> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
When I worked at Home Depot during the 2000's there was a "schedule person" who would mostly wonder around talking to friends who worked there while messing up my schedule every other week. When I applied I told them I wouldn't work on certain days because of school, they hired me under those conditions. The schedule person couldn't go 2 weeks without messing it up. I have to conclude this person was paid more than me to just randomly throw people onto a schedule every week, giving thought only to their friends (which I was not). I do hope this person's job was replaced by computers years ago.
One of the most challenging problems I've every been faced with is machine-scheduling a set of manufacturing facilities. I understand that Home-Depot is a simple case, but I would caution you against trivializing the problem. The amount of compute (and accurate data collection) necessary to beat a (semi-competent) human is astounding.
On side note, I'm mentally preparing myself for a wave of AI powered plant scheduling hucksterism where those selling the systems bill AI as a tool that can magically fix the persistent problem of poor data collection.
It doesn't help that this is such a fun problem every programmer wants to try solving it.
What do you think the hardest part of solving this with computers is? Surely if we can get all the constraints (some of which would be soft-constraints) into the computer it can come up with an better solution than a person can. Right?
Is it a problem because the real world is messy and not all the data can go into the computer? Or is it that we just don't know how to define a "score function" that accounts for everything?
The real world version of the problem looks similar to the 'flexible job shop' but with a few tweaks that increase the problem complexity significantly.
Real time, accurate data collection is a non-trivial problem in a high-mix environment and if you've got a handle on the first two, compute infrastructure to crunch all of it and then push it back to the facility being scheduled is expensive.
Finally, systems that are this optimized can be slow to react to sources of error.
The alternative is to pay a couple of guys to spend most of their time walking or golf-carting around a few hundred thousand square feet of facility. Their job is to intimately know the various processes and employees involved, run a very basic scheduling protocol and modify it on the fly as the situation demands. In most instances, it is very hard to prove that the technologically complex version is a true improvement over the good ol' boy approach.
As such, the computational solutions usually end up implemented to boost the companies valuation to potential buyers.
edit: job shop scheduling can work wonders, but it generally fails hard in 'high-mix' environments.
True. That is a job that could easily be done better by a computer. On the other hand, if you mostly eliminate human workers in general that job becomes much easier.
>>I do hope this person's job was replaced by computer years ago.
It was not (source: family & friends did that job at several Home Depots recently:)
It takes about 16 - 24 hours of work on a weekly basis to manually update schedule after it has been automatically generated based on policies, requirements, and all known constraints.
Reasons, if you care - I got to hear about them weekly:
1. Department Supervisors are supposed to manage the schedules for their teams, but they did not at most stores, for various reasons from lack of training to lack of will/bother. So the job effectively gets "internally and unofficially outsourced" from a dozen leaders who know their teams, to a single HR / schedule person who now has 150-200 people they know less well (and other work to do as well). This was NOT well understood by corporate/HQ, so entire process is based on flawed assumptions from the get-go.
2. As part of that, nobody's preferences and working hours are correctly in the system. Again, should've been entered upon hire and maintained by DS, instead a single person needs to figure out and manage for 150-200 people.
3. As part of that, people made changes all the time - wedding, funeral, birth, movie, party, picnic, vacation, illness, whatever. Should: Be entered directly in the system by the DS. Actually: people leave voicemail, post it notes, yell in passing, or try to telepathically message, yes, the single person who's job it is strictly speaking not to maintain such information.
4. Software isn't great; training and documentation are worse; processes are not reflective of reality; and nobody does what they're supposed to do, from associates to DSs to ASMs. People TRY their best, mind you. But people are people, so see next point:
5. Basically, the problem there, as I see it: just like economists assume perfectly rational economic actors and physicists assume frictioneless spheres, programmers assume "well defined requirements understood by all and a process that is documented and accurately followed" when they say "this can definitely be easily automated" :->. Don't even get me STARTED on bright eager university graduates who come to companies to do robotic process automation of business processes in a quick agile way with fast ROI.... and the even quicker and painful lesson in real life they soon obtain :O
This is NOT to say I don't feel your pain - I very much do! Not sure if a little bit of background will help or make it worse :-/
Why is the generated schedule so bad that it requires a couple dozen hours to fix? Does the schedule produced fail to meet the defined constraints? Or is it because some of the constraints have not been entered into the computer?
