My first degree was in electronics, back before computers were common. I have my journeyman tool & die certification. My second degree was in computer science, and my third was project management, all earned while working forty to sixty hours a week and raising a family. I was considered a factory automation specialist for the last fifteen years of my thirty-five year working life.
I know this will be a tldr for most readers, but if you would like some inside dope on automation in general and office automation in particular, this may suit.
Graeber was right in Bullshit Jobs: almost all cubicle jobs are nothing burgers created to fill org charts and help management pretend they are running the company. I eventually worked fulltime in seven factories, three of them startups, and the following statement is measureable, observable fact: Factories run better when the bosses and their minions are gone, and most of what gets done correctly gets done in spite of management and its clueless attempts at control.
- Logistics matters.
- Quality control matters at the lab level.
- Liasing with suppliers and customers matters.
Every other office job I ever studied could be coded out of existence easily with '4GL' style programming. It's not that AI can't do most office jobs. It's that most of them should not be done at all. Most cubicle and office jobs could be done more reliably with a few lines of programming; AI would be overkill if it lived up to its hype. Being as aware as a doorknob, AI will screw up more than it helps with draining the management swamp. Picture phone menu logic in charge of approving or declining purchase requisitions.
The universally chanted silliness about robotics replacing factory workers is also nonsense. America's "capitalists" started selliing their factories to Asia in the 80s when robotics came along. Why? Two main reasons:
1) You must know what you are doing to build and manage automation. A Harvard MBA <might> be qualified to manage an automated factory after ten years of automation engineering on a factory floor. Good luck finding a company smart enough to just promote an engineer with a secondary business degree.
2) One robot is many times as expensive to operate and maintain as forty Malay kids who dream of owning a bicycle. To meet his amortization schedule, Mr. Robot requires squeaky clean uninterruptible power in a temperature-controlled environment, a factory-trained technician in near attendance 24 hours every day of the year, and an engineer who understands motion control programming in 3D well enough not to kill people. Gravity and entropy require a robot to be reprogrammed constantly as it wears, and especially when moving parts are replaced. When the Malay kid drops a doll's head on the floor of the converted chicken house, with its string of 40-watt bulbs overhead, he bends down and picks it up. When Mr. Robot gets off his stroke, and he will, two dozen doll heads slam the safety fence before you can blink.
There are two production requirements that can make automating a production process feasible: speed and repeatability. I did time in a German vehicle assembly plant with acres of two-story robots revolving in a blur. There was more skilled labor per square meter in that place than there is at Johns Hopkins, and twice as much unskilled support staff. Assembling luxury cars from chassis to buff in 145 minutes made that plant feasible, and nothing less could have.
American business fled screaming from manufacturing altogether when programmable machinery began to take off 45 years ago, because that kind of manufacturing is beyond 99.9% of business people. Business loathes skilled workers of all levels. They want cookie cutter people filling cookie cutter 'positions'. American stockholders, ever hungry for the quick-boost profits that come from swinging the axe, are finally using AI, of all the clownish fad scams, to replace management fluff. I guess because it is the stupidest and most expensive possible way to "automate" those management jobs. Automating 999 of 1000 of them would be about as complicated as mapping a work process with a flow chart.
Automation requires repeatable, proven competence in technical trades; American corporations promote sycophancy. Automating production processes requires integrity, accountability, and professional standards that do not bend to pressure: American corporate life identifies and promotes corruptibility first and foremost. Automation work is a collaborative effort in which cooperation, not competition, is key. American corporations promote smiling malice towards peers and seething fear-fueled contempt towards one's understudies. If you have ever worked six months at a corporate job, you know I am telling it like it is.
If you love your kids, make them learn to do things. Using video controllers is good in moderation, but they need to learn a musical instrument, hammer nails, shape wood, prep and cook food, sew and knit, grow things in dirt. I see the soft little boneless, useless hands on twenty- and thirty-year-old people and I am hard-pressed not to cry out in horror. Being able to actually do something, anything productive, enriches children physically, mentally, and emotionally: make them learn something real or you will make them someone's cattle.
Nailed it. Entirely. The PMC have the most easily automated jobs on the planet. Really most management tasks boil down to doing monotonous procedural things involving shuffling around and transforming data. The thing computers are good at, and designed to do.
