I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I’m reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how “work” might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work “you and I do today” (including Altman himself), doesn’t look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity’s core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn’t seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they’re made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don’t need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn’t have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
Executive positions are probably the easiest to replace with AI.
- AI will listen to the employees
- They will try to be helpful by providing context and perspective based on information the employee might not have.
- They will accept being told they are wrong and update their advice.
- They will leave the employee to get the job done, trusting that the employee will get back to them if they need more help.
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The AI won’t have a twitter account to go on racist rants.
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The AI won’t end up on the Epstein list.
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The AI won’t drunkenly send nudes to an intern.
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Don’t executives spend their day talking to AI and doing whatever they say?
Exactly. No need to add the executive toxicity filter
If OpenAI gets wiped out, maybe it wasn’t even a “real company” to start with
What do we need the mega rich for anyway? They aren’t creative and easily replaced with AI at this point.
What do we need the mega rich for anyway?
Supposedly the creation and investment of industries, then managing those businesses which also supposedly provide employment for thousands who make the things for them. Except they’ll find ways to cut costs and maximize profit. Like looking for cheaper labor while at the same time thinking of building the next megayacht for which to flex off at Monte Carlo next summer.
Sam Altman is a huckster, not a technologist. As such, I don’t really care what he says about technology. His purpose has always been to transfer as much money as possible from investors into his own pocket before the bubble bursts. Anything else is incidental.
I am not entirely writing off LLMs, but very little of the discussion about them has been rational. They do some things fairly well and a lot of things quite poorly. It would be nice if we could just focus on the former.
hes probably afraid, its going to burst too fast and is left holding the bag, thats why GATES, musk, MS, google is trying to stem the bleeding.
The problem is the capitalist investor class, by and large, determines what work will be done, what kinds of jobs there will be, and who will work those jobs. They are becoming increasingly out of touch with reality as their wealth and power grows and seem to be trying to mold the world into something, somewhere along the lines of what Curtis Yarven advocates for, that most people would consider very dystopian.
This discussion is also ignoring the fact that currently, 95% of AI projects fail, and studies show that LLM use hurts the productivity of programmers. But yeah, there will almost surely be breakthroughs in the future that will produce more useful AI tech; nobody knows what the timeline for that is though.
its also hurting students currently HS and college too, they are learning less than before.
But isn’t the investment still driven by consumption in the end? They invest in what makes money, but in the end things people are willing to spend money on make money.
You’d think so, but unfortunately not. Venture captial is completely illogical, designed around boom or bust “moonshot” ideas that are supposed to completely change everything. So this money isn’t driven by actual consumption, rather speculation. I can’t really speak to other forms of investment but I suspect it doesn’t get a whole lot better. The economy has become far too financialised with a fiat currency that is completely separate from actual intrinsic value. That’s why a watch can cost more than a family home, which isn’t true consumption - just this weird concept of “wealth”
They invest in things they think they will be able to sell later for a higher price. Expected consumption is sometimes part of their calculations. But, they are increasingly not in touch with reality (see blockchain, metaverse, Tesla, etc). Sometimes they knowingly take a loss to gain power over the masses (Twitter, Washington Post). They are also powerful enough to induce consumption (bribe governments for contracts, laws, bailouts, and regulations that ensure their investments will be fruitful). They are powerful enough to heavily influence which politicians will get elected, choosing who they want to bribe. They are powerful enough to force the businesses they are invested in to buy/sell to each other. The largest, most profitable companies, produce nearly nothing, they use their positions of being near-monopolies to extract rent (i.e. enshittification/technofeudalism).
Sam, I say this will all my heart…
Fuck you very kindly. I’m pretty sure what you do is not “a real job” and should be replaced by AI.
I’ve worked for big corporations that employ a lot of people. Every job has a metric showing how much money every single task they do creates. Believe me. They would never pay you if your tasks didn’t generate more money than they need to pay you to do the task.
Every job has a metric showing how much money every single task they do creates.
Management accountants would love to do this. In practise you can only do this for low level, commoditised roles.
