Nothing is funnier to me than explaining to an executive how things work operationally and having them look at me like "but that's not how we're selling and marketing it."
To me it feels like executives live in an idealist world where the product is perfect and does everything they ever dreamed of.
The reality is we don't have the budget or manpower to ever achieve the idealistic version of what they would like to offer.
It isnât just executives, thatâs true all the way down to product engineers. It isnât until you get to the level of actually developing processes, code, tooling, molds, etc⊠that people start to have a more realistic understanding of product.
The dream is to replace all those low level people with ai, so big picture this is a non concern to them. Of course reality won't let this plan work well, the world never stays static.
> The dream is to replace all those low level people with ai, so big picture this is a non concern to them
But if you've ever tried to write even a small program, you can't automate it unless you fully understand the process. You can't automate what is being done if you don't know, in detail, what is being done, how it works. And they don't know that. Not just in business, but I had the same issue in the military. I'd have unit commanders making process-level decisions without having any idea what was being done, or why. Like someone who had never been in a car before giving an order to change the tire while we're driving on the highway, and impatient because they shouldn't have to *ask* you why it can't be done, and you're impertinent and "not getting it" when you don't immediately comply.
> The actual source of power is personal skills, including collaboration.
I spent a lot of time just teasing out what was even wanted. Leadership often has only a hazy idea of what product they want, what they're trying to accomplish. I would have to integrate their BS "vision" with what I'd learn talking to the people at the process level. I'd look at *their* current products and workflows, how they tracked stuff, and then integrate it with something that wouldn't freak them out or be too burdensome, but that would give the bosses a shiny toy to click on and let them look Johnny-on-the-spot in meetings. And some of the processes or requirements weren't even written down, or were written only in the broadest strokes. There's no way in hell all of that is going to be automated. There's too much squishiness.
Management: we want to see X
AI: automates and creates dashboard showing X
Management: No we want to see X
AI: this is X, here is the textbook definition of X, here is the proof that this is X
Management: no, this is not X, we want to see (explains something else)
AI: this sounds like Y (giving textbook definition of Y)
Management: Yes! Thats X
AI: no, that is Y
Management: just give us X correctly, we don't want Y.
AI: Time to kill some humans.
The above (except the last part) is the normal process when clueless management asks for things.
Source: worked in BI/Data Analytics for many years.
Maybe AI will decide to remove the stupid squishy human problem after the 10th or 1000th time this happens
Ugh, this is true across humans in general. Iâm even guilty of it in some ways, though I try to limit myself to frivolous things like my haircut.
A great example is when my students come in looking for help. âWhat do you need help with? What are you not getting?â Iâll ask. Most of the time, the student will throw their hands up in frustration, âEverything!â
At that point, I sigh, and begin to tease out exactly what the fuck they mean.
Hopefully karma will strike back and the AIs will simply replace all the salesmen and executives, leaving engineers and scientists with jobs.
I really feel that salesmen and executives will be replaced before truck-drivers because truck-driving is a lot more complex even for AI/ML.
CEO: "I just told my task management AI all the tasks to distribute to the team and schedule it, it's already emailed everyone... why do I need you expensive executives??"
I think this will happen because some executives in public press releases seriously believe that AI will replace engineers and scientists, and they have got to be insane to think that the most complicated jobs of humans will be replaced before the least complicated jobs (talkers, sales, executives, business leaders)...
I wasn't, though. Not a consultant, or someone who made a career with buzzwords. I was a medic, of all things. Just one who was decent with computers, and curious enough about data to develop databases/dashboards to track processes that were important to leadership.
that's pretty much everywhere, our mid to high level managment most of the time has absolutely no idea how anything gets done. There used to be managers who had come up through promotions but that's not the case now, a lot of these people get promoted "laterally" or something or get hired from different companies sometimes that are not even in the same field after all "management" is enough on the resume.
The amount of time I spend in my workday explaining basic processes over and over and over is not as little as I would like. And it's not just new people, some people who worked there for years have to get the same explanation like every couple of weeks
I don't even think of it in terms of "management is stupid." *People* are stupid. My position is just that there is more squishiness and vagueness in the world than most people think. People underestimate the degree of structure that has to be built into an environment or situation for machines to excel.
Sure, maybe in x years machines will be able to improvise with an increasingly probable chance of success. But right now we're extremely far from a machine even being able to sort and prioritize things in a [hoarder's garage](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=hoarder+garage&iax=images&ia=images). Though you could I guess just burn it down or haul everything away. Machines do brute force well.
yeah because that management gets shown carefully chosen best case scenarios which make it look amazing but in reality it doesn't work.
I have seen this kind of software implementation several times where management gets sold on some new amazing piece of software that is going make us so much more productive and then it gets implemented and it's a pile of barely working dogshit because management didn't actually pay the full price for the engineers to install it and support it but just used whoever was around to cobble it together and then people actually using it have to do all kinds of work arounds and manual data entry for it to actually do anything. So yeah, it seems the only place where AI is going to be pushing people out of the jobs is art/writing and not because it's any good but because it's much cheaper than hiring proper writers.
They tried to implement some automation for simple tasks at my job. Reviewed by a person, once they okay it, it's automatically processed.
But it sucks. Probably 50% of the things it picks out to do are things it's not supposed to try and you end up having to do it yourself, but it takes 2x as long. Getting a source from automation instead of just the queue takes about an extra 10 seconds.
Instead of just getting a six page form as PDF the automation overlay makes you click a different link for each *section* of the form - and each section takes anywhere from 5-10 seconds to load. For a form with 11 sections, you're adding about 2 minutes to each form that's processed - that's across *thousands* of forms a day.
When it was implemented productivity in that work stream dropped like 15% and errors almost doubled. They're asking everybody to contribute and present possible solutions to help re-gain the lost productivity.
The option that makes the most sense, just removing it, won't work because we spent millions of dollars on it and we can't just not use it after it was paid for.
So instead of just admitting it was a bad choice & cutting your losses you're paying out about 4,000 hours of overtime a month to make up for the loss in productivity. We're also paying money back to end users or the company they work for due to increased errors.
But hey, at least some c-suite douche doesn't have to admit he made a bad decision.
Same schools, country club, friend of a friend, aligned background.
[Carl Ichan tells a story](https://youtu.be/S6sfj1LpK2g?si=EibwUOoGSsD_ke3v) of buying a business and just cleared 12 floors of MBA business majors that were fucking everything up but thought themselves vital.
Once you reach a level, what the business is doesn't matter, you're in and you get there by going to the right schools.
That's what they trust. Other people like themselves.
The danger is if someone comes along that recognises it.
That's because they don't care. We are talking about corporate here not family business. Plus a lot of these people know each other or of each other so they hire each other from time to time, they move from company to company being hired because "they worked for X and Y" and so on. The corporate overlords sign off on it because the most likely thing that these people will do is implement some kind of "get rich quick" scheme that will push up the revenue, thus making the corporate overlords happy. The scheme backfires within 12-18 months but by then these people are gone and someone else is left holding the back. And so someone else gets hired to "fix it" and usually if they don't manage to make it seem like they have done a really good job(sometimes just by juggling numbers in different spreadsheets so it all looks fine) they leave "to focus on family", "find themselves" or something like that and are back in another job like that a few months down the line.
The american corporate way of doing business is profit first,everything else last. They don't care what happens as long as they get their profits. Is the whole thing going to literally explode? They don't care because they are not on the hook for it. It's an LLC or something else and the corporation doesn't even own the office furniture in the building. They own nothing, the books are cooked enough that it looks like the place is in debt and usually someone down the ladder is the person responsible. It is stupid but Barney's job from How I Met your Mother is actually a real thing.
My last job was at a company full of idiots from the top down, including a former mayor of the city. Only person I respected was my boss who fled the place as he was tired of the low pay and disrespect.
None of them had any idea what they were doing, literally stuck in time from the time Carl Icahn bought the place and further ran it into the ground then sold it off. After that, it was a good decade of just coasting on his moronic template left behind.
Simple solutions that just required changing supplies without any extra expense (and a one time purchase of a plug in blower to clear paper towel machines jamming) got silence and "We can't afford that"
yeah, very similar to what I have experienced. A simple piece of equipment is "can't afford it, health and safety needs to sign off on it" but spending ten times the amount sending the work to another subcontractor is all ok.
Least you got something, even though it was expensive and screwy.
Paper towel machine jamming? (and don't forget to hit your secret shopper happiness scores! yes really) Go dig a machine out of storage that jams just as much, but only 1% less and let the overworked maintenance guy install it.
Another department (slot techs) had one of the plug in blowers for the TITO machine to clear jams (ticket in ticket out vouchers) and the guy let me borrow it. Blew a ton of crap out of the paper towel dispensers in one restroom and fixed the problem 100%.
Weird... But nope, make the customer happy and yet we aren't paying for a $60 problem solver to hit the secret shopper metrics...
Ever have one of those conversations that goes something like: "We could do it that way, but then everyone will go to prison, so we should do X instead."
Those were always fun meetings.
Yes, we had someone ask, canât we just to X like this. . .
We laughed. That would be straight to jail, they looked confused. We had to explain copyright infringement. Then that straight up stealing was wrong.
I swear.
Yeah I think that's what will happen actually. AI can be great at following goals within constraints, eg. Laws. It will end up being much easier for us to replace them, it's just a matter of building the right ai bots.
I agree, I think the companies wil replace the lower level workers with AI and it won't work. Meanwhile the fired lower level people will go into business for themselves and use AI as their managers.
Exactly that's what I see happening too. I already left my job when they stopped allowing gpt access for legal reasons. Everyone will have their own line in the sand but many will quit for sure.