But instead of automating away managerial trivialities, we seem to be trying to automate away the things that are fundamentally human; art, literature, interacting with other people.
One imagines a future where all the humans have MBAs and spend most of their time copy-pasting subscription revenue figures and cloud service invoice line items into spreadsheets for some AI art web application.
I sold heavy electrical MRO and OEM in my 1st job out of college. We also sold lots of factory automation.
It was a great experience watching the creativity and problem solving the engineers and the floor guys come up with. One role I ended up with: I became the company motor control center expert for placing the actual order w correct specs after those guys knew what they needed.
And the tech growth re: more capable and less expensive just kept coming so fast (this was the 1990s).
I got to go to the Allen Bradley factory in Milwaukee for their sales training, I remember it like it was yesterday.
Feb 25·edited Feb 25Liked by Morgthorak the Undead
I will add since others are reading.. "MRO is maintenance repair operations" and OEM is "original equipment manufacturer"
IE my 2 main revenue streams were
1) the companies building machines and systems etc using my products inside their products
2) the maintenance and repair of the facility itself that this production would be occuring inside of...lightbulbs, safety equipment, things like that to keep the building operational while they build the widget
Fun days. Lotsa blue collar guys and happy hours and seeing multiple types of manufacturing
Feb 25·edited Feb 25Liked by Morgthorak the Undead
I think in the UK the managerial style of a lot of companies is a bit different but it’s the same ethos: Managerialism rules. When issues occur more management is needed rather than getting out of the way and letting technical people solve it. More reporting is always needed for some reason. And the worst one of all is the Plug and Play attitude - where just because an MBA told you, you think you can drop into any facet of a company and “manage” well. In this particular case AI would probably be able to get the lay of the land and the critical aspects and adapt to it way quicker than Mr MBA and his little god complex.
Agreed. I’m a contrarian on making a living - anyone able to do things physically will be in high demand in the coming years as it will be irreplicable by a machine.
Plus, you add up all the inflation on the HR departments, the EPA and all the red tape jobs…. And the only way, the ONLY way to get inflation under control…
Is to cut all the crap out of this economy.
Every single dead end job. Every single unproductive one, needs to go.
You do that, and suddenly the trades and blue collar will be in demand. The wage situation will reverse, demand will reverse. Inflation will be under control.
I am sorry this is “engineering brain” at its worst. Engineers who think they can automate everything using “modern” programing languages don’t really understand what is happening at a business. It is a true case of Dunning-Kruger and narcissism.
Well, chinese companies run circles around american companies. And one of the most salient aspects of chinese capitalism is how much of it is run by engineers and not business school graduates.
You would need to explain how Chinese companies “run circles” around US companies by some objective manner.
But what you might be saying is Chinese companies tend to be more efficient in areas such as manufacturing. That’s true, but they are far behind the US in most areas of innovation. If you ask me to pick efficiency or innovation in the 21st century, I am going with innovation.
The tech world is especially bad for the progressive mind disease.
I work in this sector and it isn't the beliefs they have it is the mindless confidence. Most assume every normal person is pro immigration, pro gay, pro trans, pro cultural destruction.
I work in the laptop class and I am firmly of the view our societies are doomed until we confront them and their insane beliefs.
There’s certainly a lot of Gell-Mann effect going on. I have worked in the space industry pushing the boundaries of technology with really gifted engineers and scientists. Having to conform to exacting requirements and having to build precise tools and accurate measurement processes. Seeing uncertainty and error up close and how it affects what you can do and what is real. And yet loads of them believe man-made climate change is a real verified thing.
After losing just about everything and seeing the fall of e-mail jobs, I’m not feeling bad about completely retooling and getting in the trades going two years now.
“Learn to code” was Biden’s advice to coal miners he planned to put out of business back in 2019 when he was running for President. “C’mon man! If you can throw coal in a furnace, you can learn to code!” (Actual quote)
No amount of disgust and contempt for Joe Biden will ever be enough.
Ref. Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber. Most of these people are completely useless and they know it. Looking forward to them trying to learn to code. Once that fails I'm not sure what they'll do. I make my own coffee so I don't personally need a barista, and I wouldn't trust them to mow a lawn or wash a car, but I'm sure they'll figure something out.
