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.
If they were real work to begin with why would you pay for AI to replace them?
Starting this conversation with Sam Altman is like showing up at a funeral in a clowncar
Or showing up at a strip club with communion wafers
Or both, not a singularity, but a duality
So long as we’re not engaging with someone quoting Altman, I’m good with anything.
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.
You guys are getting documentation?
Well, if I’m not, then neither is an LLM.
But for most projects built with modern tooling, the documentation is fine, and they mostly have simple CLIs for scaffolding a new application.
I mean if you use the code base you’re working in as context it’ll probably learn the code base faster than you will, although I’m not saying that’s a good strategy, I’d never personally do that
The thing is, it really won’t. The context window isn’t large enough, especially for a decently-sized application, and that seems to be a fundamental limitation. Make the context window too large, and the LLM gets massively offtrack very easily, because there’s too much in it to distract it.
And LLMs don’t remember anything. The next time you interact with it and put the whole codebase into its context window again, it won’t know what it did before, even if the last session was ten minutes ago. That’s why they so frequently create bloat.
If your argument attacks my credibility, that’s fine, you don’t know me. We can find cases where developers use the technology and cases where they refuse.
Do you have anything substantive to add to the discussion about whether AI LLMs are anything more than just a tool that allows workers to further abstract, advancing all of the professions it can touch towards any of: better / faster / cheaper / easier?
You seem to be taking this a bit personally…
I’ve got something to add: in every practical application AI have increased liabilities and created vastly inferior product, so they’re not more than just a tool that allows workers to further abstract because they are less than that. This in addition to the fact that AI companies can’t turn a profit, so it’s not better, not faster, not cheaper, but but it is certainly easier (to do a shit job).
CEO isn’t an actual job either, it’s just the 21st century’s titre de noblesse.
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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.
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The AI won’t have a twitter account to go on racist rants.
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The AI won’t end up on the Epstein list.
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The AI won’t drunkenly send nudes to an intern.
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Don’t executives spend their day talking to AI and doing whatever they say?
Exactly. No need to add the executive toxicity filter
Sam Altman is a huckster, not a technologist. As such, I don’t really care what he says about technology. His purpose has always been to transfer as much money as possible from investors into his own pocket before the bubble bursts. Anything else is incidental.
I am not entirely writing off LLMs, but very little of the discussion about them has been rational. They do some things fairly well and a lot of things quite poorly. It would be nice if we could just focus on the former.
Sam, I say this will all my heart…
Fuck you very kindly. I’m pretty sure what you do is not “a real job” and should be replaced by AI.
What do we need the mega rich for anyway? They aren’t creative and easily replaced with AI at this point.
What do we need the mega rich for anyway?
Supposedly the creation and investment of industries, then managing those businesses which also supposedly provide employment for thousands who make the things for them. Except they’ll find ways to cut costs and maximize profit. Like looking for cheaper labor while at the same time thinking of building the next megayacht for which to flex off at Monte Carlo next summer.
If OpenAI gets wiped out, maybe it wasn’t even a “real company” to start with
Can’t AI replace Sam Altman?
To be fair, a lot of jobs in capitalist societies are indeed pointless. Some of them even actively do nothing but subtract value from society.
That said, people still need to make a living and his piece of shit artificial insanity is only making it more difficult. How about stop starving people to death and propose solutions to the problem?
There’s a book Bullshit Jobs that explores this phenomenon. Freakonomics also did an episode referring to the book, which I found interesting.
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth
The jobs did not start out that way, I guess these people have been tossed to the side and are not where the action currently is.
Yet they are still employed because the boss does not understand what they are doing and they might embellish their contributions etc.
There are so many people who do little, drink free coffee talk to everyone and are seen as very social, liked by everyone etc. They do fucking nothing, I know a handful of them.
why capitalist societies specifically?
They may seem pointless to those outside of the organization. As long as someone is willing to pay them then someone considers they have value.
No one is “starving to death” but you’d have people just barely scraping by.
This is the tricky nature of “value”, isn’t it?
Something can be both valuable and detrimental to humanity.
With many bearaucracies there’s plenty of practically valueless work going on.
Because some executive wants to brag about having over a hundred people under them. Because some proceas requires a sort of document be created that hasn’t been used in decades but no one has the time to validate what does or does not matter anymore. Because of a lot of little nonsense reasons where the path of least resistance is to keep plugging away. Because if you are 99 percent sure something is a waste of time and you optimize it, there’s a 1% chance you’ll catch hell for a mistake and almost no chance you get great recognition for the efficiency boost if it pans out.
