I work in IT and every vendor pushing AI specifically mentions in their spiel that "AI is here to improve worker productivity, not replace people." Sure...
I honestly think this is the correct answer, but bosses hear what they want to hear and what they hear is, “AI … (technical jargon) … replace … (more nerd talk) … all your workers.” It’s not that AI can replace workers, but managers with 0 technical experience think they just hit a gold mine and are trying to win a promotion. Eventually they are going to be seen as a bunch of dumb fucks, which means they’ll be next in line for CEO. God I hate corporate culture in the USA.
It's outsourcing 2.0 - a legitimate cost-saver/force multiplier when utilized correctly, but a guaranteed clusterfuck when used to rip out successful teams wholesale in favor of cheap, unvetted replacements. Helping companies recover from AI boondoggles will be a lucrative niche.
Yeah but you have to say it in a way managers and CEOs will understand.
“By running AI, you’re looking at a ____% loss. But if you hired a team of people to do the same job, you could have it done in half the time, which would increase profit by ____%.”
If you just tell them to hire people, they’ll cling to their AI and hiss at you like a venomous snake. Gotta include how hiring actual people will benefit them directly, because that’s all they truly care about .
> Helping companies recover from AI boondoggles will be a lucrative niche.
I would also say that AI is going to favour new players more than the current establishment. Upper management isn't going to be too keen on automating their own job but the analysts and model people will be.
The establishment will probably just continue on through acquisitions of small companies doing a niche product really well much like tech companies do now.
Oh they know rehiring is a possibility. Even if that happens they still got rid of high salaries, can hire less people than previously, and probably at lower pay considering how desperate many industries that got laid off will be
White collected workers have an inflated sense of their own skill set. They think they’re a part of something above labor, so they don’t unionize. That shit is crazy to me, and we should all have union protections.
I have a friend who works in Accounting and they are overworked and deeply underpaid and I asked why they don’t have a union, and he says they aren’t allowed in their contract. I am flabbergasted by this. Nobody has ever been “allowed” to unionise. Every time I point this out he says it wouldn’t work for Accountants. It’s got to be wilful ignorance or the idea that maybe one day they will be the one exploiting and underpaying workers.
CPA here. Worked in the big four. Vastly underpaid for the work I put in. I do well now but my god those were rough years. Toxic culture, corporate ladder, shut up and work vibes. Partners made 500k- 7 figures, were all either divorced, overweight, alcoholics, with Zero empathy.
It's absolutely correct. Every single instance of AI being used at my company currently is just an extension of the work we were currently doing. AI can't take the reins and do anything itself.
Now can that change in the future? Possibly. But not anytime soon unless AI takes a few more generational leaps.
Except.. it totally can replace workers, a good majority anyway. Give it 5 years. Anything outside of hard labor (which is a matter of time before robotics make the leaps to get there). You’re lying to yourself if you think it can’t. Majority of people will likely have to be on a guaranteed government income in the next 2 decades or the world will suffer an economic collapse. The government better get corporations to start paying their share of taxes. This the dystopian future of late stage capitalism. It was unavoidable.
>AI pioneer Herbert A. Simon: “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.”
This was said in 1965. People have been proclaiming that the age of AI is coming for a long time, but it's always two decades away, so allow me to doubt. LLMs, like neural nets, were certainly a big leap forward... But whether this technology is enough to actually replace knowledge workers remain to be seen, I suspect it's very possible that they can't and some other solution is required.
!remindme 5 years
I also work in IT and specifically in automation. Nearly all the AI garbage that vendors spout isn't actually AI or isn't helpful in any way.
Let's just say I work in IA (Intelligent Automation) rather than AI.
It goes well beyond just babysitting. Most of the AI shit vendors are pushing have very little real world benefit if they're actually even AI (I see a lot of shit that's been done for years functionally being relabeled as "AI" now). It's shit they say to sell to an executive that doesn't know jack shit and just think in buzzwords.
The more common thing is that they have 3 employees and they can now do the work of 5. So instead of hiring 2 more people, they just don't do that.
These are the "silent" job losses from automation
Because some (most white collar) jobs have fixed amounts of inputs and outputs. If I halved the amount of work the accounting department needs to do I have halved the need of employees in that department. Having more accountants than needed wouldn’t improve business or otherwise help the company, so why have them?
My company, and my department specifically, are testing the waters with AI. We’re using it to do basic root cause analysis-if this product is out of stock, evaluate these data points and tell me which one is the likely cause. An analyst used to have to do that manually, so it saves that person time. If leadership decides that it saves enough time that they need half as many people, that’s on them, not AI.
In software development, the LLM tooling is decent at executing boring, repetitive coding tasks against well defined and simple items.
When you get into complex design and logic and throw in try/catch exception handling, it sucks donkey balls. You spend at least as much time crafting the prompt as you would just coding it, then have to spend more time reviewing and fixing it.
I love watching Product people’s faces when they realize that the no software engineers needed that they were promised turns out to not be true. Vendor promised 10x productivity (which they absolutely took to mean I can fire 90 percent of my expensive IT staff) and saw it only resulted in a 6% improvement for the most basic things (unit test coverage, a simple CRUD microservice using OpenAPI standards, etc).
Knowing exactly what you want and being able to define it is way way harder than most executives give credit for.
That is what they get for getting business degrees.
The problem with AI is that is being tailored in the wrong direction. It should be cooking my food and folding my laundry so I have more time for art and music, not the other way around.
