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 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.
There is definitely a market pressure not being fulfilled that I think does accommodate much more effective tech workers.
At least in the spaces I frequent the cap isn’t as much the volume of work you have to do, it’s how much of it you can’t get to because the people you do have run out of time.
The real question is whether at the corporate level there will be a competitive pressure to keep the budget where it is and increase output versus cut down on available capacity and keep shipping what you’re shipping. I genuinely don’t know where that lands in the long term.
If smaller startups are able to meet the output of shrunk-down massive corpos and start chipping away at them maybe it’s fine and what we get is more output from the same people. If that’s not the case and we keep the current per-segment monopoly/oligarchy… then maybe it’s just a fast forward button on enshittification. I don’t think anybody knows.
But also, either way the improvements are probably way more incremental and less earth-shattering than either the shills/AIbros or the haters/doomers are implying, so…