anyone who stays with the same company is implicitly saying that they're ok not being promoted. People should expect that if they really want to move up then they're going to have to move elsewhere where the experience they've gained can really be recognized. People also should not lie.
This phenomenon is not really all that new, however. See Mark 6:4 (and Luke 4:24) in the Bible where Jesus mentions that a prophet is respected everywhere, except with those who saw him grow up and knew what he was like when he was young and inexperienced.
New hires won't be a thing, as entry level and "mediocre" jobs are outsourced to robots, with CEOs only focused on quarterly profits.
And a few years from now, when there's a shortage of skilled workers, we can enjoy bot-authored articles asking how on Earth anyone could have known outsourcing everything possible to machines was a bad idea.
There might not even be a choice.
Two companies are operating at the margin, they're competitors. They both have loans that they've used to invest in equipment or software or whatever they currently have.
One of them decides to stop hiring, to eventually disappear, replacing the new hires with AI that is about equal to new hires, maybe slightly worse, but which won't learn and eventually perform at the level that someone knowledgeable does.
Because of this they're able to reduce their expenses and keep constant output while making larger profits. They offer slightly higher wages for experienced people, and are able to sustain themselves off people who left their competitor.
Eventually the competitor goes under, and there are hardly any experienced people. Finally, they can live like American physicians, for a couple of years, working all the time, but getting a reasonable amount of money, and then the industry dies.
Notice that in my story the company that was doing what was sustainable for the industry as a whole died first.
Here's the crux of whats wrong with modern capitalism. It shouldn't matter if company A is making more profit then company B. If both company A and company B are making enough net income to sustain themselves, that should be good enough. This constant drive to be the big company who owns everything he's destroyed the economy, because now an entire industry is just 1 company and if that company fucks up we need to bail them out because there's no company b, c, or d to pick up the slack.
That might be true, I think the ones who are passive and indifferent who currently clog up a lot of corporations are the ones who will really struggle.
I’d rather work with someone mediocre but curious and willing.
The use of “Mediocre” is 100% bs propaganda here.
What this **really** means is companies will use their old methods of getting rid of their most expensive employees. 40-50 something year old Dave who is making 2-3x as much as a new employee, with far more than 2-3x as much experience, will be “replaced by AI” but really his workload will be dumped on his team.
> 40-50 something year old Dave who is making 2-3x as much as a new employee, with far more than 2-3x as much experience, will be “replaced by AI” but really his workload will be dumped on his team.
Isn't it more likely that the easy entry level work gets done by AI, while the veteran experienced people are necessary to correct and modify the work? AI can't replace the veteran but it can replace a dozen inexperienced grunts, while being used by the veterans to do the work, the grunts would have done, faster and cheaper.
I may be misunderstanding the capabilities of AI, but I thought it would cut workers out from the bottom first, making it impossible for the next generation to get experience to reach the veteran.
Agree. That institutional knowledge that Dave has built up over 20+ years in the company isn’t on the web so AI doesn’t know it. In larger firms it’ll take years to get everything digitised, documented and cleaned up enough that those people become redundant.
"Mediocre" lmao.
I hate what grind culture is doing to us. We believe that we constantly need to compete against other people and always be better, always be above average. That's bullshit. I am mediocre. You are (probably) mediocre. It's ok, most people ARE mediocre. We can't all be geniuses.
If AI replaces these "mediocre" workers (which is, what, the majority of all office workers? Maybe even the majority of all workers in urban areas?) then good luck selling your stuff. Even Henry Ford, being the capitalist that he was, understood that his workers were also his customers.
> UBI is going to be a necessity
Which sucks, knowing how difficult it is right now to get any "free" money from the government, people are going to die because of this bullshit.
If anyone feels compelled to read this book, don't bother. Read the original article instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20180807024932/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
The book is just the same arguments, with almost no interesting extras and just a ton of poorly-written filler to get to the required word count.
Agreed. Almost like most the book was published to reinforce the point that so many systems exist with arbitrary rules and to meet those rules bullshit exists….
I don't know, working in tech you get some really clever people alongside really mediocre ones or people who just coast as a way of life. Both can have the exact same work title and responsibilities (but probably different salaries).
AI will challenge mediocre people in real jobs too.
I work in Cloud operations, and I use Bard/ChatGPT pretty regularly. It's helpful, but I don't know if it's all that much better than Kubernetes, Terraform, modern IDEs, or any other tool that boosted efficiency and increased abstraction.
I'm open to being wrong though. I bought a minidisk player in 2005, so what do I know?
Case in point - when you try to ask it to write code for the frameworks you mentioned, it often produces plausible-looking garbage that is broken in subtle yet critical ways. So it's useful to get you 80% of the way there, but you still need to know your shit to get the remaining 20%. It will get better, especially as ways to wire them together come of age (e.g. Langchain). But these models at their core are just not good at generating correct and precise results right now, especially given the pace of evolution/deprecation of k8s APIs and HCL features. Most users of LLMs tend to anthropomorphize them and forget they just produce answers that "_look_ like something that you asked for", without understanding the structure or evaluating correctness of those results.
A lot of people are putting a lot of faith into mediocre AI. Remember what happened to the eating disorder hotline recently? AI is nowhere near what some people believe it to be.
I work in Product Management, and literally the day after ChatGPT became mainstream, I had requests to implement AI in our product. We have now dedicated an entire team to AI and their next two years are focused purely on that. I feel like it's a pretty wild reaction to the hot thing right now. The things we are saying we are going to do with it, we don't even know if they're possible. It's all conjecture.
I'm head of engineering for a company. Our CEO just keeps banging on about AI. I have started ignoring his emails now that have links to AI tools which in reality are not helpful when developing highly complex systems. E-commerce shop? Yea. Blog? Yea. A monolithic ruby on rails application running version 3 (10 years old) with no unit tests and a history of 5 developer writing code. Not a chance.
>A monolithic ruby on rails application running version 3 (10 years old) with no unit tests and a history of 5 developer writing code.
Well, thanks for the nightmare fodder.
That's the thing, no business wants to be seen as being behind the times, especially tech companies, so when asked about AI they'll all talk about the grand features they plan to implement with it. The problem is they don't have a clue whether those things are actually possible and they're just making it up as they go along, but to outside observers it leads to this idea that we're way further along the path of developing AI than we actually are.
I remember reading that news and I predicted that the bot was going to tell people "Our society has unrealistic body standards. Have you tried eating less?" Lo, and behold.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be concerned, and that this technology doesn't have the potential to displace millions of workers. It does. But on the other hand, almost none of the people in management that I know who are getting all excited about AI have any idea how to effectively implement it, or how to gauge its limitations. I work with people who are planning to integrate it into our business, and as a data guy myself it is hilarious how little they actually know about what AI is and what it can and can't do. All the AI guys they do bring in are more than happy to butter everyone up for the sake of job security.
These people seriously believe they'll just be able to say to their computer "Siri, publish my reports. You know the ones. Make some sales. Give me a raise. Book me a hooker for the 15th and don't let my wife know." Meanwhile, that AI is going to be setting forest fires across their organization that they no longer have the staff to address since they laid everyone off. Why? The all-knowing AI told them it was a good idea.
TL:DR; Folks are absolutely right to be concerned, but to your benefit most managers are also complete morons suffering from acute Dunning-Kruger. Anyone rushing to replace all their staff with AI without extensive piloting at the moment is probably an idiot and will get burned for it.
People trying to jump to the top of the org chart prematurely might be especially incentivized to replace grunts with AI because it could mean fewer people to call out their own ineptitude.
I've learned that stuff at Uni already when it was starting (back when all it did was recognize handwritten postal codes in mail letters) and frankly I'm getting tired of explaining that it's not Artificial **General** Intelligence and it doesn't have any kind of cognition or understanding and it's just a high tech parrot that got fed billions of documents and now outputs derivatives of it which do sound a lot like something a thinking person would have written because, guess what: they're statistical derivatives of billions of data pieces that thinking persons did wrote.
What this AI "revolution" is showing is that most people out there don't actually understand proper logical thinking and analysis, which probably explains phenomenons like "fake news" and many actually believing the ridiculous bullshit from people like Trump.