He doesn’t know Jobs was wiped out by cancer?
I have been working with computers, and networks, and the internet since the 1980s. Over this span of 40-ish years, “how I work” has evolved dramatically through changes in how computers work and more dramatically through changes in information availability. In 1988 if you wanted to program an RS-232 port to send and receive data, you read books. You physically traveled to libraries, or bookstores - maybe you might mail order one, but that was even slower. Compared to today the relative costs to gain the knowledge to be able to perform the task were enormous, in time invested, money spent, and physical resources (paper, gasoline, vehicle operating costs).
By 20 years ago, the internet had reformulated that equation tremendously. Near instant access to worldwide data, organized enough to be easier to access than a traditional library or bookstore, and you never needed to leave your chair to get it. There was still the investment of reading and understanding the material, and a not insignificant cost of finding the relevant material through search, but the process was accelerated from days or more to hours or less, depending on the nature of the learning task.
A year ago, AI hallucination rates made them curious toys for me - too unreliable to be of net practical value. Today, in the field of computer programming, the hallucination rate has dropped to a very interesting point: almost the same as working with a not-so-great but still useful human colleague. The difference being: where a human colleague might take 40 hours to perform a given task (not that the colleague is slow, just it’s a 40 hour task for an average human worker), the AI can turn around the same programming task in 2 hours or less.
Humans make mistakes, they get off on their own tracks and waste time following dead ends. This is why we have meetings. Not that meetings are the answer to everything, but at least they keep us somewhat aware of what other members of the team are doing. That not so great programmer working on a 40 hour task is much more likely to create a valuable product if you check in with them every day or so, see “how’s it going”, help them clarify points of confusion, check their understanding and direction of work completed so far. That’s 4 check points of 15 minutes to an hour in the middle of the 40 hour process. My newest AI colleagues are ripping through those 40 hour tasks in 2 hours, impressive, and when I don’t put in the additional 2 hours of managing them through the process, they get off the rails, wrapped around the axles, unable to finish a perfectly reasonable task because their limited context windows don’t keep all the important points in focus throughout the process. A bigger difficulty is that I don’t get 23 hours of “offline wetware processing” between touch points to refine my own understanding of the problems and desired outcomes.
Humans have developed software development processes to help manage human shortcomings, humans’ limited attention spans and memory. We still out-perform AI in some of this context window span thing, but we have our own non-zero hallucination rates. Asking an AI chatbot to write a program one conversational prompt at a time only gets me so far. Providing an AI with a more mature software development process to follow gets much farther. AI isn’t following these processes (that it helped to translate from human concepts into its own language of workflows, skills, etc.) 100% perfectly, I catch it skipping steps in simple 5 step workflows, but like human procedures, there’s a closed loop procedure improvement procedure to help perform better in the future.
Perhaps most importantly, the procedures are constantly reminding AI to be “self aware” of its context window limitations, do RAG (research augmented generation) of best practices for context management, DRY (reduce through non-repetition and use of references to single points of truth) its own procedures and documentation it generates. Will I succeed in having AI rebuild a 6 month project I did five years back, doing it better this time - expanding its scope to what would have been a year long development effort if I had continued doing it solo? Unclear, I’m two weeks in and I feel like I’m about where I was after two weeks of development last time, but it also feels like I have a better foundation to complete the bigger scope this time using the AI tools, and there’s that tantalizing possibility that at any point now it might just take off and finish it by itself.
I agree with the sentiment, as bad as it feels to agree with Altman about anything.
I’m working as a software developer, working on the backend of the website/loyalty app of some large retailer.
My job is entirely useless. I mean, I’m doing a decent job keeping the show running, but (a) management shifts priorities all the time and about 2/3 of all the “super urgent” things I work on get cancelled before then get released and (b) if our whole department would instantly disappear and the app and webside would just be gone, nobody would care. Like, literally. We have an app and a website because everyone has to have one, not because there’s a real benefit to anyone.
The same is true for most of the jobs I worked in, and about most jobs in large corporations.
So if AI could somehow replace all these jobs (which it can’t), nothing of value would be lost, apart from the fact that our society requires everyone to have a job, bullshit or not. And these bullshit jobs even tend to be the better-paid ones.
So AI doing the bullshit jobs isn’t the problem, but people having to do bullshit jobs to get paid is.