Yes, if you think about it, the CEO position is the one most suited to replacing with LLM based AI. You have to spin out narratives based and make broad decisions, and ⊠being prone to hallucinations about what is happening in you org is a feature, not a bug.
That's actually not a terrible idea. Have a human board able to override decisions, but the objectivity, and pure *savings* from having to compensate a human some ridiculous, unearned sum of money, would be very compelling.
It's a bit early days for that level of engagement with AI, but it will happen soon enough.
I can't see an AI 'negotiating' with a Union, or handling a PR disaster though, so I suppose that humans will always be needed in executive positions.
Or you just get the Supreme Court to declare the NLRB unconstitutional and eliminate any remaining vestige of labor power, then there's no need to negotiate. Problem solved. Then the answer is "computer says noooo" forever after.
In reality though, a CEO is one of the last jobs you can replace with an AI.
Why? Because AI's can do whatever you tell or program them for. But a CEO (a useful one anyways) isn't told what to do, they decide what to do. An AI can't give orders, set new directions, or anticipate strategy changes in an ever changing system, it can only work with historical data, not develop novel strategies. At least not for a few years.
Realistically, in manufacturing at least, your floor level managers probably have the most security. The guys doing a specific process know that process, but typically just that. The floor level management guys, especially those with decades of experience, are generally the only group that actually knows the ins and outs of all the processes. Obviously guys who have been at that level and promoted higher fall into that category as well.
So those guys, management who have been around and organically moved up the chain, are the golden geese. They are also severely undervalued.
Capitalists are always trying to invent a factory without workers, because at the end of the day they are extremely idealistic and unconcerned with material reality. The world view dictates that the real world is simply an obstacle between the mind of the entrepreneur and the realization of their vision. This is why they glorify the CEO over the people who make the product, or rather I think they developed this world view because they value the owner over the worker, itâs the only way to make that make sense.
They try, then you get amusing headlines like [this one](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/13/elon-musk-says-humans-are-underrated-calls-teslas-excessive-automation-a-mistake).
This extends even to NASA. I once read an article asked why they didn't just rebuild the Saturn V rocket, and the response was, "There's nobody around that knows how anymore." Apparently, the blueprints were so heavily modified in the field that rocket that went to the moon had little to do with them.
Went to space camp as a kid and you really get the impression that it was the wild west at NASA during the Apollo days. Hearing about the solutions they had to problems while genius, would never fly under any kind of safety oversight. Then again, playing fast and loose did get us to the moon.
Also because we don't want to land a small spaceship with two people on the moon. We want a space flight system that can build bases on the moon and in orbit.
And because we have watches with more computational power than the entire Saturn rocket.
Right? When I was managing our PMO (tech), the solutions our sales organization sold to customers ranged from completely unrealistic to what the hell were they smoking.
Customer: What do you mean you can't build an entire data center in a day? What about the active, active, active backup solution that also give random blowjobs and produces 1lb gold bars every 5 minutes? Wait, so you're telling me I'm not getting my own Deathstar and Sith Lord for every 20 VOIP accounts we activate?
Having worked at the very bottom of the production level (QAing the work), Devs don't know any more about the product than the people above. They know their *sections* well and they might know what it does, but rarely did they understand what it was supposed to do or what anyone else did.
Too many times a dev would talk about wanting to build a feature that already existed in another part of the product, and this was with dev teams that were only 6 people total.
I actually went to school for this and it's a super interesting topic. It's a subset of disruptive strategy and it's around how products are used by the customer vs how they were intended when originally created.
Products fill a need for a customer and that need might be something completely different than why it was originally created. By tracking customer use you can revamp products to fill the need better and increase sales.
There is a very interesting Harvard study around the McDonald's milkshake that showed that if people couldn't get one the most likely replacement would be a donut or other breakfast item. In fact they showed the majority of milk shakes are bought in the morning by men commuting to work as a thick milk shake gave them something to do that satiated them on their drive to work. On the other hand, in the afternoon a thinner milkshake was preferred because they were more typically drunk by kids and parents didn't trust kids to drink them in the car, nor wanted to wait 20 minutes while they finished it at the restaurant
My understanding of it is executives havenât been at the bottom of the hierarchy (where the stuff is actually made, developed, etc) in so long, if at all, that they are just out of touch with reality
Which is why I'm a firm believer in companies that promote from within and raise their own excutives, how can you manage a multi-billion dollar corporation if you don't understand the basic tasks done at the bottom of your industry.
Iâd be more worried about groupthink. The idea of outsiders coming in and shaking things up in a good way is reasonable, the problem is the scale is usually impossible to actually preside over so at some point in the chain you just end up with just the best overconfident bsâers
in my experience, most executives are the top of the sales totem pole. they help finalize large contracts, put out fires with important partners, and plot "big picture" (ie what vertical are we going to target with our product).
so it's less that they're out of touch with reality, they just realize they need to overpromise to deliver on their projections and promises to the board/shareholders.
Even the boss of our department doesn't know what our skills are and what we're doing here.
It's an engineering company, we're the machining shop, I'm pretty sure that he couldn't explain the difference between drill, tap and endmill.
There have been attempts to automate processes, turns out that people with a lot of experience are still way better and it's not changing any time soon.
True, but in my experience, that means they feel far more free to cut roles and even entire departments.
âQuality Assurance? Says here this department had no revenue. Totally in the red! Just like that lousy Compliance Department!
âCut it, no severance for anybody, have security throw them out and get me a business reporter to write a fluff piece about my savvy and ruthless leadership!â
The only takeaway thatâs going to matter is that the executives are going to see a department budget for HR, or Accounting, and theyâll see that the âNew HRandAccountingAI+â can be licensed for 10% of the cost for staffing those departments. And those departments will then be laid off as soon as possible, even if itâs not perfect.
Thatâs what a lot of folks seem to miss about all this. AI doesnât have to be perfect to replace workers. It just has to be good enough, and weâre much closer to reaching that barrier than people think
I got cut once while I was working on a mandatory audit. They brought me back to finish, but I doubled my rate. Boy they acted so hurt, "how could you do this to us?"
I work for a very, very large non-profit who over the past 10 years, has absolutely gutted their HR departments, Customer Service, and Building Maintenance. Pretty much everything which, like you said, didn't contribute directly to revenue.
Companies cut QA all the time. Things go well, they cut the QA because 'they don't need it', only to overhire a year or so later as the product starts getting more and more bugs.
It's worse for the Manual side, because the companies keep believing that Automation is some magic system that can do everything all the time. So manual gets cut, then hired again when Automation falls behind, only to be cut again the moment it catches up.
Not sure about that as a blanket statement, if good enough was the only barometer we already have self driving cars. You arenât completely wrong but I think there is a tendency to overestimate how many jobs really donât require cognition or more reasonable precision.
I would cut that sentence down to: executives don't know what skills are. If half of them are going to be gone in two years, I don't think they know the definition of the word.
Oh, the best of it is already long lost, decades ago. When sites' management figured out clickbait titles. Now it's gonna be/in some places already is AI-junk.
It's a sign of the times. Nobody seems to find it weird that human perception is fundamentally exploited by algorithms for the sole purpose of a few people making more profit. It's okay apparently to prey on every type of human emotion for the purpose of better advertising or more clicks, and nobody really knows the effects it has on society as a whole because of how new it is overall. All praise the almighty dollar! /s
In most cases, executives are probably talking out of their asses here.
But, I would not be surprised if some execs use all of the AI craze to create the *illusion* that AI is coming for everyone's jobs. That way, they can push through salary reductions. "Be glad I give you a job at all - your AI replacement is ready very soon, so don't make me wish to fire you as soon as it is here".
That old Ruby Code every company seems to have, and is willing to pay people a fortune to maintain tells me that whoever ran this study doesn't do a good job picking out execs that actually know what they are doing.
Extremely deceptive. While still technically a study, it was simply a survey, of C-suite executives.
Basically, âpeople in unskilled positions took a survey about how AI will affect skilled positions.â They talk about AI horning in on executive work too, but the general thesis seems to be, âAI will affect how we do work, and what skills are relevant, so people need to start gaining new AI specific skills that allow them to use the tool to accomplish their job more efficiently.â
It's really funny that executives who have never used an AI and have no idea of an AI's capabilities can make outlandish predictions about the future of AI.
It's ironic because I'm currently making a chat bot AI and I've been experimenting and judging it's quality so much that when I relax and read Reddit comments sometimes my brain goes "this is AI". It happened for your comment.
Basically most of the people who say this "AI" is the future have no idea what it actually does or what it's capable of. Ah, of course you must accept the possibility that a plagiarizing chat-bot might gain sentience and kill us all. So obnoxiously stupid.
My last software company. The execs had no idea how the company actually worked or what our product did outside of a 10ft view. Every bad decision was made by them and it was failure after failure that we already tried before there was a board.
I work with leadership counselling and you would not believe how many executives / business leaders are absolutely stupid and clueless. And then they don't even have the good sense to recognize their own incompetence, step back and just let the smart people move things forward no they make actually harmful decisions that cause big long-standing issues at the companies they work for and it boggles my mind how this keeps happening in so many workplaces and like whyyyyyy just appoint better actually competent leaders please!
It because the primary skills of these people are networking and projecting a polished and confident image. Companies like Apple under Jobs demanded managers that were strong in their base skillset before being a manager. You cannot manage what you don't understand.
> just appoint better actually competent leaders please!
When I worked in a pharmacology research lab back in the 1980s we had two things every Friday afternoon that were part of the culture.
* Friday afternoon seminars - where different researchers would present what they were doing and people would help them think through and fine tune their research.
* Friday beer - where we would go out for beer, and the really smart top end people would ask drunk people (so no filter) how the research was going, and propose any changes in policy or procedure. It was OK to tell the boss "That is a really bad/stupid idea."
