GOLIKEHELLMACHINE: i am less convinced that AI is going to replace jobs than i am that companies are going to cut jobs on the premise of AI replacing them and then hire those people back as contractors for less money and fewer protections, because that’s what’s happened a *lot* in the last 20 years.

i am less convinced that AI is going to replace jobs than i am that companies are going to cut jobs on the premise of AI replacing them and then hire those people back as contractors for less money and fewer protections, because that’s what’s happened a *lot* in the last 20 years.

It might mean the end of a lot of jobs potentially and the fear is that it might become harder and harder to find new places to land.

this is sort of what some of the SAG fight was about; most people don’t actually believe that “AI” is going to replace writers, but writers recognized that the *threat* of “AI” was being used to undermine their position. unfortunately, most of us, in most industries, are not unionized.

And it's worth noting that the studios, which totally could have just told the writers to pound sand and switch to SitcomAI or whatever, knuckled under. It's nowhere near that capable, and studio executives knew it.

Well, they knew it by the end of the strike. I suspect that one of the things driving the length of the strike was a discovery process on the part of some executives figuring out the limits of generative AI.

Yep, which makes it even more convincing

everything’s starting to remind me of this One Weird Trick

Cole Wehrle on The One Weird Trick of the 19th centuryyoutu.be From his excellent Designer Notes interview with Soren Johnson

You just need to look at the hype around crypto destroying our entire financial system to maybe consider that the people touting AI have a vastly inflated sense of self importance that in no way correlates to what their product actually does.

Yeah. I've already seen several for UX that are either "help us with this AI to design a UI" or "we built this using an AI generated UI and it doesn't work, fix it for us" all while trying to charge half of what they should be paying. In this case, though, I think it bites them in the ass.

It has, already, in art, though admittedly not at a mass scale. Covers/concept art/etc. Not so much at the "high quality/skilled" end, but my argument is you don't get there without learning on the jobs that are being lost right now. BUT you're right that what you say is maybe the bigger threat.

There were already people on reddit a while back complaining they'd been laid off their writing jobs and then hired back on contract for less money to oversee AI doing their previous job.

They'll just fire half the people and tell the remaining half to use these brand new tools that make them 10% more effective in order to do the work of uh... oh shit wait hang on

If it actually did what they claimed it did, maybe. But yeah, a lot of it is just going to be a thinly veiled excuse to push knowledge workers into precarity.

This is what’s starting to happen to copywriters and translators who previously had strong freelance work and are now being offered less money to check work produced by AI.

Maybe with a brief period in between where whatever models got sold to the CEOs as being the new lifeblood of the company have like an 80% error rate

I worked for a large insurance company in the data entry department. We had been working on training the computers to extract the correct info from the documents. The company announced a break thru in the software then laid off 40% of employees. A month later tried bringing them back as 1099

as usual, the real threat of AI isn't AI as much as it's what people do with it

100% — “austerity politics” — it’s less about what AI can do and more about what it will be used to justify.

Right. Blaming ai on denying healthcare is just an oopsie. Blaming people is a policy.

As my last employer found out, the moment you let me go, I am go to be immediately more expensive to rehire, especially if it’s as an independent contractor.

I’m definitely tacking on extra “Bullshit Shoveling Fees” if anyone wants me to come fix their AI garbage.

especially when i’m destroying my work and code on my way out. Fuck these companies.

Also, I dont work in the tech industry at all, but I analyze companies. Having a 30% profit margin is straight up theft.

oh yeah. they'll fire you, install AI, and then fixing up AI shit will become a gig economy thing

That's what I am saying This is the real threat of ai not that it's so good that we don't need humans working anymore fantasy corporations try to sell

This has been going on since the beginning of industrialization: break a task down into multiple smaller parts, claim the smaller parts now require less skill, pay less per hour for doing the smaller parts, and now the entire task costs less in labor. From logicmag.io/supa-dupa-sk...

Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Controllogicmag.io The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.

For the private sector. For public sector jobs, they'll get hired back at ridiculous consultant rates to do the same job. Because that has also definitely happened.

See Uber, AirBNB: Undercut existing industry by burning piles of VC to push cheaper, unregulated version of same. Once prior industry is wounded enough, jack prices and fuck workers to death. (And sell your stock just before the last part, obv)

YUP, this is the exact model

1/2 Here's a quote from Karl Marx' Capital chapter 1, explaining why that is: The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth.

2/2 The handloom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

Text: www.marxists.org/archive/marx... Audiobook: youtu.be/Ii5OWhzpYiM?...

OTOH if you run the economy hot and maintain good worker protections, the results of this are going to turn out a lot worse for the companies making the mistake than for the workers. It's almost always possible to make the cost of miscalculated creative destruction fall on investors, not workers.

Ai is a computer program just like everything else. First you pay programers to do all the work. Then you steal it and fire all the employees so none can maintain ownership and you can hire dumbshit losers to maintain the code. This has been happening since the beginning of computers.

It'll be "achieving synergies" and "rightsizing" all the way down.

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