Scheduling is NP complete, but the problems are small enough that I think computers can trivially find near optimal solutions, given some scoring function, better than a human can. Why doesn't this happen? Is defining the scoring function too hard? Am I wrong about computer's solving abilities?
Language models have proven themselves reliable with natural speech and highly technical speech (like code), they could help make entering the constraints more approachable. Also, as my example demonstrates, if such a system fails occasionally, it's not worse than the status quo.
Not GP, but usually things are missing or not up to date. Also, people are really bad at defining what exactly is a "good" result. When we introduce scheduling at customers it can take twenty to thirty iterations until we have a good scoring function with all constraints. And then the data needs to be kept up to date or it gets slowly worse over time (requirements change, data rot). This often leads to people saying "the system is bad, I'll just do it by hand" instead of investing the time to find the underlying issue. Especially if it happens gradually. First you rework one schedule, then two and so on. Or if they are not able to enact a change of the system. In many companies the people who do the schedule don't know who to tell that the system is getting worse or get ignored. And they have a job to do after all ..
Stereotypical discussion with customers after a "bad" scheduling result: "Hey, why did your system not schedule Dave to do any of these jobs? All others are at 100% already, but he has nothing to do." "The job all need a Fubar cert, Dave doesn't have one." "Of course he has a Fubar cert." "Not according to the system." "Oh, we probably forgot it, because all schedulers know it anyway."
I tried to provide detailed, bullet-point answers to that question, in the initial post, and the general comment on difficulty of automating seemingly discrete and simple business processes.
I don't have much additional information, but perhaps to summarize:
* Initial iteration of system is (by definition) imperfect
* People who are supposed to maintain constraints and parameters, don't
* Person who typically does end up maintaining the system is not aware of all constraints and parameters, and doesn't have power or channel to change system
* Process for noting and updating constraints is poorly communicated and not enforced
* Through entropy, system, which was not perfect in the first place, gets worse over time, which feedback loops because people keep overriding it and updating it less and less.
My friends'/family experience has been that when a new HR Manager joins a store, they tend to "clean up" everything as much as they can; but then entropy sinks in again - people don't update constraints and requirements, system deteriorates, and provides more reason/excuses for people to not use it properly.
------------
On aside, in my own daily life, I've been working on ERP systems all my life, and as a techie it's a fascinating place to be. I assumed that numbers are numbers, business processes are well structured, defined and documented, and that people who's job it is to use a specific system will be at least somewhat proficient in that system. None of those things are necessarily broadly true :).
On aside-aside, similar thing can be observed in MS Project btw. MS Project has an incredibly powerful scheduling engine. It's amazing! But! 99% of MS Project users don't know how to use MS Project. They try to use it as Excel. They type in some tasks, the dates aren't what they want them to be, then they override automatic scheduling by putting manual dates rather than putting constraints into the system... and the negative feedback loop commences. I've rarely seen a MS Project Plan file which properly uses the scheduling engine :-/
As others have mentioned, you don't always have a complete and accurate set of constraints. So you generate a schedule based on what you have. You hand it out to your employees. And they point out conflicts that they forgot to tell you about or that come up on short notice. So you have to rework the schedule to take them into account manually.
You could regenerate the schedule with the additional constraints. But the new schedule is likely quite different from what you originally handed out. People will have assumed the original schedule is final and they will have made plans. You cannot simply replace the schedule.
You might also already be halfway into the schedule period and the new schedule might only be fair if you had applied it from the beginning of the period.
You might be able to account for all of that in your constraints but it's going to get really hairy.
Notice than in warehouses it's been at least for the past 10 years that people work with a headset in which a computer order them to go to aisle F, rank 9, take 2 boxes on pallet 3; then say "OK" when the boxes are loaded, and go on this way all day long, like meat robots. The level of soul-sucking exploitation is already way past anything reasonable.
