Laid-off coal miners in the last decade were contemptuously told to “learn to code.”
But the worm has turned. Google is looking at laying off 30,000 people it expects to replace with artificial intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal reports that large corporations across the board are planning to lay off white-collar workers.
Investor Brian Wang notes ChatGPT is already causing white-collar job loss.
We’ll all own nothing … do nothing … and be happy. Oh! Wait! 30,000 people were just freed to go pursue their “art”. How utterly blissful.
Art is a lucrative career , ask Hunter Biden
Awesome! There’s a market for all the painted rocks the hippies sell on Telegraph Ave.
Pursue their art?!? Run Art, RUN!
Replacing computer people with computer programs????? Does anyone else see just what might be wrong with this?
Google search has become almost useless today. Hopefully with 30,000 less people meddling with the search algorithm it gets back to what is used to do.
Come on. It’s very useful to find out when the local coffee shop opens.
They all want eye watering profits.. The perfect employee will do 10 jobs at once and require no paycheck.. Sweet.. Next they will be working on AI consumers who will consume at 10X the rate.. Double sweet..
Not being needed anymore is a bottomless pit of despair.. No reason to believe that they won’t be playing both ends against the flesh and bone middle..
AI has no need for paper money.. Understand?..
The software will be created really fast, and really cheap. But will it work? Will it be secure?
Or will it contain lots of bugs and lots of basic security vulnerabilities like stack overflow dumps, etc.? My bet is it will be absolute garbage, created by a Large Language Model AI.
What is a LLM AI? You feed it huge amounts of information in a specific language, and it learns how to MIMIC human speech, grammar, and syntax. That whole Artificial Intelligence truth thing is still a little bit sketchy though, where the LLM AI makes up facts out of whole cloth.
If you remember the first rule of computing:
GIGO – Garbage IN, Garbage OUT.
What is a human baby? You feed him huge amounts of information in a specific language, and he learns how to MIMIC his parent’s speech, grammar, and syntax. That whole human Intelligence truth thing is still a little bit sketchy though, where the human makes up facts out of whole cloth.
See how that works?
Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B hardest hit.
I wonder if the miners really took to coding and created the AI stuff?
We can only dream.
“Dey took ur jerbs” – Google Employees
The difference is – in the Real World, we still need coal.
Google not so much.
This morning while setting my iPad timer for a task, I noticed that it now has a list of several timer settings I’ve used in the past. But alas It was much faster to simply set a new timer than to scroll in search of an identical timer set in the past, and then have to delete those to de-clutter.
My example above may seem trivial and silly perhaps, except that it highlights how useless, annoying and even counterproductive are many of the tasks of these genius coders. So no surprise to see 30,000 google gigs gone.
Last century mantra: Learn to code.
This century mantra: Learn to prompt.
https://learnprompting.org/
As a blast from the past,from some hard rock gold miners I knew.
A chain dragged over the transmission lines, will solve all your electricity problems.
The Great computerized Future has one glaring deficiency..we can’t keep the lights on.
With no electricity,your marvelous software is defunct…
The obvious solution to prevent “Computers Taking over”?
Emperor Justine’s Energy policies..
As for the media minions losing their “jobs”..heh when the subsidy to the “news Corporation” changes from $x/employee to $x/ corporation???
Bye bye employee.
After all,look at the amazing profitability of the border scam contractor..
When white collar folks start losing their jobs, unemployment will suddenly become a serious issue.
Rusty..
True but not for those of us that work with our hands….Y’all be forking out plenty to keep your ICE vehicles running & the Fuel you use to propel it.
I also forsee a huge market in self help Books on Maintenance of damned near everything…as well as an increase in Creamtoria.
Elon Musk got rid of most of his employees at Twitter and things got a lot better. I suspect if Google and YouTube weren’t micromanaged to keep out conservative viewpoints they could do away with most of their staff. All the world asks is to try to control kiddie porn and porn to minors. Saving drug companies from relatives of people they kill doesn’t have to be part of their mandate.
They need to learn how to mine coal.
The disruption to the current norm by AI is really going to be disruptive and in a really really big way.
Re-education camps will need teachers with a ‘human touch’, they’ll like those jobs!
Suddenly the 30,000 former Google employees have discovered that they have become the useless class of carbon that the WEF types want to eliminate
Chuckling about smug white-collar workers being smack dab in the middle of the AI cross-hairs is one of the small pleasures I allow myself.
AI is the current buzzword and magic bullet that will be enthusiastically adopted, overused, and misapplied in far too many cases. “Let’s get rid of everybody and replace them with AI.”
There are going to be a lot of “Oops. AI is not ready for that job, and we just got rid of everyone who knows what they are doing. Now what?”
Robots were once the buzzword and magic bullet. They hurt or shuttered some small businesses and cost the big boys a lot of money – scrap and downtime – before the bugs were worked out. Now manufacturers mostly know where to use them, how to use them, and just as importantly, when not to use robots.
Robots replaced workers doing straightforward, repetitive tasks. AI is supposed to replace workers with tasks that require judgement and the ability to think and come up with solutions to problems.
The transition to robots has had some very rocky patches and still does now and then. I think the transition to the magic bullet of AI will be even more problematic than switching jobs over to robots.
Just my opinion, based on experience with robots in manufacturing. YMMV.
Very good points, H.R. Add on to this that AIs have to be trained using lots of data. Where are the companies going to get that data? From the people they plan to replace…who will literally be training their replacements to eliminate their own jobs. I strongly suspect that a lot of that training data is going to be…intentionally adjusted, shall we say. Good luck getting those AIs to do the jobs correctly.
The differences between these two companies?
One does actual work, turning out enduring and vitally necessary products. The other is just overpaid makework. One product you can buy, own, and touch (and throw away if it does not work), the other you cannot. One is necessary for the operation and construction of your computer, the other is not. You can’t eat cell phone apps.
One cannot be done by machines. The other “requires” union reps because of the greed and sloth on both sides. Yet.