WILL A.I. TAKE OVER YOUR JOB?

[Uncle Flea]

I frickin hope so. I'm getting tired of begging. I need a robot to send out there.

Ill dress it up like lil orphan Annie make do the good ship lollipop dance for tourists

[Klaus Schwab]

Please do not be afraid of the machines.  When the physical brain for digitization is active there will be no need for jobs. 

They will give you food and water and clean your holding pens regularly.

[Perforated Opinions]

fuck no.

[LebowskisRug]

It's actually been really useful. I can drag and drop code I don't understand or that someone else wrote and it explains what everything does and why. Instead of scheduling meetings and taking hours or days to sort through things I spent 30min.

It's also really useful for taking complex concepts and explaining them at a moderately technical level. If I have to explain to people why we are adopting a specific statistical method it's much easier to write technical jargon and let ChatGPT dumb it down.

Interesting that the first few papers on economics and AI demonstrate it's lifting the lower skilled workers up more than any other group.

[EdLawndale]

It's actually been really useful. I can drag and drop code I don't understand or that someone else wrote and it explains what everything does and why. Instead of scheduling meetings and taking hours or days to sort through things I spent 30min.

It's also really useful for taking complex concepts and explaining them at a moderately technical level. If I have to explain to people why we are adopting a specific statistical method it's much easier to write technical jargon and let ChatGPT dumb it down.

Interesting that the first few papers on economics and AI demonstrate it's lifting the lower skilled workers up more than any other group.

Come again?

[LebowskisRug]

Current AI is just image creation and chatbots. The chatbots basically are a really good Google. So I use them to google what specific code means so I can learn faster and not have to do everything from scratch. I also use it to take more complex language and dumb it down for executive reports.

The second part is that studies on companies that have adopted existing AI have found that it makes the lowest skilled/paid workers the most productive and many at the upper levels that don't produce somewhat less "skilled".

[EdLawndale]

Hmmm, maybe I just don't understand because Idk what the sort of job is that you do (not too familiar with coding)...

Like why isn't the answer that you're just not a good communicator?

[LebowskisRug]

Hmmm, maybe I just don't understand because Idk what the sort of job is that you do (not too familiar with coding)...

Like why isn't the answer that you're just not a good communicator?

I work in statistics and experimentation and my background is mostly in machine learning. Most people, even smart ones, fail to grasp basic statistical concepts.

In my role I evaluate very large internal programs that have high visibility and generate a lot of revenue. People such as myself often partner with very non technical/non stats heavy people. Even tho they might have taken stats in college they probably couldn't explain simple concepts so imagine when I'm trying to tell them about how we estimate that switching to a specific method could save us millions of dollars. I have the data to back it up, but there is a lot of technical details underneath and the entire story needs to be as simple as possible. Lots of their ideas would not be sound practice and you need to dumb things down a level further than you'd think.

Statistics is not intuitive and so much goes into design and methods that's why you see a lot of pop sci fads related to dietary research or the social sciences make a splash and then fade- it was based on bad statistics/statistical design.

My problem is I'm not concise. I take a long time to edit work. ChatGPT does that for me. I can then work hours a week less on shit like presentations.

As for coding GenAI can take chunks of code and you can ask it to explain what the code does and it will detail what every line of code does. In most industries where people write code actual documentation of said code is terrible, or like the inner workings of a madman. Sometimes you'd need to actually talk to the person to know what they did and why so you can understand or redo it.

Recently I had to build something similar to an internal tool that had already been built. I could wait 3 days to meet with the old Engineer and hope to hell they had the communication skills (many don't) to explain it to me or spend 30min using GenAI to explain me the code so I could basically find and replace a few sections.

Also, when I'm done GenAI can write the documentation for me more or less. I still have to check the shit out of it, but it gets me 80%-90% of the way there.

[EdLawndale]

Ho-lee fuck, I still don't know what that all means but it seems gnarly. Sounds like you have it dialed in. Keep doing whatever works for you.

[modern life is war]

Expand Quote

Hmmm, maybe I just don't understand because Idk what the sort of job is that you do (not too familiar with coding)...

Like why isn't the answer that you're just not a good communicator?

[close]

I work in statistics and experimentation and my background is mostly in machine learning. Most people, even smart ones, fail to grasp basic statistical concepts.