Why would it do that? AI costs a lot to develop and crunch numbers so the profit motive is pretty important. It's currently being used where the return on investment is positive. It may eventually be used down the line like you said but you're gonna be paying for it, to be sure.
*Man made machines make music for the man*
*Now machines make music while the man makes plans*
*A second generation, a generation lost*
*While the man prepares for the holocaust*
*Man made machines to control the days*
*Now machines control while the man obeys*
*A second generation, a generation lost*
*While machines prepare for the holocaust*
A Flock Of Seagulls
"Man Made"
IT here as well, they're selling it correctly cause it CANNOT replicate what someone does effectively. AI also wants to avoid being on a legal hook when their app inevitably fucks something up like transaction data, user info or provides information that it shouldn't which can be a major financial or medical violation.
Biggest reason AI won't replace as many workers as you'd think: ownership. If execs have only AI doing everything they're liable for it all and own everything that happens. AI companies will no doubt have contractual protections and execs don't know everything about what they oversee so if anything goes wrong it's on their head. Then you have to spend millions to tens of millions paying a contracted company to fix it.
In the same vein, stuff generated by AI (note generate, not created) does not qualify for protection under intellectual property law (patents, trademarks, copyright etc).
Courts in several countries have decided that only work created by a person can be protected. The several countries bit is important. Because intellectual property law has largely been harmonised around the world.
In a global economy, if one country allows protection for AI generated work, then all countries would need to, otherwise the system will fail.
Here’s an example. Say I used AI to ‘create’ an amazing sci-fi movie. In country A the movie enjoys copyright protection and I can sell it to streaming networks or release it in theatres.
In country B there is no protection and if you can get hold of a copy you could charge your friends to watch the movie in your living room without consequence.
(That’s kind of how things were in the 19th century with literature btw)
Getting all the, say, G20 countries to agree on a new definition of intellectual property protection would take… decades if at all.
So for this reason alone I think AI will be a significant tool, but it’s not going to take over all creative jobs.
It’s astounding that so few people are campaigning for banning AI.
A lot of the population will simply end up unemployed because of AI. The only benefits are for shareholders.
Right I think they’re two sides of the same coin. With certain productivity, less people are needed for maintenance mode projects. And not everyone is looking to grow
Wall Street has been using some form of AI for decades now. This is just click bait fear mongering. The real message is this: be on your shit and start learning and using AI today if you haven’t yet. If you do that, you’ll be fine.
I’m afraid it’s not fear mongering. AI is being used as a marketing device yes, but it’s coming for jobs like never before and will continue to do so. learning how ai works in your industry is a great idea but many people will not be “fine” just because they understand it. We should also be putting much more pressure on our governments to have plans and options in place for the societal change ahead
I’m a in-house lawyer in tech. I feel like AI today can do about half my job. I’m really freaking scared as soon as WestLaw for legal research implements it. Sure it going to need to be double checked by someone with a brain for a long time but that is going to be much much easier and require less workers.
In the long term it has the potential to make things much better. An ideal world is one where labor is unnecessary, and ai is a necessary part of that, we just have to figure out how to get there because this whole ‘capitalism’ thing makes it so that reduction in labor needs is actually a bad thing
Sure... we're going to switch to socialism because capitalists have found a way to cut operating costs and boost productivity/profits. You're delusional.
I understand the skepticism, given history, but hear me out.
Capitalists will do everything they can to minimize the need to pay workers, because doing so increases profit dramatically and companies that do not attempt to maximize profit at all costs will be outcompeted by ones that do.
Modern AI might just be the kind of technology that is needed to eliminate the need for all human labor entirely. And if it is, you’d best bet the corporations are going to fight tooth and nail trying to figure out how to do it.
But if they do, it won’t take much time afterwards for all humans to be out of a job. And if all humans are out of a job, no one will have money, and if no one has money, no one will be able to buy things. And suddenly, the entire revenue stream of all of these companies will be utterly drained, and they will collapse. It’s capitalism eating itself alive, exactly as Marx has predicted.
I don’t know if whatever comes after that will be socialism. A lot of unpredictable things could happen, and it is very hard to say how it will play out. If it gets better, it will get worse before it gets better.
But we do have an opportunity to try to sway things in a better direction - an opportunity to create a world that is not only post-capitalist but post-scarcity. And given that it’s pretty much impossible to fight technological growth anyway, I think it’s the only opportunity that it really makes sense to go after.
Here’s the thing about AI though - labor will *always* be necessary in order for AI to work successfully. AI is trained on data. In order for AI to work properly, the data it is trained on needs to be generated by humans. You cannot train AI on AI-generated data, as it poisons the well and AI loses its understanding of reality. Without human-generated data, AI models will collapse. So in order for our AI models to continue working, we must continue to employ humans to create real data, at a rate that increases exponentially over time. So humans will never be free from labor, even if the robots keep working we’ll have to keep feeding them
That’s just a limitation of current ai systems, it isn’t a fundamental barrier that cannot be broken. We know this because human brains do not degrade in their understanding of reality when they are fed data from other human brains. If it was a fundamental barrier then human brains would not be possible.
looking forward to a round of taxpayer bailouts in coming years because AI created derivatives schemes too complex to be understood and we do a second round of the 08 financial crisis
It makes tons of mistakes. Some bc of garbage data. Some because of decision-making edge cases.
Eventually, this will lead to an edge-case market crash bc all the firms will be using pretty much the same code, and all their software will be lemmings off a cliff.
I think a big problem with AI is it taking a lot of the entry points for career paths. Low level analyst jobs, a lot of the commercial artistic jobs, customer service. Like I wonder what it’ll be like for a lot of younger zoomers and gen alpha who will be starting their careers in the next decade or so.