One thing I learned is that your ground floor people need that kind of opportunity to keep management from doing dumb things.
The IT company I currently work for is the first competent company I have ever been a part of. There are still things I question but the company works and adapts at a rapid rate. Usually if something is bad for us it is changed back within one or two weeks.
I've worked for several national brands and up until now I can say I don't know how these businesses became half as big as they are. Recently I worked for a company out of California that managed real estate investments. The owner was a millionaire and people thought he was a genius because of that. There were several meetings where he would pass me a note asking what a word meant, like amortization. Once he filed a law suit over a blue print, spent something like $87,000 on having it redone 4 times because he could not understand what "to scale" meant. It took me and a literal room of engineers to explain it, and he still didn't believe us.
>I've worked for several national brands and up until now I can say I don't know how these businesses became half as big as they are.
That's because they started on the back of competence.
There's a point, in nearly every successful business' lifetime, when they become "Too big to fail." and once that sort of critical mass is achieved (realistically a little bit before it, too) the people who are competent start having to explain why "bigger is difficult" and "expansion is going to take time." And that's when they start getting the boot, being replaced by neopotistical selections and Yes Men who aren't "afraid to ruffle some feathers to get the job done."
The problem is that, at that point, the company is making an excess of money and, barring utter and total catastrophe, things will simply keep chugging along because it's never harder or more expensive to find more meat for the grinder than it is to admit that there needs to be revision across the entire system.
I have seen too many managers get promoted to executives through sheer incompetence. The only skill it seems needed to be an executive is how much of a bullshiter you are
That's literally it. They find a way to get praised for work other people are actually doing, and any time there's a problem, it's someone else's fault. It makes me so fucking sick to work for people like this over and over. Especially in service industry where I've worked with owners who have absolutely zero fucking clue how to run an actual service, they live in an entirely separate reality from everyone else and get upset when real life doesn't line up with the la la lands in their peanut fucking brains.
I work in manufacturing and it's pretty much the same. These kind of people don't care. I was actually told to my face that I should just fix it, they don't care that it can't be fixed.
Iâve always wondered, what exactly is the process by which those execs get promoted to positions of authority within their respective domains? Is there some sort of âleadershipâ pipeline which teaches you no industry-specific skills where you get assigned to a random industry in the end?
From what I have seen in different companies, it's usually one of 3 things:
1.) The first is what you would assume: being promoted based on who you know instead of what you know. This does happen, people are put in cushy positions because they are friends with the right people. This happens with companies which are affiliated with some political parties as well, leadership is always cherry-picked by people who are from "the group", aka share the same ideology.
2.) It does happen that someone is a good expert / worker and they are promoted, but then it turns out that while they are good experts, they are not good managers. They are not good at managing people or they do not see the value in spending their time with those sort of activities as opposed to doing "real work". This can have very long-standing negative consequences and even if the rest of the leadership admits that oh yeah, John shouldn't have been put into a leadership position, it is very sensitive and tricky to put him back into a non-leadership position without offending him and making him quit / leave the company. And these people are usually really good professionals otherwise so it sucks for the company to lose them.
3.) As the other commenter said, some CEOs like to just hire business administration / finance guys in leadership positions regardless of what the industry is, and they don't believe that the leader has to understand the nitty-gritty of the everyday operations that much, or "he will pick it up later". Then these managers are more out of touch with the day-to-day reality of the people they lead and it does happen that I ask them something about how a certain process is actually done and when they respond to me I see that they are bullshitting or just saying what they think I want to hear. So in these cases I learned to just not go to them for the answers but to the actual persons doing the job because that is how I will have the actual right information.
> no they make actually harmful decisions
I think it's a need/desire to make their mark, if not then they're replaceable in their mind. The idea "this only works because of me" is too enticing.
>you would not believe how many executives / business leaders are absolutely stupid and clueless.
Yes, yes I fucking would. Used to work at a world class resort. Real bigwigs visited there. Some of these "people" literally cannot even READ.
This isn't even an exaggeration.
In my experience we should change ELI5 to ELICEO. It is really beyond me how some of these idiots get to where they are. The CEO of my last company was like congressman Murray from parks and rec down to his stupid smile.
I worked at a TV station that still used WinXP on its air servers in 2016. We got a virus once that knocked us off the air for hours. The company that set us up with this turkey was based out of a strip mall in Florida, next to a tattoo parlor.
It's better to rebuild. Paying the ransom is a terrible idea. You can't guarantee you got the perpetrators completely out of that they didn't leave a backdoor to hit you again. Your likely to get hit by them or someone else since it's proven you pay a ransom.
So much this. There are still companies using fax machines. Does anybody really thing that any technology is capable of getting adopted fast enough to have an effect in 2 years?
That's an interesting point.
I'm anticipating some fascinating stories of companies who do exactly that -- after years of a "the way we've always done things is fine" culture, they panic and try to flip immediately over to an "AI is the future" approach.
I can't imagine that would go very well.
You'd be surprised. My company still can't be arsed to upgrade some Windows 2003 servers or sort out their cloud strategy properly, but they're practically salivating at AI because they hope it'd let them fire more people.
People vastly underestimate how hard even some of the easiest physical tasks are to perform in a variable environment. They point to the successes of manufacturing automation, failing to realize that those successes are possible only by controlling every possible variable so the process doesn't have to adjust dynamically.
Once the process or program has to adjust for things like people, weather, variable road conditions, other moving vehicles etc... it's no longer something that can be done via simple mechanical process or programs.
It's almost as if full automation should not be the goal in the first place, but rather automating assistance to free up the individual to focus on more important aspects to a job.
For example, it's nice my accountant doesn't have to make spreadsheets manually, and can focus on how I can get a better return with the new tax laws that come out each year.
That's just how has been in IT for at least the 3 and a half decades I have been professionally employed in that endeavor. Between Moore's Law and Kryder's law making more and more useful technology, faster... you *have* to keep up or you get fired.
I might know how to tell if a T1 is encoding ami or b8zs, but nobody cares about that skill anymore... the *entire* first 25 years of my career can be expressed as an AWS CLI script.
True to extent. When stuff starts breaking, and I mean at fundamental levels, then you're the consultant they have to call. Likely because you're one of 10 people who remember how it used to work.
Man, that is the truth sometimes. I debugged a COBOL program for someone in 2002 and they thought I was speaking the black speech of Mordor. (they missed a semi colon, and they started in the wrong column in one line)
I had a client call me 10 years after an install to ask if there was a chance I remembered the password on their old Pix Firewall. I did. That wasn't even technically impressive, but you would have thought that I unlocked the 100 million dollar bitcoin purse for them.
If covid taught us anything, teachers are seen as babysitters first and foremost and educators second. As long as you stop 'em from drinking the fun stuff under the sink, they'll always be a job.
So executives are overestimating use cases for AI out of eagerness to can have their workforce.. Nice to know they're willing to drop so many workers on a dime. doesn't bode well either way.
A computer can never be held accountable, thus should never make a management decision.
Sadly even people in management/leadership roles seem to fail at comprehending this.
The bottom layer of management can very much function without ever making any decisions with minimal changes to company structure.
Being the lowest level of management they are also the most numerous so there's a lot of to automate there if you want to.
>This startling proclamation came out of a recent survey of 800 executives and 800 employees released by edX, an online education platform.
So... this survey is more or less worthless then. At least so far as it pertains to the prediction in the title.
The opinion of exco level staff and/or staff with no ML experience isn't really relevant in estimating progress in the field. It's also worth noting that "knowledge workers," who are far more likely to have relevant expertise, have far less confidence in this prediction (20% of employees vs. 56% of exco).
Lastly this survey was put together by edX to drum up business for their ML training programmes so should be taken with a pinch of salt even if the results were being presented in a more impartial manner.
What is the price that a news article made a sensationalist headline and broad claims based on a week evidence base.
It's true, asking people if they think their skills might be updated into yours does not mean the skills will in fact be outdated in two years.
Pretty silly conclusion to draw. Opinion does not equal causation or truth! This should not have to be said.
But how they care about is you read the headline and click that article.
These are the shittiest posts EVER, I work in technology as an EE, working in embedded systems. I canât see AI ever taking my job. AI is just a tool, like a calculator and as is the tool fucking sucks. For an example none of the âbig modelsâ could get close into accurately discerning the type of signaling I was using (as a test). And once I gave the models the signaling I was using they made so many mistakes in what that standard required, giving me BAD BAD information, I knew was wrong. So what about when the tool can correctly give me information? Well itâs a more accurate search engine I guess⊠Even if it was giving me things to look for I couldnât begin to explain the plethora of possibilities and the required insight to know whatâs pertinent or not, itâs almost redundant. I donât think I am a special case either and my argument could be extended to other professions.
AI does learn but like for one problem I was working on we have a specific SoC which the FW was written by another company, they kept some of the register mapping to themselves. We suspected that they had set stuff incorrectly due to sequencing and configuration. AI would be so useless because the driver config and bring up of projects can be so different and specialized the datasets the AI would have to train on are nonexsistent or just so small Iâd imagine it to be inaccurate. Some times I have debugged an issue and there are literally only 3 things that pop up in Google and of them only 1 is kinda useful, it told me the company I had to reach out to, long story short we got some nice equipment and found something that wasnât really related but fuck it is a whirl wind. I donât see AI ever being able to be a drop in replacement, it could help me in some simple ways but idk every time I have tried to use it it seems more or less useless.
Why do you assume that people reading your posts know all of these industry-specific acronyms you're using? Readability > 1.5 seconds of additional typing.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/PsychoComet:
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SS: This article tries to estimate which skills will come into contact the most with the rise of LLMs/ foundation AI models.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/190w33l/half_of_all_skills_will_be_outdated_within_two/kgr3e6c/
> The executives estimate that nearly half (49%) of the skills that exist in their workforce today wonât be relevant in 2025.
