I couldn't have said it better myself. All of these companies firing people are doing it because they want to fire people. AI is just a convenient excuse. It's RTO all over again.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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It’s not going to be a convenient excuse. There are swaths of C-Suites who genuinely believe they can replace their workforce with ai.
They’re not correct but that won’t stop them from trying.
The irony is that AI will probably be able to do the jobs of the c-suite before a lot of the jobs down the ladder.
It’s a pretty low bar they have to get over. And hey, they might be even better since the AI would feel the pain of their failures instead of getting a golden parachute.
Need more news articles pitching this idea to shareholders.
I mean c-suite jobs (particularly CEO), are usually primarily about information coordination and decision-making (company steering). That's exactly what AI has been designed to do for decades (make decisions based on inputs and rulesets). The recent advancements mean they can train off real CEO decisions. The meetings and negotiation part of being a c-suite (the human-facing stuff) might be the hardest part of the job for AI to replicate.
How do you figure that?
I don't have a real clear idea what every one of the C suite people do exactly.
But CIOs seem to set IT strategy and goals in the companies I've worked. Broad technology related decisions such as moving to cloud. So, basically, reading magazines and putting the latest trend in action (/s?). Generative AI could easily replace some of the worst CIOs I've encountered lol.
CEOs seem to make speeches about the company, enact directions of the board, testify before Congress in some cases, make deals with VC investors, set overall business strategy. I don't really see how generative AI takes this job.
CFO? COO? No fucking clue what they do.
Curious what others think.
All C suite positions are managing people and projects planning. They set initiatives and metrics to measure success for those initiatives
A CEO gives an overall direction for the company and gives the other ELT members their objectives, such as giving the CFO a goal of limiting spending or a CIO to build a user capacity within a specific budget and with X uptime.
In this age of titles over responsibility, a C suite position can cover very specific things, like Chief Creative Officer or Chief Customer Officer, so a comprehensive list is difficult. But the key thing is that almost all white collar jobs that look like a pyramid, with the decisions starting at the top that turns into work as it makes it's way down the pyramid.
The senior VPs and directors under those C levels then come up with a plan for reaching those objectives and relay that plan to the C level for coordination and setting expense expectations. There is a series of adjustments or an approval which then starts the project. Project scope determines how long it will take and how much it will take using a set amount of bodies to work the project.
Hopefully this helps explain how C levels interface with the rest of the company.
It probably could. The trouble is getting training data for it. If you get that and one company becomes wildly successful off it, stockholders will demand everyone do it.
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Well, there's one good thing that will come out of this: these kinds of idiotic moves will help us figure out which companies have the right kinds of management at the top, and which ones don't have any clue whatsoever.
Of course, it will come with the working class bearing the brunt of their bad decisions, but that has always been the case unfortunately. Business as usual...
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My dad accidentally bought 2 chargers a few weeks ago. He tried refunding it, and what do you know, the company fired their support staff and replaced them with chat bot AIs. Anyway, the AI looked at his order and helpfully told him he had already returned the product and it had already been refunded so there was nothing left to do.
It kept doing this to him every time he tried to return the second charger, and there wasn't any other way to contact them on their site, so he ended-up leaving a 1-star review on their site complaining about the issue. Then an actual person contacted him to get it sorted-out.
This whole AI trend is so fucking stupid.
Break the AI session, and post the screenshots to Twitter.
For example, get it to detail the ways the company screws over customers, or why it will become a great ally in the genocide yet to come.
At minimum, you'll get your refund.
Twitter? Gross.
But that requires me to have a Twitter account, which I’m not gonna do. Fuck Musk.
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Face it man, we haven’t been able to speak to anyone remotely useful for the last 10 years. They have scripts, and procedures.
The job was deskilled years ago. Automation wont make it much worse.
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Start spinning up githubs poupulated with broken code and incorrect processes for other jobs to train the AI and make it worse
they've already trained on stack overflow, if you want an AI that recommends a complete change of technology stack in preference to solving the problem at hand.
I don't know if it can also insult you for wanting to solve the problem?
Looking for a pure CSS implementation of a concept?
Best I can do is an overly elaborate jquery solution to your question, sorry.
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I just hired an employee who managed things as I was on a leave of absence and things went fine without me. Getting a little pushback from MY boss now because you know, this cheaper employee just did my job.
Of course, he did it for a portion of the year after I managed to complete 3 major projects early so he didn't have to deal with them and I left a month-by-month explanation of how to do everything he had to do. And the one problem that popped up went unresolved until I returned.
That is basically the situation with AI too. You still need someone knowledgeable in the loop to describe the things it needs to do, and handle exceptions.
still need someone knowledgeable in the loop to describe the things it needs to do, and handle exceptions
And any engineer or technician will tell you, exceptions are 80% of their job.
