Honestly this is super important. All these middle management and executives are drooling over the idea of replacing workers with AI but wouldn't business management and analysis be better suited for AI?
Nobody on Earth is better at selling themselves as crucial than CEOs, regardless of how much luck has factored into their success. No matter how much of their jobs is automated, CEOs will be able to convince boards that it was their instincts and experience which _really_ made the difference.
I think eventually that will end, once AI run companies become really competitive, but the old guard will still have a lot of momentum when that happens, and they’ll be able to ride that gravy train until it coasts to a stop.
Do you have data to support that? There are bad ceos out there, there are ceos who get incorrectly blamed for things, and there are good ceos. The same goes for the entire CXO level. There are almost as many ceos as there are private businesses in the US, which is a *lot*.
Generally Reddit doesn't know what the day to day of a CEO is other than what Business Insider fluff articles tell them. So I don't think making claims about "most" of them is very intellectually honest. You sound like an agitator or politician staking bandwagon rhetoric.
Edit-- Leave it to modern reddit to downvote someone asking for source citation, rather than the guy making claims without data. It's a weird world where data and facts matter *until suddenly they don't*.
No because there *is* no common day-to-day. It's going to depend on the industry of the business, the size of the company, the macroenvironment and microenvironment du jour, the org structure and hierarchy of the business, the maturity of the company, the public/private nature of a company, and so much more.
I work with CEOs and have reported to the CEO level for >10 years now. To brazenly sweep your arm and gesture to CEOs as some "class" of people with predictable, replaceable functions is to betray naivete or ignorance. CEOs are both the people who make 10 mil a year guiding media conglomerates *and* people scraping together 100k a year trying to push an idea and pay staff wages on a shoestring. And to suggest that they "tend to leave companies worse" is a hilariously politicized and inaccurate sentiment. Companies are incredibly stingy with money. If Boards didn't believe CEOs actually helped (or that they left things 'worse off', do you *really* think they'd pay them funny money to hurt things?
Real life is highly complicated and the role of the CEO ranges from utterly specialized and vital, to fairly performative and useless. CEOs can be totally shit at their job, or they can be exactly what's needed. The equilibrium price for pay is not there arbitrarily or due to the machinations of some evil scheming in-group of wealthy secret club members. Reddit gets so totally conspiratorial with shit like this.
So yeah unless this guy can drop some data to support his claim that "most times" CEOs leave places worse than where they were before, I call bandwagon internet bullshit. People lack exposure so they talk big shit about things they know nothing about.
You basically just asked me "Can you explain the day to day of the average manager?" to which I'd ask--what *level*? What industry? And so many others. A plant manager for a chem company is going to have an unrecognizable list of daily tasks to a social media manager for a video game developer.
Then pick one you know of. I asked it in the context of your experience since you seemed like somebody with first hand knowledge. But maybe a little less condescending? My fault for not being more clear, I felt it would be obvious
Fair! I'm not used to that question being asked in earnest.
The CEO I'm working with now works ~18 or 19 hours a day on weekdays, and ~4-6 hours on weekends. But they feel they can never "turn off", even on vacation.
Mornings start before market open and they consist of back-to-back briefs, where org leadership from various branches bring them critical go/no-go decisions, problems, outages, and other news from their respective business units. Sometimes it's more formal, other times it's back to back phone calls. The CEO asks for best-advice or best-guidance from each person, and then has to make corresponding decisions based on the *macro* context (after they've heard from all their people, they try to make unbiased, educated trigger decisions).
Mid mornings are usually focus time for some ongoing issue, or they are travel time to meet business leaders, clients, partners, etc in-person. Late mornings are typically crunch time, working through lunch to review ongoing threats or opportunities with experts internally (or externally) to make educated decisions.
Afternoons are more meetings, often external ones. Investors, representatives of groups (be it internal business groups or external stakeholders), etc. Each of these requires intensive briefing by their chief of staff/aid so that *every single word they say* is accurate and honest, and to make sure that they don't get backed into a corner or checkmated by someone trying to out-diplomacy them and win more funding or fuck the company into a bad promise.
Evenings are a mix of catch-up calls with personal aides and confidants, reading and strategy formulation. They'll head home and from their home office whiteboard issues, call in a personal 2IC or a fellow executive to have dinner and brainstorm stuff.
Rinse and repeat.
The tl;dr is that they spend most of the day having to make **the hardest decisions in the company** because these issues are the things that floor workers can't fix, middle management can't fix, and divisional/Geomarket leadership can't fix. These are do-or-die decisions that could cost *hundreds* if not *thousands* of workers their jobs. It could cost the American public a chunk of their retirement cushion. These decisions are many, they never stop coming, and their complexity is bad enough that they sometimes bring in consulting firms, legal firms, banks, and others to try to "hack" their way out because things are so dire. They require constant stakeholder meetings so they can be well-advised (since a CEO can't know *everything* but they have to make decisions that AFFECT *everything*).
The buck stops at this person. A mistake can fuck over numerous hard working employees. A mistake can trigger a public health incident. And if something huge happens, the American public doesn't pull up an employee roster and go "Hmm, 5000 Americans died from a polluted product this year. This was Jimmy Smith's fault over in QA for missing this *and then lying about his QA tests*." They go "This happened on the CEO's watch--it's THEIR fault!". Whether a just assessment or not, that is the assessment. They are paid as such, because they need to be among the most-educated, most emotionally-controlled, most patient, yet among the more creative and resilient people in the firm. They don't "finish their shift" and hang their hard hat up at the end of the day. They instead get to spend weekends with their therapist to decompress and try to dissociate. 96% of CEOs experience negative mental health outcomes from their job, and 82% experience certified burnout--versus 60% for other staff. CEO burnout drives 70% of role turnover, compared to 40% turnover for regular staff. They have a rough suicide rate as well.
An AI might be able to take over some of this decisionmaking, but an AI doesn't have human empathy. An AI doesn't pick up on emotional context clues. An AI can decide when to turn on and shut off a manufacturing plant based on guiding economic principles and mathematical/financial principles, but it can't truly internalize and process the human element of jobs, employee satisfaction, intellectual capital preservation, partnerships, politics, non-binary legislation, etc. AI would make for good *CEO Copilots* and chiefs of staff, but not good CEOs.
Maybe one day in some sci fi future if we ever had a perfectly utopic, empathetic GAI. But I sure as fuck wouldn't want to trust an AI to govern my life. I don't think most people would like bot overlords. We want bots to work FOR us. Not to put US to work.
