- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- technology@lemmy.world
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Management greed, stupidity, and self serving is perennial. Nothing new there.
In the article, it even reinforces this with a story about a fake livestream from the 90’s or early 2000’s.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb said in “The Black Swan” that he thought one of the unrecognized strengths of stock-market-based economies was that as publicly traded companies grow and get older, they tend to become bloated and incapable, and lose money and eventually die; and this represents a mechanism for redistributing wealth away from the investing classes (“the rich”) with some of the money making its way back into society as a whole.
IDK if that’s still true or ever was, but he was extremely successful working in finance; he wasn’t just some idiot saying his opinions.
Doesn’t work as well these days when everything is too big to fail and gets bailed out, instead of letting the economy endure the destruction part of creative destruction.
Another idiot writer missing how AI works… along with every other automation and productivity increase.
I literally automate jobs for a living.
My job isn’t to eliminate the role of every staff member in a department, it’s to take the headcount from 40 to 20 while having the remaining 20 be able to produce the same results. I’ve successfully done this dozens of times in my careers, and generative AI is now just another tool we can use to get that number down a little bit lower or more easily than we could before.
Will I be able to take a unit of 2 people down to 0 people? No, I’ve never seen a process where I could eliminate every human.
I sat in a room of probably 400 engineers last spring and they all laughed and jeered when the presenter asked if AI could replace them. With the right framework and dataset, ML almost certainly could replace about 2/3 of the people there; I know the work they do (I’m one of them) and the bulk of my time is spent recreating documentation using 2-3 computer programs to facilitate calculations and looking up and applying manufacturer’s data to the situation. Mine is an industry of high repeatability and the human judgement part is, at most, 10% of the job.
Here’s the real problem. The people who will be fully automatable are those with less than 10 years experience. They’re the ones doing the day to day layout and design, and their work is monitored, guided, and checked by an experienced senior engineer to catch their mistakes. Replacing all of those people with AI will save a ton of money, right up until all of the senior engineers retire. In a system which maximizes corporate/partner profit, that will come at the expense of training the future senior engineers until, at some point, there won’t be any (/enough), and yet there will still be a substantial fraction of oversight that will be needed. Unfortunately, ML is based on human learning and replacing the “learning” stage of human practitioner with machines is going to eventually create a gap in qualified human oversight. That may not matter too much for marketing art departments, but for structural engineers it’s going to result in a safety or reliability issue for society as a whole. And since failures in my profession only occur in marginal situations (high loads - wind, snow, rain, mass gatherings) my suspicion is that it will be decades before we really find out that we’ve been whistling through the graveyard.
that will come at the expense of training the future senior engineers until, at some point, there won’t be any (/enough)
Anything a human can be trained to do, a neural network can be trained to do.
Yes, there will be a lack of trained humans for those positions… but spinning up enough “senior engineers” will be as easy as moving a slider on a cloud computing interface… or remote API… done by whichever NN comes to replace the people from HR.
ML is based on human learning and replacing the “learning” stage of human practitioner with machines is going to eventually create a gap in qualified human oversight
Cue in the humanoid robots.
Better yet: outsource the creation of “qualified oversight”, and just download/subscribe to some when needed.
Anything a human can be trained to do, a neural network can be trained to do.
Come on. This is a gross exaggeration. Neural nets are incredibly limited. Try getting them to even open a door. If we someday come up with a true general AI that really can do what you say, it will be as similar to today’s neural nets as a space shuttle is to a paper airoplane.
In that case, the whole tech industry should, in solidarity, refuse to look for work and let the tech companies that just launched major layoffs feel the foolishness of their actions. Those tech workers need to wait long enough to allow Google, MSFT, Meta, Apple, etc. suffer the consequences of automation. If they managed this, when they finally do come crawling back, tech workers can get fat raises using this solidarity and collective action.
They’d need to unionize first.
It’s expensive to live in tech communities. All the workers would need to move their families to somewhere more affordable and demand to work from home, on top of everything else, and they’d need to have enough savings to afford that. Right now, tech workers tend to carry debt, which is the bane of collective action.
Sort of. But people in society CAN act in solidarity. It’s obviously unlikely (something tech CEO’s calculated in these layoffs).
Obviously, capitalist exceptionalism is going to cause them not to do this. No one wants to loan their neighbor some money to weather a strike that WILL eventually lift ALL BOATS because of the whole “fuck you, got mine” vibe of EVERYONE in cutthroat capitalist societies. If I had the money, I’d certainly take part in this kind of collective action…and I’d also argue that many tech workers can because they were paid INCREDIBLY well in comparison to most trades…but you and I know they won’t.
I’m a member of a stagehand union that will NEED to strike during the summer (our busiest season) in order to gain some ground back from what price gouging, austerity, and inflation has taken from us. I can easily guess how likely the membership will be to endorse a strike when we will have been out of work for more than a year when negotiations start. That doesn’t make what I said less true; just about as unlikely as a third power coming to power in the United States two party electoral system.
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I agree with you but let’s not pretend that that’s not entirely BY DESIGN.