It depends on the scale and speed of the destruction of the jobs. The scale gets too large and it happens too quickly and people cannot retrain or pursue other fields and there will be a bunch of society wide consequences, those are bad even if the people who lost the jobs are mostly turds.
That said I think AI is getting the credit when some of these companies just failed to bring customers any real value. Eventually AI swimsuit models and writers might have bankrupted Sports Illustrated but they self destructed because they forgot they were supposed to write about sports and put thin attractive women in their swimsuit addition.
Good point about societal disruption. Hungry people without jobs are a recipe for disaster for any society.
True about Sports Illustrated. The woke commies took over and ran that pub into the ground. It was always about the T&A for straight guys who like sports. How dumb can you be to screw that formula up but they did.
I expect AI content to get worse at some point. When the Internet fills up with AI generated mediocrity, then AI gets trained by AI.
And this filling up is already happening. Link builders have been using article spinners to fill up useless blogs for years. AI is the ultimate article spinner. (And I suspect the hardest hit by AI are those who crank out crap content on Fiverr and similar cheap labor sites. Much of their crap was worse than AI to start with.)
That's a good point, I had not thought of it in those terms. I read the search engines are already flooded with AI generated crap, making their results worse. But AI training on AI is going to make it even more of a problem.
It's funny you mention Fiver, I had thought at one point to do some writing work there. But when I went on, I found it filled with people already. That, plus the AI onslaught made me shrug my shoulders and walk away from it. Not worth the bother now trying to establish a presence there to make some money.
I wonder how many of the customers who buy writing on Fiver are already using AI instead?
Don't slum on Fiverr. If you are going to do writer gigs, move up a level to WriterAccess or something! (Your writing here far exceeds the quality there as well, but I suspect some of the gig writers there can write better than what they produce for low pay -- when they have time and inspiration.)
Writer Access has been around for years. I tried using them a decade ago in order to try to bring a site I had back to the top of the search rankings. Better than Fiverr. But still a waste of money. Your writing here is vastly better than what I paid 60 bucks for back then. (Whether you could sustain that quality when writing on arbitrary topics is another matter. Might be worth a shot if your current work pays poorly.)
I'll look into it, thanks. My time is relatively short for such work though, but who knows it might be worth checking out. I always viewed sites like Fiver with suspicion though, because it seemed like there were hustler types on there.
I am pretty good at tailoring my copy and content for whoever is paying me, though some topics are dull and require vast amounts of caffeine to get my brain focused on them.
Thank you again for the kind words, that makes me feel good. 🥰
Regression to the mean. It the bain of all mathematical models. It surprisingly get’s less attention than it should. This is most likely because most people don’t want to hear that their ML model is going to degrade and there is nothing you can do about it except to retrain / rebuild.
From the standpoint of the “Cabal,” of course, they could always just use Nanotech to wipe a bunch of us out quicker … 💥 Holy smokes, they’ve already done that! 😣😧☠️
Oh no! This place has just finished convincing me to get my copy of Foundation Trilogy off of the shelf and reread it for the first time since 1980. There’s a lot of pages in that book! And I estimate a 87% probability that it will convince me to read even more Asimov when I finish it.
My suggestion, in that case, after your re-read, would be to pick up the rest of the foundation novels that he penned decades after the original trilogy: “Foundation’s Edge,” 1982, the first sequel; “Foundation and Earth,” 1986, the sequel to the sequel; “Prelude to Foundation,” 1988, a “prequel” to the trilogy; and “Forward the Foundation,” 1993, A second prequel as a sequel to the first prequel (but still in front of the original trilogy).
Although the original trilogy itself will always hold a special place in my heart as it has for decades now, the other four books are actually pretty damn good, and Asimov ultimately weaves the whole series in with several of his other earlier books, such as “The Caves of Steel” and his robot series novels… kind of like Heinlein’s “Future History” books in that sense. future history series in a sense …
Also, if you haven’t read it, my favorite novel by Isaac Asimov is still “The Gods Themselves,” 1972, one of the most incredible stories I’ve ever read (and I’ve been reading science fiction since 1969, going all the way back right to Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, etc.). 🤓
Asimov, as you might know, was a liberal — but he never let that interfere with his storytelling. He wrote well over 500 books, and I’ve got about half of them. What a mind!!! ✨💥
I don’t have all 500, but my mother is a life member of the science fiction book club and we piled up quite a few.
