I saw another article today saying how companies are laying off tech workers because AI can do the same job. But no concrete examples… again. I figure they are laying people off so they can pay to chase the AI dream. Just mortgaging tomorrow to pay for today’s stock price increase. Am I wrong?
I’m seeing layoffs of US workers, who are then being replaced by Indian, South American and Ireland nationals… not AI. But they’re calling it AI.
We need to figure out two words for AI that represent off shoring. I can’t think of any though.
AI = Actually Indians
Yeah kinda, my coworkers talk to ChatGPT like it actually knows stuff and use it to fix their broken terraform code.
It takes them a week or longer to get simple tickets done like this. One dude asked for my help last week, we actually LOOKED at the error codes and fixed his shit in about 15 minutes. Got his clusters up within an hour. Normally a week long ticket – crunched out in 60 minutes by hand.
It feels ridiculous because it’s primarily senior tech bro engineer types who fumble their work with this awful tool.
I have never seen a clearer divide and correlation between the value I observe being produced, and those that don’t understand the limitations and value of LLMs.
It’s exhausting, because, yes, LLMs are extremely valuables, but only as so far as to solve the problem of “possible suggestions”, and never as “answers and facts”. For some reason, and I suppose it’s the same as for why bullshit is a thing, people conflate the two. And, not just any “people” either, but IT developers and IT product managers, all the way up. The ones that have every reason to know better, are the ones that seem to be utterly clueless as to what problems it solves well, what is irresponsible for it do be used for, correctly evaluating ethics, privacy and security, etc. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a mad house or just haven’t found the same hallucinogenic that everyone else is on.
What I’m reading out of this… there’s going to be a massive shortage of senior programmers in 20(?) years. If juniors aren’t being let go/not hired and AI is doing junior work…
AI will have to massively improve or else it’s going to be interesting when companies are trying to hold on to retirement age people and train up replacement seniors to verify the AI delivers proper code.
AI is just another reason for layoffs for companies that are underperforming. It’s more of a buzzword to sell the company to investors. I haven’t seen people actually use AI anywhere in my large ass corp yet.
I called Roku support for a TV that wasn’t working and 90% of it was a LLM.
All basic troubleshooting including factory resetting the device and such seemed like it was covered and then they would forward you onto the manufacturer if it wasn’t repaired because at that point they assume it is likely a hardware issue (backlight or LCD) and they want to get you to someone who can confirm and sell you a replacement I’m sure.
I went to taco bell the other day and they had an AI taking orders in the drive thru, but it seemed like they had the same number of workers.
They also weren’t happy I tried to mess with the ai.
I think quite the opposite AI is making each tech worker more efficient at the simple tasks that ai is capable of handling while leaving the complex high skill tasks to humans.
I think that people see human output as a zero sum game and that if ai takes a job then a human must lose a job I disagree. Their are always more things to do more science more education more products more services more planets more stars more possibilities for us as a species.
Horses got replaces by cars cos a horse can’t invent more things to do with itself. A horse can’t get into the road building industry or the drive through industry etc.
There are so many more things to do. Nowadays, we’re just barely doing what really needs to be done. Pretty much everything else gets ignored.
The horse analogy is actually pretty good. Back in the horsy days, you would not travel to the nearest city unless it was really important. You would rely on the products and services you had in your town. If something wasn’t available, tough luck. If it was super important, you might undertake the journey to the nearest city where you could buy that one thing.
Nowadays though, you totally can drive 20 minutes to get stuff done. Even better than that, logistics don’t depend on horses any more, so you can have obscure stuff shipped to your home, no problem.
This applies to all sorts of things too. Once AI is ready to take on more tasks… some really creepy and nasty stuff will probably happen, but it might almost be worth it. I think it should be possible to do many tasks that simply get ignored today.
Like, who will pick up the trash today? Nobody. The trash guy will show up on Thursday, so deal with it. Who will organize the warehouse? Nobody. It’s not a complete disaster just yet. We can manage for the time being. We’ll fix it when production is about to stop because we can’t find stuff in the warehouse any more. Examples like this can be found everywhere.
More science to do… made me think of portal. :)
I was channelling the lemons
Had a new hire try to do all his automation programming in python with an AI. It was horrifying.
Lists and lists and lists of if else statements they caught if a button errored but never caught if it did the right thing. 90% of their bug reports were directly due to their own code. Trivially provable.
Work keeps trying to tell us to use more AI but refuses to mention whether the training data is using company emails. If it is then a buttload of unlabeled non public data is getting fed into it. So only a matter of time until a “fun fact” from the AI turns into a nightmare.
Most of our stuff is in an obscure field with outdated code, so any coding assistance is not really that impressive.
Well, some jobs are probably being replaced. Like, I can imagine someone being paid to describe in detail what’s in a picture and writing it down would be replaced pretty quickly.
But if the article means programmers, devops, sysadmins etc., then hell no, there’s no way the current iteration of AI can replace them and instead of spreading misinformation, the article authors should focus on real reasons the layoffs happen.
But that doesn’t bring as many interactions as doom news of companies replacing us with a smart text predict software, does it?
Is the job you describe in your first paragraph really a job, though?
Performing mathematical calculations used to be a dedicated job. They called those people computers.
Yes. That’s exactly how we got the first image generating AIs - people took a huge amount of pictures and described in detail what’s in there. That’s how AI knows how to generate “a cat in a space suit standing on a moon” - there were a lot of pictures described “cat”, “space suit”, “standing”, “moon” etc. and the AI distilled the common part of each image matching the description.
And there are plenty use-cases to have a description of what’s on an image. For example for searching through images based on what’s in there.
There are lots of types of work in the tech space. The layoffs I seen have impacted sales and marketing (probably happens elsewhere too) because AI makes the day to day work efficient enough they don’t need as many people.
No, it’s basically filling the role of an auto complete and search function for code based. We’ve had this for a while and it generally works better than a lot of stuff we’ve had in the past, but it’s certainly not replacing anyone any time soon.
I work for a web development agency. My coworkers create mobile apps, they start off with AI building the app skeleton, then they refine things manually.
I work with PHP and some JavaScript and AI supports me optimizing my code.
Right now AI is an automatization tool that helps developers save time for better code and it might reduce the size of development teams in the near future. But I don’t see it yet, and I certainly don’t see it replacing developers completely.
Without saying too much, my company implemented innovative “AI” applications to reduce time wasted by certain workflows. I think I don’t have to worry about job security for the next decade…
It’s a convenient cover for their over hiring during covid. When it came out it felt like and continues to feel like what spell check was to writers/editors.
I still haven’t really figured out why they did so much over hiring during covid. It seemed to be everywhere and with no particular reason. Almost a “because everyone else is doing it” kind of thing.
I don’t know Python, but I know bash and powershell.
One of the AI things completely reformatted my bash script into a python the other day (that was the intended end result), so that was somewhat impressive.
Half of my job is now done with AI, mostly PowerShell scripting and creating PowerPoints / reports. I just play videogames or cook or clean for half of the workday now.
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