Agreed, he calls the people doing the work incompetent (possibly just technically) but I’m not sure how someone technically incompetent, but otherwise fully competent, could properly train an LLM?
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Not sure how much technical competence is needed to point an AI at a very large library of written assets and say ‘digest that’.
But I was working in an IT services company producing highly customised (unique to each prospective client) predominantly non-technical documents as sales support material. An LLM would have made my life a lot better. And there would have been techies galore to support the model’s development and training, if needed.
Interestingly, we did, in the couple of years before I left and retired, outsource some of this to our Indian colleagues, who did help reduce the overhead slightly by being able to churn out the core answers to questions, saving me from starting with a blank sheet of paper. It still needed careful checking and wordsmithing, though - as would an LLM’s output, I suspect.
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Human trainers are essential. My hypothesis is that experts in a field who adapt to Ai will become a new type of power user, displacing their peers.
One of my focus industries is construction. It depends on people making calculations off PDF files using digital tape measures. It is a process so stupid, most people outside the field don’t believe me when I explain it to them.
Adobe should be hauled before congress for gunking up 8% of the economy. It’s madness. Ai is doing crazy stuff with archaic processes people havn’t given up since they first got windows 98.
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Which means they can justify cutting labor costs. Fire people. The ghost of Jack Welch has entered the chat.
Tools that do the job they need to do.
To proletarianize it, mostly…
I don’t know… This is feeling an awful lot like another bubble…
GenX is a conspiracy… we don’t actually exist. 
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Most of this thread…
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah AI blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah AI blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah AI blah blah blah. Blah.
ETA: I wanted to type a lot more blahs, but I got tired and bored. Maybe AI could help me with that.
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So people should spend 8 hours a day clicking on pictures because architects keep all the actual data trapped in PDF files?
I’ve seen professional, soon to retire boomers insisting their junior staff use adding machines and pencil/paper tabulation to cost estimate million dollar projects, all while downplaying “new” technology like excel.
The amount of backwards processes out there is astounding. Much of it should have been eradicated from the economy years ago, because it is not a technology problem. There is an entire generational workforce doing things backwards. Preserving this inefficiencies for “jobs” is laughable. People are wasting their lives on computers for no good reason.
All this unnecessary admin time drives up construction and housing prices.
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the person who stumbled upon the “crash any ai” prompt, described what you’re talking about
( edited for brevity )
a client asked for a tool to automate boring work as an intellectual property attorney… [ some ] parts needed to call US government service apis – entirely straightforward.
Other parts involve value judgements such as “does this seem close to that?” where “close” doesn’t have a strict definition. That’s the bit an AI-based classifier should be able to perform “well enough” – if not quite as effectively as a human being. The age AI has ushered in the age of “mid” – not great, but not horrid either.
i love that phrase “the age of mid” - it seems spot on
( he never says whether he finished the tool. apparently crashing every ai with a single prompt distracted him )
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related: The idea that screenshots constitute proof is laughable but nevertheless insidious, and sometimes I think that ABBYY has a financial interest in people abandoning text for jpegs. We shouldn’t need AI to make sense of crappy data exchange.
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There is nothing wrong with new technologies, but it’s pretty clear at this point that it’s part of the hypecycle pushed by venture capitalist. Sometimes, the tried and true makes sense. Sometimes, new technologies are really helpful. AI has not proven to be the latter thus far.
Again, much of this seems to be being pushed to cut labor costs. Plenty of people have made this observation, not just me.
Also, ageism isn’t a good look. I’m guessing MOST boomers are retired, and you’re actually talking about Gen Xers. Those are the group who are nearing retirement.
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That’s a horrifying idea. Kill it with fire.
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it’s always a human problem, and ai isn’t going to fix it
Japan says goodbye to floppy disks in official use
that said, efficient business practices isn’t the key to everything.
does goldman even try to account for the loss of lives and property due to climate change, which will get even worse due to large scale ai use?
probably not, because those externalities are paid by we the people, not the corporations directly. they might get efficient business practices, and we’ll get a forever altered planet
i’d be happy for a few backwards tasks, without all the heat domes and hurricanes
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In my experience, boomers. I still regularly see 75 year olds not quitting. But yea, some gen-x too.
To be clear - I have great empathy for their generation. Probably more than most, and have extended a great deal to help colleagues navigate tech. That said, the repercussions throughout society by poor data management the past few decades has likely significantly contributed to our national malaise by skyrocketing costs through excessive admin in things like education, construction, and healthcare.
My point is the VE hype is a drop in the bucket compared to what Ai is going to for B2B. But the public doesn’t see this, so news stories become the dominant story.
If you’re right, then fix the processes. Which is independent of AI, unless the AI you’re talking about is a glorified digitization algorithm…
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True, but we are certainly entering uncharted territory, where white collar work can be automated similar to how automation reduced labor in manufacturing.
What humans figure out to do with all the labor saved is anybody’s guess.
well, get them a social safety net, some retirement support, housing protection, and adequate healthcare… i’d bet you’d see this intransigence clear right up
we don’t need ai to improve lives, when social policy would more than suffice
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FWIW they stay on because it’s white collar work, intellectually engaging, and they don’t know what else to do. Believe it or not, they enjoy their jobs.
It’s part of their generation’s bubble. Many don’t have the same uncertainties the younger generations face.
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well, to keep on point: we don’t need ai to improve people’s lives, and we know that ai will ( and is ) going to harm the climate. climate change is an existenial issue. labor efficiency for the white collar set is not.
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I’m with you, but it’s easier said than done.
I don’t know your background, but for people that must do grueling, meticulous, information management 8+ hours a day, the implementations of ai are astounding.
You can’t stop people from making bad data. But ai can take somebody elses bad data and make it useful. Sounds simple but it’s an incredible thing.
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