I’m loving how much of “psychohistory” predicted AI. And a line where Asimov comments on a character having an odd profile because of his fluffy sideburns…..
But naturally, of course, I got annoyed by the fact that I had several words in there, repeated twice … wish I could edit a comment, but I don’t seem to have that feature available. Thank you sir! 👍🏼😜
Feb 22·edited Feb 22Liked by Morgthorak the Undead
I think Nuval Noah Harari admired by elites is a real creep but he did say with AI we would have a useless class of people. In a lengthier video he said maybe they could get UBI, play video games and eat candy all day. If you visit this link there will be more recommended lengthier videos where he says Jesus is fake news, freewill is over, and humans are hackable animals. The elite class will be the new gods. This is about 3 minutes. I worked in banking my entire life and worked on both sides from collecting to lending and can see how loan officers will be replaced as programs will be written and it will be simple yes or no where I would work hard to try and get the customers the mortgages they needed. Nuval is highly connected with the World Economic Forum who is connected with the UN.
Life has a way of turning out differently in the elites want or expect. So they will try to have things their way, but it might not work out as they hoped.
thank you for being a good banking guy and trying to take care of your customers. That speaks well of you as a person.
Because public sector unions have contracts that insist any software automation introduced doesn't eliminate any government "jobs". The tumor is only, ever, always, permitted to grow. Even if you lay them off due to budget cuts or some other permissible reason, you have to rehire them with back-pay as soon as a new position opens up. Which it always does, because legislators never run out of new things that need a touch of government interference.
Still fascinating how the AI was able to take all of the inputs that were made available, and use them to conclude that images of white people are hateful and disturbing. Garbage In/Garbage Out still applies.
I doubt anyone sat there and read Kendi to The Machine. But it still picked up the dominant message of our culture. “White people are evil and should be exterminated”.
while I could care less about white collar jobs decreasing, there are a lot of vocations on the list that I don't see potential improvement from involving AI in their decisions.
teaching and psychiatry for example, many of those practitioners are very indoctrinated already, but AI is even more programmable for compliance with the WokeAss agendas bleeding into those fields.
I certainly don't want my social credit score mandated reeducation taught by establishment trained AI, and would prefer that the psychiatric evaluation be carried out by a human when the Man gains sufficient power to levy that farce upon regular citizens for noncompliance.
Lol, this article and the AI hot takes are absolutely laughable.
No one is losing their jobs because of AI automation. No one. Maybe some data entry people. Maybe.
What happened was interest rates went up and money is no longer free. People have to think about things like the cost of debt, which means reprioritization and new business strategies.
Essentially we had over employment is speculative industries like tech and a lack of fiscal discipline at many more traditional firms like UPS.
I say this as the lead AI consultant from a well established consultancy. AI is being adopted, but while 10% gains in productivity in some areas is certainly a big win, it does not justify mass layoffs. People are way too credulous about AI right now as we are at or approaching peak hype.
AI is a useful tool and will have major impacts on how we live and work. That said, the idea of mass white collar layoffs in present or near future is unconnected to reality. The technology is not even close to where lay people think it is.
My advice would be if you want to write good corporate commentary, don’t take companies at their word. Ever.
Google wants you to focus on the positives that they had major AI wins, while steering you away from the more mundane financial explanations for their layoffs. It’s basic corporate spin that can easily be dispelled by looking at their financials and knowing the technology.
You were basically just rehashing corporate propaganda while claiming to have an anti-corporate stance in this article.
These are the people who told the working class socialism was coming soon, so not to worry that the factories were closing, automating, and going overseas.
Has anyone tried giving the white collar workers this good news?
My first degree was in electronics, back before computers were common. I have my journeyman tool & die certification. My second degree was in computer science, and my third was project management, all earned while working forty to sixty hours a week and raising a family. I was considered a factory automation specialist for the last fifteen years of my thirty-five year working life.
I know this will be a tldr for most readers, but if you would like some inside dope on automation in general and office automation in particular, this may suit.
Graeber was right in Bullshit Jobs: almost all cubicle jobs are nothing burgers created to fill org charts and help management pretend they are running the company. I eventually worked fulltime in seven factories, three of them startups, and the following statement is measureable, observable fact: Factories run better when the bosses and their minions are gone, and most of what gets done correctly gets done in spite of management and its clueless attempts at control.
