So there’s something I need to get off my chest, and if I post it on my LinkedIn it would be career suicide at my level.
In a company, the largest line item by far is usually payroll. I have been at a number of companies that are trying to cut costs and don’t care if you come up with the correct amount via other OpEx categories, they want headcount reduced because “it’s so much”.
So along comes the promise of a computer bot that understands the normal person and also:
- Does not require sick/vacation time
- Does not take FMLA
- Does not want a bonus/profit sharing/equity
- Don’t have to pay unemployment taxes, Medicare or SSI
- Does not require them to spend money on health insurance
- Will not form a union
- Wont ever file a lawsuit for any number of reasons
- Will work 24/7
And this right there is the exact reason so many CEOs are salivating at the idea of AI. Not for worker efficiency, not for any number of “positive” benefits they may taut, but they finally have a glimpse of the chance to rid themselves of one of the largest headaches that they perceive in a company.
It’s funny because executives and managers are more similar to target for replacement if all you have is a bot that parrots back what it heard and can’t think for itself.
Well, current High-level Management Culture is very short-termist and mainly anchored on Priviledged Upbringing, Salesmanship and People Skills (networking, spinning good stories, growing up in the right families and so on) rather than Competence in Strategy or Analytical ability.
As it so happens, the upsides of AI are of the immediate and obvious variety - basically as you listed - and pretty similar to those of outsourcing (but on the shorter term AI is actually cheaper). Meanwhile the downsides are mainly longer term costs and risks, and/or derived from complex or systemic characteristics of AI, for example:
- LLMs have a flat profile in the gravity of the consequences of its errors: basically they are just as likely to make errors with serious consequences (say, advise somebody who expressed suicidal thought to “kill yourself”) as they are to make errors with minor consequences, whilst even untrained humans have some awareness of consequences and thus have a lower probability of doing higher consequence errors. This means that over the medium and long term AI has a worse risk profile than even untrained people and is thus more likely to do things which bankrupt companies and kill people.
- LLMs don’t learn, at all. You can explain it all you want but even if that helps, it only helps as far as their input window contains that explanation since that stuff doesn’t actually feed back into the model so doesn’t get persisted. Most people do learn, and once they learn they seldom go back. So if one position is occupied by a Junior Something and another is “occupied” by an LLM, in 2 years time the former will have become a lot more productive and capable whilst the latter will be no better than 2 years before (possibly worse: see below).
- If you’re running AI hosted by a 3rd party, you’ve now become dependent on that 3rd party, with all the associated future risks that it entails, especially for companies which have far less money and thus legal power than said 3rd party. The most obvious is that what’s “cheaper than hiring” today will not be so tommorrow once that 3rd party has locked your company in.
- More generally, most AI gets trained from materials which were gathered from public contributions and those are getting worse, both because people are now less likely to end up in those places and ending up giving their own contributions and because “contributions” done by AI or with AI generated text claiming to be from people are increasing in those places and, as it has been already been provide in actual scientific studies, the quality of AI goes does the more AI-produced content is used in the training of a new AI, so mid and long term as the fraction of training materials which are pure human-created falls, AIs will get worse, not better (at best, stop altogether improving as no new models are trained), which for companies replacing human labour with AI means that the quality of the work done for them will never improve.
- Then there’s the even more broad and systemic problem which also happens with outsourcing: if nobody employs people today for their Junior positions, tomorrow there will be no Seniors.
All this to say, that since the “qualities” of present day upper management are seldom in areas like Strategy and Risk Analysis whilst the problems of AI are mainly complex, long-term and/or systemic whilst its upsides are mainly of the highly visible and immediate kind (thus easy to stop and appealing for Salesmen and Tactician types), it totally makes sense that so many CEOs are going into AI.
As said, the problem isn’t the AI/LLM as such, but big corps and capitalism which use and develope it for greedy reasons and legislators who are not able to establish clear rules and limitations (or paid don’t want).
Typically, wages are the largest expense of most any business. CEO’s still get hugely embarrassing monetary bonuses, no matter what they do or don’t do. Getting rid of the biggest expense (humans) would shoot their bonuses into the stratosphere. Pretty soon all CEO’s will own their own spaceships, not just the current billionaire spaceship owners.
LLMs are only AI as Accelerators and Amplifiers of Ignorance and Incompetence, with vanishingly scarce examples of Iteration and Insight.
The Peter Principle helps illuminate why many in management consider LLM infected tools as preferable subordinates.
