Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With
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I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I'm reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how "work" might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work "you and I do today" (including Altman himself), doesn't look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity's core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn't seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they're made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don't need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn't have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Talking psychology, please stop calling it AI. This raises unrealistic expectations. They are Large Language Models.
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Yeah, I have never spent "days" setting anything up. Anyone who can't do it without spending "days" struggling with it is not reading the documentation.
You guys are getting documentation?
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Talking psychology, please stop calling it AI. This raises unrealistic expectations. They are Large Language Models.
Raising unrealistic expectations is what companies like OpenAI are all about
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Have you ever built anything with your hands that mattered?
Yes. How is it relevant to moderne SWE practices?
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Have you ever built anything with your hands that mattered?
I know this was aimed at someone else. But my response is "Every day." What is your follow-up question?
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Talking psychology, please stop calling it AI. This raises unrealistic expectations. They are Large Language Models.
In computer science machine learning and LLMs are part of AI. Before that other algorithms were considered part of AI. You may disagree, probably because all the hype around LLMs, but they are AI
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In computer science machine learning and LLMs are part of AI. Before that other algorithms were considered part of AI. You may disagree, probably because all the hype around LLMs, but they are AI
You missed the psychology part?
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This.
It will be the baby of idiocracy and blade runner.
All the horrible dehumanising parts, without any of the gritty aesthetics, and every character is some kind of sadistic Elmer Fudd.
It will be the baby of idiocracy and blade runner.
I agree.
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I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I'm reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how "work" might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work "you and I do today" (including Altman himself), doesn't look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity's core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn't seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they're made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don't need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn't have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
I'd not put an LLM in charge of developing a framework that is meant to be used in any sort of production environment. If we're talking about them setting up the skeleton of a project, then templates have already been around for decades at this point. You also don't really set up new projects all that often.
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In computer science machine learning and LLMs are part of AI. Before that other algorithms were considered part of AI. You may disagree, probably because all the hype around LLMs, but they are AI
Granting them AI status, we should recognize that they "gained their abilities" by training on the rando junk that people post on the internet.
I have been working with AI for computer programming, semi-seriously for 3 months, pretty intensively for the last two weeks. I have also been working with humans for computer programming for 35 years. AI's "failings" are people's failings. They don't follow directions reliably, and if you don't manage them they'll go down rabbit holes of little to no value. With management, working with AI is like an accelerated experience with an average person, so the need for management becomes even more intense - where you might let a person work independently for a week then see what needs correcting, you really need to stay on top of AI's "thought process" on more of a 15-30 minute basis. It comes down to the "hallucination rate" which is a very fuzzy metric, but it works pretty well - at a hallucination rate of 5% (95% successful responses) AI is just about on par with human workers - but faster for complex tasks, and slower for simple answers.
Interestingly, for the past two weeks, I have been having some success with applying human management systems to AI: controlled documents, tiered requirements-specification-details documents, etc.
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You missed the psychology part?
No, I saw it, but I was replying to the "please stop calling it AI" part. This is a computer science term, not a psychology term. Psychologists have no business discussing what computer scientists call these systems
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No, I saw it, but I was replying to the "please stop calling it AI" part. This is a computer science term, not a psychology term. Psychologists have no business discussing what computer scientists call these systems
wrote last edited by [email protected]What do i even answer here...
Who talks even about computer scientists? It's the public and especially company bosses who get wrong expectations about "intelligence". It's about psychology, not about scientifically correct names.
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What do i even answer here...
Who talks even about computer scientists? It's the public and especially company bosses who get wrong expectations about "intelligence". It's about psychology, not about scientifically correct names.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Ah, I see. We in the software industry are no longer allowed to use our own terms because outsiders co-opted them.
Noted.
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I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I'm reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how "work" might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work "you and I do today" (including Altman himself), doesn't look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity's core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn't seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they're made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don't need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn't have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
wrote last edited by [email protected]creating value
This kind of pseudo-science is a problem.
There is no such thing as "value". People serve capital so they don't starve to death. There will always be a need for servants. In particular capital needs massive guard labor to violently enforce privilege and inequality.
The technologies falsely hyped as "AI" are no different. It's just another computer program used by capital to hoard privilege and violently control people. The potential for unemployment is mostly just more bullshit. These grifters are literally talking about how "AI" will battle the anti-christ. Insofar as some people might maybe someday lost some jobs, that's been the way that capitalism works for centuries. The poor will be enlisted, attacked, removed, etc. as usual.