- Logistics matters.
- Quality control matters at the lab level.
- Liasing with suppliers and customers matters.
Every other office job I ever studied could be coded out of existence easily with '4GL' style programming. It's not that AI can't do most office jobs. It's that most of them should not be done at all. Most cubicle and office jobs could be done more reliably with a few lines of programming; AI would be overkill if it lived up to its hype. Being as aware as a doorknob, AI will screw up more than it helps with draining the management swamp. Picture phone menu logic in charge of approving or declining purchase requisitions.
The universally chanted silliness about robotics replacing factory workers is also nonsense. America's "capitalists" started selliing their factories to Asia in the 80s when robotics came along. Why? Two main reasons:
1) You must know what you are doing to build and manage automation. A Harvard MBA <might> be qualified to manage an automated factory after ten years of automation engineering on a factory floor. Good luck finding a company smart enough to just promote an engineer with a secondary business degree.
2) One robot is many times as expensive to operate and maintain as forty Malay kids who dream of owning a bicycle. To meet his amortization schedule, Mr. Robot requires squeaky clean uninterruptible power in a temperature-controlled environment, a factory-trained technician in near attendance 24 hours every day of the year, and an engineer who understands motion control programming in 3D well enough not to kill people. Gravity and entropy require a robot to be reprogrammed constantly as it wears, and especially when moving parts are replaced. When the Malay kid drops a doll's head on the floor of the converted chicken house, with its string of 40-watt bulbs overhead, he bends down and picks it up. When Mr. Robot gets off his stroke, and he will, two dozen doll heads slam the safety fence before you can blink.
There are two production requirements that can make automating a production process feasible: speed and repeatability. I did time in a German vehicle assembly plant with acres of two-story robots revolving in a blur. There was more skilled labor per square meter in that place than there is at Johns Hopkins, and twice as much unskilled support staff. Assembling luxury cars from chassis to buff in 145 minutes made that plant feasible, and nothing less could have.
American business fled screaming from manufacturing altogether when programmable machinery began to take off 45 years ago, because that kind of manufacturing is beyond 99.9% of business people. Business loathes skilled workers of all levels. They want cookie cutter people filling cookie cutter 'positions'. American stockholders, ever hungry for the quick-boost profits that come from swinging the axe, are finally using AI, of all the clownish fad scams, to replace management fluff. I guess because it is the stupidest and most expensive possible way to "automate" those management jobs. Automating 999 of 1000 of them would be about as complicated as mapping a work process with a flow chart.
Automation requires repeatable, proven competence in technical trades; American corporations promote sycophancy. Automating production processes requires integrity, accountability, and professional standards that do not bend to pressure: American corporate life identifies and promotes corruptibility first and foremost. Automation work is a collaborative effort in which cooperation, not competition, is key. American corporations promote smiling malice towards peers and seething fear-fueled contempt towards one's understudies. If you have ever worked six months at a corporate job, you know I am telling it like it is.
If you love your kids, make them learn to do things. Using video controllers is good in moderation, but they need to learn a musical instrument, hammer nails, shape wood, prep and cook food, sew and knit, grow things in dirt. I see the soft little boneless, useless hands on twenty- and thirty-year-old people and I am hard-pressed not to cry out in horror. Being able to actually do something, anything productive, enriches children physically, mentally, and emotionally: make them learn something real or you will make them someone's cattle.
Nailed it. Entirely. The PMC have the most easily automated jobs on the planet. Really most management tasks boil down to doing monotonous procedural things involving shuffling around and transforming data. The thing computers are good at, and designed to do.
But instead of automating away managerial trivialities, we seem to be trying to automate away the things that are fundamentally human; art, literature, interacting with other people.
One imagines a future where all the humans have MBAs and spend most of their time copy-pasting subscription revenue figures and cloud service invoice line items into spreadsheets for some AI art web application.
Excellent, you nail it!
I sold heavy electrical MRO and OEM in my 1st job out of college. We also sold lots of factory automation.
It was a great experience watching the creativity and problem solving the engineers and the floor guys come up with. One role I ended up with: I became the company motor control center expert for placing the actual order w correct specs after those guys knew what they needed.
And the tech growth re: more capable and less expensive just kept coming so fast (this was the 1990s).