In my role I evaluate very large internal programs that have high visibility and generate a lot of revenue. People such as myself often partner with very non technical/non stats heavy people. Even tho they might have taken stats in college they probably couldn't explain simple concepts so imagine when I'm trying to tell them about how we estimate that switching to a specific method could save us millions of dollars. I have the data to back it up, but there is a lot of technical details underneath and the entire story needs to be as simple as possible. Lots of their ideas would not be sound practice and you need to dumb things down a level further than you'd think.

Statistics is not intuitive and so much goes into design and methods that's why you see a lot of pop sci fads related to dietary research or the social sciences make a splash and then fade- it was based on bad statistics/statistical design.

My problem is I'm not concise. I take a long time to edit work. ChatGPT does that for me. I can then work hours a week less on shit like presentations.

As for coding GenAI can take chunks of code and you can ask it to explain what the code does and it will detail what every line of code does. In most industries where people write code actual documentation of said code is terrible, or like the inner workings of a madman. Sometimes you'd need to actually talk to the person to know what they did and why so you can understand or redo it.

Recently I had to build something similar to an internal tool that had already been built. I could wait 3 days to meet with the old Engineer and hope to hell they had the communication skills (many don't) to explain it to me or spend 30min using GenAI to explain me the code so I could basically find and replace a few sections.

Also, when I'm done GenAI can write the documentation for me more or less. I still have to check the shit out of it, but it gets me 80%-90% of the way there.

So with AI essentially making your job a lot easier, are you now expected to be much more productive than you previously were, or have your employers not cottoned on to how much easier your job is now?

[LebowskisRug]

No changes really. I actually have time to pursue things on my want-to-do list in greater depth and I can spend more time doing what I do better. In any job there's always things that you never have time to get to or don't put the last 5% effort into. Now I have time for that.

Here's an example: I've always wanted to estimate the revenue impact of if we required people to roll out winning experiments sooner. No one asked to do that as we don't really know if it matters. By having extra time the last 2 weeks I did that analysis in my spare time and found that we can make an extra $10M dollars per year. Everyone is pretty stoked on that.

In my role it's not like you're expected to do X hours on the things I mentioned above it's more that you have a deadline and the thing has to be done to some degree by that deadline. You just have time to apply your actual unique skills better instead of the rote shit everyone hates being time consuming.

[Uncle Flea]

I fucking hope so. I'm so sick of standing around town waiting for fools to ask me for drugs.

Sure I can shore brb yo.

Zing

[TheLurper]

The only saving grace is that we need to keep jobs because you can't advertise to AI to buy dumb shit

Sadly, Fordism died a long time ago. The business world is run by people who repeat simplistic Milton Freidman and Von Hayak fallacies that sound reasonable.


I'm still training an IA program to do my job. It is amazing how simple it is to give the computer the input data to help train it. The line I've been given is that is it best to be the one training the AI as I might have chance at being in charge once its usage "scales" across the organization.

However, I worry that AI will allow the company to Taylorize my position and reduce my pay. Or, even worse, it will allow a bunch of know-nothing MBA bros to do my job.

[S.]

Expand Quote

Hmmm, maybe I just don't understand because Idk what the sort of job is that you do (not too familiar with coding)...

Like why isn't the answer that you're just not a good communicator?

[close]

I work in statistics and experimentation and my background is mostly in machine learning. Most people, even smart ones, fail to grasp basic statistical concepts.

In my role I evaluate very large internal programs that have high visibility and generate a lot of revenue. People such as myself often partner with very non technical/non stats heavy people. Even tho they might have taken stats in college they probably couldn't explain simple concepts so imagine when I'm trying to tell them about how we estimate that switching to a specific method could save us millions of dollars. I have the data to back it up, but there is a lot of technical details underneath and the entire story needs to be as simple as possible. Lots of their ideas would not be sound practice and you need to dumb things down a level further than you'd think.

Statistics is not intuitive and so much goes into design and methods that's why you see a lot of pop sci fads related to dietary research or the social sciences make a splash and then fade- it was based on bad statistics/statistical design.

My problem is I'm not concise. I take a long time to edit work. ChatGPT does that for me. I can then work hours a week less on shit like presentations.

As for coding GenAI can take chunks of code and you can ask it to explain what the code does and it will detail what every line of code does. In most industries where people write code actual documentation of said code is terrible, or like the inner workings of a madman. Sometimes you'd need to actually talk to the person to know what they did and why so you can understand or redo it.