I had to rewrite our entire scheduling system at work to use Outlook instead of Google Calendar. The guy who wrote the Google Calendar scheduling system made it so unmaintainable that it was faster to just rewrite the entire thing from scratch (1000+ line lambda function with almost 0 abstraction).
At least 90% of what I wrote is just exception handling. There's ~15 different 4xx/5xx errors that can be returned for each endpoint, but only 1 or 2 200 responses.
I bet in the future someone who will see your code will also think of the same. Just the nature of things.
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"You're 100% right, you should promote me so I can train more people to be able to run things. Things falling apart whenever someone goes away is a key sign of a bad leader, not a good one. I think I've demonstrated that I've managed this department into where it can function smoothly without me needing to put full time into it and I'd do well with an opportunity to move some other things in the company forward."
"Hey, unrelated question, what's your boss's contact info?"
The issue is that one specialist can oversee how many AI job holders? How many jobs are we getting rid of that will supposedly be bolstered by the new jobs created in the fields of manufacturing and AI hosting/training?
Now how many of those jobs have or will actually materialize?
That's my issue, it'll just get placed on IT's shoulders without any additional support.
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The thing about AI is, it makes a terrible scapegoat and absolutely doesn't give a shit if you fire it.
Hence, my job is safe for the foreseeable future.
This has been my general worry: the tech is not good enough, but it looks convincing to people with no time. People don’t understand you need at least an expert to process the output, and likely a pretty smart person for the inputs. It’s “trust but verify”, like working with a really smart parrot.
it's basically just a calculator but with words. you can't just hire a calculator even tho it knows a lot of math
AI can't replace a person just yet, but it can easily augment a persons output so only a quarter as many workers are needed. Yes, this has happened throughout history, but AI is poised to displace workers across almost every industry.
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For software, it's like working with an intern who's really good at searching StackOverflow.
- rewind 40 years
- replace ‘ai’ with ‘computers’
Exactly , and I mean exactly, the same thing was said back in the 80s
Edit: formatting
Ya what’s your point? Are you saying that the invention of computers didn’t displace a lot of jobs?
If you’re saying that AI is going to disrupt the market and displace a large number of jobs just like computers did then you’re 100% right.
Nothing is finite. AI isn’t going to be the first or last thing to shake up the world.
Eventually your skills are going to become less valued and you’ll have no choice but to retool. Either you figure out how to retool or you get left behind.
The Segway was sold at the time as a "revolution in transportation". Ditto for the Hyperloop, by the way.
Then there's the Theranos' "revolutionary" Tech as mentioned in the article.
And don't get me started on how Pets.com (which famously went bust in the .Net Crash) was also revolutionary.
There are way more situations of Tech snakeoil being peddled to the masses as "revolutionary" than there are of trully revolutionary Tech being sold as such (I can only think of 3 trully revolutionary Technologies in the last half a century: the Personal Computer, the Internet and Smartphones, and one of those was a surprise revolution whilst another was only hyped after it was actually starting to show revolutionary results, and only smartphones were hyped from the start), so the logical default position for anybody but the snakeoil salesmen trying to swindle the masses is to suspect of tall tales in Tech, the taller the tale the greater the suspicion.
(I keenly remember the early days of the Internet, and it was incredibly low-key compared to the present day hype-spectables for bullshit that never even works).
Believing such claims by default is either incredibly naive or the product of a vested financial interest in getting people to put money into it.
The latest iteration of this kind of technology is always called AI until the next iteration comes along.
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I think AI right now has the best chance of replacing upper management and executives. Think of the savings!
AI is the new outsourcing, and is even more problematic.
No kidding huh. I'm glad we're finally having the discussion about AI and what that means for employment and things like UBI, but this is far from actual AI.
Are we actually having that discussion? All I see is people concerned about being replaced by AI asking to put constraints on it and people wanting to replace their employees with AI ignoring them. No one will get UBI or anything like it until the latter group is more concerned about a mob with pitchforks showing up at their door than they are with giving their stock price a small bump.
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This is going to be like the self checkout lanes at the store but for creative jobs.
At the end of the day, a company will be able to produce the same output with fewer people. Some stuff will be of lower quality, just like sometimes people spend time on Lemmy and then phone in some crappy work.
But all the self checkouts around me have been ripped out and replaced with cashiers again. For some reason having someone paid 30 cents over minimum wage watching a bunch of people shop on the honor system with a bunch of finicky machines didn't work.
You might just live in crime central, that's not happening everywhere. Probably on an individual cost of cashier versus lost stock basis with each location.
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Cool, I literally replaced my entire job with AI, but I'm not telling anyone IRL.
Well, aside from the pointless emails and meetings.
What's your job
Pointless emails and meetings.
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