The Rise and Fall of the Knowledge Worker
The Rise and Fall of the Knowledge Worker
Knowledge workers, whose jobs involve handling information rather than producing goods, were supposed to be the beneficiaries of neoliberalism and globalization. But generative AI and a hypercompetitive employment market is immiserating them too.
I have yet to see any so called „AI“ that is even remotely able to replace true „knowledge workers“.
LLM can be helpful. But I do not believe that I will live to see them replace humans on more than an low to average level.
Here "replace" doesn't mean "being able to do the same job". It means you get fired. Automation in most fields never even tried to get close to a level of quality comparable to what a human can do, but it was enough to displace a majority of workers.
The author is a machine learning engineer, so he's perfectly aware of the limits of whatever is called AI. The point is to make those limits irrelevant by lowering the expected level of quality, as it happened with textile, food, and so on.
The article makes a good point that it's less about replacing a knowledge worker completely and more industrializing what some categories of knowledge workers do.
Can one professional create a video with AI in a matter of hours instead of it taking days and needing actors, script writers and professional equipment? Apparently yes. And AI can even translate it in multiple languages without translators and voice actors.
Are they "great" videos? Probably not. Good enough and cheap enough for several uses? Probably yes.
Same for programming. The completely independent AI coder doesn't exist and many are starting to doubt that it ever will, with the current technology. But if GenAI can speed up development, even not super-significantly but to the point that it takes maybe 8 developers to do the work of 10, that is a 20% drop in demand for developers, which puts downward pressure on salaries too.
It's like in agriculture. It's not like technology produced completely automated ways to plow fields or harvest crops. But one guy with a tractor can now work one field in a few hours by himself.
With AI all this is mostly hypothetical, in the sense that OpenAI and co are all still burning money and resources at a pace that looks hard to sustain (let alone grow) and it's unclear what the cost to the consumers will be like, when the dust settles and these companies will need to make a profit.
But still, when we're laughing at all the failed attempts to make AI truly autonomous in many domains we might be missing the point
I think you hit the nail on the head where this is heading by questioning the final costs. Currently "AI" development is burning through insane piles of money and energy and no one is really paying a significant cost to use it... It's a loss leader at the moment but it's unclear if there are many uses for it if it were to be full price. Is it going to be another voice assistant situation where people like usi g it but it's actually really hard to make any money off it directly?
Part of the problem is also that, while an acre of land can feed a family of 4, there's no way to generate enough surplus from that single acre to be able to afford a tractor in the first place. So the tractor creates the need for much larger farm plots being owned by a single person, which way up all the supposed extra free time the automation/mechanized tool was supposed to bring.
In the end, less people can work the land to sustain themselves and the only people better off are those who already had more than enough to go buy.
The issue is that anyone who looks objectively at the technology knows that AI / LLMs can't replace knowledge workers in a large set of tasks, yet you see week after week.. month after month the pattern
- Some new company says going to replace x% of employees with AI...
- X weeks / months later... said company reports the attempt was a failure and are having to hire people back
It is as the thought of saving the money of firing all those people is too much to resist for "top management".
You would think after the first batch of companies go through the same, other companies would learn, yet I just keep seeing the same happen again and again.
There is also the potential backslash. Specially if "management" is dumb enough to try and present firing hundreds / thousands of people like a a good thing.. for example Duolingo's case
It’s basically some sort of Enshitification: AI does the job bad in short time so the company can make more? Quality is not important as long as a shitty version of the product can go live.
Well, what can I say, such companies, as soon as they find out that they can save money, will immediately do it, and not only companies, but also ordinary people.
What do you mean? Any AI can replace any knowledge worker. You just fire the worker and say AI will do it, easy
Look around... Running a corporation isn't about doing things or making things anymore, it's about the stock price. And consulting companies have convinced investors that layoffs are so hot and rich
If you haven't noticed, the quality of everything has been plummeting since COVID. They don't care about tomorrow problems, just extracting as much wealth as they can before it all comes crashing down
I have seen workers replaced with automation that sorta, kinda does the job but not really and its really making everything kinda suck nowadays.
Yeah, if the user can't verify the truthfulness of the LLM generated text then it has no use as it can't be trusted.
I'd say the thing LLM is best at for me is giving me a starting point, in the same way that it is easier to fix someone else's writing than it is to write something from a blank slate. Oh and copilot is generally up to date on where in Microsoft 365 Admin you find an option right now, compared to all the outdated official and unofficial guides out there.Maybe yes maybe no but they are trying very hard to make it a reality keep that in mind.
At my job we’re just finishing up a big project that’s mostly ChatGPT output because the consultant we wanted to do it quoted a super high price. So there’s at least one consultant in the world that missed out on 4 months’ work.
Before blaming AI, blame companies who decided to outsource as much as possible to the lowest priced options, regardless of quality. Once those options became "cost prohibitive" (read, not cheap enough to satisfy shareholders), only then did the rush to develop AI truly begin.
The cheaper the better, but such an opinion will undoubtedly lead to the collapse of civilization lol.
"Learn to code" didn't solve the deep underlying issues with the job market?
now they are getting rid of those very same people.
We're making the same mistake with AI as we did with cars; not planning human future.
Cars were designed to atrophy muscles, and polluted urban planning and the air.
AI is being designed to atrophy brains, and pollutes the air, the internet, public discourse, and more to come.We should change course towards AI that makes people smarter, not dumber: AI-aided collaborative thinking.
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-better-to-work-on-intelligence-augmentation-rather-than-artificial-intelligence/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunenhttps://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
Well, in Terminator it looks too cool, in reality it could be like in the novel Brave New World.
stem is also fucked, including biotech, it was difficult before to set foot in the fields, but with all these cuts, they are less likely to recover.
How did no one think that maybe the global south would try and better themselves and come after the top end as well as the low end? Why haven’t the developed countries invested in education more and more to compensate?
The arrogance is alarming.
What's surprising about this? Did you expect anything different under capitalism?
I WANTED TO LIVE IN A BOOM GENERATION, NOT A BUST GENERATION!
Well, we all want something, but if we judge by history, we will have to fight for our beliefs differently, and who cares.