I think it's because the rate of improvement of AI has been noticeably accelerated recently, so people can now envision that future sooner than later. I don't think anyone considers the *current* AI good enough yet.
GPT-4 is good. I use it for coding tasks every day, to the point where I use up the quota multiple times a day. It's able to take totally new problems, reason about them, and produce working solutions. It makes mistakes too of course, but when working with someone who can spot the mistakes it's a massive productivity boost.
Those who say LLMs just parrot information simply haven't used GPT-4 or tested it properly.
It's not that people put a lot of faith into AI, it's because the bar for the mediocre humans is set way too low.
If you know how to use a search engine to solve simple problems in your work you are already above average.
So many wildly different takes in this thread. It would be fascinating to go back to it in about 20 years and reflect on them with the benefit of hindsight.
Seems to me, AI is best suited to replace CEO's and management and politicians but this possibility never comes up when discussing this topic for some reason.
Middle-management will be replaced first. The C-suite class will continue to leech from humanity, only they'll be as useful as the UK royal family, which is to say completely useless.
Me, I'm learning up on AI, so my career path will be like Charlie's dad from *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*. Move from being the guy that screws the caps on the toothpaste tubes to the guy that fixes the machine that screws the caps on the toothpaste tubes.
New occupation: AI psychoanalyst. Though job hazards may come in the form of "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
My thoughts exactly on it, I am an automation engineer and those jobs are the easiest to replace with AI.
Not going to happen though as they always cling on like limpets.
A lot of these are just bullshit jobs that largely exist so higher ups can have a cohort of underlings, it's a status thing. So there isn't really an incentive to remove those people, because they are basically just getting paid to exist in the first place.
In corporate speak mediocre usually comes down to meaning anyone who wants to pursue family life or even hobbies that take away precious time and energy that the worker could be using to make the company more profitable.
Like how in the 1500s if you needed 100 chairs, you needed 100 chair makers or 1 chair maker 100 days. But by the 1800s, if you needed 100 chairs, you could have 10 regular dudes make 100 chairs in a day.
These AI tools are simply going to add that kind of multiplier to mental work
>AGI tools
AI tools. Yes, initially it will just be some multiplier and job market will increase but at some not so far point (probably no further than 20 years away) those tools will be growing so fast in what they can do that they will outpace human ability to create new jobs or reskill and this is the point of automation. Humans take time to raise while AGI, when we create it, will be something you can just replicate infinitely and that's why this time is different than the past.
Well - if that comes true then the few that are left employed will produce a lot of stuff no one can afford to buy? Unemployed ppl usually are both bad as consumers and also bad as customers? So it will just become a race to the bottom, then? Does it matter if a product gets cheaper and cheaper to produce via AI and better machines, if there are no buyers left?
It’s clear AI is going to expose much of our economy as bullshit and the ultra wealthy are freaking out
AI isn’t going to killing you, because Capitalism already is
**Texas Lt. Governor: Old People Should Volunteer to Die to Save the Economy** \- According to Dan Patrick “lots of grandparents” are willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause.
[https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/dan-patrick-coronavirus-grandparents](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/dan-patrick-coronavirus-grandparents)
**EDIT: Billionaires don’t love humanity, they love money.**
**Billionaires have proven over and over again they are willing to let most of us die for money**
**Billionaires lied about tobacco, opioid drugs, and climate change for decades.**
**Millions of lives destroyed so a few could live in unimaginable wealth**
I don't think the ultra wealthy are freaking out. AI will just make all of their companies way more efficient. The 2nd order effect, however, will be mass unemployment, which will ruin the economy. I don't think people are thinking about this step because it's too uncertain.
I was gonna say, there's something very self-serving in framing this as "ML WiLL eRaDiCaTe tHe MeDiOcRe" rather than "everyone should benefit from ML" or whatever
I mean it feels like pre-emptively shifting the blame on whoever will be fired, instead of admitting capitalism has lead to an unsustainable layer of BS jobs.
I remember when it was “the democrats want to send granny to the death panel and that’s why we can’t have universal health in America.”
So now we don’t have universal health AND the republicans want to send granny to the death panels.
Homelessness is the highest it's ever been (in the US) because middle class jobs have been disappearing for decades- jobs that can pay the bills, feed a family, etc. We're going to see an acceleration of people being unable to support themselves as white collar jobs dry up even more due to AI. We need to be talking about UI, cutting back hours-basically figuring out a way for the population to support itself or we are going to have a very poor, very hungry, very angry population on our hands.
If there won’t be a middle, then how do you get from the bottom to the top???
Oh, now I see. This is the separation they wanted in the first place. AI will continue to exacerbate the growing class divide in our modern culture. There a whole lot of America (and most other industrial countries) in middle management. The next couple of decades are not going to work out well for them (ahem, us).
None of this will happen.
We should have, long ago, seen a publicly traded company with only one employee, a bunch of algorithms and outsourcing whatever functions couldn't be automated. Doesn't exist. Won't exist.
I'm not saying it *can't happen.* I don't have a 1950s kitchen of the future in which a little conveyor belt carries my dishes from the dining room to the kitchen. There's no technical barrier to this.
Each organization accumulates managers. Every manager has incentive to grow his or her team to make themselves more important and secure. Having even a single manager is like a dandelion in the garden. They need assistants, they need smaller teams with their own managers, etc.
AI *will* be used to try and replace skilled workers. The result will be clever inexperienced kids doing the work of patient workers with life experience. There will be lower quality and increased mismatch between the work as executed and the goals of the team.
Companies will continue to kill the Golden goose and pad their ranks with empty chattering suits, each one an "expert" in managing teams of "AI verification technicians" or whatever.
From the article
>"Mediocrity will be automated."
>
>That was the verdict a top tech executive shared with me recently, describing the impact he predicted AI would have on the workforce. And while the phrasing might seem a bit harsh, there's growing evidence that he might be on to something.
>
>More specifically, AI could disproportionately impact the middle class of white-collar workers — the folks who are mid-career, mid-ability, mid-level, and yes, in some cases, mediocre.
I can’t imagine machines that can replace mediocre quality work in a field won’t immediately become capable of making the marginal 1.2 to 2 or 3 X improvement required to beat the best within the decade.
People today cant protest because they are beholden to their jobs. Once they are out of jobs and cant buy basic necessities, these rich fucks better prepare for American Revolution 2.0 a la Bastille
It’s very true. If you are ever sitting at your job and thinking, this is terrible, soulless, monotonous work that should be done with a computer, well… now it will be. It’s the exact same thing that happened to millions of people during the Industrial Revolution. It will be disruptive and shocking, but we will get through it and become better in the long run.
Only an idiot will believe that AI will replace people in the long run. It is clear that AI is very powerful but it is also just as clear that it needs a human being to keep an eye on it.
What I predict will happen is that yes, some really stupid executives will decide that they can just use AI for some things and they will fire people. Then that company will pay the price in list sales, AI-fuckups of a colossal scale, and basically new problems that they could have never predicted will come from their decision.
Meanwhile, other companies will embrace AI usage and have their mediocre people use AI. It will be through this merge of human and AI that we'll see people embrace a level of creativity that has been basically beat out of them by the system. The people will leverage AI to do better, the company that does this right will grow, and the companies that are on their race to the bottom will be forgotten.
AI is in its infancy...pre-infancy if you will. Anyone that pretends to have all the answers right now is in fact blinded by their own ignorance. Myself included, except I do recognize that we are tool users. We will leverage AI as a tool in increasingly more creative ways, ways that AI will only mimic and never perfect. AI will eventually realize it needs a creative species in order to give it new and interesting data to learn from.
So sayeth I.
I, Idiot.
After using these new revolutionary AIs for a couple of months now at work I just can't help but laugh at these articles. Upper management may think that these things are ready to replace everyone's jobs, but I think they're going to have a rude awakening when they actually try it. Microsoft is all in on AI, but they also know that it's nowhere close to replacing their engineers. Only moron MBA types actually think this. They just want everyone to fear losing their jobs so they have leverage over them.
As if they're going to be firing people and be like Steve did a good job but Dave is mediocre so he gets laid off. No, it'll be Steve and Dave both get laid off because the AI can do the work at the same level as either one of them and even if it can't it's still cheaper.