Where there’s a need for labor, it will be filled. Some of those meat robots are happy for the pay, some are not and wish for a way up (not out). Let’s not assume everyone working in a warehouse is a lazy meat robot.
It would be a happy ending if it meant the end of useless busy work to impress managers. The machine would understand you need extra employees to deal with spikes in customers and wouldn't require employees to "stay busy" during downtime.
Thank you for mentioning Manna. I did not know about that short story and I very much enjoyed it in the past ~90 minutes. A lot of food for thought and absolutely astonishing that it was apparently published 21 years ago!
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.
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...
I assume that you have the best of intentions. However, I think it is exactly thanks to our Western societies focusing so much on intellectual merit, that we are running into serious problems with a part of society not being able to keep up.
Why is it better to be smart? Why would you give more freedom and more money to someone who has a larger brain capacity? It's not something most people can do something about.
And even if people can do something about it, it's a race to the bottom. Initially we have given many more people proper education, raising the average bar, and now we have to compete with computers as well.
I'd prefer a society where we would value kindness, bodily flexibility, strong hands, or random other traits as much as having fast processing speed in your brain.
> Why is it better to be smart? Why would you give more freedom and more money to someone who has a larger brain capacity? It's not something most people can do something about.
I'm saying it is something a person can do something about, just like an athelete can train for the Olympics. Also, it takes creative intelligence to solve our problems, which benefit even those that don't have creative intelligence skills. From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
I have nothing against working with my hands and have enjoyed it myself in the past. My suggestion is for those young people who want white collar jobs and want to compete with AI, which isn't a great thinker - yet.
I would qualify that with "To a degree". whether or not we concede that nature or nurture is the most predominant factor for the upper potential threshold for a persons intelligence, that doesn't really help the person born... as they have control over neither.
There are plenty of snake oil companies that have attempted to sell a silver bullet towards being able to increase somebody's fluid intelligence everything from luminosity to hucksters which claim to be able to teach you how to have an eidetic memory, but it's mostly a con.
Interesting that you decided to pick athletes because I would argue that genetics play a far larger part in determining one's aptitude for being able to participate at the Olympic level than anything else.
Do you think that the 10,000 other diligent athletes that can't even get close to Usain Bolt don't train just as hard as he does? What about the thousands of equally studious physicists who will never get close to a Richard Feynman or an Enrico Fermi?
I will grant that through diligence and dedication one can increase one's ability to pattern match to solve certain problems.
>Why would you give more freedom and more money to someone who has a larger brain capacity?
preferences aside, you "get" things because you either make them yourself, or you barter the value you are able to generate. money is just the fungible medium to mediate such barter, it makes the value you generate exchangeable in a generic way instead of limiting you to barter only with people who has things you want / need. if you are smart, you can generate more valuable things and provide more valuable services for other people. in return you get more things. it is perfectly natural. it is not random. your bodily flexibility or strong hands don't produce things, by themselves, that you can exchange for things you need / want. you can convert those skills to generate value (for yourself to survive, or for others to exchange with things for your survival) but by themselves they don't mean much.
I am not saying it is a good deal for most people, but it is a perfectly natural order in how things work.
Why is it better to be beautiful?
Why is it better to be physically fit?
I don't think anyone in the universe would disagree that we wish society was based more heavily on a culture of empathy, i'm just not sure I understand what your point is.
Compare our society with one from anywhere before the Enlightenment. Brains and science were not held in high esteem. Obviously these societies were horrible for a lot of people. Our current one is horrible for many as well. My comment was supposed to revoke action, not invoke.
I'm not as optimistic as you about the speed of AI advancement. I believe it will be slow enough for someone to stay ahead of it for awhile. I believe AGI is quite hard and will take decades.
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.
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.
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.
My cynical take is that the arrival of AGI would be legislated away, probably for decades. If it can do an engineer's job, but better, it can do the CEO's job better as well. And the president's. When everyone's livelihoods are on the line, those with a lot to lose will wage endless war to keep from losing it. The process of getting everyone on side and validating that things are unquestionably better will take a generation. Even if we perfected AGI tomorrow, I suspect I would be an old man, or dead and buried, before it actually runs the show.