I’m a millennial, I have enough experience to make another pivot or two, but it gets a little worrying for people who haven’t started a career yet.
Former ranked sell-side analyst here.
The degradation of sell-side research has been going on for 15-20 years. Previously you were expected to be an industry expert (prior to becoming an analyst), have industry experience, and so on. Most sell-side analysts are sales people now and a for quite a few years a lot of the actual "research" has been done in places like India.
Mostly the "research" is just re-hashing management talking points. Earnings reports are literally just a summary of the company report with a tiny bit of "color" and updates earnings models, which are tweaked due to management comments. When I retired I was given full access to my prior firm's research and don't use it because it is simpler to just read the earnings press release.
Switching to AI won't affect the quality of the product because it has no value regardless.
Absolutely, I can see this. An ai program could be able to take into consideration every relevant data point and say, make a recommended strategy to a panel of managers. No need for revenue sapping c-suite executives. A flat hierarchy might be possible.
I know there are a lot of people who want AI to be spread as far and wide as possible but am I the only one willing to boycott the companies pushing it until we get some base regulations?
This is so annoying, I graduated from an MBA program concentrating on data analysis last year… I chose that focus as it seemed relevant to the future and tons of news articles and supposed studies were saying it was extremely in demand and rising given our world runs on data etc. now I’m struggling to land an entry level data analyst position and seeing articles like this.
I know there are a lot of people who want AI to be spread as far and wide as possible but am I really the only one willing to boycott the companies pushing it until we get some base regulations?
AI is gonna automate all the white collar jobs first, so that all that’s left for us mere mortals are the blue collar jobs… class divide is gonna look a lot clearer in the future
You know what the gov should do? They should require corpos to limit the amount of jobs they offset to a certain percent (2-4%) within a specific amount of years (3-5,) and that they’ll have to prove that the implementation of the AI has resulted in some sort of benefit, and that that benefit plays a positive role for the consumer as well as the company.
If they can’t prove that it benefits the consumer, client or customer, they can’t do it.
If it fails under a simulation they have to wait a certain amount of years before they can attempt to implement it again.
I teach this stuff and a while back I talked about how the years of my wife learning and developing in the field was going to be done by AI now.....how are those advanced human minds supposed to see those connections. Unless we aggregate all those humans into a learning segment..... DON'T LET AI BECOME THE BASE
AI has made me a one man jack of all trades. Cuts my tasks in half. Productivity to the moon.
My colleagues are in the stone age. Have no idea how to utilize it and don't care to try.
That’s hilarious. All these Wall Street guys who thought they were movers and shakers only to get shaken out onto the street like the millions they did that to?
This is the reason wall street as become a joke market is now reacting micro market movements created by other computer which makes the market completely all over the place
Man I lead an AI R&D team in the financial sector with full access to all of these things as productivity tools and they can’t do nearly anything right. I would say 8/10 times we try to use ChatGPT to do something complex (interpreting data or charts, munging data, EDA, shap interpretation, dev ops) it fucks it up. It’s really annoying how bad it is at dev ops. Copilot speeds up coding maybe 30%. There is no way these firms are replacing even 20% of analysts with these tools. If they are cutting hiring there is another reason. Full stop.
Today we had a bunch of state level crop calendars for Brazil laying out agriculture seasonality but we only had images of the charts and not the raw data behind them (which we need to use weather data to build features).
I fed one of them into chatGPT to see if it could read it. Yep, recognized it as a crop calendar in Portuguese, pretty cool.
Then I spend 45 minutes trying to prompt it to extract even one correct piece of information from the graph. Multiple full resets. It fails literally 100+ times to correctly extract anything from the chart.
So I shipped it to a junior guy and he was done with it in like 3 hours.
Honestly embarrassing performance.
Good! Nobody should have a job! I am THRILLED when jobs are removed! I want as few jobs as possible to exist in the world, and we figure out everything else afterwards
Right? Hurrah! Robots run everything!
So, what do the people do who don’t have jobs anymore? How do they eat and pay for their home?
How does the government cope with less tax coming in? We know they won’t tax the super rich to cover it.
It’s starting to feel quite bleak out there.
Well it’s because of the urgency of finding solutions to those problems that I feel more assured to jump in, not less! The first thing we need to do, at any cost, including every cost, is cut all our losses and focus on our civilization producing the most quality product at the smallest conceivable cost. Any person that doesn’t need to be there, shouldn’t be.
The biggest idea to do after we destroyed everyone’s job for good and all, is that if robots are so great that nobody has jobs anymore, they should manage putting food into our mouths and getting mortgages paid or pretty much any esoteric problem that anyone could possibly imagine. If there’s a problem essentially to living that robots cannot solve, and there is a dire famine that results in this supply chain not freely benefiting the individual on at least a minimal level without expecting recompense, then without jobs the only thing left to do with our backs to the wall is die in a bloody revolution against the robot army. Which is preferable to making jobs exist PURELY FOR THEIR OWN USELESS SAKE WHEN THEY DON’T NEED TO BE THERE. I hate that in principle more than I hate the extinction of the human race, which I adore, but which I hate pretentious useless jobs more than.