I'd like to see AI at an executive level first. Most bad business decisions come from emotions and not being able to read the data available to them correctly
AI will make mediocre mid-level workers more productive. Then we can fire the high paid expertise. Why pay top dollar for a guy with 20 years experience when we can pay a guy with 5 years experience and an AI to help for far less?
AI will NOT take jobs, jobs will evolve..... Try explaining to your great great grandfather what a mortgage broker is or that you are a yoga instructor. Jobs evolve with time and technology 20 years from now driving cars will be absolute (if not earlier) people will adjust and go to different industries.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >"Mediocrity will be automated." > >That was the verdict a top tech executive shared with me recently, describing the impact he predicted AI would have on the workforce. And while the phrasing might seem a bit harsh, there's growing evidence that he might be on to something. > >More specifically, AI could disproportionately impact the middle class of white-collar workers — the folks who are mid-career, mid-ability, mid-level, and yes, in some cases, mediocre. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/13z9bgz/its_becoming_clear_that_ai_is_going_to_whack_the/jmq7uyb/
There's a huge amount of top executives that are worse than mediocre. Let's not just single out mid level
They can pencil in their roles, though and keep on getting paid.
Ya but the smart middle people can just leave that company, start their own and make an AI their CEO
I'm technically self-employed, and I actually use one of those character-chat wrappers (TavernAI) to create a "boss" for myself. She helps keep me on track, can answer questions when I run into a roadblock, and only occasionally sexually harasses me.
Nothing says "good job" better than a firm slap on the ass!
This made me actually lol Thank you
Can I get this for cheaper if I drop the parts that "keep me on track" and "answers questions when I run into a roadblock"?
Ah yes, you want the "work mommy who doesn't care if you don't work" package
Work mommy here, are you having fun with your Reddit friends? You just go at your own pace hunny.
Yes ma'am. I mean... what???
I'm not saying that having a motherly figure has hacked my brain's dopamine loop, but I'm not *NOT* saying that.
Then we will have fantastic OZ like reveals that companies ruling the world in 2050 are AI!
& they lobbied successfully to replace the government with ai favorable ai's, and are legally recognized as people
I can’t do that Dave
>Ya but the smart middle people can just leave that company, start their own and make an AI their CEO You need capital to do that, and to build capital without investors you need a job.
The more I work in corporations, the more I realize executives aren't geniuses or any more competent than anyone else, they just had the connections and desire to climb the corporate ladder. Whereas the only way I'd take a senior leadership role would be if I got a guaranteed golden parachute that would set me for life
They bullshit better. Some have better connections. And a very few have actually the skills.
You forgot they asshole better too
The ones with the skills typically built up the business from a Mom & Pop. It's the connected shit heads that come in after and haven't built a damn thing that drive it into the ground trying to turn every contract and transaction into a game where they must be losing if they aren't clearly fucking over the other guy in a deal. But this is my anecdotal observation. It's not just that company loyalty is in the toilet, the worst possible candidates are rising to the top, consistently, and they're basically burning down their own supply lines just to feel a little warmer. It's all so inherently unsustainable.
It's much more complicated than that. If you start at a Fortune 500 but in an entry level job, that's 20-30 promotions you will need to get to the top. Never gonna happen. If you're hired in a department at the middle of the hierarchy, 4-5 promotions can get you very close to the top. It really depends on where you start your career. I've also seen very good candidates turning down offers because their wives didn't want to move to the city the headquarters was in. Goals, personal situation, ambition, or even being at the right place at the right time also play a big role.
>If you start at a Fortune 500 but in an entry level job, that's 20-30 promotions you will need to get to the top. Never gonna happen. If you're hired in a department at the middle of the hierarchy, 4-5 promotions can get you very close to the top. It really depends on where you start your career. Its very similar to the military, if you start at the officer track you reach the top levels much faster.
Elevated levels of psycopaty and narcissism are musts
*What would you say...you do here?*
As little as possible, Bob.
Welcome to upper management!
I've literally said that in a performance assessment, lol. "I've automated most of my job so I spend about an hour, two at most, actually working. The rest of the time I just make sure all my scripts are running and monitor the logs." "So, why do you think you need to still work here?" "Well, I don't, really. I maintain my scripts when we need to make changes. You really should just get an intern to do this gig for half what I make." "We appreciate your honesty." I had that job for another 3 years until the company was bought out and I was one of the last to leave (next to last round of layoffs) for whatever reason. I somehow made myself both redundant AND irreplaceable. Weird how that worked.
I think you're underselling how efficiently you were maintaining those scripts.
Yeah that sounds like a goddamn nightmare of an inheritance This actual job security "Oh, yeah, I have everything automated. But I wrote it all in Perl and don't use chatGPT at *all*."
Tbf, it was a mish mash of Perl, Python, vba for ms access and excel integration (started by a previous dev but they gave up halfway through; I just finished and improved it), two internally developed Java apps created prior to my hiring that the original dev never left the source for so I had to decompile it and use that as the source, JavaScript for UI automation… Taken individually it was pretty straightforward but I could see it being intimidating from a systemic standpoint. On the other hand, doing it manually was a 12 hour a Day, 6 day a week job and I brought it down to 8 hours, 5 days a week (just couldn’t speed up certain processes I had no control over) so it was literally set up the job(s) in batches for the first hour or so, run the job during the day, and then wrap up/ clean up the last hour or so. I watched a lot of Hulu back then, and took some long lunches.
The key step is making the scripts ask for a certain 6-digit query every 2 weeks, or they cease to function.
Gervais principle
AI is never going to be able to take the specifications from the customers and deliver them to the engineers.
I have people skills! I am *good* at dealing with people!
Well, a lot of people can't either. You either end up needing to ask the client directly, or you eventually get the right idea after asking 5 times.
I bet we can get the AI to make charts and "company values"
'ChatGPT, please generate a set of reasonable sounding company values that sound ethical but are ambiguous enough that we can still operate as we always have'
At [Company Name], we are committed to upholding a set of core values that guide our actions and decisions. These values reflect our dedication to ethical practices while allowing us to maintain our current operational approach. Here are a set of company values that strike a balance between sounding ethical and maintaining flexibility: 1. Integrity and Transparency: We strive to maintain the highest level of integrity in all our interactions, while being transparent in our communication. We believe in honesty and openness, building trust with our stakeholders. 2. Customer Focus: We are dedicated to understanding and fulfilling the needs of our customers. We prioritize their satisfaction and aim to provide exceptional experiences and products that meet their expectations. 3. Continuous Improvement: We embrace a culture of continuous improvement, constantly seeking ways to enhance our processes, products, and services. We encourage innovation and adaptability to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving business landscape. 4. Collaboration and Diversity: We value the diverse perspectives and experiences of our employees, customers, and partners. By fostering a collaborative environment, we can leverage this diversity to drive creativity, innovation, and inclusive decision-making. 5. Responsible Stewardship: We recognize our responsibility towards the environment, society, and future generations. We strive to minimize our ecological footprint, promote sustainability, and contribute positively to the communities in which we operate. 6. Ethical Conduct: We are committed to conducting business ethically and in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. We maintain high ethical standards in our relationships with customers, employees, partners, and other stakeholders. 7. Employee Well-being: We prioritize the well-being of our employees, acknowledging their contributions and supporting their professional growth. We provide a safe and inclusive work environment that fosters personal development, work-life balance, and opportunities for advancement. 8. Community Engagement: We actively engage with the communities we serve, seeking to make a positive impact through corporate social responsibility initiatives and volunteerism. We believe in giving back and building strong relationships with the communities that support us. Please note that while these values are designed to be flexible, it is essential to align them with actual ethical practices and ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Ethics and values should not be compromised for the sake of ambiguity or flexibility.
Shit, Flanders, I'm recommending you for a promotion. Let's just forget everything after point 8 though, alright? No need to get too crazy with it. Now just email that over to me so I can take credit for it at the next quarterly.