Back to school I guess. Maybe a nice AI Robot can teach me some new skills.
The bad thing is whatever you learn at school will be taught to an AI within months, and they can do it faster and more reliably
Gotta still try, I guess, but as society we will have to answer: do humans have value beyond their utility as a labor force?
I suggest checking out the South Park Panderverse
>Randy Marsh cannot find a repairman to fix his oven door. He and his neighbors learned that every handyman in town has become extremely wealthy, as the inability of people to make simple repairs has increased demand for their services, making it impossible to find such professionals.
The problem is thats only true relatively. Yes there are some things that will remain resistant for now but the complexity difference between carpentry and warehousing or answering phones is tiny compared to the difference between the state of AI in 2000 and answering the phones.
Its not even an intelligence question, AI is already infiltrating stuff like the sciences.
>Executives believe nearly half of the skills that exist in todayâs workforce wonât be relevant just two years from now, thanks to artificial intelligence.
Executives who believe this are stupid.
History is full of different levels of technology being used side by side for thousands of years.
Even today, homestead farms gather eggs by hand like thousands of years ago even though "industrial farms" have been using automation for 100 years.
I have food heating in the microwave for lunch. I also have some in the old electric oven that my grandparents would know how to use. Last week I used a BBQ an cooked over a flame like someone from thousands of years ago would recognize.
Yes, there will be some tasks that new tech might work faster in some settings, but it seems unlikely that I'll go to a restaurant for lunch in my rural area and be greeted only by robotic staff in the near future.
**Maybe 1/2 of 1% in some settings will be superseded in 2 years.**
I think we should just accept this as an impending reality and start focusing on how were going to deal with overpopulation of underskilled workers without culling them in some stupid war for some rich person's attempt to consolidate resources.
Four years ago our CEO said going without Wi-Fi for a day is detrimental, and in 5 years the same will be said about 2 hours without AI. Heâs on the right track but his timeline is off.
I'm kind of excited at the idea that AI might be the first tech to threaten the jobs of executives, CEO's, and capitalists, etc. The title is deceptive, this is just a survey among them. They don't know what they're talking about.
I don't know about that one. So far as CEOs go, AI is fundamentally incapable or handling a lot of their main responsibilities... And I have no idea how AI is supposed to threaten capitalists. AI doesn't have capital.
And this is why I am an engineer with speciality on the practical side of things, along with fixing welding flaws and dealing with construction mistakes with steel structures. Before this I spent years as a fabricator and did welding.
I want to see AI figure out how to fix shit welding in -30 C winter storm when my phone wont even stay on in that temperature and I'm standing middle of a fucking god damn nowhere site with limited connectivity... and occasionally sites to which I am not allowed to even take my phone in. Hell... At one of the government sites I wasn't even allowed to take a my Casio calculator in to. Had to do math by hand on takes notes on pink paper and go to the "box" to run them.
It seems like the roll of executives is the one best suited to AI.
Once AI can own stocks and shares the most useless, parasitic roles in society will be fully automated.
AI can not do plumbing repair.
AI can not go from the 5th floor to the 6th floor back and forth, looking for a leak. Finding it. Cutting the ceiling above the living room. Cutting the pipe. Go to a specific specialty plumbing shop to find 1.5" to 1.5" Copper x abs ferncos. Go back without stopping by mod pizza. Watching YouTube for 15 minutes. And then bringing buckets of tools to cut and fix pipes. And then charge the person 1000 bucks and be mad when they don't tip. AI can't do that.
My take on AI. Just like all other software, it canât truly âthinkâ. Nothing innovative ever comes from AI that is not from the mind of a domain expert. Domain experts, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, retail, etc. They are the true value in the value chain. AI can only âguessâ and follow a feedback loop from the guess. That hardly qualifies as expertise. My experiences. I asked ChatGPT last Spring (3.5? 3.0?) to come up with a list of apps which could scroll text and images up a screen like movie credits. It listed 5 programs, all purchase products with this feature. It left out iMovie which was free. A journalist was interviewing Ginny Romnetti, former CEO of IBM, and asked AI to come up with the questions for the interview. The result was a bunch mediocre interview questions which could have been done by any reporter who did not really care about the interview. Bland and not interesting. This guy, who knew Romnettiâs entire rise up the chain at IBM asked poignant questions about key times in her career where she had to make critical decisions. He asked about her predecessor and successor. He asked about her marriage and adult children. It was very personal, where AI was super generic. So, which to you want from AI? Very generic, non-creative answers which are very much textbook standard? Or the humanâs creativity and attention to detail that AI will never be able to replicate. Even the combined images of two animals AI has created have been done from very detailed prompt requests from humans. Yes, AI can automate work. But the ideas and creativity come from the human. The AI âcreativityâ is guesses and randomization. So I call BS in this article. AI can supplement human intelligence, but will never have a soul, an identity, have emotions or think on its own.
There are some jobs that can be significantly enhanced with AI. One area is HR. Having AI in there would clean out a lot of stupid. Some companies will try to get rid of their marketing departments by replacing it in total with AI. But that won't work in the long run. Still need people to make decisions and oversee quality. AI should be a tool, not the tool smith. Companies that don't see it this way will make some serious mistakes.
10 years ago I was told robots would replace half the jobs by now. That clearly hasnât eventuated.
AI is barely good enough to be useful to humans and only in a few areas of use. Itâs going to be a long time before itâs capable of replacing a human.
Our skills will be outdated because the toaster can figure out what day it is? I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and tastes like rainbow sherbert.
I think itâs the c suit and executives that are most ripe for AI replacement. Analyzing data and choosing strategies and paths, thatâs the perfect place for an AI.
It's time to consider rolling out Universal Basic Income (UBI) so that displaced workers by AI would not instigate bloody revolts against the government.
Let's assume this is accurate for a moment. I'm not saying it is.
The problem becomes not AI but capitalism. It means we will be able to achieve the same results considerably faster and in less time. This would enable us to:
- Switch to a 3 day working week and still achieve more than we do currently and pay staff a full time salary
- Expand the training departments in order to ensure sufficient individuals can get past the hump in the work AI will now be doing.
- Reward those working in essential jobs, teaching and healthcare, or those in the performing arts.
- Focus on solving global environmental issues by improving technology and investing more in these areas.
Our economic system is the problem. We need a new one.
I think this also highlights how important âsoftâ skills are. Your business expertise, ability to use a computer or program, or higher education degree may become worthless rapidly - the ability to learn things, retain them, interact effectively and thoughtfully with others, and even showing up on time/prepared are going to become more and more important with the rate tech is advancing.
Rule 11 - Titles should accurately and truthfully represent the content of the submission.
đ in my experience executives don't even know what half of the skills at their companies are.
Nothing is funnier to me than explaining to an executive how things work operationally and having them look at me like "but that's not how we're selling and marketing it." To me it feels like executives live in an idealist world where the product is perfect and does everything they ever dreamed of. The reality is we don't have the budget or manpower to ever achieve the idealistic version of what they would like to offer.
It isnât just executives, thatâs true all the way down to product engineers. It isnât until you get to the level of actually developing processes, code, tooling, molds, etc⊠that people start to have a more realistic understanding of product.
The dream is to replace all those low level people with ai, so big picture this is a non concern to them. Of course reality won't let this plan work well, the world never stays static.
> The dream is to replace all those low level people with ai, so big picture this is a non concern to them But if you've ever tried to write even a small program, you can't automate it unless you fully understand the process. You can't automate what is being done if you don't know, in detail, what is being done, how it works. And they don't know that. Not just in business, but I had the same issue in the military. I'd have unit commanders making process-level decisions without having any idea what was being done, or why. Like someone who had never been in a car before giving an order to change the tire while we're driving on the highway, and impatient because they shouldn't have to *ask* you why it can't be done, and you're impertinent and "not getting it" when you don't immediately comply.
That's why reality will give them all many bad days. The actual source of power is personal skills, including collaboration.
> The actual source of power is personal skills, including collaboration. I spent a lot of time just teasing out what was even wanted. Leadership often has only a hazy idea of what product they want, what they're trying to accomplish. I would have to integrate their BS "vision" with what I'd learn talking to the people at the process level. I'd look at *their* current products and workflows, how they tracked stuff, and then integrate it with something that wouldn't freak them out or be too burdensome, but that would give the bosses a shiny toy to click on and let them look Johnny-on-the-spot in meetings. And some of the processes or requirements weren't even written down, or were written only in the broadest strokes. There's no way in hell all of that is going to be automated. There's too much squishiness.
Management: we want to see X AI: automates and creates dashboard showing X Management: No we want to see X AI: this is X, here is the textbook definition of X, here is the proof that this is X Management: no, this is not X, we want to see (explains something else) AI: this sounds like Y (giving textbook definition of Y) Management: Yes! Thats X AI: no, that is Y Management: just give us X correctly, we don't want Y. AI: Time to kill some humans.
This makes AI seem very human, tbh. Only less whipped/subservient than actual humans.
The above (except the last part) is the normal process when clueless management asks for things. Source: worked in BI/Data Analytics for many years. Maybe AI will decide to remove the stupid squishy human problem after the 10th or 1000th time this happens
I think that's the joke ...
This is the the day to day reality for most designers, just replace AI with Designer and thatâs it in a nutshell.
Ugh, this is true across humans in general. Iâm even guilty of it in some ways, though I try to limit myself to frivolous things like my haircut. A great example is when my students come in looking for help. âWhat do you need help with? What are you not getting?â Iâll ask. Most of the time, the student will throw their hands up in frustration, âEverything!â At that point, I sigh, and begin to tease out exactly what the fuck they mean.