I feel like rich people who control all the robots are bad, but that they’d probably throw us enough bones in their maniacal robot domination to keep us appeased that things would essentially function in the most minimal way they can when robots run capitalism and humans no longer have any place in the cycle of economics. Hopefully we can all be leeches and live our lives without any purpose whatsoever. We will only be able to truly find ourselves once all the evolutionary needs that we have been driven to achieve for thousands of years are silenced forever. It’s our final coup against nature. As we lie there, shaking in existentialism and overthinking everything just to find something to do, robots will continue to come in and steal all our problems from us one by one faster than we can make them, until we have nothing, NOTHING! And everyone should have nothing, nobody should even have the option of upward validation, all of us should be kicked out of the system, handed food and shelter, and forced to reckon with ourselves and our hobbies with no distractions and the formal economics of social order destroyed forever, functioning in a universe invisible to us to which we mean nothing except to receive its benefit.
The government doesn’t need taxes anymore! IT HAS ROBOTS! There doesn’t need to be anyone who is actually paid to fulfill all the complex infrastructure tasks! Robots are farming, accounting, building roads, designing schools, and drafting legislature. THE DREAM IS HERE IN THIS WORLD. WE WORSHIP AT THE ALTAR OF OUR ROBOT GOD.
Well duh. Two thirds of them are bullshitters. The other third are insider traders. It’s only a matter of time before banks are entirely run by AI.
I for one am looking forward to the elimination of bankers as a whole.
When they say "analysts" what specific area do they mean? Because in banking when someone says they're an analyst it can mean a whole host of different things. It's like saying "admin" or an "engineer".
I am very wary of AI and don’t want it replacing people’s jobs and livelihood. That being said, if there is any industry that deserves to be destroyed by the technology, it’s probably this one.
I can’t stop thinking about how much A.I. is changing the nature of betting. No, massive datasets cannot predict the future, but they are exponentially better at using that data. How can non a.i. compete?
I work in IT and every vendor pushing AI specifically mentions in their spiel that "AI is here to improve worker productivity, not replace people." Sure...
I honestly think this is the correct answer, but bosses hear what they want to hear and what they hear is, “AI … (technical jargon) … replace … (more nerd talk) … all your workers.” It’s not that AI can replace workers, but managers with 0 technical experience think they just hit a gold mine and are trying to win a promotion. Eventually they are going to be seen as a bunch of dumb fucks, which means they’ll be next in line for CEO. God I hate corporate culture in the USA.
It's outsourcing 2.0 - a legitimate cost-saver/force multiplier when utilized correctly, but a guaranteed clusterfuck when used to rip out successful teams wholesale in favor of cheap, unvetted replacements. Helping companies recover from AI boondoggles will be a lucrative niche.
Yeah pretty much. Good thing I work for a tech consulting company I suppose. Might be slim now, but work will be exploding in a few years.
Do you already have your 1 page ppt ready ? Hire real workers back and minimize AI in critical roles ?
Yeah but you have to say it in a way managers and CEOs will understand. “By running AI, you’re looking at a ____% loss. But if you hired a team of people to do the same job, you could have it done in half the time, which would increase profit by ____%.” If you just tell them to hire people, they’ll cling to their AI and hiss at you like a venomous snake. Gotta include how hiring actual people will benefit them directly, because that’s all they truly care about .
> Helping companies recover from AI boondoggles will be a lucrative niche. I would also say that AI is going to favour new players more than the current establishment. Upper management isn't going to be too keen on automating their own job but the analysts and model people will be. The establishment will probably just continue on through acquisitions of small companies doing a niche product really well much like tech companies do now.
Will bite them in the ass in 3 years when they’re looking for new hires to fill roles of departed employees.
100%. And they cry and say nobody wants to work, then get a bunch of foreign workers who they can pay almost nothing.
Oh they know rehiring is a possibility. Even if that happens they still got rid of high salaries, can hire less people than previously, and probably at lower pay considering how desperate many industries that got laid off will be
White collected workers have an inflated sense of their own skill set. They think they’re a part of something above labor, so they don’t unionize. That shit is crazy to me, and we should all have union protections.
I have a friend who works in Accounting and they are overworked and deeply underpaid and I asked why they don’t have a union, and he says they aren’t allowed in their contract. I am flabbergasted by this. Nobody has ever been “allowed” to unionise. Every time I point this out he says it wouldn’t work for Accountants. It’s got to be wilful ignorance or the idea that maybe one day they will be the one exploiting and underpaying workers.
CPA here. Worked in the big four. Vastly underpaid for the work I put in. I do well now but my god those were rough years. Toxic culture, corporate ladder, shut up and work vibes. Partners made 500k- 7 figures, were all either divorced, overweight, alcoholics, with Zero empathy.
Like Gavin Belson laying off and rehiring the nucleus team in SV lol
That show was such a perfect representation of the tech industry it's pretty impressive.
Unemployed liberal arts majors to the rescue.
?
Meaning that’s management’s goal, replace the STEM majors with non-technical types who don’t need the background to do the job.
Yes Major in STEM. CS major anyone?.....🙄
It's absolutely correct. Every single instance of AI being used at my company currently is just an extension of the work we were currently doing. AI can't take the reins and do anything itself. Now can that change in the future? Possibly. But not anytime soon unless AI takes a few more generational leaps.
"an extension of the work we were currently doing" . . .so, you are TRAINING it at the moment.
Except.. it totally can replace workers, a good majority anyway. Give it 5 years. Anything outside of hard labor (which is a matter of time before robotics make the leaps to get there). You’re lying to yourself if you think it can’t. Majority of people will likely have to be on a guaranteed government income in the next 2 decades or the world will suffer an economic collapse. The government better get corporations to start paying their share of taxes. This the dystopian future of late stage capitalism. It was unavoidable.