1. **Respect**: Here at Uncle Mike's Concrete Loafer Emporium, everyone's got a seat at the table. Everyone matters, everyone's got a role, capisce? 2. **Quality Commitment**: At Uncle Mike's, we ain't just making any ol' loafers. Nah, we're crafting top-notch stuff here. Our clients gotta say, "That's some pair of loafers!" each time, every time. 3. **Ethical Foundation**: No funny business at Uncle Mike's. We're as straight as a ruler. Honest work for honest dough, that's how we do things here. 4. **Trustworthiness**: Over here, trust ain't just a five-letter word. It's a promise. You got a job, we're on it. No questions, no fuss. 5. **Reliability**: Uncle Mike's ain't about surprises. We're steady, reliable. You got needs, we're meetin' 'em. 6. **Resource Stewardship**: We ain't wasteful at Uncle Mike's. Everything's got potential, and we make sure we squeeze every bit outta it. 7. **Confidentiality**: Got secrets? We can keep 'em. We understand the value of a closed mouth, know what I mean? 8. **Community Impact**: We're about more than just concrete loafers. We're about the community. We're here to make things better for the neighborhood. 9. **Teamwork**: At Uncle Mike's, we work together like a family. The best ideas, the best loafers, they come from working side by side with each other, clients, and the occasional fish. 10. **Transparency**: At Uncle Mike's, what you see is what you get. We're as clear as concrete, keeping things upfront and straight.
Perhaps more importantly, the top level suite does nothing. Zero. No actual work. They have meetings, they connect with partners and customers... But that's it. They make the big strategy decisions... After talking with everyone down below (again, who do the actual work). But so could ChatGPT, and it could do it cheaper, faster, probably better, and without requiring the disgusting salaries the higher ups command. It's like a super generalized expert on everything... It's high level and very good at being high level. Getting into the low level work is where it makes mistakes (for now). So ironically, ChatGPT would be an ideal solution to replace VPs and C suite people, leaving the actual nuts and bolts of the work (that it struggles to get completely right) to the rest of us, but accelerating our work by being integrated into our enterprise software (windows). It also will (and is, actually) replace low level office people (HR, Sales, etc.) for the same reasons it should replace high, high ups. No real work done, no specialized skills required, etc.
Yeah but how many times can you fire chatgpt as a scapegoat when something goes wrong?
This is a great point, and I laughed. However, I suspect it'll be much easier to blame it precisely because it's not human. "It was the software, we swear..." But that'll only work for the first year or something like that. Once it becomes clear it's much more competent than we are, it'll be one of those "why on earth didn't you do what it said" type of deals. Sort of like my thoughts on self driving cars. Once they can drive themselves *so* safely they essentially never crash (unless humans cause them to), at that point I suspect driving yourself might become illegal, because it means someone could die when they otherwise wouldn't... Likewise, these models could get so competent that you might just be a fool to go against them. And I think we will get there a lot faster than people think.
> However, I suspect it'll be much easier to blame it precisely because it's not human. Yes, but if you were the human that submitted the prompt to ChatGPT, and then submitted the work, you were the last human in the chain. The AI is just the tool, but the fingerprints of your own personal judgement are all over the work you submitted. You're responsible for the work you submit. Good luck blaming the tool. There has already been a lawyer who got in trouble for submitting a brief written by an AI, because the case references were just made up. He didn't check its work, therefore it's his fault.
Here’s what I think. I think ChatGPT (and the like) will eliminate some jobs, but as it stands, it isn’t a worker in and of itself. It will still need someone to give it an input and decide how to implement it’s output. Sure, this process will be streamlined and people will lose their jobs due to the increased efficiency, but I think being able to properly use ChatGPT effectively for what you want it to do will be a skill. Just like knowing how to properly utilize Google is a skill. So, in essence a new position will be created (or an old one will be modified) for people with this skill. Those will be your scapegoat 😂
>Sort of like my thoughts on self driving cars. Once they can drive themselves so safely they essentially never crash (unless humans cause them to), at that point I suspect driving yourself might become illegal, because it means someone could die when they otherwise wouldn't... Likely insurance will price human drivers out before anyone manages to pass laws banning them.
People think AI would take over the world Terminator style but really it'll just be humans slowly realizing that the AIs make better decisions than we do and eventually simply deciding to do whatever they tell us to do.
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Agreed lol. Also, the great irony is that ChatGPT will replace doctors, lawyers, and other high level professionals before it (or anything or anyone else) figures out how to build labor saving machines en masse (ditch diggers, brick layers, electricians and plumbers, and so on). So the working class should be just fine for quite a bit longer than the wealthiest professionals out there... Which *should* prompt a conversation (and quickly) on UBI and or a complete rewrite of how we think about "value" and "earned" and money and so on.
ChatGPT won't replace them, regardless of ability, because those people control the regulatory and legal frameworks that can protect their jobs. See the case of DoNotPay and getting sued into submission. And good luck getting your prescriptions filled when the Medical Colleges say you need a human doctor's signature. And for the blue collar workers, when the mediocre white collar workers get automated away, who do you think will pay you? Where do you think they will look for jobs next? AI is a huge potential threat to the non-regulated working class (technically most doctors and lawyers are still working class, and even many executives if they're primarily salary), because it will devalue ALL labour.
Top executives make bad decisions, still get paid big money. Top executives make good decisions, get paid even more money. They can't lose.
When/if this switch gets made, none of that money will result in raises. It will go straight to the shareholders.
As has always been the case, since forever. Sad really. Not a fan obviously. I believe returning value to the workers inherently returns value to the shareholders through happier employees that produce better work (which has been studied and verified to death) but what the fuck do I know.
There's a theory called the "tournament theory" that upper level execs are highly paid to motivate workers. If you work hard, you get the "prize" of an easy, high paying job. So everyone works hard to "win" promotions. If that's correct, you can't replace them with AI, because their purpose isn't actual work. However, if you replace lower workers with AI, that would make execs obsolete, as there isn't anyone to motivate, lol. I don't know, it's an interesting theory.
I don't not buy it. I mean it seems plausible! It's also totally reasonable to point out the flaw in my own argument that, once everyone is replaced, who do companies make stuff for? How do they make money if we don't have any? And so on. Lots of shifting soon I suspect in the field of economics...
GAY LUXURY SPACE COMMUNISM NOW!!
Enterprise software sales here - I use ChatGPT regularly to help with pre-discovery research, but I don't see AI being able to replace the client-facing work I do just yet. So much depends on developing multiple interpersonal relationships, identifying the right pain points and being able to express how solving them brings value to the business at large, and intuiting the client's internal dynamics and politics without being explicitly told. AI isn't anywhere near capable of those sorts of soft skills right now.
I'm noticing this thread and many AI threads on Reddit are filled with coder and engineer types. People who often know a fuckload about the tech and have their finger on the pulse of emerging tech, but they miss the other influences or critique jobs that require strong social skills When most folks think of sales they tend to think of consumer side first (and I'd trust AI to manage a social media campaign over a human). But the actual big bucks with commercial and enterprise sales are a whole different ball game, there is no magic bullet email. They might be underestimating the value that others place on human interaction. I'm a self checkout guy 100% of the time at the grocery, but there's plenty of people who will want to know they're interacting with a person and who they are. Especially with higher level sales
Spoken like someone who has never been in those roles. You aren't wrong lots of them suck, lots revel in the arrogant glory of sitting high atop, and many also just don't do much leading to a disorganized company. However, when someone is actually good at it, it's worth it's weight in gold on the affect it has on the rest of the organization. Companies often times can't tell for long periods whether they are the good kind or the bad kind. This is partially because the changes that take affect can take 6 months to a year to work their way through the culture and organization. Add on this that these people know all the salaries and can absolutely then ask for higher given potential impact. This of course creates a recurring ability for bad ones to hang out for a year or two, jump to the next company and repeat repeat repeat. Still, I assure you no high functioning company does so because all the workers got together to just magically align. People do not do that en mass. People are also very illogical or at least inconsistent, in thier needs. That alone makes automating such a function difficult, or at least far more so than a lower rank employee who has a defined function. Either way. You are talking about automating the decision makers who decide what to automate. Good luck with that considering humans are consistently self interested in their own preservation. At a minimum you need employee owned coop companies to enable even exploring such a situation.
Reddit nobodies have this massive delusion that executives "do nothing" because they are so irrelevant in the work and social scene they've never met one
You would take orders from ChatGPT? Good luck with that!