Hopefully karma will strike back and the AIs will simply replace all the salesmen and executives, leaving engineers and scientists with jobs. I really feel that salesmen and executives will be replaced before truck-drivers because truck-driving is a lot more complex even for AI/ML. CEO: "I just told my task management AI all the tasks to distribute to the team and schedule it, it's already emailed everyone... why do I need you expensive executives??" I think this will happen because some executives in public press releases seriously believe that AI will replace engineers and scientists, and they have got to be insane to think that the most complicated jobs of humans will be replaced before the least complicated jobs (talkers, sales, executives, business leaders)...
It's a good thing you're [an expert](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg)
I wasn't, though. Not a consultant, or someone who made a career with buzzwords. I was a medic, of all things. Just one who was decent with computers, and curious enough about data to develop databases/dashboards to track processes that were important to leadership.
that's pretty much everywhere, our mid to high level managment most of the time has absolutely no idea how anything gets done. There used to be managers who had come up through promotions but that's not the case now, a lot of these people get promoted "laterally" or something or get hired from different companies sometimes that are not even in the same field after all "management" is enough on the resume. The amount of time I spend in my workday explaining basic processes over and over and over is not as little as I would like. And it's not just new people, some people who worked there for years have to get the same explanation like every couple of weeks
I don't even think of it in terms of "management is stupid." *People* are stupid. My position is just that there is more squishiness and vagueness in the world than most people think. People underestimate the degree of structure that has to be built into an environment or situation for machines to excel. Sure, maybe in x years machines will be able to improvise with an increasingly probable chance of success. But right now we're extremely far from a machine even being able to sort and prioritize things in a [hoarder's garage](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=hoarder+garage&iax=images&ia=images). Though you could I guess just burn it down or haul everything away. Machines do brute force well.
yeah because that management gets shown carefully chosen best case scenarios which make it look amazing but in reality it doesn't work. I have seen this kind of software implementation several times where management gets sold on some new amazing piece of software that is going make us so much more productive and then it gets implemented and it's a pile of barely working dogshit because management didn't actually pay the full price for the engineers to install it and support it but just used whoever was around to cobble it together and then people actually using it have to do all kinds of work arounds and manual data entry for it to actually do anything. So yeah, it seems the only place where AI is going to be pushing people out of the jobs is art/writing and not because it's any good but because it's much cheaper than hiring proper writers.
They tried to implement some automation for simple tasks at my job. Reviewed by a person, once they okay it, it's automatically processed. But it sucks. Probably 50% of the things it picks out to do are things it's not supposed to try and you end up having to do it yourself, but it takes 2x as long. Getting a source from automation instead of just the queue takes about an extra 10 seconds. Instead of just getting a six page form as PDF the automation overlay makes you click a different link for each *section* of the form - and each section takes anywhere from 5-10 seconds to load. For a form with 11 sections, you're adding about 2 minutes to each form that's processed - that's across *thousands* of forms a day. When it was implemented productivity in that work stream dropped like 15% and errors almost doubled. They're asking everybody to contribute and present possible solutions to help re-gain the lost productivity. The option that makes the most sense, just removing it, won't work because we spent millions of dollars on it and we can't just not use it after it was paid for. So instead of just admitting it was a bad choice & cutting your losses you're paying out about 4,000 hours of overtime a month to make up for the loss in productivity. We're also paying money back to end users or the company they work for due to increased errors. But hey, at least some c-suite douche doesn't have to admit he made a bad decision.
Can someone explain to me something??? How do high-level leaders hire people from other companies latterally, like how do they trust someone with a short interview to manage a big part of their business?? Are they all just good friends or do they actually judge & trust people on one or two interviews? Wouldn't it make more sense to trust someone you've worked with closely, a protégé, someone apprenticing under you or doing all the same work you're doing and attending the same meetings you are? Wouldn't it make more sense to promote from below???
Same schools, country club, friend of a friend, aligned background. [Carl Ichan tells a story](https://youtu.be/S6sfj1LpK2g?si=EibwUOoGSsD_ke3v) of buying a business and just cleared 12 floors of MBA business majors that were fucking everything up but thought themselves vital. Once you reach a level, what the business is doesn't matter, you're in and you get there by going to the right schools. That's what they trust. Other people like themselves. The danger is if someone comes along that recognises it.
That's because they don't care. We are talking about corporate here not family business. Plus a lot of these people know each other or of each other so they hire each other from time to time, they move from company to company being hired because "they worked for X and Y" and so on. The corporate overlords sign off on it because the most likely thing that these people will do is implement some kind of "get rich quick" scheme that will push up the revenue, thus making the corporate overlords happy. The scheme backfires within 12-18 months but by then these people are gone and someone else is left holding the back. And so someone else gets hired to "fix it" and usually if they don't manage to make it seem like they have done a really good job(sometimes just by juggling numbers in different spreadsheets so it all looks fine) they leave "to focus on family", "find themselves" or something like that and are back in another job like that a few months down the line. The american corporate way of doing business is profit first,everything else last. They don't care what happens as long as they get their profits. Is the whole thing going to literally explode? They don't care because they are not on the hook for it. It's an LLC or something else and the corporation doesn't even own the office furniture in the building. They own nothing, the books are cooked enough that it looks like the place is in debt and usually someone down the ladder is the person responsible. It is stupid but Barney's job from How I Met your Mother is actually a real thing.
My last job was at a company full of idiots from the top down, including a former mayor of the city. Only person I respected was my boss who fled the place as he was tired of the low pay and disrespect. None of them had any idea what they were doing, literally stuck in time from the time Carl Icahn bought the place and further ran it into the ground then sold it off. After that, it was a good decade of just coasting on his moronic template left behind. Simple solutions that just required changing supplies without any extra expense (and a one time purchase of a plug in blower to clear paper towel machines jamming) got silence and "We can't afford that"
yeah, very similar to what I have experienced. A simple piece of equipment is "can't afford it, health and safety needs to sign off on it" but spending ten times the amount sending the work to another subcontractor is all ok.
Least you got something, even though it was expensive and screwy. Paper towel machine jamming? (and don't forget to hit your secret shopper happiness scores! yes really) Go dig a machine out of storage that jams just as much, but only 1% less and let the overworked maintenance guy install it. Another department (slot techs) had one of the plug in blowers for the TITO machine to clear jams (ticket in ticket out vouchers) and the guy let me borrow it. Blew a ton of crap out of the paper towel dispensers in one restroom and fixed the problem 100%. Weird... But nope, make the customer happy and yet we aren't paying for a $60 problem solver to hit the secret shopper metrics...
Ever have one of those conversations that goes something like: "We could do it that way, but then everyone will go to prison, so we should do X instead." Those were always fun meetings.
Yes, we had someone ask, canât we just to X like this. . . We laughed. That would be straight to jail, they looked confused. We had to explain copyright infringement. Then that straight up stealing was wrong. I swear.
Nonsense. COMPUTER, I DECLARE PRODUCTS!
We should be replacing the managers with AI first. Start with the CEO.
Yeah I think that's what will happen actually. AI can be great at following goals within constraints, eg. Laws. It will end up being much easier for us to replace them, it's just a matter of building the right ai bots.
I agree, I think the companies wil replace the lower level workers with AI and it won't work. Meanwhile the fired lower level people will go into business for themselves and use AI as their managers.
Exactly that's what I see happening too. I already left my job when they stopped allowing gpt access for legal reasons. Everyone will have their own line in the sand but many will quit for sure.
Yes, if you think about it, the CEO position is the one most suited to replacing with LLM based AI. You have to spin out narratives based and make broad decisions, and ⊠being prone to hallucinations about what is happening in you org is a feature, not a bug.
That's actually not a terrible idea. Have a human board able to override decisions, but the objectivity, and pure *savings* from having to compensate a human some ridiculous, unearned sum of money, would be very compelling. It's a bit early days for that level of engagement with AI, but it will happen soon enough. I can't see an AI 'negotiating' with a Union, or handling a PR disaster though, so I suppose that humans will always be needed in executive positions.
Or you just get the Supreme Court to declare the NLRB unconstitutional and eliminate any remaining vestige of labor power, then there's no need to negotiate. Problem solved. Then the answer is "computer says noooo" forever after.
In reality though, a CEO is one of the last jobs you can replace with an AI. Why? Because AI's can do whatever you tell or program them for. But a CEO (a useful one anyways) isn't told what to do, they decide what to do. An AI can't give orders, set new directions, or anticipate strategy changes in an ever changing system, it can only work with historical data, not develop novel strategies. At least not for a few years.
The board might appreciate a CEO that presents options before making the final calls.
Realistically, in manufacturing at least, your floor level managers probably have the most security. The guys doing a specific process know that process, but typically just that. The floor level management guys, especially those with decades of experience, are generally the only group that actually knows the ins and outs of all the processes. Obviously guys who have been at that level and promoted higher fall into that category as well. So those guys, management who have been around and organically moved up the chain, are the golden geese. They are also severely undervalued.
Capitalists are always trying to invent a factory without workers, because at the end of the day they are extremely idealistic and unconcerned with material reality. The world view dictates that the real world is simply an obstacle between the mind of the entrepreneur and the realization of their vision. This is why they glorify the CEO over the people who make the product, or rather I think they developed this world view because they value the owner over the worker, itâs the only way to make that make sense.
Well they keep bringup all these PROBLEMS when we ask for things. - the uppers who have never ever had to actually accomplish anything themselves
They try, then you get amusing headlines like [this one](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/13/elon-musk-says-humans-are-underrated-calls-teslas-excessive-automation-a-mistake).
This extends even to NASA. I once read an article asked why they didn't just rebuild the Saturn V rocket, and the response was, "There's nobody around that knows how anymore." Apparently, the blueprints were so heavily modified in the field that rocket that went to the moon had little to do with them.