I got to go to the Allen Bradley factory in Milwaukee for their sales training, I remember it like it was yesterday.
I will add since others are reading.. "MRO is maintenance repair operations" and OEM is "original equipment manufacturer"
IE my 2 main revenue streams were
1) the companies building machines and systems etc using my products inside their products
2) the maintenance and repair of the facility itself that this production would be occuring inside of...lightbulbs, safety equipment, things like that to keep the building operational while they build the widget
Fun days. Lotsa blue collar guys and happy hours and seeing multiple types of manufacturing
I think in the UK the managerial style of a lot of companies is a bit different but it’s the same ethos: Managerialism rules. When issues occur more management is needed rather than getting out of the way and letting technical people solve it. More reporting is always needed for some reason. And the worst one of all is the Plug and Play attitude - where just because an MBA told you, you think you can drop into any facet of a company and “manage” well. In this particular case AI would probably be able to get the lay of the land and the critical aspects and adapt to it way quicker than Mr MBA and his little god complex.
I have a latent fascination with automation and robotics of this kind, thanks for posting this!
Superb article, thank you Alan!
Agreed. I’m a contrarian on making a living - anyone able to do things physically will be in high demand in the coming years as it will be irreplicable by a machine.
Plus, you add up all the inflation on the HR departments, the EPA and all the red tape jobs…. And the only way, the ONLY way to get inflation under control…
Is to cut all the crap out of this economy.
Every single dead end job. Every single unproductive one, needs to go.
You do that, and suddenly the trades and blue collar will be in demand. The wage situation will reverse, demand will reverse. Inflation will be under control.
And boomers will cry.
Gen X and Millennials will smile.
Our children will stop being slaves.
And life will go on.
perfect
addendum to perfect:
make your kids
write on paper
I am sorry this is “engineering brain” at its worst. Engineers who think they can automate everything using “modern” programing languages don’t really understand what is happening at a business. It is a true case of Dunning-Kruger and narcissism.
Well, chinese companies run circles around american companies. And one of the most salient aspects of chinese capitalism is how much of it is run by engineers and not business school graduates.
You would need to explain how Chinese companies “run circles” around US companies by some objective manner.
But what you might be saying is Chinese companies tend to be more efficient in areas such as manufacturing. That’s true, but they are far behind the US in most areas of innovation. If you ask me to pick efficiency or innovation in the 21st century, I am going with innovation.
wow, incredible! Definitely gonna save this post.
The tech world is especially bad for the progressive mind disease.
I work in this sector and it isn't the beliefs they have it is the mindless confidence. Most assume every normal person is pro immigration, pro gay, pro trans, pro cultural destruction.
I work in the laptop class and I am firmly of the view our societies are doomed until we confront them and their insane beliefs.
There’s certainly a lot of Gell-Mann effect going on. I have worked in the space industry pushing the boundaries of technology with really gifted engineers and scientists. Having to conform to exacting requirements and having to build precise tools and accurate measurement processes. Seeing uncertainty and error up close and how it affects what you can do and what is real. And yet loads of them believe man-made climate change is a real verified thing.
I've seen this too. People you cannot write off as stupid or low IQ. Yet they believe a 2 degree shift in temperature will wipe out life on Earth.
Covid taught me IQ and qualifications mean little compared to character or personality.
After losing just about everything and seeing the fall of e-mail jobs, I’m not feeling bad about completely retooling and getting in the trades going two years now.
Good for you, I hope you do very well, my friend. I pray for your success and prosperity in the trades. 👍🏻
I'm with you. Went from management in my field to skilled labour. I went from relying on people to fix things to fixing the things.
“Learn to code” was Biden’s advice to coal miners he planned to put out of business back in 2019 when he was running for President. “C’mon man! If you can throw coal in a furnace, you can learn to code!” (Actual quote)
No amount of disgust and contempt for Joe Biden will ever be enough.
He embodies the corrupt, stupid and elitist nature of our ruling class perfectly.
Ref. Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber. Most of these people are completely useless and they know it. Looking forward to them trying to learn to code. Once that fails I'm not sure what they'll do. I make my own coffee so I don't personally need a barista, and I wouldn't trust them to mow a lawn or wash a car, but I'm sure they'll figure something out.