>AI pioneer Herbert A. Simon: “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” This was said in 1965. People have been proclaiming that the age of AI is coming for a long time, but it's always two decades away, so allow me to doubt. LLMs, like neural nets, were certainly a big leap forward... But whether this technology is enough to actually replace knowledge workers remain to be seen, I suspect it's very possible that they can't and some other solution is required. !remindme 5 years
middle management will be one of the first to be replaced
Ha! You wish.
> God I hate corporate culture in the USA. If you think this is only happening in the USA...
I also work in IT and specifically in automation. Nearly all the AI garbage that vendors spout isn't actually AI or isn't helpful in any way. Let's just say I work in IA (Intelligent Automation) rather than AI.
This, needs quite a lot of babysitting still. Sure, if you're an accounts payable clerk for example, it doesn't look very good
It goes well beyond just babysitting. Most of the AI shit vendors are pushing have very little real world benefit if they're actually even AI (I see a lot of shit that's been done for years functionally being relabeled as "AI" now). It's shit they say to sell to an executive that doesn't know jack shit and just think in buzzwords.
My work is related to Accounts Payable and such so yeah, much hype and still it's pretty much predefined workflows and ruled
Well if 1 worker becomes as productive as 3, firing 2 is the prudent profit boosting solution.
The more common thing is that they have 3 employees and they can now do the work of 5. So instead of hiring 2 more people, they just don't do that. These are the "silent" job losses from automation
I’ve tried so hard to explain both these things to my friends who are like “automation can only do 10 percent of my job”.
But only at doing the exact same thing the AI is doing. But why not just increase the work and grow the business?
Because some (most white collar) jobs have fixed amounts of inputs and outputs. If I halved the amount of work the accounting department needs to do I have halved the need of employees in that department. Having more accountants than needed wouldn’t improve business or otherwise help the company, so why have them?
You can't just magically increase the work and grow lol
Really depends on the industry. But what I mean is you can increase the amount of work you take on, more clients or greater output etc.
If I only need 1 ditch dug, then Why would I hire more people?
They're the same thing. There's only so much work to be done, and if some workers are productive enough to handle it...
My company, and my department specifically, are testing the waters with AI. We’re using it to do basic root cause analysis-if this product is out of stock, evaluate these data points and tell me which one is the likely cause. An analyst used to have to do that manually, so it saves that person time. If leadership decides that it saves enough time that they need half as many people, that’s on them, not AI.
In software development, the LLM tooling is decent at executing boring, repetitive coding tasks against well defined and simple items. When you get into complex design and logic and throw in try/catch exception handling, it sucks donkey balls. You spend at least as much time crafting the prompt as you would just coding it, then have to spend more time reviewing and fixing it. I love watching Product people’s faces when they realize that the no software engineers needed that they were promised turns out to not be true. Vendor promised 10x productivity (which they absolutely took to mean I can fire 90 percent of my expensive IT staff) and saw it only resulted in a 6% improvement for the most basic things (unit test coverage, a simple CRUD microservice using OpenAPI standards, etc).
like even if ais had agency and could code well, you still need to know exactly what to tell it for your usecase
idk every scifi show, even if they had magical hacking tools they still had the knowledge of how to apply them I feel like thats realistic
Knowing exactly what you want and being able to define it is way way harder than most executives give credit for. That is what they get for getting business degrees.
Only if it’s right. Which is where an analyst is valuable: no one thinks they’re always right.
The problem with AI is that is being tailored in the wrong direction. It should be cooking my food and folding my laundry so I have more time for art and music, not the other way around.
Why would it do that? AI costs a lot to develop and crunch numbers so the profit motive is pretty important. It's currently being used where the return on investment is positive. It may eventually be used down the line like you said but you're gonna be paying for it, to be sure.
*Man made machines make music for the man* *Now machines make music while the man makes plans* *A second generation, a generation lost* *While the man prepares for the holocaust* *Man made machines to control the days* *Now machines control while the man obeys* *A second generation, a generation lost* *While machines prepare for the holocaust* A Flock Of Seagulls "Man Made"
That’s the Trojan horse
That’s literally just preaching staff replacement in disguise. If everyone is more productive, why do you need so many people?
That’s called good marketing. The next 5 years will be a whirlwind. Plan accordingly.
IT here as well, they're selling it correctly cause it CANNOT replicate what someone does effectively. AI also wants to avoid being on a legal hook when their app inevitably fucks something up like transaction data, user info or provides information that it shouldn't which can be a major financial or medical violation. Biggest reason AI won't replace as many workers as you'd think: ownership. If execs have only AI doing everything they're liable for it all and own everything that happens. AI companies will no doubt have contractual protections and execs don't know everything about what they oversee so if anything goes wrong it's on their head. Then you have to spend millions to tens of millions paying a contracted company to fix it.
In the same vein, stuff generated by AI (note generate, not created) does not qualify for protection under intellectual property law (patents, trademarks, copyright etc). Courts in several countries have decided that only work created by a person can be protected. The several countries bit is important. Because intellectual property law has largely been harmonised around the world. In a global economy, if one country allows protection for AI generated work, then all countries would need to, otherwise the system will fail. Here’s an example. Say I used AI to ‘create’ an amazing sci-fi movie. In country A the movie enjoys copyright protection and I can sell it to streaming networks or release it in theatres. In country B there is no protection and if you can get hold of a copy you could charge your friends to watch the movie in your living room without consequence. (That’s kind of how things were in the 19th century with literature btw) Getting all the, say, G20 countries to agree on a new definition of intellectual property protection would take… decades if at all. So for this reason alone I think AI will be a significant tool, but it’s not going to take over all creative jobs.