Mopping a floor has a determined metric. I’m not kidding. It’s a metric. Clean bathrooms are worth a determined dollar amount. It’s not simply sales or production, every task has a dollar amount. The amount of time it takes to do the task has a dollar value determined and on paper. Corporations know what every task is worth in dollar amounts. Processing Hazmats? Prevents the fine. Removing trash or pallets? Prevents lawsuits and workplace injury. Level of light reflected from the floor? Has a multiplier effect on sales. Determined. Defined. Training sales people on language choices, massive sales effect. They know how much money every single tasks generates, fines or lawsuits prevented, multiplier effects on average ticket sales, training to say ’ highest consumer rated repair services ’ instead of ‘extended warentee’ these are on paper defined dollar amounts. There is NO JOB in which you are paid to do something of no financial value. There are no unprofitable positions or tasks.
Your examples are all commoditized and measurable. Many roles are not this quantifiable.
There is NO JOB in which you are paid to do something of no financial value.
Compliance, marketing, social outreach, branding.
Putting a $ amount on these and other similar roles is very difficult.
But I agree, if the value added is known to be zero or negative then usually no-one is paid to do it.
There are no unprofitable positions or tasks.
Not when they are set up, but they can become unprofitable over time, and get overlooked.
Compliance is calculated with previous years costs in workman’s comp, hiring and training costs, and lawsuit and fine payouts. It’s one of the easiest tasks to break down to dollar amounts. If we paid $8k at every site and one site paid $2k because they didn’t get fined on electrical outlets out of code, then one task in compliance saved $6k I’m not theorising with you. I have seen the excel spreadsheets, this isn’t me assuming they exist, this is quantified. This is specified on paper man. What don’t you get here? Marketing is VERY easy to assign a dollar amount to. We made $100k one quarter with $1k paid in marketing, we made $200k next quarter with $2k paid on marketing. Very easy to determine. You want to wake everyone in the morning meeting up? Tell them you want to pull money out of Advertising and redirect it to payroll. They’ll all spit their coffee out. Social media is also very easy to quantify. You just compare metrics across all quarters and pair them to social media follows, this is a huge metric that a lot of business decisions are made on, this isn’t amorphous just because you’re unaware of how important it is to business. Branding also has hard values assigned, and supporting or changing branding is very much a numbers game. Why else do you have companies willing to buy the name of another company even when they don’t need their production or staff along with it? I don’t think you grasp that every single task someone does for a corporation is matched to a dollar figure amount. Seriously. If I could get labor class people to drop one myth it would be that their labor has next to no value. They know what you’re worth and they know how much they aren’t paying you out of the value you produce.
Compliance is calculated with previous years costs
No, that’s just what you spent last year.
Marketing is VERY easy to assign a dollar amount to.
It’s easy to see how much it costs. It’s very hard to determine exactly how much additional revenue any particular campaign creates.
They know what you’re worth
Pick anyone at the C-Level. How much revenue do they bring in? What’s the ROI of a CFO?
This is part of the reason I don’t work for big corporations… yuck
If they were real work to begin with why would you pay for AI to replace them?
That would actually be true if companies were run by the people doing the work.
This guy needs to find Luigi.
that’s a smart comment to make.
Can’t AI replace Sam Altman?
To be fair, a lot of jobs in capitalist societies are indeed pointless. Some of them even actively do nothing but subtract value from society.
That said, people still need to make a living and his piece of shit artificial insanity is only making it more difficult. How about stop starving people to death and propose solutions to the problem?
There’s a book Bullshit Jobs that explores this phenomenon. Freakonomics also did an episode referring to the book, which I found interesting.
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth
The jobs did not start out that way, I guess these people have been tossed to the side and are not where the action currently is.
Yet they are still employed because the boss does not understand what they are doing and they might embellish their contributions etc.
There are so many people who do little, drink free coffee talk to everyone and are seen as very social, liked by everyone etc. They do fucking nothing, I know a handful of them.
management, CEOs, csuites, and admins being one of them.
They may seem pointless to those outside of the organization. As long as someone is willing to pay them then someone considers they have value.
No one is “starving to death” but you’d have people just barely scraping by.
With many bearaucracies there’s plenty of practically valueless work going on.
Because some executive wants to brag about having over a hundred people under them. Because some proceas requires a sort of document be created that hasn’t been used in decades but no one has the time to validate what does or does not matter anymore. Because of a lot of little nonsense reasons where the path of least resistance is to keep plugging away. Because if you are 99 percent sure something is a waste of time and you optimize it, there’s a 1% chance you’ll catch hell for a mistake and almost no chance you get great recognition for the efficiency boost if it pans out.