It depends on the scale and speed of the destruction of the jobs. The scale gets too large and it happens too quickly and people cannot retrain or pursue other fields and there will be a bunch of society wide consequences, those are bad even if the people who lost the jobs are mostly turds.
That said I think AI is getting the credit when some of these companies just failed to bring customers any real value. Eventually AI swimsuit models and writers might have bankrupted Sports Illustrated but they self destructed because they forgot they were supposed to write about sports and put thin attractive women in their swimsuit addition.
Good point about societal disruption. Hungry people without jobs are a recipe for disaster for any society.
True about Sports Illustrated. The woke commies took over and ran that pub into the ground. It was always about the T&A for straight guys who like sports. How dumb can you be to screw that formula up but they did.
I expect AI content to get worse at some point. When the Internet fills up with AI generated mediocrity, then AI gets trained by AI.
And this filling up is already happening. Link builders have been using article spinners to fill up useless blogs for years. AI is the ultimate article spinner. (And I suspect the hardest hit by AI are those who crank out crap content on Fiverr and similar cheap labor sites. Much of their crap was worse than AI to start with.)
That's a good point, I had not thought of it in those terms. I read the search engines are already flooded with AI generated crap, making their results worse. But AI training on AI is going to make it even more of a problem.
It's funny you mention Fiver, I had thought at one point to do some writing work there. But when I went on, I found it filled with people already. That, plus the AI onslaught made me shrug my shoulders and walk away from it. Not worth the bother now trying to establish a presence there to make some money.
I wonder how many of the customers who buy writing on Fiver are already using AI instead?
Don't slum on Fiverr. If you are going to do writer gigs, move up a level to WriterAccess or something! (Your writing here far exceeds the quality there as well, but I suspect some of the gig writers there can write better than what they produce for low pay -- when they have time and inspiration.)
I never heard of writeraccess, that must be a new one. Thanks for the tip though, I appreciate it. Thanks for the kind worse about my writing too.
Writer Access has been around for years. I tried using them a decade ago in order to try to bring a site I had back to the top of the search rankings. Better than Fiverr. But still a waste of money. Your writing here is vastly better than what I paid 60 bucks for back then. (Whether you could sustain that quality when writing on arbitrary topics is another matter. Might be worth a shot if your current work pays poorly.)
I'll look into it, thanks. My time is relatively short for such work though, but who knows it might be worth checking out. I always viewed sites like Fiver with suspicion though, because it seemed like there were hustler types on there.
I am pretty good at tailoring my copy and content for whoever is paying me, though some topics are dull and require vast amounts of caffeine to get my brain focused on them.
Thank you again for the kind words, that makes me feel good. 🥰
Regression to the mean. It the bain of all mathematical models. It surprisingly get’s less attention than it should. This is most likely because most people don’t want to hear that their ML model is going to degrade and there is nothing you can do about it except to retrain / rebuild.
From the standpoint of the “Cabal,” of course, they could always just use Nanotech to wipe a bunch of us out quicker … 💥 Holy smokes, they’ve already done that! 😣😧☠️
On white collar job loss a short story by Isaac Asimov called, "Alas, all thinking." is a great read.
Oh no! This place has just finished convincing me to get my copy of Foundation Trilogy off of the shelf and reread it for the first time since 1980. There’s a lot of pages in that book! And I estimate a 87% probability that it will convince me to read even more Asimov when I finish it.
My suggestion, in that case, after your re-read, would be to pick up the rest of the foundation novels that he penned decades after the original trilogy: “Foundation’s Edge,” 1982, the first sequel; “Foundation and Earth,” 1986, the sequel to the sequel; “Prelude to Foundation,” 1988, a “prequel” to the trilogy; and “Forward the Foundation,” 1993, A second prequel as a sequel to the first prequel (but still in front of the original trilogy).
Although the original trilogy itself will always hold a special place in my heart as it has for decades now, the other four books are actually pretty damn good, and Asimov ultimately weaves the whole series in with several of his other earlier books, such as “The Caves of Steel” and his robot series novels… kind of like Heinlein’s “Future History” books in that sense. future history series in a sense …
Also, if you haven’t read it, my favorite novel by Isaac Asimov is still “The Gods Themselves,” 1972, one of the most incredible stories I’ve ever read (and I’ve been reading science fiction since 1969, going all the way back right to Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, etc.). 🤓
Asimov, as you might know, was a liberal — but he never let that interfere with his storytelling. He wrote well over 500 books, and I’ve got about half of them. What a mind!!! ✨💥
Have fun on the re-read!!! 👍🏼
I don’t have all 500, but my mother is a life member of the science fiction book club and we piled up quite a few.