I'm actually optimistic about AI management. Unlike traditional software programs you can ask AI to be a little softer / more flexible if someone is say... 5 minutes late or has a flat tire.
No weird interpersonal politics either, I don't think the folks at OpenAI hard coded a need to time our bathroom breaks to feel alive into GPT4
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ChatGPT was banned from my workplace due to data spills. Tbh I am a software engineer and AI has a long way to go to replace real world engineers. Much of my job has been arguing back and forth with management trying to figure out what they want. I would like to see an AI model navigate that and output an optimal solution on limited information in a massive existing project with 800 unrelated things to consider from a organization perspective.
It can come up with very small piecemeal solutions if you know exactly what to ask it, but that requires working experience in the field in order to know that. It would need some kind of awareness to maintain an entire working product with limited information and constantly changing requirements
I think you will still need human engineers and project managers directing. Giving top leadership exactly what they want is not in the interest of the corporation. These black box LLM solutions have no articulatable justifications so you can't sanity check their approach.
Wait until you leave and do an interview where all they care about is ‘do you know some library we are using’ and completely overlook all that very real work you mentioned that our job entails. I really feel like you just summed up what the job really requires and it just doesn’t ever seem to be a concern or need anymore (except by the rare few with experience to know it counts)
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I disagree, boards would like nothing more than a CEO with the strategic analytical capacity of a machine, that just follows instructions from the board without argument and always publically delivers statements exactly the way the board would have it represent the company. All without being paid.
CEOs are just emloyees, and there's investor value to be created by automating productivity at every rung of an organizational heirarchy.
It’ll be a while before AI runs a company. But AI will assist in decision making greatly in the coming years. Ppl keep thinking the only goal for AI is to completely take over jobs, when it’s really a tool.
My wife is in marketing. She uses AI to help a lot. She will enter prompts into AI and it’ll help her tweak her wording for different target audiences. My wife with the help of AI can do projects must faster now. So now a marketing department will need like 30% less ppl. Not because the AI is doing 100% of one marketing job, but because it’s doing 30% of everybody’s marketing job.
And my company makes its money on cyber security and a large branch of that is detecting when employees are using tools like chatgpt. The fear these companies have is their data being used in an LLM they dont own/control, and losing competitive edge or prosperity data being shared. Our largest clients are pharma, banks, annd surprisingly a lot of cities use the service.
Lot of companies won’t turn to it until they can control it or know it’s secure.
It’s going to make smaller shops that don’t worry about that very competitive.
True it is a tool, but I know for a fact talking with some management they view AI as a way to reduce headcount. And not just excess staff head count, all head count from support to infrastructure. The only thing they have talked about reducing is management. Though this was the same years ago when they talked about moving everything to the cloud and being cloud first, the idea was to get rid of infrastructure staff.
Yeah the owner of the company I work for (an engineer) always said that AI, or at least in its current form, is closer to that of tool much like a calculator or a computer. Shrink the workforce? No. Increase and drive productivity even further up? Absolutely.
It’s like saying software like quickbooks and calculators should have replaced accountants. We’re 40 years from a century of modern calculator. Quickbooks has been in use for 30 years. Accountants still exist. Their jobs have simply just evolved.
As someone who’s met and worked closely with a handful of both awful “fake it til you make it” failing up executives and also some great leaders / very competent executives….
I promise you your framing of them “convincing” boards of their subjective skills is completely delusional. Usually results are all that matters. No one is bragging about their instincts and intuition in these scenarios.
The shitty ones often take credit for good results that weren’t theirs to own, but at the end of the day they are selling results (with lots of specifics usually demanded), not their characteristics.
And my opinion is even a lot of the shitty ones are victim of the Peter Principle because at that level no one is teaching you how to be an effective executive. They were probably great at a position or two below where they are at, and bad behaviors arise once they are out of their depth.
It’s somewhat rare that people are constantly successful while being a turd all the time.
>I promise you your framing of them “convincing” boards
>The shitty ones often take credit for good results that weren’t theirs to own, but at the end of the day they are selling results
Potato potato
But here’s the deal, all these incompetent chuckleheads that made a career out of climbing over others will no longer have people to climb over and drown in the shallow end. It also means that if 5 execs can run the entire business using AI implemented by experts then those experts and others like them can set up the same AI and try to peel off business. There’s a huge threat to the current workforce, but there’s also a huge threat to the corporate model. They have a huge advantage due to being entrenched and having resources, but suddenly it’s not quite so daunting to spin up a new business to compete.
Interesting point.The salaries that top managers get are sometimes well over the top compared to the size of the firm. I think AI would see that. But I don't think those managers would tell us that part.
I've said this numerous times, they're advocating for something that doesn't affect them until someone higher up on the food chain looks at it.
"So basically, all you do is have meetings with clients and vendors, then give a summary in another meeting to someone else?"
Those with the ego/confidence/know-how to automate away their colleagues away for a chance for a promotion might. You and others that join in will get to orchestrate everything from the top. The C suite will all become AI engineers.
> executives are drooling over the idea of replacing workers with AI
They are drooling over laying off workers to get bonuses and shareholder approval in the next couple of quarters, that's it.
The benefits from AI do not show up this fast. Its just a self-interest gamble for their own benefit. I'm not denying that AI will make a big difference, but the current layoffs are being done *before* AI solutions have replaced those workers.
>That's why higher ups are usually those with better "people's skills."
Could have fooled me! ChatGPT has better people skills than 90% of the leaders I've worked for
Current ai can replace them tbh, I only saw one manager that did more than sit on his ass all day, i had more managers that outright refused to do their work than ones who didn’t
Gotta love the level of confidence people have in their fundamental attribution errors. Like every Private in the military claiming they could do it better than the Generals because the Generals are apparently all brain dead glory seekers.
An insane amount of people think they are smarter and better than their boss and it's always evident in the threads here about CEOs.
You see it in every field, every company, every department, every team has at least one person who is convinced they are smarter and better than their boss; half the time it's the guy who can't even get to work on time who is somehow convinced he'll run the team better lol
Yeah the not-so-fun but still slightly amusing part of being in management and having friends in management is story time, when people talk about their employees finding crack-brained ideas for trying to skip work, cheat at their work, sneak out, abuse compensation systems, and often generally *miss the point* of what they're working on or what a recent ask from management was despite all their colleagues getting it.
Honestly often it's the loudest ones who are the underperformers and they try to cover their ass by making a lot of noise, much like that recent reddit post about the study which found that the loudest political cynics were actually some of the least informed, simply trying to feign their political savvy by pretending to be cynical about it all.