Recently I had to build something similar to an internal tool that had already been built. I could wait 3 days to meet with the old Engineer and hope to hell they had the communication skills (many don't) to explain it to me or spend 30min using GenAI to explain me the code so I could basically find and replace a few sections.

Also, when I'm done GenAI can write the documentation for me more or less. I still have to check the shit out of it, but it gets me 80%-90% of the way there.

You explained this really well. 

From what I have heard from skate friends who work as programmers (somehow a lot of my skate buddies do) most of them use AI in some way.

I need to get into AI as well. I don’t see that many uses for what I do a teacher unless I could find a way for it to grade tests, which would be amazing. It would also be good to understand it a little better to find ways to incorporate it into one of my politics classes. How can you think about something critically if you do not understand how it works at all…

[signtime]

I am a teacher. Technically I could be replaced by AI, but I am hopeful humanity isn‘t that stupid. If AI teaches the kids, how can they ever learn to do that what AI cannot do? Also, uh, humans need other humans to become a properly socialized beings that‘s obvious to everyone at least I hope it us.

Of course AI is scary, but I also think people overestimate it. Human needs are fairly basic and AI is not really gonna help you with your relationship problems, existential fears or emotional insecurities.

In a Post AI World (unless someone really fucks up and causes a disaster) there are still going to be the same basic human struggles about power and money. Unchecked AI will be an extension of corporate power or state power, but we need to think more about how technology can improve life for everyone. Like other technologies it will make a lot of parts of our life more effective and more productive and I fear it will mostly serve those already in power.

What I want to know is when am I finally going to be able to work less and make more money thanks to all this fancy new shit?

Has there in a transition in k-12 to online learning course modules?

I went back to college to do some continuing ed and was very suspicious that my self-paced online learning modules were made with AI. The homework grading was certainly all automated.

[signtime]

I work in government, and AI would be immensely helpful if we adopted it. Our agency's culture is very anti AI though.

If government in general does adopt AI, IMO the consulting industry would be screwed.

There's already been a handful of new consultants popping up on our radar that are extra scammy and sloppy and so obviously and incredulously using AI. They're ruining it for all the real consultants because they're pressuring government workers to just start making their own AI stuff.

[linty]

Sure,why not?

[S.]

Expand Quote

I am a teacher. Technically I could be replaced by AI, but I am hopeful humanity isn‘t that stupid. If AI teaches the kids, how can they ever learn to do that what AI cannot do? Also, uh, humans need other humans to become a properly socialized beings that‘s obvious to everyone at least I hope it us.

Of course AI is scary, but I also think people overestimate it. Human needs are fairly basic and AI is not really gonna help you with your relationship problems, existential fears or emotional insecurities.

In a Post AI World (unless someone really fucks up and causes a disaster) there are still going to be the same basic human struggles about power and money. Unchecked AI will be an extension of corporate power or state power, but we need to think more about how technology can improve life for everyone. Like other technologies it will make a lot of parts of our life more effective and more productive and I fear it will mostly serve those already in power.

What I want to know is when am I finally going to be able to work less and make more money thanks to all this fancy new shit?

[close]

Has there in a transition in k-12 to online learning course modules?

I went back to college to do some continuing ed and was very suspicious that my self-paced online learning modules were made with AI. The homework grading was certainly all automated.

I am German and I teach in Germany. Here there certainly isn't. Not yet. Public schools are still struggeling to provide every room with a working projector. I am shure there will be a push for it in some areas, though. A fully digitized and standardized test, corrected and analyzed by AI would be the wet dream of alot of scientists and government beaurocrats. They perceive of learning as a simple input/output system to be controlled and optimized by them.

There has been a big push in that direction already, with alot of reforms in the past two decades. The irony is that by teaching standardized forms of writing and how to solve standardized tasks (we teach our students standardized signal words so called "operators", which indicate the type of text we are looking for in a given test). In doing that they have basicly focused on that part of education that AI can now do better than most people can.

I think what is needed in post AI education is more critical thinking, learning how to grasp a subject from multiple points of view, thinking creatively, subjective interpretation, ethical reflection, self-reflection etc. In other word that part of thinking that AI cannot do for us now and maybe never should do for us.