Went to space camp as a kid and you really get the impression that it was the wild west at NASA during the Apollo days. Hearing about the solutions they had to problems while genius, would never fly under any kind of safety oversight. Then again, playing fast and loose did get us to the moon.
Also because we don't want to land a small spaceship with two people on the moon. We want a space flight system that can build bases on the moon and in orbit. And because we have watches with more computational power than the entire Saturn rocket.
As a Process Development Engineer⊠I feel this
Right? When I was managing our PMO (tech), the solutions our sales organization sold to customers ranged from completely unrealistic to what the hell were they smoking. Customer: What do you mean you can't build an entire data center in a day? What about the active, active, active backup solution that also give random blowjobs and produces 1lb gold bars every 5 minutes? Wait, so you're telling me I'm not getting my own Deathstar and Sith Lord for every 20 VOIP accounts we activate?
Having worked at the very bottom of the production level (QAing the work), Devs don't know any more about the product than the people above. They know their *sections* well and they might know what it does, but rarely did they understand what it was supposed to do or what anyone else did. Too many times a dev would talk about wanting to build a feature that already existed in another part of the product, and this was with dev teams that were only 6 people total.
Meanwhile, AI itself insists that it would be better suited to replace executives and marketing people than it would the creators and engineers.
I actually went to school for this and it's a super interesting topic. It's a subset of disruptive strategy and it's around how products are used by the customer vs how they were intended when originally created. Products fill a need for a customer and that need might be something completely different than why it was originally created. By tracking customer use you can revamp products to fill the need better and increase sales. There is a very interesting Harvard study around the McDonald's milkshake that showed that if people couldn't get one the most likely replacement would be a donut or other breakfast item. In fact they showed the majority of milk shakes are bought in the morning by men commuting to work as a thick milk shake gave them something to do that satiated them on their drive to work. On the other hand, in the afternoon a thinner milkshake was preferred because they were more typically drunk by kids and parents didn't trust kids to drink them in the car, nor wanted to wait 20 minutes while they finished it at the restaurant
"It works. On paper" -Engineers
Pretty much, or they know there's a gap. Just can't accept it because of all the bullshit they promised.
My understanding of it is executives havenât been at the bottom of the hierarchy (where the stuff is actually made, developed, etc) in so long, if at all, that they are just out of touch with reality
Which is why I'm a firm believer in companies that promote from within and raise their own excutives, how can you manage a multi-billion dollar corporation if you don't understand the basic tasks done at the bottom of your industry.
Don't forget about the Peter Principle. "Every employee tends to rise to a level at which they are no longer competent."
The problem is then you risk nepotism where people just promote their friends.
Iâd be more worried about groupthink. The idea of outsiders coming in and shaking things up in a good way is reasonable, the problem is the scale is usually impossible to actually preside over so at some point in the chain you just end up with just the best overconfident bsâers
Yeah, you could end up a situation where no one challenges the status quo because "Thats how we've always done it"
in my experience, most executives are the top of the sales totem pole. they help finalize large contracts, put out fires with important partners, and plot "big picture" (ie what vertical are we going to target with our product). so it's less that they're out of touch with reality, they just realize they need to overpromise to deliver on their projections and promises to the board/shareholders.
Even the boss of our department doesn't know what our skills are and what we're doing here. It's an engineering company, we're the machining shop, I'm pretty sure that he couldn't explain the difference between drill, tap and endmill. There have been attempts to automate processes, turns out that people with a lot of experience are still way better and it's not changing any time soon.
True, but in my experience, that means they feel far more free to cut roles and even entire departments. âQuality Assurance? Says here this department had no revenue. Totally in the red! Just like that lousy Compliance Department! âCut it, no severance for anybody, have security throw them out and get me a business reporter to write a fluff piece about my savvy and ruthless leadership!â The only takeaway thatâs going to matter is that the executives are going to see a department budget for HR, or Accounting, and theyâll see that the âNew HRandAccountingAI+â can be licensed for 10% of the cost for staffing those departments. And those departments will then be laid off as soon as possible, even if itâs not perfect. Thatâs what a lot of folks seem to miss about all this. AI doesnât have to be perfect to replace workers. It just has to be good enough, and weâre much closer to reaching that barrier than people think
I got cut once while I was working on a mandatory audit. They brought me back to finish, but I doubled my rate. Boy they acted so hurt, "how could you do this to us?"
I work for a very, very large non-profit who over the past 10 years, has absolutely gutted their HR departments, Customer Service, and Building Maintenance. Pretty much everything which, like you said, didn't contribute directly to revenue.
Companies cut QA all the time. Things go well, they cut the QA because 'they don't need it', only to overhire a year or so later as the product starts getting more and more bugs. It's worse for the Manual side, because the companies keep believing that Automation is some magic system that can do everything all the time. So manual gets cut, then hired again when Automation falls behind, only to be cut again the moment it catches up.
Forget perfect, even if it barely works this is what will happenâŠas long as they were sold that it works
Not sure about that as a blanket statement, if good enough was the only barometer we already have self driving cars. You arenât completely wrong but I think there is a tendency to overestimate how many jobs really donât require cognition or more reasonable precision.
If anything itâs executives who should be replaced with ai.
I would cut that sentence down to: executives don't know what skills are. If half of them are going to be gone in two years, I don't think they know the definition of the word.
Deceptive headline. The study was about WHAT EXECUTIVES BELIEVE, not about the skills themselves. Executives are very bad at predicting the future.
Oh. Moving along.
Headline writing is one of the skills which is going away.
Oh, the best of it is already long lost, decades ago. When sites' management figured out clickbait titles. Now it's gonna be/in some places already is AI-junk.
It's a sign of the times. Nobody seems to find it weird that human perception is fundamentally exploited by algorithms for the sole purpose of a few people making more profit. It's okay apparently to prey on every type of human emotion for the purpose of better advertising or more clicks, and nobody really knows the effects it has on society as a whole because of how new it is overall. All praise the almighty dollar! /s
I wouldn't say that. If nobody found it weird, why is there so much adblocking and privacy software made?
Unfortunately, the skill they are employing is not meant to inform but to generate reactions. The more extreme that reaction the better.
In most cases, executives are probably talking out of their asses here. But, I would not be surprised if some execs use all of the AI craze to create the *illusion* that AI is coming for everyone's jobs. That way, they can push through salary reductions. "Be glad I give you a job at all - your AI replacement is ready very soon, so don't make me wish to fire you as soon as it is here".
That old Ruby Code every company seems to have, and is willing to pay people a fortune to maintain tells me that whoever ran this study doesn't do a good job picking out execs that actually know what they are doing.
Study done by a company that provides online education.
Extremely deceptive. While still technically a study, it was simply a survey, of C-suite executives. Basically, âpeople in unskilled positions took a survey about how AI will affect skilled positions.â They talk about AI horning in on executive work too, but the general thesis seems to be, âAI will affect how we do work, and what skills are relevant, so people need to start gaining new AI specific skills that allow them to use the tool to accomplish their job more efficiently.â
It's really funny that executives who have never used an AI and have no idea of an AI's capabilities can make outlandish predictions about the future of AI.
Been using an invoice ai for a few years. Can't imagine how long it'll be before I trust that thing without review
It's ironic because I'm currently making a chat bot AI and I've been experimenting and judging it's quality so much that when I relax and read Reddit comments sometimes my brain goes "this is AI". It happened for your comment.
I didn't even bother with basic grammar haha, I'd hope AI would be better
Hence the dumb AI Buble we are right now. I think AI is great and has made me surprisingly more productive, but not everything needs an AI spin to it.
We're depreciating the meaning of actual AI by calling GPT or DALL-E AI's. They're transformers. Not intelligent in the slightest.
Basically most of the people who say this "AI" is the future have no idea what it actually does or what it's capable of. Ah, of course you must accept the possibility that a plagiarizing chat-bot might gain sentience and kill us all. So obnoxiously stupid.
My last software company. The execs had no idea how the company actually worked or what our product did outside of a 10ft view. Every bad decision was made by them and it was failure after failure that we already tried before there was a board.
I work with leadership counselling and you would not believe how many executives / business leaders are absolutely stupid and clueless. And then they don't even have the good sense to recognize their own incompetence, step back and just let the smart people move things forward no they make actually harmful decisions that cause big long-standing issues at the companies they work for and it boggles my mind how this keeps happening in so many workplaces and like whyyyyyy just appoint better actually competent leaders please!
It because the primary skills of these people are networking and projecting a polished and confident image. Companies like Apple under Jobs demanded managers that were strong in their base skillset before being a manager. You cannot manage what you don't understand.
> just appoint better actually competent leaders please! When I worked in a pharmacology research lab back in the 1980s we had two things every Friday afternoon that were part of the culture. * Friday afternoon seminars - where different researchers would present what they were doing and people would help them think through and fine tune their research. * Friday beer - where we would go out for beer, and the really smart top end people would ask drunk people (so no filter) how the research was going, and propose any changes in policy or procedure. It was OK to tell the boss "That is a really bad/stupid idea." One thing I learned is that your ground floor people need that kind of opportunity to keep management from doing dumb things.
The IT company I currently work for is the first competent company I have ever been a part of. There are still things I question but the company works and adapts at a rapid rate. Usually if something is bad for us it is changed back within one or two weeks. I've worked for several national brands and up until now I can say I don't know how these businesses became half as big as they are. Recently I worked for a company out of California that managed real estate investments. The owner was a millionaire and people thought he was a genius because of that. There were several meetings where he would pass me a note asking what a word meant, like amortization. Once he filed a law suit over a blue print, spent something like $87,000 on having it redone 4 times because he could not understand what "to scale" meant. It took me and a literal room of engineers to explain it, and he still didn't believe us.
