Comment by direwolf20
16 days ago
It's conceivable to us working in white collar knowledge jobs where our input and output is language. Will it also make 5% more homes built by a carpenter?
16 days ago
It's conceivable to us working in white collar knowledge jobs where our input and output is language. Will it also make 5% more homes built by a carpenter?
It might provide cover to lay off more than 5% of us (the LLM can create a work-like text product that, as far as upper management can tell, is indistinguishable from the real thing!), then we will have to go find jobs swinging hammers to build houses. Well, somebody’s got to do it.
The idea that companies need "cover" to perform layoffs (particularly in the US) doesn't make sense to me. Tech companies, all companies lay people off regularly. (To a first order approximation) if a worker is a net positive to a company then the company will want to keep them, and if they are not then the company will want to get rid of them. AI or no AI.
I’ve seen many essential people being laid off for stupid reasons, the gp reason above being part of the story for some. Finance runs the world not tech. Tech is only welcome when it helps finance else it is marginalized.
Seems like the cover might be for investors. If a company is shrinking but you don't want investors to know it's shrinking, you can say you're improving productivity with AI.
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That seems pretty reasonable, yes. That is like asking if putting a low-cost Ops Research specialist in every company could make a 5% difference in operations - yes it could. Making resource-efficient decisions is not something that comes naturally to humans and having a system that consistently makes high quality game-theoretic recommendations would be huge.
Bunch of tiny companies would love to hire a mathematician to optimise what they are doing to get a 5-10% improvement. Unfortunately a 5-10% improvement in a small business can't justify the cost of hiring another person, and good mathematicians with business sense and empathy are a rare commodity.
Lots of jobs like daycare, teachers, cleaning, the material costs are near zero and your ability to increase productivity using technology is very low.
You can reduce quality of cleaning. But it's very hard to clean faster and better at the same time.
These industries are not going to be optimized by an AI. The only optimization is lower overhead or lower salaries.
Sure, we could have robots in daycare, but I don't think lack of AI is why my wife would have concerns :)
Of course there's jobs that don't have a productivity boost from AI. The question is whether across the entire economy there will be a 5% GDP boost.
Teachers, cleaners, and daycare workers may see 0% gains, but don't be surprised if that is made up for by 10% gains the productivity of tech, law, marketing, advertising, manufacturing, government, etc. (okay maybe not government).
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If that seems reasonable to you then you don't know anything about residential construction. The problems that homebuilders face aren't amenable to mathematical solutions. They have to deal with permitting issues, corrupt / incompetent government officials, supplier delays, bad weather, flakey workers, etc. The notion of a 5% improvement from LLM is ludicrously naive.
Even if you ignore the red tape.
At some point you're stacking bricks and hitting nails.
AI just won't make you stack bricks much faster :)
The first 2 are very LLM amenable, the last 3 are very mathematical-solution amenable (optimising around issues like that is basically what Ops Research does). I don't see what your argument is here.
The list of people claiming that maths won't work who then get bulldozed by mathematicians is long.
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