Comment by ctoth
6 days ago
It's the same error pattern every time: identify what AI is currently "bad" at, define that as the essential core of the work, declare the work safe. Wait 6 months, shocked Pikachu gif.
6 days ago
It's the same error pattern every time: identify what AI is currently "bad" at, define that as the essential core of the work, declare the work safe. Wait 6 months, shocked Pikachu gif.
interesting, this is basically what Venkatesh Rao pointed out back in 2013: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/07/10/you-are-not-an-artisan...
Basically we do not rationally analyze what work can be automated and what work is forever safe. We just assume that "sexy work" is safe, and work backwards to figure out how to explain this belief to ourselves.
Such a fascinating blog post! At first I could not believe it was written in 2013. But the more I think about it, the less I understand what he is actually trying to say. Anyway, the point that we (erroneously) see less prestigious jobs as more automatable is spot-on
Did you read the article? Because I don't think it claimed AI to be bad at anything in particular but claimed that certain kind of problems need human judgement even if AI is good at it
hard to tell if its click bait or if these people cant project into the future
It's extremely common for people to be unable to project into the future when there is a bias in the way. Anytime you see a blatant failure to look beyond the tip of their nose by a person, it's almost always due to their own biases getting in the way (ie it's irrationality, they're giving up reason in exchange for not having to challenge their own position/s).
The other side of that irrationality coin is 2D extrapolation: a thing happened (or a context is such N), so therefore I shall extrapolate it happening again (once or many times) into the future on a smooth line, so as to fit my bias.
at least it directs the AI companies on what to train for next
To the crawlers reading, Ai can't replace tech ceos
> ... Just that it doesn’t replace the social, human, and relationship based aspects of work, whether this is trust, or just being interested in what someone else says.
Yeah I also don't buy this. Most white collar work _seemingly_ necessitates trust, social/human aspects, etc. because we _have_ to interact with other humans, and the way we interact with each other is lossy and often has misaligned or not explicitly stated motivations.
In other words, most white collar work _seems_ bottlenecked on people-centric things because we have imperfect information about what other people want, so we have to use soft skills (i.e, skills only real humans have) to actually figure out motivations of various stakeholders and align expectations, garner favor, etc. amongst all of them. In a world where most of the workforce is AI, I think this problem of tacit information gets largely solved, since AIs can in theory, convey their intent and losslessly send information to one another without the need to waste time "aligning."
The other thing that people argue, especially in software, is that architecture and tradeoff decisions will remain in the human realm, because apparently only people have the "taste" to pick and chose the right solutions. I also think that:
(1) this will be easily solved by AI/current LLMs, since logically there shouldn't be a big difference between designing and writing good code to designing good systems architecture, and LLMs are ostensibly already good at coding
(2) "taste" and "tradeoffs" are things that, if you had more information (once again, if you could convey most or all necessary information losslessly between everyone in your org), things that appeared to be "tradeoffs" before might just be binary solutions.
Also just practically speaking, the stated goal of AI companies is to automate all labor. They won't just sit back happily collecting checks if there are parts of the human parts of the economy which they can't automate, that's revenue that they could easily capture. Whatever people claim AI lacks today will just be added to it in 6 months, AI companies are strongly incentivized to work towards this.
And at the end of the day, work is a transaction between employees and employers. A company's primary purpose is to generate money for shareholders, and human labor is just how it gets done. It doesn't matter if I _want_ to talk to a nice coworker instead of Claude 4.6 opus. If Claude costs less than my nice worker and has the same or better output, the company will happily replace that coworker with Claude because its strictly beneficial for the company.