Students also need to use and experiment with AI, I think. It is just a fact of life and the better people know how it works and how it impacts their life the better it will be for society as a whole and for the individual's freedom within it.
 

[wax poetic]

Couldn't remember if I replied to this or not but here's my .02.

2 years ago my good friend (who is one of the top experts in ai) told me to start figuring out what I'm doing next because within 5 years I won't have a job (I'm a web developer).  In my head I was like bs and continued on.

A few months ago my team had a meeting with a quest speaker ... he is in the ai industry and basically told all of the writers on the team that in a year 1 of them will replace the whole team because that one will be able to accomplish the work of the whole team in less time ... he told the developers we would be about a year after that.  Since then management has been pushing us to learn how to best use ai, on our own time, to be prepared.

The tech industry is going to be f'd in a year or two.

[AllenIverson]

Unlikely.

[LebowskisRug]

Couldn't remember if I replied to this or not but here's my .02.

2 years ago my good friend (who is one of the top experts in ai) told me to start figuring out what I'm doing next because within 5 years I won't have a job (I'm a web developer).  In my head I was like bs and continued on.

A few months ago my team had a meeting with a quest speaker ... he is in the ai industry and basically told all of the writers on the team that in a year 1 of them will replace the whole team because that one will be able to accomplish the work of the whole team in less time ... he told the developers we would be about a year after that.  Since then management has been pushing us to learn how to best use ai, on our own time, to be prepared.

The tech industry is going to be f'd in a year or two.

That sounds like a fucking horrible company to work for. Any company that would round up employees and then tell them they should be scared for their jobs truly doesn't give a shit about its employees. While GenAI can write code and design shitty websites, it doesn't have the aesthetic and programming knowledge that lives in a good developer's head.

My company employs hundreds of people that theoretically could be replaced by GenAI that doesn't exist yet but instead is working to figure out how to make internal tools to augment work.

Take for example web chat. Most of that is automated now but we have experts that provide people with very important financial advice based on lots of codes and regulations. CharGPT could look it up but won't have the experience that these experts have had seeing the actual results.

What the company has built is a tool that listens to the customer and starts finding all the relevant laws and codes and gives it to the expert. It has access to past customers and their results and can provide summaries of what happened. It's making the experts more efficient at their jobs.

This is what you're seeing so far in many industries there have been 2 prominent Economics papers that have analyzed the effects.

[grimcity]

@Sleazy nailed it in his first-page comment when he referred to having some diversity, I mostly do web/online app development, but I can kick over to UX/UI or even pre press if I had to. Having said, we're at the fetal stages of AI right now, so it's hard to gauge what it's gonna be like a month from now.

I do private and government contracts, and the implementation of generative tools will have a much bigger impact on private company employees doing the type of stuff I do, as we often handle sensitive data that you don't want processed or seen outside of the networks under your organization's control. A tech company would be more likely to save money on staff whereas government agencies usually have pretty set budgets and are less likely to risk data exposure.

Right now I love a lot of the tools that have come from AI, and depending on the entity you work for, it may help to be the AI-authority in your organization. I'm using my current position to maintain that angle now. A lot of folks can write a prompt, but even now, if an HR manager had GPT write an entire application, you need someone who knows how to implement it and clean the code.

Like I said though, this is today. I've been in this business since '98, so change isn't new (though the speed of change has increased). IT/Tech has always been a hustle... this is a good wakeup for all of us in the sector, just learn what you can and keep up with it like every other little nuanced thing we pick up due to the work or just being a solid geek.

It's kinda scary, but I'm also stoked to see everything moving so fast. Just trying to keep up.

[Jawn Gyatti]

Couldn't remember if I replied to this or not but here's my .02.

2 years ago my good friend (who is one of the top experts in ai) told me to start figuring out what I'm doing next because within 5 years I won't have a job (I'm a web developer).  In my head I was like bs and continued on.

A few months ago my team had a meeting with a quest speaker ... he is in the ai industry and basically told all of the writers on the team that in a year 1 of them will replace the whole team because that one will be able to accomplish the work of the whole team in less time ... he told the developers we would be about a year after that.  Since then management has been pushing us to learn how to best use ai, on our own time, to be prepared.

The tech industry is going to be f'd in a year or two.

That sounds like a horrible place to work. First, they threaten your livelihood, then they essentially tell you to do unpaid training in order to prepare for a potential position that might be available in the future. Jesus Christ....