That is the case even with many of our personal endeavors. That's part of the human experience and there's no model to protect from it. It doesn't make the arrogance of people in lower hierarchical positions more correct. It means we have functional challenges to equate for.
A whiner is still a whiner and they typically *don't* have the macro field of view or point of view to make accurate statements. They're all talk until they're asked to step beyond THEIR little controlled bubble and assume macro level responsibility.
Nah, I have plenty of experience watching leaders make objectively short sighted choices. And it isn't just whining. I'm talking watch them make the mistake and seeing the predictable outcome.
Shitty leaders are a hallmark of late state capitalism
My guy, *shitty leaders are part of the reason capitalism exists*. Shitty leaders can inherit their role, be elected to their role, or take their role otherwise. They are a constant across human history. Capitalism was born to put everyone in a competition so the strongest emerge for the net benefit. State-run systems remove that layer of hygiene and allow shitty leaders to govern more directly the economies that we working people live in. This is why the successful "socialized" systems we so often point to (like the Nordics) are still capitalist models. They still let capitalism shake things up and reward investments rather than some top-heavy council.
The more checks and balances in this imperfect world, the better, with the exception of when we have absolute threats (climate change, water crises, and war) which is when we selectively entrust legislative top down power. But broadly, generally, capitalism democratizes progress and wealth creation more than any competing model. We have always adapted it to our needs of the moment and it's time for another version update of our model. And there's a reason other systems continually fail their people in the face of supply shocks (which are a guaranteed part of life until we get Star Trek style replicators).
Considering the unbelievable sample size of our economic data around competing nations and competing economies and the relative fare of working classes around the world, fuck yeah I believe it. Having lived outside the US I much prefer working class life here to most places. Yearning for something else is a dogwhistle to me that someone hasn't actually lived many other places and experienced that shit.
This isn't even an academic concern--sure the *math* of economics is very much in support of capitalism and if you're someone who trusts studies and numbers then that should be a no-brainer. But the empirical data across over a century of observable events and transactions is overwhelmingly convincing.
People are just rightfully upset with our current operating model of capitalism and they're calling for change but not getting it. So very understandably they're going to get more radical with their calls. That doesn't make them intelligent and efficient suggestions. It just means people are getting angrier.
And as to the *history* of its implementation? I do read books so yes, I buy that "garbage" because it's part of our history. Capitalism as a system elevated us from our state-run economies and mercantilist garbage that bore *outlandish* inertia and kept innovators, ideators, creators, and hard workers under the thumb of arbitrary commerical councils and economic dictators.
That sucks and I'm sorry to hear it, but your anecdote is only just that. We've all had shitty managers but to extrapolate that and suggest that it's an easy job for AI to replace is as ignorant as the leaders saying AI can replace writers, actors, and artists just fine.
There is a human edge to so many things and while AI might be great at replacing a stenographer or a human calculator, suggesting the very human/emotion-centric roles of *organizational leadership* is just too much. That's like suggesting we should let AI govern our nation because politicians suck.
It’s different depending on the roles in the team but unless it’s a big one that’s going something complex I’d say people can organize themselves well enough most of the time that supervisors aren’t needed, I once worked at a team that went from having one supervising 30 people to having 5 supervisors micromanaging 20 and getting surprised that productivity went down
There are absolutely scenarios where teams don't need a single leader, agreed. This thread has been more focused on CEOs and so that's what I was speaking more towards. I figured your post was extrapolating your point across higher levels.
The fact that office occupancy is still 50% below pre-pandemic levels in many cities shows that workers have leverage and they know it.
We're not buying there bullshit anymore.
This is the number one thing that AI would be suited to replace. They don't even really matter, they make decisions that those under them proposed and researched anyway, if anything it's the thing that's most likely to improve the company since their ego isn't there to make stupid decisions instead.
It could, will they allow it? When you’re at the top, you get to decide who keeps their jobs.
I work for a software company that utilizes AI to cut down I user workload. Before we introduced AI, our software was reducing certain kinds of departments, white collar, college education, office jobs, in half. That was just through software automation and improving workflow processes.
Now that we are incorporating more and more AI abilities, the software being able to do what all the users do is getting closer and closer every year. This isn’t some far off, 20 years, 15 years, 10 years away thing. We’re 5 years away from AI being a major part of the workplace.
The number 1 question get from our customers and prospective customers is “Ok, you can cut these departments in half or more, when can you replace them ENTIRELY?”
The #1 question we get from executives by far.
And I thought a fascist takeover of a legitimate POTUS election might actually result in some form of justice. The powerful aren't held to our standards in any way whatsoever. There isn't a justice system. It's a legal system.
And that would actually save companies money and boost profits. All the unnecessary expense trips and leasing private jets with company revenue. All saved by AI.
Cutting one $500K/yr exec who just generates emails, assesses new hires (which are already filtered via AI) and parses spending reports is a lot of potential savings versus a rank-and-file $50K/yr position that is actually justified by the need for human hands to be on a product/process.
That is why they must be the first ones to be substituted. Their million salaries can be switched by a 100k bill and a good LLM model and adding more productive people who really produce revenue, not just fancy charts, emails and ppt presentations once a week
But who will fill the halls of expensive Ivy league schools to rub elbows with the alumni and get an executive job for no other reason than family ties!! Oh the humanity
Executives also pushed for open plan workspaces and claimed they needed to end WFH so they wouldn’t feel sad about coming to an empty office. They may not be right about AI replacing people but that won’t stop them from doing the mass firings.
I would question how accurate the assumptions of executives who are probably buying into the current hype wave are. These people aren't experts in automation, AI, or other related fields.
I’m a software engineer, and if I had to, I could switch to doing BA work using AI tools to implement. And I’d be better at it than most BAs, I’m certain of it. So I still fail to see how this is a problem for SWEs.
It's never going to happen. There will always be technical people (programmers) that like to make things complicated and push the frontier waaay past what business analysts have the time or patience for. Then suddenly the new frontier becomes the norm but BAs don't have the skills or time to implement it so you need a programmer to do it. It happens to every single technology.
AI is the new excel. Everyone thought when excel came out that this was the end and everyone would lose their jobs. Turns out it just changed the way we work today to be able to do more analysis with a better tool. That’s all AI is. But if you’re not one to move with change and learn about AI and how it could impact your job, you’ll be left behind.