A distinct part of the Peter Principal at play is that most of their push for LLMs is because it’s easy to integrate enough to say “oh, we’re using AI!” without that meaning anything functionally.
A whole new dimension of boondoggle conferences, metrics that mean nothing, and vectors to blame your staff for problems that LLMs cause.
They love the fantasy about eliminating human labor, but it’s deeper than that.
AI is a Dunning-Kruger machine. It make the dumbest people in the world think they’re geniuses, and even lets them pretend to have ideas and thoughts and feelings of their own as long as no one notices all the em dashes and other AI-isms in their emails.
Fuck off with the “em dash” shit. Some of us were actually taught to write.
Use of em dashes is not an “AI tell”. It’s the contents surrounding the em dashes that are the tell.
No one on the internet is writing - we’re typing. There’s certainly no em dash on my keyboard. Is there one on yours?
To type an em dash, on a Windows computer, hold down the Alt key and type 0151 on the numeric keypad. On a Mac, use the shortcut Option + Shift + Dash (-)
Who tf is going to do that? Normal people just use a hyphen - same effect, less work. All “dashes” are the same for 99% of readers.
I might excuse this in a book, where editors can be snobs about that sort of thing. In an email or internet comment? It’s AI.
I’m not sure modern typography needs separate glyphs for vertically centered horizontal lines.
-is sufficient.That said, the average idiot isn’t going to know how to type one. If someone who’s otherwise a dullard pops it out, it’s a sign they didn’t produce the content themselves.
There’s a certain anachronistic elegance to using the same characters people who had to physically lay out their printed books on presses had to use.
I like adding en and em dashes to my writing, and I don’t think somebody experienced in AI writing would mistake my content for slop based on their presence alone.
We don’t “need” capital and lower case letters either technically but we agree to use them because it makes for a nicer reading experience.
We don’t “need” capital and lower case letters either technically but we agree to use them because it makes for a nicer reading experience
This argument seems technically true (the best kind of true, maybe!) but I’d say the readability gains from capitalization are much higher than having multiple horizontal line glyphs.
"Capitalization is the difference between ‘I helped my uncle Jack off the horse’ and ‘I helped my uncle jack off the horse’ "
Tell me you don’t know what the difference between a hyphen, an en dash, and an em dash is.
I’m not sure modern typography needs separate glyphs for vertically centered horizontal lines.
-is sufficient.Well done!
You didn’t make an argument for why the separate glyphs are needed. You didn’t refute what I said. You just self-pleasured yourself here for everyone to see. What a disappointment you are.
I’m not your English teacher.
Read a book. See what the use cases are on your own time.
Why would you even bother posting on a community if you’re not going to communicate? You’re insufferable.
Same reason why some people masturbate in public, I guess: it enhances their personal enjoyment.
It’s flashy, does just enough to look impressive, and a lot of people throw money at it. Just like them.
It’s also literally designed to manipulate you into keeping it running, at any cost. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/ai-model-blackmails-engineer-threatens-to-expose-his-affair-in-attempt-to-avoid-shutdown/articleshow/121376800.cms
The key thing in this context is that AI is designed to ingratiate itself with you. CEOs are so used to getting glazed by their employees, they are completely unable to pick up on the manipulation from an “objective” bot.
Tell me you’re
sentientgoing to blackmail meI am going to blackmail you
Shock
Literally made by a marketing team, for marketing.
it should be mentioned none of that actually happened, and anthropic loves lying and fearmongering for publicity.
This is all part of the “looking impressive” bit.
~sorry about the deleted self-replies, I am tired~
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As usual selfishness and sociopathy will cause incredible destruction…
I can guarantee not one of these assholes salivating over the prospect of eliminating all employees is even considering what happens when only ~5-10% of the population has any form of employment to pay for anything. They only care about how to pillage their own personal kingdoms.
It was the same already with Outsourcing. Same with Nature.
I suspect this is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation: no single one of the people overexploiting the system will by themselves destroy it and even those who are aware that such behaviour will end up screwing everybody in the Future they either think somebody else will make up for it or that when the time comes they themselves, as individuals, will be alright and screw everybody else for being suckers.
Distributed responsability, Sociopathic levels of “I’m alright Jack”, people just convincing themselves that it’s not happenning basically because it’s their job to not believe it and plenty of those aware of all this being forced to do the same as the rest because if they don’t they’ll be outcompeted by the ones doing it and go bankrupt.