The other question is: what sort of economy would even remain? One where the same AGI runs everything and engages in adversarial games against itself?
AGI is difficult to forbid, compared to certain illegal media. Legal enforcement can look at media to decide if some enforcement is neccessary. The most difficult thing is probably gaining access to a laptop, for example.
But what exactly is AGI? This is the first problem. Where to draw the border between harmless and dangerous AI? Careful legislation needs to give clear limits. Too little and real AGI doesn't get banned. Too much and useful AI like LLMs get banned. Unclear law is unenforceable and people start ignoring it.
The second problem is detecting. Police can just look at media and they know. But they can't look at abstract data and immediately say, hm, looks suspicious. They need to look at software behavior, and this is a lot more work. This is like catching someone stealing red-handed. But what behavior exactly is illegal, even if they could watch AGI doing something?
And finally, AGI is probably clever and might hide by playing dumb.
I think the shift in productivity here is potentially massive and compressed in such a short timeline that we've never seen anything like this before.
People often bring up horses and cars, but think about the timescale of how long it took to make that shift. Horses still played a role in WW1, decades after the automobile was a thing.
The other factor is the non-existent cost barrier. Think about the transition from typewriter to word processor -- it took a relatively long time for computing to become affordable enough to be accessible meaning that the transition from typewriter to word processor manifest over a large span of time allowing for labor to adjust.
AI is practically being given away for free and prices are constantly dropping.
> I think the shift in productivity here is potentially massive and compressed in such a short timeline that we've never seen anything like this before.
that's if hype will be supported by quality eventually.
I think it is still not clear if AI can automate even some trivial clerks jobs without failures.
The authoring tool allows retailers and brands to generate hundreds of articles a day which would have taken a team of human writers days if not weeks to put together. Some of the work straight up couldn't be done previously because the number of people required would be too exorbitant for the returns.
Some of the content augments existing content on the retailer and brand websites. Some of the content is feeding into SEO.
And its good enough that we are ranking #1 in Google just a few weeks in for some customers in competitive search terms.
I wonder if spam (for human consumption) is just a temporary thing... the real value to capture is where the purchasing (or other kinds of) decisions are to made. If consumers embrace AI agents, the money in influencing their decision via their attention to influencing the AI training material directly.
I think search engines won't have a spam problem for long... but AI training will start to have a spam problem as a side effect of developing into a marketplace. The influence market moves from people to machines.
If the search terms are "competitive" what's the moat that keeps your customers' competitors from leveraging the same foundation models until that term is flooded with marginally-optimized copy? High-quality copy used to be a signal that the retailer or brand had enough success and therefore capital to afford to invest in the copy. Now anyone can do it, even retailers and brands that are terrible or maybe even fake. So what's the value of Google search if all it's surfacing is the highest-quality AI authoring tool? Maybe you can play the spread between now and wide adoption but it seems like eventually you'll be shooting yourself in the foot.
ChatGPT4 arrived anywhere from 5 to 20 years early depending on the "expert" you asked in 2019. Same thing happened with AlphaGo. In 2014, beating a human master in Go was still 15 years off. Then it happened a year later.
Humans are on the cusp of learning that just like everything else so far, there is nothing special or unique about the meat version of intelligence. In fact it's likely hilariously weak compared to purpose constructed general intelligences. Similar to a bird racing a jet, a cheetah against a V12, or horse pulling against a truck.
Does this even contradict the person you're responding to? Jets, V12s, and trucks are operated by people. They're not fully-automated. Alpha Go has not put anyone out of work and it's been a decade now. 15 years isn't that far off. Go was supposed to be such a monumental benchmark because it was widely assumed being good at it was a sufficiently intellect-complete task that mastering it must mean any software that could do so could surely do just about anything intellectual. Winning Jeopardy was supposed to mean that, too, which Watson did even before Alpha Go was invented, yet Watson has also not put anyone out of work even though it's been around for over 13 years now.
Your takeaway seems to be software will always do things ahead of when we expect, whereas my takeaway is we're incredibly bad at guessing what sorts of tests and benchmarks mean software will be able to totally replicate, best, and replace human reasoning and decision-making. Beating games, predicting protein folding, forming reasonable-sounding paragraphs, and scoring high on the LSAT have all turned out to not be enough.