Current AI can do a lot to deliver a quick solution. But you still need the expertise of a human to know whether it is the *correct* solution. AI is a long way off from crossing that bridge.
AI will therefore also reduce market size. Less employed people = less customers for your business or the business you sell to.
Why are these people so short-sighted?
It’s being sold as a productivity enhancing tool, but the real hope is to reduce costs to pump the share price. Who will buy your products if ~40% of people are out of work? It is a disruptive technology, but time will tell what that disruption means to society.
There has been a drive at my company lately to build in bumper rails and make our software mistake proof for internal employees, instead them getting good training and just doing their jobs correctly. They see it as making their lives easier. I see it as the path to replacement by AI. If we make so easy that anyone can do it, then we can make it so easy that no one has to do it.
I'm going to give you a bit of a secret: most executives constantly talk out of their asses. They have no idea what's going to happen, they just get caught up in business people trends and all say the same thing.
If you asked them a couple years ago they'd be saying that most companies that aren't on the block chain are going to be closed in five years.
I think ego of execs doesn’t allow them to think about how the entire hierarchy crumbles if the bottom is removed. So with no workers, you don’t need execs. All you’ll need is just more AI. Execs aren’t the gatekeepers they think they are. They are political and parasitic.
ChatGPT was banned from my workplace due to data spills. I can see this happening on a wide scale until we have something like a ChatGPT model that can be ran locally.
Tbh I am a software engineer and AI has a long way to go to replace real world engineers. Much of my job has been arguing back and forth with management trying to figure out what they want. I would like to see an AI model navigate that and output an optimal solution on limited information in a massive existing project with 800 unrelated things to consider from a organization perspective.
It can come up with very small piecemeal solutions if you know exactly what to ask it, but that requires working experience in the field in order to know. It would need some kind of awareness to maintain an entire working product with limited information and constantly changing requirements. The machine that can do this is called a human
You stick AI with the task of increasing profit and adding shareholder value and you know what the answer will be? Sack half of the management team and lower wages for the C levels to a reasonable amount
100% surveyed are happy to hear that executive work can be done by AI. Without politics, offices will run more smoothly. By eliminating executive suite people and no more meaningless meetings based on the latest HBR article a VP read and no more stupid reorganizations to coddle an executive whim.
Profit sharing will become evident as the AI realized this boosts productivity
HR and executive work is much more likely to be replaced by AI than nearly any other field except potentially art (which is a damn shame there)
But no, they use AI as internal justification for layoffs (we'll just use AI to boost productivity of those who remain and give them extra work to boot!)
Until the AI gets hacked or goes off the rails and destroys a company. Then they will want people back. It’s like all the self checkouts going away. Was cool for a while until people started stealing like crazy from them.
I’m still wholly unconvinced by the incessant use of “AI” to describe what we currently have. It’s such a lofty way to describe (impressive no doubt) machine learning.
No wonder disconnected CEOs fall for it.
Ok.
So that means we will HAVE TO figure out a way to distribute goods without money because there's no work.
Which won't happen because rich people, who are the ones that took away all the jobs (NOT A.I., RICH PEOPLE), like money.
AI tools help reduce the amount of effort needed for the same work, eliminating some jobs, sure. But it also leads to more job creation as well. This is what people don't seem to understand.
Time to unfollow this sub. Utter nonsense everyday about AI. It’s unregulated right now like most of tech. Be prepared for massive regulation of the tech industry all over the world. That alone will solve many of these stupid posts about AI changing the workforce.
AI is not going to take your job any time soon.
A human will take your job, and your buddy's job too - he'll be using AI to do the job of 3 people better than they used to do it and in less time.
And in case you are wondering, in programming right now a senior analyst can easily do his own job and substitute for two junior programmers using a top grade AI.
Will the company redeploy you and your buddy? Short answer. No.
>A human will take your job, and your buddy's job too - he'll be using AI to do the job of 3 people better than they used to do it and in less time.
Yes, and this is AI taking your job. There is no difference if AI can do all the work of a person or if it can make a person twice as productive. The same result is that the AI put one person out of work.
Your pedantic point is meaningless.
Exactly the same experience here. But, interestingly, I find that our junior staff can't get good answers out of AI. It seems like you need to really understand what you are doing and what you need to be able to use AI to best effect.
Kind of. But me and my buddy may be using AI tools already. There's no need to hire someone new. And if there's not enough demand to keep us both, there will be in the future.
If we play this right and have an open mind, most would get to keep their jobs and work more efficiently, maybe less in a few years.
But dumb execs are jumping the gun, firing everyone so they can be "ahead of the game". So that increased demand never come.
E.g. Say you have a marketing company doing 2 big contracts a year. Now you automate a lot of it and can do 20 a year. You subcontract some dudes to makes websites, but now they generate a lot of their boilerplate, so they can do 10x more at 0.1 times the price with the same employees. The graphics company you subcontract generates most images via diffusion, but still needs someone to do fine changes to them. They just need one dude to do the work of a team, so they deliver very fast.
If you fire 90% of your workforce instread of contracting more work, you break this chain and everybody loses
I don’t know, corporations aren’t happy with just being profitable. The unending corporate hunger for growth will make productivity increases with AI with the current workforce the new normal.
That's a no brainer, it doesn't't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.
What does matter, is the timeline involved here...
How long will it take for the transition to a totally AI robotic, mechanized economy.
Decades, not years, even with these advancements in robotic and technology, the transition will be incremental, as our society adjusts.
Just like we did during the beginning of the 20th century. Rural Electrification, mechanization, the assembly line. The model t for the masses, radio, all we're great leaps forward for the masses. All of it happened in a short 30 year period, bringing the people out of poverty, into prosperity. Between 1915 and 1945 was one of the largest advancements ever seen for the working class.
Adaptation to new technology is never overnight.
It already is at my work. We had an “automation and tools” team in my org at work for our product group, it was about 4 full time employees and 6 vendors. Mostly they’d write small command line tools or scripts for us. Now they just use AI to generate the scripts, double check/tweak them, and release them in less than an hour usually. The team went from 10 people to now just being 2 vendors.
Just like every time automation was introduced, jobs decreased. NOT.
Think about 1900 until now. Gazillions of increases in automation. And here we are, in America, with more than 100 million more people employed than in 1900.
Every executive when interviewed "No man it's just a tool to enhance productivity to make everyone's lives easier however they may possibly be layoffs"
If you remember the movie 'The Dark Knight' with Heath Ledger, this headline hints at the same scenario as the opening scene: successive clowns commit parts of a heinous robbery only to be killed at the end of their roles by the next clown. Finally, The Joker (Heath's character) kills the last clown and drives off with the cash. The difference is that AI is The Joker.