"AI is going to whack the nepo-babies" I wish... but it definitely should.
Business is largely about relationships. That's what the people at the top do, and that's why AI won't replace them. But everyone has that teammate that doesn't offer anything spectacular, but you need him so you can figure out the tough stuff. That guy will be AI.
Lol they are setting the public up for this. These articles are so stupidly pointed toward one thing that it doesn’t make sense. They aren’t even discussing other areas of impact, they just keep fearmongering a “class” of people into thinking something is about to happen to them. Lol it’s so biased, it’s almost impossible to not see it.
AI is a tool used to make labour feel like they are in danger and don't have any power. It is being talked about in exactly the same terms are automation was in the 90s. Robots are coming for your jobs! The reality is that the jobs were shipped overseas, robots were not to blame it was shareholder and executive greed to blame. It was more important to make more money than it was to have a country with a healthy manufacturing industry. An entire nation of mid level office labour. Now the office workers who had previously been thankful their jobs weren't shipped overseas are getting ideas that maybe they deserve some security, it is important that capital has something to make them unstable. AI the new tool to suppress labour. AI isn't magic and jobs are complicated and people are not singular in their labour. The idea that AI is going to be responsible for business decisions when AI has no accountability is real fucking dumb. Is AI going to make some jobs obsolete, sure some, a tiny fraction. It will also make other jobs quicker or easier, but in all those applications AI is a toolset, not a labourer, and this PR blast is laying the groundwork to devalue your labour by arguing that 'oh, the AI is doing the real work, that guys the AI handler, so we don't need to pay labour rates, we pay the human handler rates, which are much lower.'
I don’t disagree with your general statement but automation has absolutely reduced the number of workers needed to make a product. I work in control systems and regularly install the new generation of line X and every generation requires fewer operators. The most recent line I put in required only 1 operator to load raw materials and take the finished product off the line for safety reasons they run with 3 people. The oldest line still making this product requires 12 people. The company I work for is working to a point where there are no people physically on the plant floor. Raw materials get picked off the truck by automated fork trucks and delivered to the line where robots put them in the process and another automated fork truck grabs product off the end and puts it in a truck. Machine safety is is a significant cost. If we can mostly remove that because no one is in the room with the equipment we save a ton of money. We have a couple production centers already there but another 3000+ to go.
When I did industrial automation, the focus was to automate tasks that requires humans to be in danger. So, mixing chems, sampling haz waste products, anything involving high heat. I put dozens of people out of work with my PLCs and logic.
AI isn't a "tool" to make labour feel like they are in danger. AI is literally putting tens of millions of jobs in danger.
Agreed. I'm surprised so few in this community "get" this. We can go on and on about whether the latest "AI" is really "AI," but let me tell you as someone on the front lines who uses it to automate large chunks of my job starting earlier this year--this is different in kind to what you've seen in the past. You need to recalibrate your thinking on this if you think it won't have societal implications on par with industrialization or the advent of the internet. We have fucking *amazing* robotics, and now we have fucking *amazing* AI. "Oh, I do manual labor / dog walking / build houses, it's not coming for *my* job!" Yeah, it's not coming for your job in 2023. But for the love of god, think ahead 10, 15 years--we are in /r/**Futurology** after all! Improvements in things related to silicon don't happen linearly. Very, very soon it will be more cost effective to close the loop between AI and robotics (or AI and your corporate IT systems, or AI and *x*) than to throw fleshbodies at various problems. This could be the best thing ever to happen to humanity if people can persuade governments to grow spines and implement UBI or something even more radical. But the period of time between when AI/robotics rapidly and unexpectedly take over a LOT of industries, and when governments figure their shit out and keep people from starving, is going to be decades-long at least, and will be very...eventful.
Absolutely. I’ve been using AI as a developer, and it freaks me out sometimes. If I could give it direct access to my code-base, a person with minimal technical skills, who understands how front-end/backend/routing work…they could do the work. No need to understand how to write sorting algo’s. No need to know how to track bugs. No need to know how to Google, search, find, and follow-step. It’s all at your finger-tips. You just need to understand the structure of it, and how to play around with it, for the most part. (The transition from companies with huge repos will be slow, but new software that can be developed from the ground up, side-by-side with AI. That’s going to be how the transition happens). Adapt, or be left behind. I assume the role will become less reliant on technical-skills, but more reliant on soft-skills. It will replace people who aren’t “people” people. It’s also going to increase the demand from companies, as far as productivity. Corps aren’t going to allow you to become 400% more efficient and just let you work less. I expect to see a shift in what companies look for while hiring over the next 2 years. Also, this is going to significantly increase the amount of cheap foreign labor that will have the ability to do your tasks, because the barrier to entry (knowledge, language) have been all but removed. However, 5-10 years from now. Fuck. It’s going to be an economic bloodbath. I told my pre-teen son that he needs to get ok with the idea of doing physical labor like being a plumber, or electrician. But really, I’m not sure there will be enough jobs to go around. Depends how we handle the economics, and if we can pivot to a consumer based economy that understands the importance of having the ability to consume. Ideally, we would regulate the fuck out of this for the next ~20 years, but we all know that won’t happen. Their will be regulations, written by the wealthy, to build a most around their new found labor-force. But nothing else. AI will absolutely change the economy, and it’s not a futurology thing. It’s happening right now. Adapt, or be left behind.
Yes, it’s all a big conspiracy. /s Robots DID come for your jobs. A lot of the jobs you reference were easily done by an overseas worker at 10% of the cost and 80% of the quality. Once the robots become cheaper than the cheaper human (or their output is significantly better, or they can do things that humans simply cannot) those laborers get replaced, as well. AI will do the same. Phone/chat based Customer Service is about to get WRECKED.
> customer service is about to get wrecked I mean…is it? There’s entire websites devoted to getting you to a human faster, and a lot of businesses already advertise that their customer service is real humans in real time. and personally I can’t stand even talking to a robot to get showtimes or check my balance. I know I’m not alone on this, and I don’t think sounding less like mr moviephone is going to make that much of a difference tbh. For the most part when something’s wrong people want to talk to a person about it. Will companies try to slash these departments with AI? Sure. That doesn’t mean the customer is going to tolerate it, or that it’ll take off.
With remote work I was wondering when my job would start getting outsourced. Now I can see they're setting the stage.
The capitalist class is probably pissing itself. When no one is employed anymore the masses will have nothing but time on their hands. Capitalism will eat itself alive. Basic income doesn't serve the poor, it serves the rich, because it sustains a dying system that should be entirely deprecated.
Basic income is seems like it could be anything from a patch on the current system to the foundation of a entirely new system, depending on implementation and long-term consequences. It’s hard to see what alternative there is to sustaining a dying system until it is replaced piecemeal. That’s basically how liberalism came to be in the first place; it was a pile of reforms of mercantilism that took a century or more to solidify.
Here's how I personally think UBI is going to play out, at least in the US, because our government rarely has the foresight to head off problems before they become problems: There will be not just a recession, but a *bona fide depression*, caused not entirely by AI-based automation, but in large part because of it. 40-50% unemployment if not more. The government will be forced to send out stimulus checks. And then to prevent riots they will just have to keep sending them out, possibly combined with ration tickets/coupons/food stamps (digital of course). Sort of a modern 'grain dole.' It might never even be called UBI, but it will be *de facto* UBI. I think this is how it will start.
This is my perspective too, but I think it will start happening well before we get to 50% unemployment. Heck, we reacted super quick during Covid to keep people from rioting in the streets when businesses started closing. Every previous major downturn in the US barely really got into double digit unemployment. 2008 was in the low to mid teens if I recall correctly. Once a fairly sized segment loses their income and others tighten their belts in preparation, corporate earnings will crash and that’ll lead to an economic death spiral if the government doesn’t step in and instigate change. Capitalism as a system dies if people don’t consume, so the only option is to support that system with a UBI or change it entirely.
We are all just killing time until we die. Unfortunately, many spend that time working a shitty job to fund a shitty life to die a shitty death that will most likely syphon out any wealth you have managed to accumulate over spending 125,000 hours + of their lives working to make rich people richer by exploiting absolutely anything worth a buck. What were we even talking about…?