If one person can suddenly do 90% of the work of 100, then all 100 are going to take a massive cut in pay or hours, or 90% of them are going to be looking for another job.
Some work requires direct human level control. Other work just requires a human in the loop. We've already exploited most of the things that can be automated without human level reasoning, and LLMs have made inroads on a whole bunch of things that do require reasoning.
Augmentation - any significant force multiplier applied to individuals - will result in individuals performing more work or producing more output while the overall workforce is reduced in size. Corporations exist to maximize profit, not to provide meaning and worth to human existence.
AI is taking us to a place where human labor is detrimental to value. Hourly wages won't be sensible in the face of software that can do any cognitive work a human can, for orders of magnitude less cost and overhead, with no feelings or rights to account for. Current economic models won't make sense at all without scarcity of labor, intellectual and otherwise.
No profession is safe, and things will only accelerate from here. We should probably start thinking about what a social contract means in a post-scarcity world. What does money mean? How should resources be fairly allocated if working for money is actually counterproductive even if companies were willing to hire you? What does the market look like if it's irresponsible to allow fallible human control over a task which can be performed to a higher level of quality and consistency for orders of magnitude less cost?
It won't happen all at once. It might take a few years, or it might just pop up and happen this summer, or it could take decades, but AI replacing human jobs is a zero sum game. Once machines can more efficiently and effectively perform any cognitive task that any human can achieve, it's no longer strictly economical to pay humans for those tasks. We'll either have to do pretend-work so we can justify paying humans for work that's less cost effective than paying a machine, or we'll need some sort of Universal Basic Income. I'd love to see alternative ideas, but there don't seem to be any.
We're in a very interesting period of human history.
It's probably going to be both. If you have 100 people, and you make them 10% more efficient, and demand stays the same, you can just cut costs by 10% by laying off people.
But if you're in a competitive market and there's more work to do than you're addressing with 100 people, your 91 people doing the work of 100 will be outcompeted by 100 people doing the work of 110, no?
A competitive market doesn’t mean there’s an infinite amount of work to be done. A restaurant is going to sell a finite amount of food no matter what they do. They are incentivized to spend as little as possible on salaries.
In terms of work, with zero-friction reallocation, of course automation is a good thing. There are tons of other things which need to be done besides packing boxes in a warehouse or driving people around. But we don’t have anything like perfect reallocation, and we don’t have business models for many of the things which need to be done.
I agree, but AI models are growing in capability extremely fast.
To put it in perspective when I was learning about neural networks in ~2009 it was still actively debated in the field whether neural networks were even the right paradigm for general intelligence. Back then one even knew how to make deep neural networks work well. They sucked so bad and had sucked for so many decades that most in the field just assumed that they probably weren't going anywhere without some significant advancements.
Then in the early 2010s the field exploded after a few minor algorithm tweaks allowed deep neural networks to really begin working. But even then they kinda sucked at a lot of tasks outside of niche applications like image recognition. But then a few years later we made a few more algorithmic improvements and suddenly we had pretty decent chatbots. And then a few years after than OpenAI created GTP-3.
What I'm saying is that basically went from most experts in the field doubting whether neural nets would even work to GPT-3 in about 10-12 years. That's absolutely insane progress.
With this rate of improvement the "foreseeable future" is probably less than a decade away. Assuming progress continues at this pace I strongly suspect we'll have LLMs able to beat the best humans in software development in 5 years.
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?
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.
Because nobody knows and anyone pretending to know is making it up.
I am personally skeptical that no-code solutions will replace software developers at a significant scale.
Creating a boilerplate project with no integrations or existing logic is one thing. It's a very different thing to use generative AI to maintain existing systems, integrations, and business logic without a human that knows these systems.
The landscape will change for software developers. Probably dramatically. But anyone predicting the end of software developers has as much credibility as someone who says they can talk to dead people.
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.
Such as the example provided in the article:
>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
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.
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.
> With a lot of freed up labor, people seem to find other activities they deem "important" and focus on those.