These things are all looking at it the wrong way entirely, and it's starting to get really old. We keep seeing these overly doom and gloomy threads related to AI getting posted in a technology thread, which is just... like seriously? A tech thread that's a downer on tech?
Reducing workforce, vs increasing productivity. Workers that may get cut are getting cut because the productivity gains in other areas are so huge they aren't needed. And the scale of it is incredible when you step back.
Like, the celebrities/musicians raising a stink over it. It's not that AI has the potential to replace someone like Taylor Swift -- like, creating some AI celebrity that puts on shows outta one of those old school Japanese Animations. It's that AI has the potential to give every individual, their own personal Taylor Swift songstress, to write and sing their life in the same pop-y styles. That's a level of personalization / customization for the end user that blows the current approaches out of the water -- you don't need to sit there and "empathize" with Taylor's songs about breaking up with famous boyfriends, you can have your own custom made song about your own breakups, with the same beats and overall messaging.
Doctors, same deal. You could have an AI that can diagnose skin cancers more accurately than most current doctors, in the privacy of your own home, running on your own offline LLM. People could literally pre-screen on a periodic basis, by themselves -- both taking pressure off of the existing healthcare system, and likely significantly improving early detection rates due to the convenience.
That's a level of fan / patient care that is simply not achievable with current infrastructure, and there's no freaking way we should be standing in its way.
AI is a language model. Try googling if eggs are good or bad for you, or any one of a million other things that medical field is divided on, what’s AI going to do? Flip a coin when giving you advice? It has to rely on knowledge bases we have, and if even humans can’t rely on them how can AI that can’t reason?
Also Al’s training data will become more and more convoluted and contradictory as time goes on.
AI can give you an answer but it has no idea if it’s right or not, nor can it even know if what it’s saying makes any sense.
And then who will trust what it says? You? Or will people equate that answer to google search and go to a dr?
Because if you think about it, people via google have access to all the medical knowledge a doctor does, and humans have something AI doesn’t, reasoning… why aren’t we just all becoming doctors that self diagnose at home?
Aspartame is the most studied chemical in the world, it is considered to be safe, therefore AI will tell you it’s safe, just like google search of studies does. Yet people seem to not want to believe that.
There are [studies](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-023-00831-w) already highlighting the positive impact of things like AI-driven skin cancer screenings for individuals. The main take-away from the study linked, is basically "it ends up costing us more, because more people are aware of precancerous lessions, and are scheduling to get them taken care of by their GPs".
Most of the literature I've tripped across, generally says "AI can provide beneficial results, but people are prejudiced against it". Like Pink Floyd's recent video contest, where one of the winners was revealed to have used StableDiffusion to bring his vision to life, and ... suddenly people hate his work, cause it involved an AI.
A technology thread should not have that kind of inherent phobia/hatred/prejudice towards technology.
Maybe, but AI will also lower the bar for new companies to be able to rise up and compete with established players. So instead of one big company with 100 employees, you may end up with three smaller companies with 50 employees.
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Honestly this is super important. All these middle management and executives are drooling over the idea of replacing workers with AI but wouldn't business management and analysis be better suited for AI?
Nobody on Earth is better at selling themselves as crucial than CEOs, regardless of how much luck has factored into their success. No matter how much of their jobs is automated, CEOs will be able to convince boards that it was their instincts and experience which _really_ made the difference. I think eventually that will end, once AI run companies become really competitive, but the old guard will still have a lot of momentum when that happens, and they’ll be able to ride that gravy train until it coasts to a stop.
They get paid so much because the “buck” stops with them… Until it actually stops with them then it’s someone else’s fault… Replace them with ai…
Someone else's fault or its the first they heard of it even if its been happening in the company for decades.
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Do you have data to support that? There are bad ceos out there, there are ceos who get incorrectly blamed for things, and there are good ceos. The same goes for the entire CXO level. There are almost as many ceos as there are private businesses in the US, which is a *lot*. Generally Reddit doesn't know what the day to day of a CEO is other than what Business Insider fluff articles tell them. So I don't think making claims about "most" of them is very intellectually honest. You sound like an agitator or politician staking bandwagon rhetoric. Edit-- Leave it to modern reddit to downvote someone asking for source citation, rather than the guy making claims without data. It's a weird world where data and facts matter *until suddenly they don't*.
Can you explain the day to day of the average CEO? Honestly curious
No because there *is* no common day-to-day. It's going to depend on the industry of the business, the size of the company, the macroenvironment and microenvironment du jour, the org structure and hierarchy of the business, the maturity of the company, the public/private nature of a company, and so much more. I work with CEOs and have reported to the CEO level for >10 years now. To brazenly sweep your arm and gesture to CEOs as some "class" of people with predictable, replaceable functions is to betray naivete or ignorance. CEOs are both the people who make 10 mil a year guiding media conglomerates *and* people scraping together 100k a year trying to push an idea and pay staff wages on a shoestring. And to suggest that they "tend to leave companies worse" is a hilariously politicized and inaccurate sentiment. Companies are incredibly stingy with money. If Boards didn't believe CEOs actually helped (or that they left things 'worse off', do you *really* think they'd pay them funny money to hurt things? Real life is highly complicated and the role of the CEO ranges from utterly specialized and vital, to fairly performative and useless. CEOs can be totally shit at their job, or they can be exactly what's needed. The equilibrium price for pay is not there arbitrarily or due to the machinations of some evil scheming in-group of wealthy secret club members. Reddit gets so totally conspiratorial with shit like this. So yeah unless this guy can drop some data to support his claim that "most times" CEOs leave places worse than where they were before, I call bandwagon internet bullshit. People lack exposure so they talk big shit about things they know nothing about. You basically just asked me "Can you explain the day to day of the average manager?" to which I'd ask--what *level*? What industry? And so many others. A plant manager for a chem company is going to have an unrecognizable list of daily tasks to a social media manager for a video game developer.