[GuessAgain?]

While the interviewer does grate me, I thought this was an interesting listen…

https://youtu.be/bk-nQ7HF6k4

Thought it was interesting how he suggested governments should tax AI companies massively to try to subsidise a universal income but then how those countries would most likely just fall behind in the race as certain countries will just go balls to wall with no fucks given.

I work in the creative industry and I do like how he highlighted the amount of online grifters i see on youtube and instagram now, creating content trying to scare monger and flog masses of ai related ‘hacks’ to innocent people caught in a firing line.

Anyway you tech folk seem like you know a hell of a lot more about this than i do

[modern life is war]

While the interviewer does grate me, I thought this was an interesting listen…

https://youtu.be/bk-nQ7HF6k4

Thought it was interesting how he suggested governments should tax AI companies massively to try to subsidise a universal income but then how those countries would most likely just fall behind in the race as certain countries will just go balls to wall with no fucks given.

I work in the creative industry and I do like how he highlighted the amount of online grifters i see on youtube and instagram now, creating content trying to scare monger and flog masses of ai related ‘hacks’ to innocent people caught in a firing line.

Anyway you tech folk seem like you know a hell of a lot more about this than i do

Man around the 35 min mark he talks about how we may come to a point where 90% of art is produced by AI because most people don't actually care about who produced what they consume, they just want something functional. The idea that music created by a human might become some niche thing sent chills down my spine.

Scariest thing about technology is that once the cat is out of the bag it won't go back in and we're never going to be able to go backwards in technological progression.

[swellbowed]

https://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2023/06/14/we-used-ai-to-extend-iconic-skate-photos/

[newguy]

I work in 3D animation/vfx and i'm just gonna paste something a senior Compositing Lead (compositing=taking vfx and matching it with OG plates of real footage, super important) I interned with said on Linkedin (or a vfx forum for the whole studio, can't remember). I also remember him bitching about the model we were trying to use lol



TLDR: AI is more A than I and needs constant hand holding and the braindead discord prompt thing is a mockery of what "AI" supposedly is

[Sleazy]

@Sleazy nailed it in his first-page comment when he referred to having some diversity, I mostly do web/online app development, but I can kick over to UX/UI or even pre press if I had to. Having said, we're at the fetal stages of AI right now, so it's hard to gauge what it's gonna be like a month from now.

I do private and government contracts, and the implementation of generative tools will have a much bigger impact on private company employees doing the type of stuff I do, as we often handle sensitive data that you don't want processed or seen outside of the networks under your organization's control. A tech company would be more likely to save money on staff whereas government agencies usually have pretty set budgets and are less likely to risk data exposure.

Right now I love a lot of the tools that have come from AI, and depending on the entity you work for, it may help to be the AI-authority in your organization. I'm using my current position to maintain that angle now. A lot of folks can write a prompt, but even now, if an HR manager had GPT write an entire application, you need someone who knows how to implement it and clean the code.

Like I said though, this is today. I've been in this business since '98, so change isn't new (though the speed of change has increased). IT/Tech has always been a hustle... this is a good wakeup for all of us in the sector, just learn what you can and keep up with it like every other little nuanced thing we pick up due to the work or just being a solid geek.

It's kinda scary, but I'm also stoked to see everything moving so fast. Just trying to keep up.

i like your share here. note that you can use openai directly and it won't contribute to their public model so there is private ways of using this stuff today. goverment would be nice though. not sure how your able to win those contracts. seems so hard. you must spend a lot of cycles on rfps. we should have a virtual coffee sometime.

[L33Tg33k]

People have been talking about drones delivering shit for a while now and that shit has never taken off. You can count on your daily junk mail being delivered by human hand for a while still. If anything I’ve been delivering more shit since this AI revolution.

[frontsideNECKTIE]

I think it would have to get a lot more intelligent and more adaptable to take my position, or at least be able to work with people's medical requests.

I work as a scheduler for a doctor's office, and I'm sure that it's possible to have an AI portal for patients to pick and choose appointment times, but the large demographic of people we work with are not... um... technologically inclined...I'm not even sure if our facility would allow patients to choose the time on their own like that, likely a request would be entered for the human staff to review and confirm with the patient.

Plus, a lot of people want the human contact when they call about medical issues, most say they HATE using the phone system, and others don't like our online portal either.

I'm probably too short-sighted though.