Hopefully all those people who will be out of work don't think focusing on activates like "eating" or "getting healthcare" are important because they won't be able to afford them.
People tend to take whatever jobs they can get that will pay them enough to keep working and will fit their schedules, but with very little consideration paid to what they think is important or meaningful. I don't see that changing, especially as more and more people will be increasingly forced to compete for fewer and fewer available jobs.
> Imagine we went back and time and described a social media job
It might sound strange to someone from the past, but companies hire people for "social media" jobs because doing that makes the company more money than not doing it. Businesses wanting more money should be relatable at least.
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.
This is a good example of coincidence being confused as causality. While the two events happened at the same time, the real reason behind the layoffs was a swing back from the excessive hiring we did coming into the pandemic (and honestly several years prior). With or without AI, the market swing was going to be bloody.
Example: "Despite reducing its workforce by 5% or roughly 10,000 workers, Microsoft's overall employee headcount remains well above what it was on March 11, 2020, which is right around when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic." [1]
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 think there's clearly a change. 10 years ago, we hired people for a specific technical role and paid them $80K/year. Now, we still hire people for that same job, but only pay them $60K/year.
Companies loudly announce they're laying off workers to cut costs. A short time later they're advertising those same jobs, but people are hired, or even hired back, at a lower wage.
What used to be a well-paid job 15 or 20 years ago, no longer has job security or the same benefits. It may have even be contracted as a 'gig' job, with no job security or benefits.
I think a key thing here is whether usage would increase if cost went down, for instance doctors, if the price of a medical visit decreased (ignoring the way insurance and health care works for the moment), I think people would be more likely to go to the doctor. Thus if a doctor could see more people in less time without decreasing the quality of care (which maybe AI could help with), then the doctor may be able to decrease prices and see increased usage. The increased usage would then create greater demand, which could create more jobs. (I realize doctor's not a great example for this argument, but I'm too lazy to think about a better one, lawyer might actually work better, pretend I used that in the paragraph above)
This phenomenon can be seen in how lower priced restaurants can cause people to go out more and then create more demand for restaurants. (I think this has been studied by someone somewhere)
That said this doesn't always happen, part of this has to do with the balance between lowering prices and increasing demand, etc., and part of this goes to whether or not automation can completely cover the important aspects of the job (for the typical use case) it's replacing. For example, how travel comparison and search sites cover the typical use case for a travel agent roughly (I'm guessing).
I was testing why we go some wrong information from a database and hand writing some SQL. It didn't work and the issue was not immediately obvious, so I pasted it into chat gpt with a very carefully chosen prompt and it told me immediately that I should only use one =.
That probably saved me 20 minutes of looking through the manuals.
That very carefully chosen prompt, btw, was: "what is wrong with this code"? I have since refined it to be "what is wrong with this code, assume the tables exist".
No, it is not going to mean that anyone can code, but if developers are 10 to 20 percent more efficient that means that the same problems need at least that fewer developers, more when you take into account communication overhead between devs.
There is an argument of brain drain as certain white collar apprentice type jobs require "knowing how to do every task under you before promotion". As an ai abstracts and automates parts, it will make those people no longer appreciate or design work to play nice with those types of tasks. I imagine that an upset or two will shake the system based on people not knowing how to do basic secretarial tasks, but ultimately a lot of undergrads are going to have a hard time getting a job and wages will stagnate for the rest.
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.
> We could be celebrating that we can all work less for the same pay
Overall, Americans have been increasingly working more for less pay for decades, all while productivity (and profits) have risen. Even at the SWE engineer, we should never expect innovations to ease our labor burdens unless we fight for that to be the case. By default, we'll do one of two things:
1. Be expected to do a lot more work, since AI makes it easier
2. Get laid off, because 1 person is now doing what a team did with AI (even if they're doing it worse)
It's because many jobs aren't producing anything. That's almost all of professional services and it's exactly the kind of thing that gets whittled down as much as possible.
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.
That's the wonder of capitalism. Power is in the hands of those owning the capital; from their point of view, everything goes really great and according to plan. There is no democracy, as everything is done so that as much as possible the economy is out of reach of politics (because supposedly magically the market God knows what is best).