I’m loving how much of “psychohistory” predicted AI. And a line where Asimov comments on a character having an odd profile because of his fluffy sideburns…..
I was just telling my lovely wife about psychohistory an hour ago!! ✨💪 Great minds think alike and all that … LOL
But naturally, of course, I got annoyed by the fact that I had several words in there, repeated twice … wish I could edit a comment, but I don’t seem to have that feature available. Thank you sir! 👍🏼😜
He was a genius.
If you build a physical object, you’re safe…
I think Nuval Noah Harari admired by elites is a real creep but he did say with AI we would have a useless class of people. In a lengthier video he said maybe they could get UBI, play video games and eat candy all day. If you visit this link there will be more recommended lengthier videos where he says Jesus is fake news, freewill is over, and humans are hackable animals. The elite class will be the new gods. This is about 3 minutes. I worked in banking my entire life and worked on both sides from collecting to lending and can see how loan officers will be replaced as programs will be written and it will be simple yes or no where I would work hard to try and get the customers the mortgages they needed. Nuval is highly connected with the World Economic Forum who is connected with the UN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94o-9zR2bew
Life has a way of turning out differently in the elites want or expect. So they will try to have things their way, but it might not work out as they hoped.
thank you for being a good banking guy and trying to take care of your customers. That speaks well of you as a person.
Why wouldn't AI be a threat to government jobs?
Because public sector unions have contracts that insist any software automation introduced doesn't eliminate any government "jobs". The tumor is only, ever, always, permitted to grow. Even if you lay them off due to budget cuts or some other permissible reason, you have to rehire them with back-pay as soon as a new position opens up. Which it always does, because legislators never run out of new things that need a touch of government interference.
Thanks for clarifying, I don't doubt a word of it.
There's probably lots of umakshullies and technicallies to that but it's the gist as I understand it.
It might be, but nobody has really covered that angle that I am aware of right now.
Still fascinating how the AI was able to take all of the inputs that were made available, and use them to conclude that images of white people are hateful and disturbing. Garbage In/Garbage Out still applies.
I doubt anyone sat there and read Kendi to The Machine. But it still picked up the dominant message of our culture. “White people are evil and should be exterminated”.
while I could care less about white collar jobs decreasing, there are a lot of vocations on the list that I don't see potential improvement from involving AI in their decisions.
teaching and psychiatry for example, many of those practitioners are very indoctrinated already, but AI is even more programmable for compliance with the WokeAss agendas bleeding into those fields.
I certainly don't want my social credit score mandated reeducation taught by establishment trained AI, and would prefer that the psychiatric evaluation be carried out by a human when the Man gains sufficient power to levy that farce upon regular citizens for noncompliance.
Lol, this article and the AI hot takes are absolutely laughable.
No one is losing their jobs because of AI automation. No one. Maybe some data entry people. Maybe.
What happened was interest rates went up and money is no longer free. People have to think about things like the cost of debt, which means reprioritization and new business strategies.
Essentially we had over employment is speculative industries like tech and a lack of fiscal discipline at many more traditional firms like UPS.
I say this as the lead AI consultant from a well established consultancy. AI is being adopted, but while 10% gains in productivity in some areas is certainly a big win, it does not justify mass layoffs. People are way too credulous about AI right now as we are at or approaching peak hype.
AI is a useful tool and will have major impacts on how we live and work. That said, the idea of mass white collar layoffs in present or near future is unconnected to reality. The technology is not even close to where lay people think it is.
My advice would be if you want to write good corporate commentary, don’t take companies at their word. Ever.
Google wants you to focus on the positives that they had major AI wins, while steering you away from the more mundane financial explanations for their layoffs. It’s basic corporate spin that can easily be dispelled by looking at their financials and knowing the technology.
You were basically just rehashing corporate propaganda while claiming to have an anti-corporate stance in this article.
These are the people who told the working class socialism was coming soon, so not to worry that the factories were closing, automating, and going overseas.
Has anyone tried giving the white collar workers this good news?