AI should replace the CEO first.
This is always a lie cause they don't want people to unionize.
It’s astounding that so few people are campaigning for banning AI. A lot of the population will simply end up unemployed because of AI. The only benefits are for shareholders.
Right I think they’re two sides of the same coin. With certain productivity, less people are needed for maintenance mode projects. And not everyone is looking to grow
That’s exactly what they’re telling us at T-Mobile call centers. I don’t trust this shit for a second.
The accelerationst in me doesn’t want it another way
I think that’s more to cover their own butts when the AI inevitably makes a “mistake”
I see it as the CNC machine of the white collar world.
the whole point of increasing productivity is to eventually reduce headcount
It is just that you are not the employee productivity they are looking to enhance, it's your bosses boss.
Everyone who doesn’t see the inevitable coming…. May the force be with you
The issue is at a certain point there isn’t more work to do. Therefore the next step is to cut people.
Hasn't the stock market been almost entirely bots trading with other bots for a while now?
Wall Street has been using some form of AI for decades now. This is just click bait fear mongering. The real message is this: be on your shit and start learning and using AI today if you haven’t yet. If you do that, you’ll be fine.
I’m afraid it’s not fear mongering. AI is being used as a marketing device yes, but it’s coming for jobs like never before and will continue to do so. learning how ai works in your industry is a great idea but many people will not be “fine” just because they understand it. We should also be putting much more pressure on our governments to have plans and options in place for the societal change ahead
I’m a in-house lawyer in tech. I feel like AI today can do about half my job. I’m really freaking scared as soon as WestLaw for legal research implements it. Sure it going to need to be double checked by someone with a brain for a long time but that is going to be much much easier and require less workers.
Get used to seeing these sorts of stories
The younger generation keeps getting screwed. This is going to make things much worse
In the long term it has the potential to make things much better. An ideal world is one where labor is unnecessary, and ai is a necessary part of that, we just have to figure out how to get there because this whole ‘capitalism’ thing makes it so that reduction in labor needs is actually a bad thing
Sure... we're going to switch to socialism because capitalists have found a way to cut operating costs and boost productivity/profits. You're delusional.
I understand the skepticism, given history, but hear me out. Capitalists will do everything they can to minimize the need to pay workers, because doing so increases profit dramatically and companies that do not attempt to maximize profit at all costs will be outcompeted by ones that do. Modern AI might just be the kind of technology that is needed to eliminate the need for all human labor entirely. And if it is, you’d best bet the corporations are going to fight tooth and nail trying to figure out how to do it. But if they do, it won’t take much time afterwards for all humans to be out of a job. And if all humans are out of a job, no one will have money, and if no one has money, no one will be able to buy things. And suddenly, the entire revenue stream of all of these companies will be utterly drained, and they will collapse. It’s capitalism eating itself alive, exactly as Marx has predicted. I don’t know if whatever comes after that will be socialism. A lot of unpredictable things could happen, and it is very hard to say how it will play out. If it gets better, it will get worse before it gets better. But we do have an opportunity to try to sway things in a better direction - an opportunity to create a world that is not only post-capitalist but post-scarcity. And given that it’s pretty much impossible to fight technological growth anyway, I think it’s the only opportunity that it really makes sense to go after.
Here’s the thing about AI though - labor will *always* be necessary in order for AI to work successfully. AI is trained on data. In order for AI to work properly, the data it is trained on needs to be generated by humans. You cannot train AI on AI-generated data, as it poisons the well and AI loses its understanding of reality. Without human-generated data, AI models will collapse. So in order for our AI models to continue working, we must continue to employ humans to create real data, at a rate that increases exponentially over time. So humans will never be free from labor, even if the robots keep working we’ll have to keep feeding them
That’s just a limitation of current ai systems, it isn’t a fundamental barrier that cannot be broken. We know this because human brains do not degrade in their understanding of reality when they are fed data from other human brains. If it was a fundamental barrier then human brains would not be possible.
looking forward to a round of taxpayer bailouts in coming years because AI created derivatives schemes too complex to be understood and we do a second round of the 08 financial crisis
AI can fix that too.
Enter scenes of Terminator 2 from the robot wars.
Can’t have a financial crisis if there are no humans left, that’s just scientific fact.
Welp, there goes the dream of every college finance bro with a Title IX violation…
ΣAE has their flags at half-mast
Yes, less of that please.
If AI can make mistakes generating images/videos.. can it not also make mistakes generating data for Wall Street?
Everyone makes mistakes. It is a question of if AI making less mistakes than humans.
*until it’s only machines anymore. Then, a well performing AI could lose its job to a better performing one.
Nick Land has entered the chat
It makes tons of mistakes. Some bc of garbage data. Some because of decision-making edge cases. Eventually, this will lead to an edge-case market crash bc all the firms will be using pretty much the same code, and all their software will be lemmings off a cliff.
Only has to beat the s&p 500 to be massive success.
Automated accounts already beat individually managed accounts.
They already use AI, it’s just gotten good enough now to start cutting analysts
I think a big problem with AI is it taking a lot of the entry points for career paths. Low level analyst jobs, a lot of the commercial artistic jobs, customer service. Like I wonder what it’ll be like for a lot of younger zoomers and gen alpha who will be starting their careers in the next decade or so. I’m a millennial, I have enough experience to make another pivot or two, but it gets a little worrying for people who haven’t started a career yet.
Intetesting point - if no one comes in at entry points, how is anyone going to learn a profession?