This is the tricky nature of “value”, isn’t it?
Something can be both valuable and detrimental to humanity.
why capitalist societies specifically?
Productivity will rise again and we will not get compensated even if we all get better cooler jobs and do the same but 10x more efficiently. Which we won’t get to do, some of us will have no jobs.
Earnings from AI and automation need to be redistributed to the people. If it works and AI does not blow up in their face because it’s a bubble, they will be so filthy rich that they either don’t know what to do with it or lose grip of reality and try to shape politics, countries, the world etc.
See the walking k-hole that tried to make things “more efficient”.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
– The Orange Catholic Bible
Also, that pompous chucklefuck can go fuck himself. There are people who could barely feed themselves at less than a couple dollars per day.
read the next sentence after that.
I have been working with computers, and networks, and the internet since the 1980s. Over this span of 40-ish years, “how I work” has evolved dramatically through changes in how computers work and more dramatically through changes in information availability. In 1988 if you wanted to program an RS-232 port to send and receive data, you read books. You physically traveled to libraries, or bookstores - maybe you might mail order one, but that was even slower. Compared to today the relative costs to gain the knowledge to be able to perform the task were enormous, in time invested, money spent, and physical resources (paper, gasoline, vehicle operating costs).
By 20 years ago, the internet had reformulated that equation tremendously. Near instant access to worldwide data, organized enough to be easier to access than a traditional library or bookstore, and you never needed to leave your chair to get it. There was still the investment of reading and understanding the material, and a not insignificant cost of finding the relevant material through search, but the process was accelerated from days or more to hours or less, depending on the nature of the learning task.
A year ago, AI hallucination rates made them curious toys for me - too unreliable to be of net practical value. Today, in the field of computer programming, the hallucination rate has dropped to a very interesting point: almost the same as working with a not-so-great but still useful human colleague. The difference being: where a human colleague might take 40 hours to perform a given task (not that the colleague is slow, just it’s a 40 hour task for an average human worker), the AI can turn around the same programming task in 2 hours or less.
Humans make mistakes, they get off on their own tracks and waste time following dead ends. This is why we have meetings. Not that meetings are the answer to everything, but at least they keep us somewhat aware of what other members of the team are doing. That not so great programmer working on a 40 hour task is much more likely to create a valuable product if you check in with them every day or so, see “how’s it going”, help them clarify points of confusion, check their understanding and direction of work completed so far. That’s 4 check points of 15 minutes to an hour in the middle of the 40 hour process. My newest AI colleagues are ripping through those 40 hour tasks in 2 hours, impressive, and when I don’t put in the additional 2 hours of managing them through the process, they get off the rails, wrapped around the axles, unable to finish a perfectly reasonable task because their limited context windows don’t keep all the important points in focus throughout the process. A bigger difficulty is that I don’t get 23 hours of “offline wetware processing” between touch points to refine my own understanding of the problems and desired outcomes.
Humans have developed software development processes to help manage human shortcomings, humans’ limited attention spans and memory. We still out-perform AI in some of this context window span thing, but we have our own non-zero hallucination rates. Asking an AI chatbot to write a program one conversational prompt at a time only gets me so far. Providing an AI with a more mature software development process to follow gets much farther. AI isn’t following these processes (that it helped to translate from human concepts into its own language of workflows, skills, etc.) 100% perfectly, I catch it skipping steps in simple 5 step workflows, but like human procedures, there’s a closed loop procedure improvement procedure to help perform better in the future.
Perhaps most importantly, the procedures are constantly reminding AI to be “self aware” of its context window limitations, do RAG (research augmented generation) of best practices for context management, DRY (reduce through non-repetition and use of references to single points of truth) its own procedures and documentation it generates. Will I succeed in having AI rebuild a 6 month project I did five years back, doing it better this time - expanding its scope to what would have been a year long development effort if I had continued doing it solo? Unclear, I’m two weeks in and I feel like I’m about where I was after two weeks of development last time, but it also feels like I have a better foundation to complete the bigger scope this time using the AI tools, and there’s that tantalizing possibility that at any point now it might just take off and finish it by itself.