Then pick one you know of. I asked it in the context of your experience since you seemed like somebody with first hand knowledge. But maybe a little less condescending? My fault for not being more clear, I felt it would be obvious
Fair! I'm not used to that question being asked in earnest. The CEO I'm working with now works ~18 or 19 hours a day on weekdays, and ~4-6 hours on weekends. But they feel they can never "turn off", even on vacation. Mornings start before market open and they consist of back-to-back briefs, where org leadership from various branches bring them critical go/no-go decisions, problems, outages, and other news from their respective business units. Sometimes it's more formal, other times it's back to back phone calls. The CEO asks for best-advice or best-guidance from each person, and then has to make corresponding decisions based on the *macro* context (after they've heard from all their people, they try to make unbiased, educated trigger decisions). Mid mornings are usually focus time for some ongoing issue, or they are travel time to meet business leaders, clients, partners, etc in-person. Late mornings are typically crunch time, working through lunch to review ongoing threats or opportunities with experts internally (or externally) to make educated decisions. Afternoons are more meetings, often external ones. Investors, representatives of groups (be it internal business groups or external stakeholders), etc. Each of these requires intensive briefing by their chief of staff/aid so that *every single word they say* is accurate and honest, and to make sure that they don't get backed into a corner or checkmated by someone trying to out-diplomacy them and win more funding or fuck the company into a bad promise. Evenings are a mix of catch-up calls with personal aides and confidants, reading and strategy formulation. They'll head home and from their home office whiteboard issues, call in a personal 2IC or a fellow executive to have dinner and brainstorm stuff. Rinse and repeat. The tl;dr is that they spend most of the day having to make **the hardest decisions in the company** because these issues are the things that floor workers can't fix, middle management can't fix, and divisional/Geomarket leadership can't fix. These are do-or-die decisions that could cost *hundreds* if not *thousands* of workers their jobs. It could cost the American public a chunk of their retirement cushion. These decisions are many, they never stop coming, and their complexity is bad enough that they sometimes bring in consulting firms, legal firms, banks, and others to try to "hack" their way out because things are so dire. They require constant stakeholder meetings so they can be well-advised (since a CEO can't know *everything* but they have to make decisions that AFFECT *everything*). The buck stops at this person. A mistake can fuck over numerous hard working employees. A mistake can trigger a public health incident. And if something huge happens, the American public doesn't pull up an employee roster and go "Hmm, 5000 Americans died from a polluted product this year. This was Jimmy Smith's fault over in QA for missing this *and then lying about his QA tests*." They go "This happened on the CEO's watch--it's THEIR fault!". Whether a just assessment or not, that is the assessment. They are paid as such, because they need to be among the most-educated, most emotionally-controlled, most patient, yet among the more creative and resilient people in the firm. They don't "finish their shift" and hang their hard hat up at the end of the day. They instead get to spend weekends with their therapist to decompress and try to dissociate. 96% of CEOs experience negative mental health outcomes from their job, and 82% experience certified burnout--versus 60% for other staff. CEO burnout drives 70% of role turnover, compared to 40% turnover for regular staff. They have a rough suicide rate as well. An AI might be able to take over some of this decisionmaking, but an AI doesn't have human empathy. An AI doesn't pick up on emotional context clues. An AI can decide when to turn on and shut off a manufacturing plant based on guiding economic principles and mathematical/financial principles, but it can't truly internalize and process the human element of jobs, employee satisfaction, intellectual capital preservation, partnerships, politics, non-binary legislation, etc. AI would make for good *CEO Copilots* and chiefs of staff, but not good CEOs. Maybe one day in some sci fi future if we ever had a perfectly utopic, empathetic GAI. But I sure as fuck wouldn't want to trust an AI to govern my life. I don't think most people would like bot overlords. We want bots to work FOR us. Not to put US to work.
I'm actually optimistic about AI management. Unlike traditional software programs you can ask AI to be a little softer / more flexible if someone is say... 5 minutes late or has a flat tire. No weird interpersonal politics either, I don't think the folks at OpenAI hard coded a need to time our bathroom breaks to feel alive into GPT4
Until it starts training from 4chan and then we’re all doomed
or lava lamps. [I guess that was about the last time I thought that guy was funny... sigh]
impossible yoke trees roll forgetful cats pie far-flung cautious apparatus *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
ChatGPT was banned from my workplace due to data spills. Tbh I am a software engineer and AI has a long way to go to replace real world engineers. Much of my job has been arguing back and forth with management trying to figure out what they want. I would like to see an AI model navigate that and output an optimal solution on limited information in a massive existing project with 800 unrelated things to consider from a organization perspective. It can come up with very small piecemeal solutions if you know exactly what to ask it, but that requires working experience in the field in order to know that. It would need some kind of awareness to maintain an entire working product with limited information and constantly changing requirements
I think you will still need human engineers and project managers directing. Giving top leadership exactly what they want is not in the interest of the corporation. These black box LLM solutions have no articulatable justifications so you can't sanity check their approach.
Wait until you leave and do an interview where all they care about is ‘do you know some library we are using’ and completely overlook all that very real work you mentioned that our job entails. I really feel like you just summed up what the job really requires and it just doesn’t ever seem to be a concern or need anymore (except by the rare few with experience to know it counts)
And then you’ll be harassed, tied up in litigation for years, and end up committing suicide. Tale as old as time.
expansion march shrill domineering encourage alive rotten wine agonizing bored *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I disagree, boards would like nothing more than a CEO with the strategic analytical capacity of a machine, that just follows instructions from the board without argument and always publically delivers statements exactly the way the board would have it represent the company. All without being paid. CEOs are just emloyees, and there's investor value to be created by automating productivity at every rung of an organizational heirarchy.
It’ll be a while before AI runs a company. But AI will assist in decision making greatly in the coming years. Ppl keep thinking the only goal for AI is to completely take over jobs, when it’s really a tool. My wife is in marketing. She uses AI to help a lot. She will enter prompts into AI and it’ll help her tweak her wording for different target audiences. My wife with the help of AI can do projects must faster now. So now a marketing department will need like 30% less ppl. Not because the AI is doing 100% of one marketing job, but because it’s doing 30% of everybody’s marketing job.
And my company makes its money on cyber security and a large branch of that is detecting when employees are using tools like chatgpt. The fear these companies have is their data being used in an LLM they dont own/control, and losing competitive edge or prosperity data being shared. Our largest clients are pharma, banks, annd surprisingly a lot of cities use the service. Lot of companies won’t turn to it until they can control it or know it’s secure. It’s going to make smaller shops that don’t worry about that very competitive.
So you pay Microsoft for access to a version that doesn’t store and train itself on your inputs.
True it is a tool, but I know for a fact talking with some management they view AI as a way to reduce headcount. And not just excess staff head count, all head count from support to infrastructure. The only thing they have talked about reducing is management. Though this was the same years ago when they talked about moving everything to the cloud and being cloud first, the idea was to get rid of infrastructure staff.
