What I often see missing from conversations about jobs and AI from well meaning people who are rightly skeptical towards AI hype is that AI does not need to be able to do the complete job a of a whole human in order to kill jobs. It needs to make some people more productive in an industry that isn’t growing fast enough. The people that get more productive get to do the work of others who are let go or not hired. And it can definitely make some people more productive in certain areas and tasks. Whether that’s sustainable in various ways over the long term is a different question, one that many (or most) businesses are not concerned with.
For the compsci industries at least, it’s a productivity boost with moderate to extreme consequences in the middle to long term.
Not that that is a problem for CEO’s and companies that work quarter to quarter, but it will be a problem in 5-10 years when they have no senior workers to pick up/fix the problems that LLM’s introduce.
Or for the particularly dim-witted few in the short term who throw money at a problem they don’t understand while ignoring the people they are paying to advise them, thinking they can remove the “unpredictable” human element.
Unless, of course, the LLM’s improve so much in the runway each company has left, so as to eliminate these issues, i think it unlikely, but we’ll see.
What I often see missing from conversations about jobs and AI from well meaning people who are rightly skeptical towards AI hype is that AI does not need to be able to do the complete job a of a whole human in order to kill jobs. It needs to make some people more productive in an industry that isn’t growing fast enough. The people that get more productive get to do the work of others who are let go or not hired. And it can definitely make some people more productive in certain areas and tasks. Whether that’s sustainable in various ways over the long term is a different question, one that many (or most) businesses are not concerned with.
And it doesn’t even have to make anyone more productive, it just has to convince leadership they can get by with less in the short term.
Yes, that’s true also.
For the compsci industries at least, it’s a productivity boost with moderate to extreme consequences in the middle to long term.
Not that that is a problem for CEO’s and companies that work quarter to quarter, but it will be a problem in 5-10 years when they have no senior workers to pick up/fix the problems that LLM’s introduce.
Or for the particularly dim-witted few in the short term who throw money at a problem they don’t understand while ignoring the people they are paying to advise them, thinking they can remove the “unpredictable” human element.
Unless, of course, the LLM’s improve so much in the runway each company has left, so as to eliminate these issues, i think it unlikely, but we’ll see.