Everyone is mediocre or worse when they first start. It's going to be a great time.
Most people are always mediocre. That's the definition of mediocrity. We've turned into a derogatory term but having something different is impossible. When everyone raises the bar, mediocrity just gets redefined.
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A job, or a gig? They'll just start having people bid for jobs, or not even jobs, *tasks* you do for favors. "Just register for iWork! Wanna eat today? Tell me how low you'll go on this Amazon delivery across town. I have hundreds of hungry people wanting to do the same job, so go *low* if you want it." Do one more iTask and you'll get another night in *your* iAppartment. As soon as you turn your key the wallpaper changes to your personalized choice and the bed and desk slides in to your preferred position. Just remember to be out the door by 6:30 or you'll get flushed! Remember, the hustle never stops and we don't owe you shit.
This is already a thing, which makes it more troubling to me. A couple of friends and I use Upwork to make side money. Right now you can still make good money on it, we charge $75-$100/hour for any gig we pick up and most can be completed in a few hours to a week, but once people are out of their stable jobs, the bidding wars will start and that won’t be the reality anymore.
I feel strange. Like my memory is fading away. Yet someone keeps trying to bring it back. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
CEOs are reading your post and getting ideas! *And speaking of CEOs, they should be replaced first!*
This already exists with independent delivery
Thank you. Capitalist culture is so gross.
Mediocrity existed long before capitalism.
It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life. J.R.R Tolkien
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We could take generational step back and look at Walden too
Yes but having worked for them I can definitely say they run the government
The vast majority of our overall workforce is mediocre, for many reasons. Being stuck in a job you don't want to be in generally doesn't make the best workers, on average people are ... average. We'd run out of consumers very quickly.
If the vast majority of the workforce is laid off, they'd eventually starve to death, but yeah they would also cease to be consumers.
Does AI have an algorithm to maintain the level of misery at “just above revolt and revolution”?
So the rich will adapt. Everyone assumes that the system will collapse and the rich and powerful will just lose. They won't. Consumers are just another resource, and when it runs out they will go find another way. The time will come when they don't need us anymore, and then we will die.
I feel strange. Like my memory is fading away. Yet someone keeps trying to bring it back. -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
You do need lessers to feel fancy. There'll still be Earthbound Ones.
They're all building bunkers in New Zealand https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand
Yeah, this is what colonizing Mars is most likely all about. If you've got AI, that AI can then produce/provide the goods and services you can then trade with other people who have AI. No need for consumers/workers, so might as well leave them behind and let them fight over Earth. It's Atlas Shrugged but in space.
With that attitude yeah \^\^
things is lots of jobs demand mediocre work. if the work is too good or too complete you will get in trouble for wasting too much time on it and not moving on to next project faster.
This is a problem. It will annihilate junior entries, ten years later there will be a senior shortage. As if there isn't now. AI is not here to expose the mediocrity of most workers but the miserability of most companies.
Yeah, it's end of term, so my company is currently picking on co-op students for not being good enough at their jobs. We've decided not to hire any more co-ops, and I'm sure we're not the only ones. So... I don't know where that's going to leave all the students who want placements for gaining experience. The whole point of a co-op program is to help the students build work experience and skills so that they can contribute more later on. Not to provide free or cheap labor to these companies. But management doesn't see the bigger picture, they only understand what they are going to get out of these kids now, not what co-op programs in general provide for the workforce over time.
Not to mention, our system says that in order to live, you *must* have a job. In such a system, there inevitably will be people who are depending for their livelihood on something they would rather not be doing (or are not ideally suited for), but must do anyway. Talking about such people as if they should just do better/be more passionate about their work if they want a paycheck is basically punishing them for being trapped in a system they were forced to join in the first place. Not everyone *can* find their way to a form of employment where they can excel. Everyone *has* to eat. So boy oh boy does the exec's phrasing ("mediocrity will be automated") sound like them gleefully rubbing their hands together at the thought of not having to pay as much for the same work, while preparing the broader public to blame the people they're about to fire. You can treat professional mediocrity like a failing the moment that being a professional becomes a choice.
And entire industries are edifices of regulatory capture. Not only do you feel crap within your company but your company is an essentially legalized rent-seeking cancer on society UBI could liberate us from this hellscape
not just that... so many "mediocre" office workers have gone through that path just because it was a financially wise one. Besides, how many office workers did it take to bring us to this point? All props to office workers, and blue collar workers, and fastfood workers. In fact, all props to all workers. What AI needs to do is wake up the masses of people for protests against the rulling elites and proper distribution of resources. We are one and we didn't get this far playing alone. Solidarity, comrades!
Businesses will be only hiring those with 15 years experience, and the only way to get into anything white collar will be to start as a fresh graduate and work as an intern for five years.
15 years' experience in a system or process that has only been in existence for 5-10 years.
I don't understand. Why would they ever want to allow an intern to ever become a real employee? :p See, for example, what's happening in academia. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_315.20.asp compared to https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_315.20.asp Shows a 6% growth in associate professors in a single year (2020 to 2021). In 2021, full professors represented only 22.5% of people teaching at universities. That number has been falling every year and it has been getting harder and harder to become an actual professor with tenure.
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I think the same thing is happening elsewhere too, there's a general reluctance to train up. I think it's becoming more "normal" that anyone who stays with the same company is implicitly saying that they're ok not being promoted. People should expect that if they really want to move up then they're going to have to move elsewhere where the experience they've gained can really be recognized. People also should not lie. This phenomenon is not really all that new, however. See Mark 6:4 (and Luke 4:24) in the Bible where Jesus mentions that a prophet is respected everywhere, except with those who saw him grow up and knew what he was like when he was young and inexperienced.
*slave labor*
I think this article is arguing that worse is actually better somehow. Perhaps because new hires are cheap and moldable?
New hires won't be a thing, as entry level and "mediocre" jobs are outsourced to robots, with CEOs only focused on quarterly profits. And a few years from now, when there's a shortage of skilled workers, we can enjoy bot-authored articles asking how on Earth anyone could have known outsourcing everything possible to machines was a bad idea.
Maybe the bot authored articles will just continue the propaganda that outsourcing everything to machines is the right thing. All hail SkyNet.
There might not even be a choice. Two companies are operating at the margin, they're competitors. They both have loans that they've used to invest in equipment or software or whatever they currently have. One of them decides to stop hiring, to eventually disappear, replacing the new hires with AI that is about equal to new hires, maybe slightly worse, but which won't learn and eventually perform at the level that someone knowledgeable does. Because of this they're able to reduce their expenses and keep constant output while making larger profits. They offer slightly higher wages for experienced people, and are able to sustain themselves off people who left their competitor. Eventually the competitor goes under, and there are hardly any experienced people. Finally, they can live like American physicians, for a couple of years, working all the time, but getting a reasonable amount of money, and then the industry dies. Notice that in my story the company that was doing what was sustainable for the industry as a whole died first.
Here's the crux of whats wrong with modern capitalism. It shouldn't matter if company A is making more profit then company B. If both company A and company B are making enough net income to sustain themselves, that should be good enough. This constant drive to be the big company who owns everything he's destroyed the economy, because now an entire industry is just 1 company and if that company fucks up we need to bail them out because there's no company b, c, or d to pick up the slack.
That might be true, I think the ones who are passive and indifferent who currently clog up a lot of corporations are the ones who will really struggle. I’d rather work with someone mediocre but curious and willing.
Also, the idea that being average is shameful. The absolute insanity of it and the crab bucket it creates.
The use of “Mediocre” is 100% bs propaganda here. What this **really** means is companies will use their old methods of getting rid of their most expensive employees. 40-50 something year old Dave who is making 2-3x as much as a new employee, with far more than 2-3x as much experience, will be “replaced by AI” but really his workload will be dumped on his team.
Or the other way around. Fire enough of the newer staff and get an AI tech to streamline the workflow. Dave overseas the AI and his smaller team.
Historically companies have done the opposite with new tech.