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Ah, I see. We in the software industry are no longer allowed to use our own terms because outsiders co-opted them.
Noted.
Grow some up.
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I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I'm reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how "work" might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work "you and I do today" (including Altman himself), doesn't look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity's core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn't seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they're made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don't need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn't have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
Apart from questionable quality of the result, a big issue to me about LLMs is the way it substitutes human interaction with other humans. Which is one of the most fundamental way humans learn, innovate and express themselves.
No technological innovation replaced human interaction with a facsimile, that way before.
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Grow some up.
Dude, what age are you? 13? Log off and go play with your friends.
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If your argument attacks my credibility, that's fine, you don't know me. We can find cases where developers use the technology and cases where they refuse.
Do you have anything substantive to add to the discussion about whether AI LLMs are anything more than just a tool that allows workers to further abstract, advancing all of the professions it can touch towards any of: better / faster / cheaper / easier?
Yeah, I've got something to add. The ruling class will use LLMs as a tool to lay off tens of thousands of workers to consolidate more power and wealth at the top.
LLMs also advance no profession at all while it can still hallucinate and be manipulated by it's owners, producing more junk that requires a skilled worker to fix. Even my coworkers have said "if I have to fix everything it gives me, why didn't I just do it myself?"
LLMs also have dire consequences outside the context of labor. Because of how easy they are to manipulate, they can be used to manufacture consent and warp public consciousness around their owners' ideals.
LLMs are also a massive financial bubble, ready to pop and send us into a recession. Nvidia is shoveling money into companies so they can shovel it back into Nvidia.
Would you like me to continue on about the climate?
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At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
I'd not put an LLM in charge of developing a framework that is meant to be used in any sort of production environment. If we're talking about them setting up the skeleton of a project, then templates have already been around for decades at this point. You also don't really set up new projects all that often.
Fuck, I barely let AI make functions in my code because half the time the fuckin idiot can't even guess the correct method name and parameters when it can pull up the goddamned help page like I can or even Google the basic syntax.
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I came across this article in another Lemmy community that dislikes AI. I'm reposting instead of cross posting so that we could have a conversation about how "work" might be changing with advancements in technology.
The headline is clickbaity because Altman was referring to how farmers who lived decades ago might perceive that the work "you and I do today" (including Altman himself), doesn't look like work.
The fact is that most of us work far abstracted from human survival by many levels. Very few of us are farming, building shelters, protecting our families from wildlife, or doing the back breaking labor jobs that humans were forced to do generations ago.
In my first job, which was IT support, the concept was not lost on me that all day long I pushed buttons to make computers beep in more friendly ways. There was no physical result to see, no produce to harvest, no pile of wood being transitioned from a natural to a chopped state, nothing tangible to step back and enjoy at the end of the day.
Bankers, fashion designers, artists, video game testers, software developers and countless other professions experience something quite similar. Yet, all of these jobs do in some way add value to the human experience.
As humanity's core needs have been met with technology requiring fewer human inputs, our focus has been able to shift to creating value in less tangible, but perhaps not less meaningful ways. This has created a more dynamic and rich life experience than any of those previous farming generations could have imagined. So while it doesn't seem like the work those farmers were accustomed to, humanity has been able to shift its attention to other types of work for the benefit of many.
I postulate that AI - as we know it now - is merely another technological tool that will allow new layers of abstraction. At one time bookkeepers had to write in books, now software automatically encodes accounting transactions as they're made. At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.
These days we have fewer bookkeepers - most companies don't need armies of clerks anymore. But now we have more data analysts who work to understand the information and make important decisions. In the future we may need fewer software coders, and in turn, there will be many more software projects that seek to solve new problems in new ways.
How do I know this? I think history shows us that innovations in technology always bring new problems to be solved. There is an endless reservoir of challenges to be worked on that previous generations didn't have time to think about. We are going to free minds from tasks that can be automated, and many of those minds will move on to the next level of abstraction.
At the end of the day, I suspect we humans are biologically wired with a deep desire to output rewarding and meaningful work, and much of the results of our abstracted work is hard to see and touch. Perhaps this is why I enjoy mowing my lawn so much, no matter how advanced robotic lawn mowing machines become.
wrote last edited by [email protected]CEO isn't an actual job either, it's just the 21st century's titre de noblesse.
