Straight outta Manna, the short story by Marshall Brain. <a href="https://marshallbrain.com/manna1" rel="nofollow">https://marshallbrain.com/manna1</a><p>> Manna’s job was to manage the store, and it did this in a most interesting way. Think about a normal fast food restaurant. A group of employees worked at the store, typically 50 people in a normal restaurant, and they rotated in and out on a weekly schedule. The people did everything from making the burgers to taking the orders to cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. All of these employees reported to the store manager and a couple of assistant managers. The managers hired the employees, scheduled them and told them what to do each day. This was a completely normal arrangement. In the early twenty-first century, there were millions of businesses that operated in this way.<p>> But the fast food industry had a problem, and Burger-G was no different. The problem was the quality of the fast food experience. Some restaurants were run perfectly. They had courteous and thoughtful crew members, clean restrooms, great customer service and high accuracy on the orders. Other restaurants were chaotic and uncomfortable to customers. Since one bad experience could turn a customer off to an entire chain of restaurants, these poorly-managed stores were the Achilles heel of any chain.<p>> To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna version 1.0 was born.
If I could give young people one bit of advice I'd say "develop your thinking skills." The only way to beat AI is to stay one step ahead of it. It's shocking to me as an old person how many young people can barely think.<p><pre><code> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_thought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_training
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrative_thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century_skills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_reasoning
and so on...</code></pre>
I'm willing to entertain the idea that AI is something fundamentally different that will cause chaos, but software has been automating away all levels of white-collar jobs by the millions for the past four or five decades yet unemployment in this area remains low.<p>Based on past experience, it seems more likely that what will happen is that skill sets will change, people will become more productive resulting in more stuff getting done that necessitates more companies employing more people, etc. Which sucks of course if your skills are the ones that are automated away or become obsolete, but that's something been going on for half a century or more.<p>The hypothetical arrival of AGI, of course, especially if it's doable on commodity-level hardware, would be a different thing and the societal upheaval could be catastrophic. But I feel like the current crop of AI is just a continuation of the previous thing.
AI will augment people more than it will replace people for the foreseeable future.<p>Anyone who tells you otherwise has a shallow understanding of the tools and hasn't built anything more than demo projects.
I just wish for once they would tell us exactly which jobs were killed by AI. Did Meta let go of Stephanie the Jr Frontend Dev because of GPT4? Did Atlassian give Bob the Devops guy the boot because of Mixtral? Is Zoom no longer hiring marketers because of Claude?<p>The best they can do is say that middle management is feeling the squeeze. Google for "middle management squeeze" for a cornucopia of articles from every year for the last two decades.
Have these people used chatgpt or any kind of LLM? Originally I was in line with the article but after having used it, I'm not convinced it's going to take anyone's job unless your job is mindless tasks that should have been automated already.<p>Such as the example provided in the article:<p>>At Chemours, a DuPont spinoff, the company has trained close to 1,000 office and lab workers in AI applications over the past three years. As a result, finance professionals who used to prepare certain reports with a lot of copying and pasting between systems and spreadsheets now do it much faster because of their training with no-code analytic tools<p>Seems like a great use case for llms, large scale text generation that acts as scripting glue. AI will improve efficiency for dumb tasks meaning smaller teams can take the same workload. This will either lead to layoffs indirectly or more head count for r&d and other investment areas.
With a lot of freed up labor, people seem to find other activities they deem "important" and focus on those.<p>Imagine we went back and time and described a social media job where people work endless hours, so that other people can sh*tpost online... They'd probably look at you and wonder how people are clothed and fed in our time with so many diddling away (even stressed out!) at such jobs.
A double-digit percentage of the white collar jobs were bureaucratic bloat anyway. Part of why F250's are so operationally mediocre, since these jobs are generally filled with mediocre to incompetent workers.
Am I the only one who feels like they've been trying to insistently convince me of this since it came out? I instinctively disbelieve things that people insist I believe like this.
Related:<p><i>Tech companies axe 34,000 jobs since start of year in pivot to AI</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342877">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342877</a>
This prediction is made every year, yet white collar jobs continue to thrive in terms of pay and total employment. Ai can do a good job automating certain tasks but cannot respond to new information or adapt as well compared to humans. Lawyers and doctors do a lot more than write memos or browse information; they also represent clients in court, treat patients, etc. At best Ai helps white collar work by automating certain tasks, not replace it.
I see a lot of conflation of “companies are shifting their product focus to AI” - which everybody knows everybody is doing - and “companies are replacing staff with AI.” To be fair the latter aligns nicely with the “bloat-shedding” rationale for layoffs, which also feels like a very real trend, but so many of these articles put companies like Google “pivoting to [selling] AI” in the same breath.
By this logic, any technology is a threat. Its only a matter of how the technology is used. We could be celebrating that we can all work less for the same pay, but that's not how we're choosing to have it play out.
No Javascript:<p><a href="https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4069695532340&w=6it9fbL81OeR3pa6KXp8bY4bSP94gz9n" rel="nofollow">https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4069695532340&w=6it9fbL81O...</a>
I have been saying this for a few years now. Engineers are at risk for example. They they will wind up running businesses. AI is to white collar workers as technological change was to blue collar workers.<p>I am a 79 year old who has successfully changed his career several times. I now have a business in cybersecurity but in my past I have been several things including a Vocational Expert.
This is already happening at my workplace. Thousands of people just got cut off due to a LLM automating 90% of all my coworker's projects (mainly front end dev and basic backend api management). I predict that in the next 5 years, most software engineers will be worse off than minimum wage fast food workers. Coding is the new form of reading, and an AI will already have that knowledge.
"Prosus’s web designers, for instance, used to ask software developers to do the coding. Now they can do it themselves, Beinat says. Meanwhile software developers can focus more on design and complex code"<p>I call bs. At minimum, an extreme exaggeration.
I'm finding myself to look to hire less high level IC engineers as a mid/senior level engineer IC with ChatGPT is just as well informed and can put together the ideas necessary to implement the same things. Together they can do it just as fast and produces a similar outcome for as much as 25% less.<p>I see it as a move towards the middle where the need for high paid knowledgable people in certain subject areas will decrease, the need for people who can perform remedial tasks and rote memorization will decrease, but the pool in the middle with enough knowledge to query an LLM in a fashion to get the answers will be a necessity.