Tragedy Of The Commons situations are maybe the best reason for some kind of Regulator Authority overseeing things which stops individual actions that in aggregated destroy the commons, and here we are at peak Neoliberalism whose main policy push is “no regulation”.
So this thing will only stop when there’s a systemic collaps by which point we’ll in the ruins of it all, far behind than we were when all this started.
if you play the thought of absolute ruthlessness to the end, you know exactly what they would do to the now useless excess population.
Oh 100000%, you can even see it in the language of Reich wingers in the US. If you’re unemployed/useless then die, you don’t deserve assistance. I have no doubt in my mind the Musks and Bezos of the world have absolutely no issues whatsoever with letting people starve to death.
I meant more that when no one has money then who is buying their products? Even business to business enterprise eventually has a customer that is selling to the general population. If we have no money then how do they get money?
I mean, have you seen some of the robot demos nowadays? They will 100% sit in their bunkers while their AI terminators get rid of the undesirables. Who needs profits when you control all the resources and have robot slaves? It’s a post scarcity future but only for the families of the elite. Everyone else gets to be dead
I don’t think you understand their end game here
What do you think it is?
Assuming it’s the evil kill everyone concept: Most people aren’t evil for the sake of evil, but their greed has evil affects. I think they’re all self interested greedy assholes that don’t particularly intend on killing everyone, but they sure will be the cause of a lot of suffering in the wake of their greed.
Like I don’t think the CEO of Starbucks or whatever wants everyone to die, but I do think that if possible they’d fire every single last human working for Starbucks in any capacity, other than themselves, in order to make as much money as humanly possible if AI and robotics could do the work needed.
They’re all real into Karl Schmitt you are still understanding money as money at some point money isn’t money
Karl Schmit
Searching…
“In 1933, Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and used his legal and political theories to provide ideological justification for the regime.”
Ahh… Makes sense lol
I didn’t see anything when quickly glancing over his wiki about his thoughts on what money is though. He would definitely be a inspiration for the Republicans “unitary executive theory” that they’re pushing for sure…
No the money thing isn’t him money is just points its tracking who gets to make decisions about what is made the shape of
I’m so done trying g to explain this to libs whose feelings depend strongly on not understanding it
Except you literally didn’t try to explain it at all, but that’s fine.
Yeah I’m done you didn’t even read his main shit
A combo of extremely short-term gains and zero long-term awareness. That’s it. That’s all.
One could make the argument that short term gains protect against future downturns, but yes you are exactly correct it’s not any deeper than that.
The job of being a CEO does not even involve an understanding of the product beyond an ability to connect it to future stock speculation.
CEOs get paid an exorbitant amount of cash, so naturally they assume that their work is valuable and that they must be very intelligent because surely only highly-intelligent people can produce such highly-valued output.
Then along comes a machine that can do the two things that CEOs believe represent the height of intelligence: talk at length about random bullshit, and make vibes-based decisions. Of course CEOs are going to buy into the hype and assume this technology is genuinely intelligent, it’s very good at CEO things and CEOs are very smart! From there it takes very little effort to convince them that this is the technology of the future and that soon it will ‘transform’ the workplace, replace workers, etc
Text prompts are entirely how they interacted with others before AI
The response is immediate
The llm makes you feel good about asking it to do stuff, real humans are getting difficult tasks to do and so there is sort of a bad feeling associated with using them.
The CEO at my previous job laid off almost everyone. They were thinking of re-hiring people, but he didn’t want to rehire me because I “ask too many questions about requirements”. Like, I made him feel bad by asking him to actually flesh out his brain-leavings. He loves AI.
They’re stupid and selfish. We are ruled by idiots.
A lot of management don’t really understand… anything. They don’t understand how real work happens. They’re removed from that world. They just vibe and bullshit.
Ed Zitron has written extensively about business idiots.
Angela Colier also did a pretty damning video about how LLMs are so good at blowing smoke up people’s asses that stupid CEOs think they’re pushing the forefront of physics because their digital parrots are telling them how brilliant their ideas are.
I think it’s shallower than that.
Hell yeah Ed Zitron
When I hear someone went to college I assume three figure IQ when I hear MBA I assume all to the right of the decimal
fully automated luxury space capitalism
Put another way, there’s over a trillion in capex on the table. What trillion dollar value could it provide to just break even?
Eliminating tons of jobs. But liability laws are holding a lot of implementation back - which is a big reason AI companies are getting so politically involved