If we all get a really good universal basic income or something, I don’t think most people would mind that they don’t have to go warm a seat in an office anymore. But since we don’t and we likely won’t in the future, losing a job is a real problem, which makes Altman’s comment extremely insensitive.
Agreed. His comments are so bizarrely stupid on so many levels.
They’re not just “wrong”: they’re half-right-half-wrong. And the half that is wrong is idiotic in the extreme, while the half that is right casually acknowledges a civilizational crisis like someone watching their neighbors screaming in a house fire while sipping a cup of coffee.
Like this farmer analogy: the farmers were right! Their way of life and all that mattered to them was largely exterminated by these changes, and we’re living in their worst nightmare! And he even goes so far as acknowledging this, and acknowledging that we’ll likely experience the same thing. We’re all basically cart horses at the dawn of the automobile, and we might actually hate where this is going. But… It’ll probably be great.
He just has a hunch that even though all evidence suggests that this will lead to the opposite of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, for some reason his brain can’t shake the sense that it’s going to be good anyway. I mean, it has to be, otherwise that would make him a monster! And that simply can’t be the case. So there you have it.
It’ll be
terriblegreat.The same is true for most of the jobs I worked in, and about most jobs in large corporations.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
My job started as a relatively BS job. Basically, the company I work for makes physical things, and the people who use those physical things need to create reports to keep the regulators happy. So my first couple years on the job was improving the report generation app, which was kind of useful since it saved people an hour or two a week in producing reports. But the main reason we had this app in the first place was because our competitors had one, and the company needed a digital product to point to in order to sell customers (who didn’t use the app, someone a few layers down did) on it. Basically, my job existed to check a box.
However, my department went above and beyond and created tools to optimize our customers’ businesses. We went past reporting and built simulations related to reporting, but that brought actual value. They could reduce or increase use of our product based on actual numbers, and that change would increase their profitability (more widgets produced per dollar spent). When the company did a round of cost cutting, they took a look at our department ready to axe us, but instead increased our funding when they saw the potential of our simulations, and now we’re making using the app standard for all of our on-staff consultants and front-and-center for all new customer acquisitions (i.e. not just reporting, but showcasing our app as central to the customer’s business).
All that has happened over the last year or so, so I guess we’ll see if that actually increases customer retention and acquisition. My point is that my job transitioned from something mostly useless (glorified PDF generator) to something that actually provides value to the business and likely reduces costs downstream (that’s about 3 steps away from the retail store, but it could help cut prices a few percent on certain products while improving profits for us and our customers).
If we all get a really good universal basic income or something
I disagree with your assertion that many jobs exist because people need jobs. I think jobs exist because even “BS” job create value. If there was a labor surplus today, jobs would be created the lower cost of labor acquisition makes certain products profitable that wouldn’t otherwise be.
That said, I am 100% a fan of something like UBI, though I personally would make it based on income (i.e. a Negative Income Tax, so only those under $X get the benefit), but that’s mostly to make the dollar amount of that program less scary. For example, there are ~130M households in the US (current pop is 342M, or about 2.6 people per household). The poverty line is $32,150 for a family, and sending that out as UBI would cost ~4.1T, which is almost as much as the current US budget. If we instead brought everyone to the poverty line through something like NIT, that’s only ~168B, or about 4% of the current budget.
Regardless of the approach, I think ensuring everyone is between the poverty line (i.e. unemployed people) and a living wage (i.e. minimum wage people) is a good idea for a few reasons:
- allows you to quit your BS job and not be screwed - puts pressure on employers at low-paying jobs to provide a better work experience and pay
- allows us to distribute other benefits in dollars instead of services - this book opened my eyes to how much poor people want cash, not benefits; it’s easier to move if you have $1k/month in rent allowance than stuck in your section 8 (government assisted) housing
- could eliminate the federal minimum wage - if employers aren’t paying well, people won’t take the job because they’d rather take the gov’t handout, so I’d consider the UBI/NIT to be the minimum wage instead
- encourages entrepreneurs to start businesses - my main reason for not starting a business in worries about not being able to cover my basic needs; UBI/NIT covers that, so I probably would have started a few small businesses if I had that as a fallback
- can replace Social Security (or other gov’t pension plan), since retirees can treat UBI/NIT as their pension, and not be restricted to a specific age to take it (benefits would be lower, but very predictable)
Giving people a backup plan encourages people to take more risks, which should result in more value across the economy.
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?
This is part of the reason I don’t work for big corporations… yuck