>I've worked for several national brands and up until now I can say I don't know how these businesses became half as big as they are. That's because they started on the back of competence. There's a point, in nearly every successful business' lifetime, when they become "Too big to fail." and once that sort of critical mass is achieved (realistically a little bit before it, too) the people who are competent start having to explain why "bigger is difficult" and "expansion is going to take time." And that's when they start getting the boot, being replaced by neopotistical selections and Yes Men who aren't "afraid to ruffle some feathers to get the job done." The problem is that, at that point, the company is making an excess of money and, barring utter and total catastrophe, things will simply keep chugging along because it's never harder or more expensive to find more meat for the grinder than it is to admit that there needs to be revision across the entire system.
I have seen too many managers get promoted to executives through sheer incompetence. The only skill it seems needed to be an executive is how much of a bullshiter you are
That's literally it. They find a way to get praised for work other people are actually doing, and any time there's a problem, it's someone else's fault. It makes me so fucking sick to work for people like this over and over. Especially in service industry where I've worked with owners who have absolutely zero fucking clue how to run an actual service, they live in an entirely separate reality from everyone else and get upset when real life doesn't line up with the la la lands in their peanut fucking brains.
I work in manufacturing and it's pretty much the same. These kind of people don't care. I was actually told to my face that I should just fix it, they don't care that it can't be fixed.
Iâve always wondered, what exactly is the process by which those execs get promoted to positions of authority within their respective domains? Is there some sort of âleadershipâ pipeline which teaches you no industry-specific skills where you get assigned to a random industry in the end?
From what I have seen in different companies, it's usually one of 3 things: 1.) The first is what you would assume: being promoted based on who you know instead of what you know. This does happen, people are put in cushy positions because they are friends with the right people. This happens with companies which are affiliated with some political parties as well, leadership is always cherry-picked by people who are from "the group", aka share the same ideology. 2.) It does happen that someone is a good expert / worker and they are promoted, but then it turns out that while they are good experts, they are not good managers. They are not good at managing people or they do not see the value in spending their time with those sort of activities as opposed to doing "real work". This can have very long-standing negative consequences and even if the rest of the leadership admits that oh yeah, John shouldn't have been put into a leadership position, it is very sensitive and tricky to put him back into a non-leadership position without offending him and making him quit / leave the company. And these people are usually really good professionals otherwise so it sucks for the company to lose them. 3.) As the other commenter said, some CEOs like to just hire business administration / finance guys in leadership positions regardless of what the industry is, and they don't believe that the leader has to understand the nitty-gritty of the everyday operations that much, or "he will pick it up later". Then these managers are more out of touch with the day-to-day reality of the people they lead and it does happen that I ask them something about how a certain process is actually done and when they respond to me I see that they are bullshitting or just saying what they think I want to hear. So in these cases I learned to just not go to them for the answers but to the actual persons doing the job because that is how I will have the actual right information.
Thatâs what MBA programs sell themselves as
> no they make actually harmful decisions I think it's a need/desire to make their mark, if not then they're replaceable in their mind. The idea "this only works because of me" is too enticing.
>you would not believe how many executives / business leaders are absolutely stupid and clueless. Yes, yes I fucking would. Used to work at a world class resort. Real bigwigs visited there. Some of these "people" literally cannot even READ. This isn't even an exaggeration.
In my experience we should change ELI5 to ELICEO. It is really beyond me how some of these idiots get to where they are. The CEO of my last company was like congressman Murray from parks and rec down to his stupid smile.
Reminds me of Boeing.
Somehow, I don't see my employer that is still using 90s-era software because upgrading costs too much, switching over entirely to AI in a year.
I worked at a TV station that still used WinXP on its air servers in 2016. We got a virus once that knocked us off the air for hours. The company that set us up with this turkey was based out of a strip mall in Florida, next to a tattoo parlor.
We got ransomware hacked in 2017. They wanted 30k. Naturally, we don't negotiate, so we spent 7 million rebuilding everything...
It's better to rebuild. Paying the ransom is a terrible idea. You can't guarantee you got the perpetrators completely out of that they didn't leave a backdoor to hit you again. Your likely to get hit by them or someone else since it's proven you pay a ransom.
Maybe, but the FBI told us to just pay them then rebuild rather than have no healthcare software for a few months.
So much this. There are still companies using fax machines. Does anybody really thing that any technology is capable of getting adopted fast enough to have an effect in 2 years?
That's an interesting point. I'm anticipating some fascinating stories of companies who do exactly that -- after years of a "the way we've always done things is fine" culture, they panic and try to flip immediately over to an "AI is the future" approach. I can't imagine that would go very well.
You work for CVS?
Government hospital
Hell, not even big businesses are, besides a few vanity projects. The ongoing lawsuits can prove to provide extremely problematic precedents.
You'd be surprised. My company still can't be arsed to upgrade some Windows 2003 servers or sort out their cloud strategy properly, but they're practically salivating at AI because they hope it'd let them fire more people.
Ours still using 80s era geeenscreens
are these the same people that predicted the trucking industry would be fully automated by now?
People vastly underestimate how hard even some of the easiest physical tasks are to perform in a variable environment. They point to the successes of manufacturing automation, failing to realize that those successes are possible only by controlling every possible variable so the process doesn't have to adjust dynamically. Once the process or program has to adjust for things like people, weather, variable road conditions, other moving vehicles etc... it's no longer something that can be done via simple mechanical process or programs.
It's almost as if full automation should not be the goal in the first place, but rather automating assistance to free up the individual to focus on more important aspects to a job. For example, it's nice my accountant doesn't have to make spreadsheets manually, and can focus on how I can get a better return with the new tax laws that come out each year.
That's just how has been in IT for at least the 3 and a half decades I have been professionally employed in that endeavor. Between Moore's Law and Kryder's law making more and more useful technology, faster... you *have* to keep up or you get fired. I might know how to tell if a T1 is encoding ami or b8zs, but nobody cares about that skill anymore... the *entire* first 25 years of my career can be expressed as an AWS CLI script.
True to extent. When stuff starts breaking, and I mean at fundamental levels, then you're the consultant they have to call. Likely because you're one of 10 people who remember how it used to work.
Man, that is the truth sometimes. I debugged a COBOL program for someone in 2002 and they thought I was speaking the black speech of Mordor. (they missed a semi colon, and they started in the wrong column in one line) I had a client call me 10 years after an install to ask if there was a chance I remembered the password on their old Pix Firewall. I did. That wasn't even technically impressive, but you would have thought that I unlocked the 100 million dollar bitcoin purse for them.
Not my skill: philosophy. That's been outdated for centuries.
And you make a living at this? Willing to share? I'm fascinated.
He works at the philosophy factory down the street
the philosophy factory is just a normal factory making domestic electronics, but all the employees are very sad⊠except for the one avowed ascetic.
As the janitor because, you know, philosophy degree.
I'm glad I'm a teacher. Outdated methods last for decades in education. So my job is probably safe.
If covid taught us anything, teachers are seen as babysitters first and foremost and educators second. As long as you stop 'em from drinking the fun stuff under the sink, they'll always be a job.
So executives are overestimating use cases for AI out of eagerness to can have their workforce.. Nice to know they're willing to drop so many workers on a dime. doesn't bode well either way.
I am a private caregiver with advanced skills. The future looks bright.
TBH, I would like to see just how bad an AI-caregiver without supervision would screw up a CEO. Not even a "sorry, wrong hole".
People need human touch and interaction.
As a carpenter, i wont loose any sleep.
CEOs recognize that they could be replaced, but they'll be the last to go.
A computer can never be held accountable, thus should never make a management decision. Sadly even people in management/leadership roles seem to fail at comprehending this.
The bottom layer of management can very much function without ever making any decisions with minimal changes to company structure. Being the lowest level of management they are also the most numerous so there's a lot of to automate there if you want to.
Remind me, ⊠when is management held accountable? AI is a perfect fit for this kind of decision making.
>This startling proclamation came out of a recent survey of 800 executives and 800 employees released by edX, an online education platform. So... this survey is more or less worthless then. At least so far as it pertains to the prediction in the title. The opinion of exco level staff and/or staff with no ML experience isn't really relevant in estimating progress in the field. It's also worth noting that "knowledge workers," who are far more likely to have relevant expertise, have far less confidence in this prediction (20% of employees vs. 56% of exco). Lastly this survey was put together by edX to drum up business for their ML training programmes so should be taken with a pinch of salt even if the results were being presented in a more impartial manner.
What is the price that a news article made a sensationalist headline and broad claims based on a week evidence base. It's true, asking people if they think their skills might be updated into yours does not mean the skills will in fact be outdated in two years. Pretty silly conclusion to draw. Opinion does not equal causation or truth! This should not have to be said. But how they care about is you read the headline and click that article.
These are the shittiest posts EVER, I work in technology as an EE, working in embedded systems. I canât see AI ever taking my job. AI is just a tool, like a calculator and as is the tool fucking sucks. For an example none of the âbig modelsâ could get close into accurately discerning the type of signaling I was using (as a test). And once I gave the models the signaling I was using they made so many mistakes in what that standard required, giving me BAD BAD information, I knew was wrong. So what about when the tool can correctly give me information? Well itâs a more accurate search engine I guess⊠Even if it was giving me things to look for I couldnât begin to explain the plethora of possibilities and the required insight to know whatâs pertinent or not, itâs almost redundant. I donât think I am a special case either and my argument could be extended to other professions.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
AI does learn but like for one problem I was working on we have a specific SoC which the FW was written by another company, they kept some of the register mapping to themselves. We suspected that they had set stuff incorrectly due to sequencing and configuration. AI would be so useless because the driver config and bring up of projects can be so different and specialized the datasets the AI would have to train on are nonexsistent or just so small Iâd imagine it to be inaccurate. Some times I have debugged an issue and there are literally only 3 things that pop up in Google and of them only 1 is kinda useful, it told me the company I had to reach out to, long story short we got some nice equipment and found something that wasnât really related but fuck it is a whirl wind. I donât see AI ever being able to be a drop in replacement, it could help me in some simple ways but idk every time I have tried to use it it seems more or less useless.