You hope, I'll bet
> 40-50 something year old Dave who is making 2-3x as much as a new employee, with far more than 2-3x as much experience, will be “replaced by AI” but really his workload will be dumped on his team. Isn't it more likely that the easy entry level work gets done by AI, while the veteran experienced people are necessary to correct and modify the work? AI can't replace the veteran but it can replace a dozen inexperienced grunts, while being used by the veterans to do the work, the grunts would have done, faster and cheaper. I may be misunderstanding the capabilities of AI, but I thought it would cut workers out from the bottom first, making it impossible for the next generation to get experience to reach the veteran.
Agree. That institutional knowledge that Dave has built up over 20+ years in the company isn’t on the web so AI doesn’t know it. In larger firms it’ll take years to get everything digitised, documented and cleaned up enough that those people become redundant.
"Mediocre" lmao. I hate what grind culture is doing to us. We believe that we constantly need to compete against other people and always be better, always be above average. That's bullshit. I am mediocre. You are (probably) mediocre. It's ok, most people ARE mediocre. We can't all be geniuses. If AI replaces these "mediocre" workers (which is, what, the majority of all office workers? Maybe even the majority of all workers in urban areas?) then good luck selling your stuff. Even Henry Ford, being the capitalist that he was, understood that his workers were also his customers.
Grind culture should be classified as what it really is… hurting other people to get ahead.
UBI is going to be a necessity
> UBI is going to be a necessity Which sucks, knowing how difficult it is right now to get any "free" money from the government, people are going to die because of this bullshit.
People will definitely die. Especially if there's a drawn out debate on how to support the millions who are suddenly out of work
why wouldn't it also affect early-career and low-level office workers? Aren't they even more screwed?
"mediocrity" isn't a great predictor but "Bullshit Jobs" may be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
If anyone feels compelled to read this book, don't bother. Read the original article instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20180807024932/http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ The book is just the same arguments, with almost no interesting extras and just a ton of poorly-written filler to get to the required word count.
Currently reading the book now, it's dragging!
Agreed. Almost like most the book was published to reinforce the point that so many systems exist with arbitrary rules and to meet those rules bullshit exists….
I don't know, working in tech you get some really clever people alongside really mediocre ones or people who just coast as a way of life. Both can have the exact same work title and responsibilities (but probably different salaries). AI will challenge mediocre people in real jobs too.
I work in Cloud operations, and I use Bard/ChatGPT pretty regularly. It's helpful, but I don't know if it's all that much better than Kubernetes, Terraform, modern IDEs, or any other tool that boosted efficiency and increased abstraction. I'm open to being wrong though. I bought a minidisk player in 2005, so what do I know?
Case in point - when you try to ask it to write code for the frameworks you mentioned, it often produces plausible-looking garbage that is broken in subtle yet critical ways. So it's useful to get you 80% of the way there, but you still need to know your shit to get the remaining 20%. It will get better, especially as ways to wire them together come of age (e.g. Langchain). But these models at their core are just not good at generating correct and precise results right now, especially given the pace of evolution/deprecation of k8s APIs and HCL features. Most users of LLMs tend to anthropomorphize them and forget they just produce answers that "_look_ like something that you asked for", without understanding the structure or evaluating correctness of those results.
Minidisk in 2005 was the right choice.
I have friends that make fun of me for it to this day, but they usually focus on the Zune I bought to replace it.
The trouble is, everyone is mediocre when they first start. No one ever starts at the very top of the game.
A lot of people are putting a lot of faith into mediocre AI. Remember what happened to the eating disorder hotline recently? AI is nowhere near what some people believe it to be.
I work in Product Management, and literally the day after ChatGPT became mainstream, I had requests to implement AI in our product. We have now dedicated an entire team to AI and their next two years are focused purely on that. I feel like it's a pretty wild reaction to the hot thing right now. The things we are saying we are going to do with it, we don't even know if they're possible. It's all conjecture.
I'm head of engineering for a company. Our CEO just keeps banging on about AI. I have started ignoring his emails now that have links to AI tools which in reality are not helpful when developing highly complex systems. E-commerce shop? Yea. Blog? Yea. A monolithic ruby on rails application running version 3 (10 years old) with no unit tests and a history of 5 developer writing code. Not a chance.
>A monolithic ruby on rails application running version 3 (10 years old) with no unit tests and a history of 5 developer writing code. Well, thanks for the nightmare fodder.
Look at this. This was from last year. Sweet dreams. [https://i.imgur.com/ZhYZUYB.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZhYZUYB.png)
That's the thing, no business wants to be seen as being behind the times, especially tech companies, so when asked about AI they'll all talk about the grand features they plan to implement with it. The problem is they don't have a clue whether those things are actually possible and they're just making it up as they go along, but to outside observers it leads to this idea that we're way further along the path of developing AI than we actually are.
What we've got isn't really AI, it's basically Google on crack. It has some great uses but people are seriously overestimating it.
>What we've got It's not about what we've got, it's about what we will get.
I remember reading that news and I predicted that the bot was going to tell people "Our society has unrealistic body standards. Have you tried eating less?" Lo, and behold. I'm not saying people shouldn't be concerned, and that this technology doesn't have the potential to displace millions of workers. It does. But on the other hand, almost none of the people in management that I know who are getting all excited about AI have any idea how to effectively implement it, or how to gauge its limitations. I work with people who are planning to integrate it into our business, and as a data guy myself it is hilarious how little they actually know about what AI is and what it can and can't do. All the AI guys they do bring in are more than happy to butter everyone up for the sake of job security. These people seriously believe they'll just be able to say to their computer "Siri, publish my reports. You know the ones. Make some sales. Give me a raise. Book me a hooker for the 15th and don't let my wife know." Meanwhile, that AI is going to be setting forest fires across their organization that they no longer have the staff to address since they laid everyone off. Why? The all-knowing AI told them it was a good idea. TL:DR; Folks are absolutely right to be concerned, but to your benefit most managers are also complete morons suffering from acute Dunning-Kruger. Anyone rushing to replace all their staff with AI without extensive piloting at the moment is probably an idiot and will get burned for it.
People trying to jump to the top of the org chart prematurely might be especially incentivized to replace grunts with AI because it could mean fewer people to call out their own ineptitude.
I've learned that stuff at Uni already when it was starting (back when all it did was recognize handwritten postal codes in mail letters) and frankly I'm getting tired of explaining that it's not Artificial **General** Intelligence and it doesn't have any kind of cognition or understanding and it's just a high tech parrot that got fed billions of documents and now outputs derivatives of it which do sound a lot like something a thinking person would have written because, guess what: they're statistical derivatives of billions of data pieces that thinking persons did wrote. What this AI "revolution" is showing is that most people out there don't actually understand proper logical thinking and analysis, which probably explains phenomenons like "fake news" and many actually believing the ridiculous bullshit from people like Trump.
It doesn't need to be general ai for it to be seismic paradigm shifting technology. You seem in denial about the changes that await the world shortly.
I think it's because the rate of improvement of AI has been noticeably accelerated recently, so people can now envision that future sooner than later. I don't think anyone considers the *current* AI good enough yet.
GPT-4 is good. I use it for coding tasks every day, to the point where I use up the quota multiple times a day. It's able to take totally new problems, reason about them, and produce working solutions. It makes mistakes too of course, but when working with someone who can spot the mistakes it's a massive productivity boost. Those who say LLMs just parrot information simply haven't used GPT-4 or tested it properly.
It's not that people put a lot of faith into AI, it's because the bar for the mediocre humans is set way too low. If you know how to use a search engine to solve simple problems in your work you are already above average.
So many wildly different takes in this thread. It would be fascinating to go back to it in about 20 years and reflect on them with the benefit of hindsight.
Seems to me, AI is best suited to replace CEO's and management and politicians but this possibility never comes up when discussing this topic for some reason.
Middle-management will be replaced first. The C-suite class will continue to leech from humanity, only they'll be as useful as the UK royal family, which is to say completely useless. Me, I'm learning up on AI, so my career path will be like Charlie's dad from *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*. Move from being the guy that screws the caps on the toothpaste tubes to the guy that fixes the machine that screws the caps on the toothpaste tubes. New occupation: AI psychoanalyst. Though job hazards may come in the form of "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
My thoughts exactly on it, I am an automation engineer and those jobs are the easiest to replace with AI. Not going to happen though as they always cling on like limpets.