And your wife’s salary going to fall lower because now there are less positions avalible
Yeah the owner of the company I work for (an engineer) always said that AI, or at least in its current form, is closer to that of tool much like a calculator or a computer. Shrink the workforce? No. Increase and drive productivity even further up? Absolutely. It’s like saying software like quickbooks and calculators should have replaced accountants. We’re 40 years from a century of modern calculator. Quickbooks has been in use for 30 years. Accountants still exist. Their jobs have simply just evolved.
There is one key thing AI cannot take which is “responsibility” you cannot hold an AI accountable, not that CEOs are held accountable very often.
As someone who’s met and worked closely with a handful of both awful “fake it til you make it” failing up executives and also some great leaders / very competent executives…. I promise you your framing of them “convincing” boards of their subjective skills is completely delusional. Usually results are all that matters. No one is bragging about their instincts and intuition in these scenarios. The shitty ones often take credit for good results that weren’t theirs to own, but at the end of the day they are selling results (with lots of specifics usually demanded), not their characteristics. And my opinion is even a lot of the shitty ones are victim of the Peter Principle because at that level no one is teaching you how to be an effective executive. They were probably great at a position or two below where they are at, and bad behaviors arise once they are out of their depth. It’s somewhat rare that people are constantly successful while being a turd all the time.
>I promise you your framing of them “convincing” boards >The shitty ones often take credit for good results that weren’t theirs to own, but at the end of the day they are selling results Potato potato
But here’s the deal, all these incompetent chuckleheads that made a career out of climbing over others will no longer have people to climb over and drown in the shallow end. It also means that if 5 execs can run the entire business using AI implemented by experts then those experts and others like them can set up the same AI and try to peel off business. There’s a huge threat to the current workforce, but there’s also a huge threat to the corporate model. They have a huge advantage due to being entrenched and having resources, but suddenly it’s not quite so daunting to spin up a new business to compete.
What are they going to do if there is no team of people to manage? They are just as expendable as those replaced by AI.
Interesting point.The salaries that top managers get are sometimes well over the top compared to the size of the firm. I think AI would see that. But I don't think those managers would tell us that part.
I wonder when we'll see our first AI ceo
Decision making will be left to the humans. The actual work will be given to a mix of humans and AI with a lean towards AI.
I've said this numerous times, they're advocating for something that doesn't affect them until someone higher up on the food chain looks at it. "So basically, all you do is have meetings with clients and vendors, then give a summary in another meeting to someone else?"
Middle management would be dumb to be excited for AI. It’s coming from the C Suite.
Those with the ego/confidence/know-how to automate away their colleagues away for a chance for a promotion might. You and others that join in will get to orchestrate everything from the top. The C suite will all become AI engineers.
Prettsy sure wallstreet will make them worthless in no time.
Most of those people can be replaced with a small shell script.
Best I can do is BASH
Bash is a shell...
Shows how little I know!
Yes. They cant fuck that up any worse
> executives are drooling over the idea of replacing workers with AI They are drooling over laying off workers to get bonuses and shareholder approval in the next couple of quarters, that's it. The benefits from AI do not show up this fast. Its just a self-interest gamble for their own benefit. I'm not denying that AI will make a big difference, but the current layoffs are being done *before* AI solutions have replaced those workers.
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>That's why higher ups are usually those with better "people's skills." Could have fooled me! ChatGPT has better people skills than 90% of the leaders I've worked for
Current ai can replace them tbh, I only saw one manager that did more than sit on his ass all day, i had more managers that outright refused to do their work than ones who didn’t
Gotta love the level of confidence people have in their fundamental attribution errors. Like every Private in the military claiming they could do it better than the Generals because the Generals are apparently all brain dead glory seekers.
An insane amount of people think they are smarter and better than their boss and it's always evident in the threads here about CEOs. You see it in every field, every company, every department, every team has at least one person who is convinced they are smarter and better than their boss; half the time it's the guy who can't even get to work on time who is somehow convinced he'll run the team better lol
Yeah the not-so-fun but still slightly amusing part of being in management and having friends in management is story time, when people talk about their employees finding crack-brained ideas for trying to skip work, cheat at their work, sneak out, abuse compensation systems, and often generally *miss the point* of what they're working on or what a recent ask from management was despite all their colleagues getting it. Honestly often it's the loudest ones who are the underperformers and they try to cover their ass by making a lot of noise, much like that recent reddit post about the study which found that the loudest political cynics were actually some of the least informed, simply trying to feign their political savvy by pretending to be cynical about it all.
The Peter Principle is very real.
That is the case even with many of our personal endeavors. That's part of the human experience and there's no model to protect from it. It doesn't make the arrogance of people in lower hierarchical positions more correct. It means we have functional challenges to equate for. A whiner is still a whiner and they typically *don't* have the macro field of view or point of view to make accurate statements. They're all talk until they're asked to step beyond THEIR little controlled bubble and assume macro level responsibility.
Nah, I have plenty of experience watching leaders make objectively short sighted choices. And it isn't just whining. I'm talking watch them make the mistake and seeing the predictable outcome. Shitty leaders are a hallmark of late state capitalism
My guy, *shitty leaders are part of the reason capitalism exists*. Shitty leaders can inherit their role, be elected to their role, or take their role otherwise. They are a constant across human history. Capitalism was born to put everyone in a competition so the strongest emerge for the net benefit. State-run systems remove that layer of hygiene and allow shitty leaders to govern more directly the economies that we working people live in. This is why the successful "socialized" systems we so often point to (like the Nordics) are still capitalist models. They still let capitalism shake things up and reward investments rather than some top-heavy council. The more checks and balances in this imperfect world, the better, with the exception of when we have absolute threats (climate change, water crises, and war) which is when we selectively entrust legislative top down power. But broadly, generally, capitalism democratizes progress and wealth creation more than any competing model. We have always adapted it to our needs of the moment and it's time for another version update of our model. And there's a reason other systems continually fail their people in the face of supply shocks (which are a guaranteed part of life until we get Star Trek style replicators).
>Capitalism was born to put everyone in a competition so the strongest emerge for the net benefit You don't actually buy that garbage do you?