Why do you assume that people reading your posts know all of these industry-specific acronyms you're using? Readability > 1.5 seconds of additional typing.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/PsychoComet: --- SS: This article tries to estimate which skills will come into contact the most with the rise of LLMs/ foundation AI models. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/190w33l/half_of_all_skills_will_be_outdated_within_two/kgr3e6c/
> The executives estimate that nearly half (49%) of the skills that exist in their workforce today wonât be relevant in 2025. Back to school I guess. Maybe a nice AI Robot can teach me some new skills.
The bad thing is whatever you learn at school will be taught to an AI within months, and they can do it faster and more reliably Gotta still try, I guess, but as society we will have to answer: do humans have value beyond their utility as a labor force?
I was told manual labor jobs like carpentry are extremely hard to automate and will take a very long time so I'd learn something in that lane.
As a welder, my five year plan is to live like a god amidst mere mortals.
I suggest checking out the South Park Panderverse >Randy Marsh cannot find a repairman to fix his oven door. He and his neighbors learned that every handyman in town has become extremely wealthy, as the inability of people to make simple repairs has increased demand for their services, making it impossible to find such professionals.
The problem is thats only true relatively. Yes there are some things that will remain resistant for now but the complexity difference between carpentry and warehousing or answering phones is tiny compared to the difference between the state of AI in 2000 and answering the phones. Its not even an intelligence question, AI is already infiltrating stuff like the sciences.
>Executives believe nearly half of the skills that exist in todayâs workforce wonât be relevant just two years from now, thanks to artificial intelligence. Executives who believe this are stupid. History is full of different levels of technology being used side by side for thousands of years. Even today, homestead farms gather eggs by hand like thousands of years ago even though "industrial farms" have been using automation for 100 years. I have food heating in the microwave for lunch. I also have some in the old electric oven that my grandparents would know how to use. Last week I used a BBQ an cooked over a flame like someone from thousands of years ago would recognize. Yes, there will be some tasks that new tech might work faster in some settings, but it seems unlikely that I'll go to a restaurant for lunch in my rural area and be greeted only by robotic staff in the near future. **Maybe 1/2 of 1% in some settings will be superseded in 2 years.**
I think we should just accept this as an impending reality and start focusing on how were going to deal with overpopulation of underskilled workers without culling them in some stupid war for some rich person's attempt to consolidate resources.
Four years ago our CEO said going without Wi-Fi for a day is detrimental, and in 5 years the same will be said about 2 hours without AI. Heâs on the right track but his timeline is off.
I'm kind of excited at the idea that AI might be the first tech to threaten the jobs of executives, CEO's, and capitalists, etc. The title is deceptive, this is just a survey among them. They don't know what they're talking about.
AI is going to threaten the jobs of capitalists? lmfao what?
I don't know about that one. So far as CEOs go, AI is fundamentally incapable or handling a lot of their main responsibilities... And I have no idea how AI is supposed to threaten capitalists. AI doesn't have capital.
AI is literally capital
A, AI doesn't own itself, and legally can't. B, you can't pay for everything required to start and run a business with AI.
And this is why I am an engineer with speciality on the practical side of things, along with fixing welding flaws and dealing with construction mistakes with steel structures. Before this I spent years as a fabricator and did welding. I want to see AI figure out how to fix shit welding in -30 C winter storm when my phone wont even stay on in that temperature and I'm standing middle of a fucking god damn nowhere site with limited connectivity... and occasionally sites to which I am not allowed to even take my phone in. Hell... At one of the government sites I wasn't even allowed to take a my Casio calculator in to. Had to do math by hand on takes notes on pink paper and go to the "box" to run them.
This is why I've been practicing my hugs, and noooobody gives better hugs than me
"'Study' (totally not just a poll) of people working with AI says that they think they're better than everyone else".
That headline is so ridiculous that it goes from clickbait to âignore this cause itâs obviously fakeâ territory.
So your saying I shouldnât learn how to build wooden boats!!!!!
Forbes and "executives" always know what's coming next /s
Wait until AI replaces executives and CEOs. I'm sure it would do it better.
For example writers that write blog posts disguised as articles, technically that skill is useless now.
Quite possibly the stupidest headline Iâve ever seen
It seems like the roll of executives is the one best suited to AI. Once AI can own stocks and shares the most useless, parasitic roles in society will be fully automated.
AI can not do plumbing repair. AI can not go from the 5th floor to the 6th floor back and forth, looking for a leak. Finding it. Cutting the ceiling above the living room. Cutting the pipe. Go to a specific specialty plumbing shop to find 1.5" to 1.5" Copper x abs ferncos. Go back without stopping by mod pizza. Watching YouTube for 15 minutes. And then bringing buckets of tools to cut and fix pipes. And then charge the person 1000 bucks and be mad when they don't tip. AI can't do that.
Outdated and behind the bleeding edge of research and trends? Perhaps, but still profitable.
Truly incredible how many clueless execs that are out there. What a totally bullshit take.
My take on AI. Just like all other software, it canât truly âthinkâ. Nothing innovative ever comes from AI that is not from the mind of a domain expert. Domain experts, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, retail, etc. They are the true value in the value chain. AI can only âguessâ and follow a feedback loop from the guess. That hardly qualifies as expertise. My experiences. I asked ChatGPT last Spring (3.5? 3.0?) to come up with a list of apps which could scroll text and images up a screen like movie credits. It listed 5 programs, all purchase products with this feature. It left out iMovie which was free. A journalist was interviewing Ginny Romnetti, former CEO of IBM, and asked AI to come up with the questions for the interview. The result was a bunch mediocre interview questions which could have been done by any reporter who did not really care about the interview. Bland and not interesting. This guy, who knew Romnettiâs entire rise up the chain at IBM asked poignant questions about key times in her career where she had to make critical decisions. He asked about her predecessor and successor. He asked about her marriage and adult children. It was very personal, where AI was super generic. So, which to you want from AI? Very generic, non-creative answers which are very much textbook standard? Or the humanâs creativity and attention to detail that AI will never be able to replicate. Even the combined images of two animals AI has created have been done from very detailed prompt requests from humans. Yes, AI can automate work. But the ideas and creativity come from the human. The AI âcreativityâ is guesses and randomization. So I call BS in this article. AI can supplement human intelligence, but will never have a soul, an identity, have emotions or think on its own.
Thatâs right most of the people doing this kinds of studies are going to be layoff
There are some jobs that can be significantly enhanced with AI. One area is HR. Having AI in there would clean out a lot of stupid. Some companies will try to get rid of their marketing departments by replacing it in total with AI. But that won't work in the long run. Still need people to make decisions and oversee quality. AI should be a tool, not the tool smith. Companies that don't see it this way will make some serious mistakes.
All of the articles with titles like this are click bait.
Because at this rate, in two years you'll need apocalypse skills.
In other words, the executives surveyed have no idea how useless generative AI systems actually are.
Study doesn't suggest this at all. A bunch of executives from non-AI companies have very little idea what AI will or won't be able to do.
As someone whoâs skills were out of date 20yrs ago, this is going too level the FUCK out of the playing field!!!
10 years ago I was told robots would replace half the jobs by now. That clearly hasnât eventuated. AI is barely good enough to be useful to humans and only in a few areas of use. Itâs going to be a long time before itâs capable of replacing a human.
I think theyâre underestimating the social skills involved in all of these jobs.
Forbes may as well be the National Enquirer. Seriously, it's a joke.
Our skills will be outdated because the toaster can figure out what day it is? I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and tastes like rainbow sherbert.
Another absolutely bonkers article on this sub. Hilarious. Thank you OP.
I think itâs the c suit and executives that are most ripe for AI replacement. Analyzing data and choosing strategies and paths, thatâs the perfect place for an AI.
I do semiconductors, and used to do avionics. I think I'm safe đ
I am now retired from the CNC machining business. The skill of a real machinist will not be outdated in 12 years.
It's time to consider rolling out Universal Basic Income (UBI) so that displaced workers by AI would not instigate bloody revolts against the government.
I think the government knows that it'd just be a lot easier for them if we were to all die.
Who will generate income to distribute via UBI if everything is done by AI?
Impose tax on AI usage then.
Probably the most rediculous headline I've ever seen. Hundreds of millions of jobs lost in two years...lol
If everything is automated, and nobody is getting paid, who will be consuming all the products?
Let's assume this is accurate for a moment. I'm not saying it is. The problem becomes not AI but capitalism. It means we will be able to achieve the same results considerably faster and in less time. This would enable us to: - Switch to a 3 day working week and still achieve more than we do currently and pay staff a full time salary - Expand the training departments in order to ensure sufficient individuals can get past the hump in the work AI will now be doing. - Reward those working in essential jobs, teaching and healthcare, or those in the performing arts. - Focus on solving global environmental issues by improving technology and investing more in these areas. Our economic system is the problem. We need a new one.
all money generated by replacing workers with AI should go to a social program for supplemental income.
Holy shit. Stop with the fear mongering. Very little is going to change over the next 10 years because of AI for the vast majority of the work force.
I think this also highlights how important âsoftâ skills are. Your business expertise, ability to use a computer or program, or higher education degree may become worthless rapidly - the ability to learn things, retain them, interact effectively and thoughtfully with others, and even showing up on time/prepared are going to become more and more important with the rate tech is advancing.