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.
If they were real work to begin with why would you pay for AI to replace them?
It’s funny, years ago, a single developer “killing it” on Steam was almost unheard of. It happened, but it was few and far between.
Now, with the advent of powerful engines like Unreal 5 and the latest iterations of Unity, practically anyone outside the Arctic Circle can pick one up and make a game.
Is tech like that taking jobs away from the game industry? Yes. Very much so. But since those programs aren’t technically “AI,” they get a pass. Never mind that they use LLMs to streamline the process, they’re fine because they make games we enjoy playing.
But that’s missing the point. For every job the deployment of some “schedule 1” or “megabonk” tech replaced, it enabled ten more people to play and benefit from the final product. Those games absolutely used AI in development, work that once would’ve gone to human hands.
Technology always reduces jobs in some markets and creates new ones in others.
It’s the natural way of things.
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.
No and no. Have you ever coded anything?
Yeah, I have never spent “days” setting anything up. Anyone who can’t do it without spending “days” struggling with it is not reading the documentation.
Ever work in an enterprise environment? Sometimes a single talented developer cannot overcome the calcification of hundreds of people over several decades who care more about the optics of work than actual work. Documentation cannot help if its non-existent/20 years old. Documentation cannot make teams that don’t believe in automation, adopt Docker.
Not that I expect Sam Altman to understand what it’s like working in a dumpster fire company, the only job he’s ever held is to pour gasoline.
Dumpster fire companies are the ones he’s targeting because they’re the mostly likely to look for quick and cheap ways to fix the symptoms of their problems, and most likely to want to replace their employees with automations.
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?
Clearly the documentation I dealt with daily was a hallucination. I’m sorry to defy your superior set of facts.
deleted by creator
Don’t be silly. How’s an AI going to fly politicians to secret islands and make backroom deals?
It’s arranging all that with emails, phone calls with a fake voice etc. Maybe some useful idiots that do pimping and stuff in case it’s unable to do that 🤔
Whoa whoa whoa… no one said let AI be the administrative assistant.
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.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this since chatgpt dropped and I agree with Sam here despite the article trying to rage bait people. We simply shouldn’t protect the job market from the point of view of identity or status. We should keep an open mind of jobs and work culture could look like in the future.
Unfortunately this issue is impossible to discuss without conflating it with general economics and wealth imbalance so we’ll never have an adult discussion here. We can actually have both - review/kill/create new jobs and work cultures and address wealth imbalance but not in some single silver bullet solution.
this issue is impossible to discuss without conflating it with general economics and wealth imbalance
It’s not conflating, the two issues are inextricably linked.
General economics and wealth imbalance can be addressed with or without the chaos of AI disrupting the job market. The problem is: chaos acts to drive wealth imbalance faster, so any change like AI in the jobs market is just shaking things up and letting more people fall through the cracks faster.
Everything is “linked” - your point is moot.
The real thing most people are trying to hold onto is stability, because chaos benefits the powerful. AI is just the latest agent of chaos, from their perspectives.
Weird take.
Instead of calling it chaos, call it losing their jobs - being forced to move hundreds of miles if they want to earn decent money again…