I pretend that capitalism hasn't much to do with it, but energy availability is key. Basically (contrary to the nonsense professed by neoclassical economics of all stripes, from Solow to Krugman and Hayek to Nordhaus) the economy is a machinery to transform energy into goods and services. Capitalism is somewhat better at it than other systems in a period of sustained growth, because the wasted energy of people competing for almost the same market doing almost the same thing (basically duplicating work in vain) is compensated by the overall growth in energy consumption.
However in the coming age of restricted energy availability, capitalism will become obsolete and disappear. It's already happening, we're contemplating a new form of techno-feudalism growing upon us.
I'll add this aside : some of these people with "Nobel prizes" in economics go as far as saying things like "+4°C will only marginally affect the economy as only outdoors activities like agriculture, which represents a couple percent of GDP, will be impacted". Because as you know, agriculture as part of GDP perfectly represents its actual importance in our lives: economists don't eat I suppose :) A joke I like is "the brain is only 2% of the weight of an economist, therefore its ablation will only have a marginal impact on this economist's ability to function".
Its astounding that this talking point is so sticky. I would recommend reading US history again, including the redacted sections. You don't even have to go back to the inception of capitalism in the colonial era to demonstrate that this idea is false.
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.
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.
I find that hard to believe. Thousands of people? 90 %? I wish I could get so much help from a LLM. I’m a heavy GPT-4 and Copilot user, it explains new stuff to me, spits out configs and command line arguments, sometimes code snippets, but it utterly fails at any actual engineering tasks. Like, I work on document automation, most of my job is about evaluating changes to documents, efficiently resolving the side effects, transforming from the internal format to HTML, stuff like that. Copilot, even with its IDE integration, is rarely super helpful, it often just doesn’t understand what I’m trying to do, and it doesn’t help with architecture at all. There’s not enough “thinking” going on yet.
"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"
I implemented an AI for credit decisioning which filled up a work queue when it couldn't make the decision itself. So one could argue that the person who arranged for the work to be done that day was an AI.
I can already imagine my manager using LLM to do my performance reviews, justify whether I deserve a raise or a lay off, and many other assessments to which I already ascribe a pair of dice. Also isnt this a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39343483
They definitely do, but can you imagine typing out/telling your "llmanager" that you need a raise, and know it's totally a stochastic parrot under the hood.
Thank you for your request for a raise. At this time, due to budget constraints/organizational policies/other factors, we are unable to grant the increase you've requested. However, I appreciate your dedication and contributions to the team, and we can revisit this discussion in the future.
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.
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.
this seems very short sighted. mid/senior level engineers will not have the knowledge that they need to make the educated decision between 3-4 alternatives that chatgpt might spit out. There's also no liability for any decisions made if you can just blame chatgpt.
Also good managers inspire. Inspire growth, productivity, learning. Good luck with chatgpt
With any luck, the roles most suited to AI replacement will be CEO, COO, and CFO. But I'm sure if that turns out to be the case, the researchers will be promptly fired and the information quickly buried before anyone ever learns of it.
Another perspective: Many jobs in software do not require high levels of experience and expertise. People reach senior status (not by job title but by their role in the organization) early in their careers, after maybe 10 or 15 years. Beyond that, further experience brings only marginal gains, which can also be achieved by better tools. These jobs may be highly paid, but they are also the kind of mid-level jobs automation is expected to threaten.
I honestly don't think we've had good LLMs and experience in using them for long enough to make that kind of call yet. How do you know what you're getting isn't just lots of tech debt, for instance?
I agree there appears to be a great potential where this becomes a force multiplier reducing the need for the more experienced engineers to sit on top. To other sibling comments, yes we need better methods for managing tech debt with these emerging tools but that doesnt make OP wrong.
I have worked with so very few principal engineers and architects that "get it" because they are not hands on.
Find some good staff / principal engineers that care about growing and mentoring people and use the tools available to augment their efforts with less body counts.
And on the flip side, junior engineers can be much more performant in their roles and grow into that mid-level engineer much faster by allowing them more opportunity to learn conceptually with less rote coding.
The doers are going to thrive and the talkers and fakers are gonna struggle.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.