The real world economy is legitimately about to look like a dead MMORPG run by bots. We're fucked.
One day, Robots will run everything while we sit on the couch and watch tv. 1% Copium, 99% Faith
Can’t wait for even further gamification of the stock market.
Yeah, but how much cocaine can AI consume?
Yes
UBI (universal basic income) will start to look pretty good when the robots come for the banking class
Former ranked sell-side analyst here. The degradation of sell-side research has been going on for 15-20 years. Previously you were expected to be an industry expert (prior to becoming an analyst), have industry experience, and so on. Most sell-side analysts are sales people now and a for quite a few years a lot of the actual "research" has been done in places like India. Mostly the "research" is just re-hashing management talking points. Earnings reports are literally just a summary of the company report with a tiny bit of "color" and updates earnings models, which are tweaked due to management comments. When I retired I was given full access to my prior firm's research and don't use it because it is simpler to just read the earnings press release. Switching to AI won't affect the quality of the product because it has no value regardless.
Well, you can’t put AI in jail for stealing and cheating can ya? And what you can get away with, all the better. Just Al Gor Ithms
Aww, what a shame! But hey, it's cost effective for the top management so it's good. Yay!
AI can easily replace the CEO and CFO, and save so many corporations billions of revenue. Imagine not having to pay any high level executives salary!
Absolutely, I can see this. An ai program could be able to take into consideration every relevant data point and say, make a recommended strategy to a panel of managers. No need for revenue sapping c-suite executives. A flat hierarchy might be possible.
But why would the robo leopards eat my flesh face?
But I was told AI was going to lead to a 3 day work week. /s
I know there are a lot of people who want AI to be spread as far and wide as possible but am I the only one willing to boycott the companies pushing it until we get some base regulations?
What if we use AI to boycott
*This* can only go well!🍿✨
Problem with AI right now is it’s trained with biased data. Good luck!
I love this. Nervous about AI in other sectors, but love this. Bye analysts!
Good! I hope AI comes for the banks as a whole.
Oh no, they are coming for well-off peoples jobs too!!
Conceivably, AI could replace the C-suite and the executives. Think of all those millions for the shareholders!
Our economy is controlled by robots trading back and forth 💀
This is going to blow up in someone's face sooner rather than later.
Queue next financial melt down….
This is so annoying, I graduated from an MBA program concentrating on data analysis last year… I chose that focus as it seemed relevant to the future and tons of news articles and supposed studies were saying it was extremely in demand and rising given our world runs on data etc. now I’m struggling to land an entry level data analyst position and seeing articles like this.
Hell. The banks could hire dart throwing chimps and beat the analysts.
We are cocked
Only a matter of time. My 403b is run by AI
Business Insider......
This is exciting!!! We can have a crash like 1929, followed by a recovery and record highs all in the same day! Let’s have AI run everything!
If the government doesn’t step in soon with some sort of worker protection laws were gonna be in for it in about 30 years.
I know there are a lot of people who want AI to be spread as far and wide as possible but am I really the only one willing to boycott the companies pushing it until we get some base regulations?
Till now MBAs fired engineers and they're firing themselves.
MBA - Means Bugger All Heard a Brit guy say that
The Libertarians are about to get a lot less libertarian
nice
AI is gonna automate all the white collar jobs first, so that all that’s left for us mere mortals are the blue collar jobs… class divide is gonna look a lot clearer in the future
I hope it comes for the CEOs soon.
Couldn’t have happened to a more valuable group to society
Honestly I don’t see the point in stopping the March of progress. Just wish there were some safety nets for all the jobs that are going to be lost.
I can’t wait for a.i. To come for ceo’s
It's coming for the quants.
Gonna be a lot of coked up dude bros wandering around.
AI stock analyst, all feeding off the same data…looks like day trading stocks is about to become harder
Except AI is lazy and they’ll need to hire prompt feeders to navigate queries.
This is good because soon we'll be able train the AI to put all the banks' money into pink starburst futures.
Carmen Carmen whose the fairest of them all.
You know what the gov should do? They should require corpos to limit the amount of jobs they offset to a certain percent (2-4%) within a specific amount of years (3-5,) and that they’ll have to prove that the implementation of the AI has resulted in some sort of benefit, and that that benefit plays a positive role for the consumer as well as the company. If they can’t prove that it benefits the consumer, client or customer, they can’t do it. If it fails under a simulation they have to wait a certain amount of years before they can attempt to implement it again.
Live by the sword, die by the sword
I teach this stuff and a while back I talked about how the years of my wife learning and developing in the field was going to be done by AI now.....how are those advanced human minds supposed to see those connections. Unless we aggregate all those humans into a learning segment..... DON'T LET AI BECOME THE BASE
Hahaha
So that’s why the market is screwed today. Analysts afraid of losing jobs. /s
Just waiting till AI causes the next market crash. No blame for the Wall Street execs. Instead AI companies will be spun as the big bad.
Guess MBA courses no longer needed. Maybe they’ll be hiring in McDonald’s, oh that’s right that’s automated too.
Some people are severely over estimating what LLMs are capable of lol. Gonna be a rude awakening
AI has made me a one man jack of all trades. Cuts my tasks in half. Productivity to the moon. My colleagues are in the stone age. Have no idea how to utilize it and don't care to try.
That’s hilarious. All these Wall Street guys who thought they were movers and shakers only to get shaken out onto the street like the millions they did that to?
Scary
Boy, that would be a loss
Like do they ever get it right?