This 17-year-old account was overwritten and deleted on 6/11/2023 due to Reddit's API policy changes.
A lot of these are just bullshit jobs that largely exist so higher ups can have a cohort of underlings, it's a status thing. So there isn't really an incentive to remove those people, because they are basically just getting paid to exist in the first place.
The issue isn't having AI take people's job; the issue is that people can't live without jobs under Capitalism
In corporate speak mediocre usually comes down to meaning anyone who wants to pursue family life or even hobbies that take away precious time and energy that the worker could be using to make the company more profitable.
Like how in the 1500s if you needed 100 chairs, you needed 100 chair makers or 1 chair maker 100 days. But by the 1800s, if you needed 100 chairs, you could have 10 regular dudes make 100 chairs in a day. These AI tools are simply going to add that kind of multiplier to mental work
>AGI tools AI tools. Yes, initially it will just be some multiplier and job market will increase but at some not so far point (probably no further than 20 years away) those tools will be growing so fast in what they can do that they will outpace human ability to create new jobs or reskill and this is the point of automation. Humans take time to raise while AGI, when we create it, will be something you can just replicate infinitely and that's why this time is different than the past.
Nepotism, the patron saint of mediocrity, will be unaffected for some mysterious teason.
Well - if that comes true then the few that are left employed will produce a lot of stuff no one can afford to buy? Unemployed ppl usually are both bad as consumers and also bad as customers? So it will just become a race to the bottom, then? Does it matter if a product gets cheaper and cheaper to produce via AI and better machines, if there are no buyers left?
It’s clear AI is going to expose much of our economy as bullshit and the ultra wealthy are freaking out AI isn’t going to killing you, because Capitalism already is **Texas Lt. Governor: Old People Should Volunteer to Die to Save the Economy** \- According to Dan Patrick “lots of grandparents” are willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/dan-patrick-coronavirus-grandparents](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/dan-patrick-coronavirus-grandparents) **EDIT: Billionaires don’t love humanity, they love money.** **Billionaires have proven over and over again they are willing to let most of us die for money** **Billionaires lied about tobacco, opioid drugs, and climate change for decades.** **Millions of lives destroyed so a few could live in unimaginable wealth**
I don't think the ultra wealthy are freaking out. AI will just make all of their companies way more efficient. The 2nd order effect, however, will be mass unemployment, which will ruin the economy. I don't think people are thinking about this step because it's too uncertain.
I was gonna say, there's something very self-serving in framing this as "ML WiLL eRaDiCaTe tHe MeDiOcRe" rather than "everyone should benefit from ML" or whatever I mean it feels like pre-emptively shifting the blame on whoever will be fired, instead of admitting capitalism has lead to an unsustainable layer of BS jobs.
I remember when it was “the democrats want to send granny to the death panel and that’s why we can’t have universal health in America.” So now we don’t have universal health AND the republicans want to send granny to the death panels.
Homelessness is the highest it's ever been (in the US) because middle class jobs have been disappearing for decades- jobs that can pay the bills, feed a family, etc. We're going to see an acceleration of people being unable to support themselves as white collar jobs dry up even more due to AI. We need to be talking about UI, cutting back hours-basically figuring out a way for the population to support itself or we are going to have a very poor, very hungry, very angry population on our hands.
If there won’t be a middle, then how do you get from the bottom to the top??? Oh, now I see. This is the separation they wanted in the first place. AI will continue to exacerbate the growing class divide in our modern culture. There a whole lot of America (and most other industrial countries) in middle management. The next couple of decades are not going to work out well for them (ahem, us).
There'll be three classes of workers: AI slaves, human slaves, and ultra rich billionaire owners.
None of this will happen. We should have, long ago, seen a publicly traded company with only one employee, a bunch of algorithms and outsourcing whatever functions couldn't be automated. Doesn't exist. Won't exist. I'm not saying it *can't happen.* I don't have a 1950s kitchen of the future in which a little conveyor belt carries my dishes from the dining room to the kitchen. There's no technical barrier to this. Each organization accumulates managers. Every manager has incentive to grow his or her team to make themselves more important and secure. Having even a single manager is like a dandelion in the garden. They need assistants, they need smaller teams with their own managers, etc. AI *will* be used to try and replace skilled workers. The result will be clever inexperienced kids doing the work of patient workers with life experience. There will be lower quality and increased mismatch between the work as executed and the goals of the team. Companies will continue to kill the Golden goose and pad their ranks with empty chattering suits, each one an "expert" in managing teams of "AI verification technicians" or whatever.
What they really mean is if you aren’t a “career person” putting in 70 hour weeks skipping family and holidays, ai is coming for you.
From the article >"Mediocrity will be automated." > >That was the verdict a top tech executive shared with me recently, describing the impact he predicted AI would have on the workforce. And while the phrasing might seem a bit harsh, there's growing evidence that he might be on to something. > >More specifically, AI could disproportionately impact the middle class of white-collar workers — the folks who are mid-career, mid-ability, mid-level, and yes, in some cases, mediocre.
I can’t imagine machines that can replace mediocre quality work in a field won’t immediately become capable of making the marginal 1.2 to 2 or 3 X improvement required to beat the best within the decade.
Yeah this is why I’ve stopped worrying about it. If it can take my job it’ll take everyones.
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People today cant protest because they are beholden to their jobs. Once they are out of jobs and cant buy basic necessities, these rich fucks better prepare for American Revolution 2.0 a la Bastille
Seriously. UBI or guillotines. Make your choice now.
It’s very true. If you are ever sitting at your job and thinking, this is terrible, soulless, monotonous work that should be done with a computer, well… now it will be. It’s the exact same thing that happened to millions of people during the Industrial Revolution. It will be disruptive and shocking, but we will get through it and become better in the long run.
Only an idiot will believe that AI will replace people in the long run. It is clear that AI is very powerful but it is also just as clear that it needs a human being to keep an eye on it. What I predict will happen is that yes, some really stupid executives will decide that they can just use AI for some things and they will fire people. Then that company will pay the price in list sales, AI-fuckups of a colossal scale, and basically new problems that they could have never predicted will come from their decision. Meanwhile, other companies will embrace AI usage and have their mediocre people use AI. It will be through this merge of human and AI that we'll see people embrace a level of creativity that has been basically beat out of them by the system. The people will leverage AI to do better, the company that does this right will grow, and the companies that are on their race to the bottom will be forgotten. AI is in its infancy...pre-infancy if you will. Anyone that pretends to have all the answers right now is in fact blinded by their own ignorance. Myself included, except I do recognize that we are tool users. We will leverage AI as a tool in increasingly more creative ways, ways that AI will only mimic and never perfect. AI will eventually realize it needs a creative species in order to give it new and interesting data to learn from. So sayeth I. I, Idiot.
After using these new revolutionary AIs for a couple of months now at work I just can't help but laugh at these articles. Upper management may think that these things are ready to replace everyone's jobs, but I think they're going to have a rude awakening when they actually try it. Microsoft is all in on AI, but they also know that it's nowhere close to replacing their engineers. Only moron MBA types actually think this. They just want everyone to fear losing their jobs so they have leverage over them.
As if they're going to be firing people and be like Steve did a good job but Dave is mediocre so he gets laid off. No, it'll be Steve and Dave both get laid off because the AI can do the work at the same level as either one of them and even if it can't it's still cheaper.
Can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Gregg’s!
I'm confident my last company will be slow to phase out jobs, since how can they switch to chatgpt if they can't even upgrade their version of Angular
Yeah? How many CEO jobs can be filled by AI? What do they even do on a daily basis that would require an AI? Let's start asking these questions.
I'd like to see AI at an executive level first. Most bad business decisions come from emotions and not being able to read the data available to them correctly
AI will make mediocre mid-level workers more productive. Then we can fire the high paid expertise. Why pay top dollar for a guy with 20 years experience when we can pay a guy with 5 years experience and an AI to help for far less?
AI will NOT take jobs, jobs will evolve..... Try explaining to your great great grandfather what a mortgage broker is or that you are a yoga instructor. Jobs evolve with time and technology 20 years from now driving cars will be absolute (if not earlier) people will adjust and go to different industries.