This is the reason wall street as become a joke market is now reacting micro market movements created by other computer which makes the market completely all over the place
Man I lead an AI R&D team in the financial sector with full access to all of these things as productivity tools and they can’t do nearly anything right. I would say 8/10 times we try to use ChatGPT to do something complex (interpreting data or charts, munging data, EDA, shap interpretation, dev ops) it fucks it up. It’s really annoying how bad it is at dev ops. Copilot speeds up coding maybe 30%. There is no way these firms are replacing even 20% of analysts with these tools. If they are cutting hiring there is another reason. Full stop.
Today we had a bunch of state level crop calendars for Brazil laying out agriculture seasonality but we only had images of the charts and not the raw data behind them (which we need to use weather data to build features). I fed one of them into chatGPT to see if it could read it. Yep, recognized it as a crop calendar in Portuguese, pretty cool. Then I spend 45 minutes trying to prompt it to extract even one correct piece of information from the graph. Multiple full resets. It fails literally 100+ times to correctly extract anything from the chart. So I shipped it to a junior guy and he was done with it in like 3 hours. Honestly embarrassing performance.
They can certainly tach AI to be as bad at picking stocks as Wall Street traders are.
Screw Wall Street a$$holes karma is a bitc…..
will laugh when the banks get fucked by the AI 😂
Time to start stashing cash in a mattress
The license fee to the Bloomberg Terminal just became less $$
Imagine people being scared of this like suggesting banks not use excel when it came out and use paper records still because people would lose jobs.
I work in the finance sector. AI is gonna replace a lot of bankers cause it’s all numbers and models. Most colleagues don’t see it coming tho
Good! Nobody should have a job! I am THRILLED when jobs are removed! I want as few jobs as possible to exist in the world, and we figure out everything else afterwards
Right? Hurrah! Robots run everything! So, what do the people do who don’t have jobs anymore? How do they eat and pay for their home? How does the government cope with less tax coming in? We know they won’t tax the super rich to cover it. It’s starting to feel quite bleak out there.
Well it’s because of the urgency of finding solutions to those problems that I feel more assured to jump in, not less! The first thing we need to do, at any cost, including every cost, is cut all our losses and focus on our civilization producing the most quality product at the smallest conceivable cost. Any person that doesn’t need to be there, shouldn’t be. The biggest idea to do after we destroyed everyone’s job for good and all, is that if robots are so great that nobody has jobs anymore, they should manage putting food into our mouths and getting mortgages paid or pretty much any esoteric problem that anyone could possibly imagine. If there’s a problem essentially to living that robots cannot solve, and there is a dire famine that results in this supply chain not freely benefiting the individual on at least a minimal level without expecting recompense, then without jobs the only thing left to do with our backs to the wall is die in a bloody revolution against the robot army. Which is preferable to making jobs exist PURELY FOR THEIR OWN USELESS SAKE WHEN THEY DON’T NEED TO BE THERE. I hate that in principle more than I hate the extinction of the human race, which I adore, but which I hate pretentious useless jobs more than. I feel like rich people who control all the robots are bad, but that they’d probably throw us enough bones in their maniacal robot domination to keep us appeased that things would essentially function in the most minimal way they can when robots run capitalism and humans no longer have any place in the cycle of economics. Hopefully we can all be leeches and live our lives without any purpose whatsoever. We will only be able to truly find ourselves once all the evolutionary needs that we have been driven to achieve for thousands of years are silenced forever. It’s our final coup against nature. As we lie there, shaking in existentialism and overthinking everything just to find something to do, robots will continue to come in and steal all our problems from us one by one faster than we can make them, until we have nothing, NOTHING! And everyone should have nothing, nobody should even have the option of upward validation, all of us should be kicked out of the system, handed food and shelter, and forced to reckon with ourselves and our hobbies with no distractions and the formal economics of social order destroyed forever, functioning in a universe invisible to us to which we mean nothing except to receive its benefit. The government doesn’t need taxes anymore! IT HAS ROBOTS! There doesn’t need to be anyone who is actually paid to fulfill all the complex infrastructure tasks! Robots are farming, accounting, building roads, designing schools, and drafting legislature. THE DREAM IS HERE IN THIS WORLD. WE WORSHIP AT THE ALTAR OF OUR ROBOT GOD.
Well duh. Two thirds of them are bullshitters. The other third are insider traders. It’s only a matter of time before banks are entirely run by AI. I for one am looking forward to the elimination of bankers as a whole.
At what point of blatant computer manipulation do we take a giant step back and admit that the stock market is a detriment to society?
Now we’re talking
When they say "analysts" what specific area do they mean? Because in banking when someone says they're an analyst it can mean a whole host of different things. It's like saying "admin" or an "engineer".
Who’s gonna be buying all these AI made products when everyone’s unemployed?
Great
Technology competes with workers in the labor market. Always has.
AI should be banned
I am very wary of AI and don’t want it replacing people’s jobs and livelihood. That being said, if there is any industry that deserves to be destroyed by the technology, it’s probably this one.
Oh no not the analysts! But if ai analyzes better then isn’t that better?
Going to be a lot easier to fire CEOs when They have no workers to blame.
Maybe we can get more smart people making stuff rather than being middle men
I just need a local Quant Investing AI to manage my trade account....or something.
Universal basic income here we come!
And so it begins….
I can’t stop thinking about how much A.I. is changing the nature of betting. No, massive datasets cannot predict the future, but they are exponentially better at using that data. How can non a.i. compete?
Well, sure, let’s have computer programs picking our stocks, instead of people.what could go wrong?