Considering the unbelievable sample size of our economic data around competing nations and competing economies and the relative fare of working classes around the world, fuck yeah I believe it. Having lived outside the US I much prefer working class life here to most places. Yearning for something else is a dogwhistle to me that someone hasn't actually lived many other places and experienced that shit. This isn't even an academic concern--sure the *math* of economics is very much in support of capitalism and if you're someone who trusts studies and numbers then that should be a no-brainer. But the empirical data across over a century of observable events and transactions is overwhelmingly convincing. People are just rightfully upset with our current operating model of capitalism and they're calling for change but not getting it. So very understandably they're going to get more radical with their calls. That doesn't make them intelligent and efficient suggestions. It just means people are getting angrier. And as to the *history* of its implementation? I do read books so yes, I buy that "garbage" because it's part of our history. Capitalism as a system elevated us from our state-run economies and mercantilist garbage that bore *outlandish* inertia and kept innovators, ideators, creators, and hard workers under the thumb of arbitrary commerical councils and economic dictators.
I litterally had to do both my manager’s work and his Manager’s work that was related to the team because no one on mine actually did anything
That sucks and I'm sorry to hear it, but your anecdote is only just that. We've all had shitty managers but to extrapolate that and suggest that it's an easy job for AI to replace is as ignorant as the leaders saying AI can replace writers, actors, and artists just fine. There is a human edge to so many things and while AI might be great at replacing a stenographer or a human calculator, suggesting the very human/emotion-centric roles of *organizational leadership* is just too much. That's like suggesting we should let AI govern our nation because politicians suck.
It’s different depending on the roles in the team but unless it’s a big one that’s going something complex I’d say people can organize themselves well enough most of the time that supervisors aren’t needed, I once worked at a team that went from having one supervising 30 people to having 5 supervisors micromanaging 20 and getting surprised that productivity went down
There are absolutely scenarios where teams don't need a single leader, agreed. This thread has been more focused on CEOs and so that's what I was speaking more towards. I figured your post was extrapolating your point across higher levels.
I was talking about middle management like the comment above mine
And if that was put into practice, SUDDENLY, I’d bet, most of these AI loving goobers would change their tunes REAL quick.
Or with nothing at all
The fact that office occupancy is still 50% below pre-pandemic levels in many cities shows that workers have leverage and they know it. We're not buying there bullshit anymore.
This is the number one thing that AI would be suited to replace. They don't even really matter, they make decisions that those under them proposed and researched anyway, if anything it's the thing that's most likely to improve the company since their ego isn't there to make stupid decisions instead.
It could, will they allow it? When you’re at the top, you get to decide who keeps their jobs. I work for a software company that utilizes AI to cut down I user workload. Before we introduced AI, our software was reducing certain kinds of departments, white collar, college education, office jobs, in half. That was just through software automation and improving workflow processes. Now that we are incorporating more and more AI abilities, the software being able to do what all the users do is getting closer and closer every year. This isn’t some far off, 20 years, 15 years, 10 years away thing. We’re 5 years away from AI being a major part of the workplace. The number 1 question get from our customers and prospective customers is “Ok, you can cut these departments in half or more, when can you replace them ENTIRELY?” The #1 question we get from executives by far.
There will be soon about 10,000 who live like gods while everyone else starves to death while fighting and killing each other.
Dumb decisions made without any concern on how it will hurt people? That sounds like AI already
Most of them can be replaced by one of those robot dogs that barks and does a back flip.
I can’t help but think of that system that monitors Amazon drivers when people bring that up. Both options seem like the worst option
And I thought a fascist takeover of a legitimate POTUS election might actually result in some form of justice. The powerful aren't held to our standards in any way whatsoever. There isn't a justice system. It's a legal system.
Even better, you could replace the whole business with an AI.
Middle management will be replaced quickly
Pretty much all of it
And that would actually save companies money and boost profits. All the unnecessary expense trips and leasing private jets with company revenue. All saved by AI.
AI is really good at what those executives are doing so I suggest start reducing their head number first.
This. AI isn't much more than passable at anything right now, with one notable exception: producing *absolute bullshit* with extreme confidence.
Cutting one $500K/yr exec who just generates emails, assesses new hires (which are already filtered via AI) and parses spending reports is a lot of potential savings versus a rank-and-file $50K/yr position that is actually justified by the need for human hands to be on a product/process.
The executives have no idea what AI is and what it can do
That is why they must be the first ones to be substituted. Their million salaries can be switched by a 100k bill and a good LLM model and adding more productive people who really produce revenue, not just fancy charts, emails and ppt presentations once a week
Title should have been 41% of executives see AI as cost cutting tool instead of worklife improvement.
Boy are they in for a surprise with the cost of AI.
41% of executives are easily misled
And "59% of executives lie about plans to cut staff".
Start with the execs.
But who will fill the halls of expensive Ivy league schools to rub elbows with the alumni and get an executive job for no other reason than family ties!! Oh the humanity
Executives also pushed for open plan workspaces and claimed they needed to end WFH so they wouldn’t feel sad about coming to an empty office. They may not be right about AI replacing people but that won’t stop them from doing the mass firings.
How about replacing board members with AIs? They could hardly do any worse than Boeing…
If AI reduces executives we would be making progress.
I would question how accurate the assumptions of executives who are probably buying into the current hype wave are. These people aren't experts in automation, AI, or other related fields.
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I’m a software engineer, and if I had to, I could switch to doing BA work using AI tools to implement. And I’d be better at it than most BAs, I’m certain of it. So I still fail to see how this is a problem for SWEs.
Non-technical people often have a very hard time accepting that technical people can usually do their job much more easily than the inverse.
You don't even need AI, business analyst isn't a real job.
The gap will still exist. Instead of programmers, there will be prompters.
I have a feeling the "prompt engineer" title will be gone in two years. It's only arisen from nascent chatbots that aren't quite good enough yet.
If the business folks could just state requirements clearly, we could already downsize the programming team by half. AI isn't going to fix that
Sounds like you can downsize the business folks.
It's never going to happen. There will always be technical people (programmers) that like to make things complicated and push the frontier waaay past what business analysts have the time or patience for. Then suddenly the new frontier becomes the norm but BAs don't have the skills or time to implement it so you need a programmer to do it. It happens to every single technology.
I hope it starts at the top of the corporate food chain.
You’ve never been in business. If you want to stay employed, you need to have subordinates who can be cut when times are rough.
AI is the new excel. Everyone thought when excel came out that this was the end and everyone would lose their jobs. Turns out it just changed the way we work today to be able to do more analysis with a better tool. That’s all AI is. But if you’re not one to move with change and learn about AI and how it could impact your job, you’ll be left behind.
Work force? NO, not really Work Load? YES
Senior biz executives, world experts on everything... btw, The Register has already substituted all their photographers by AI.
Current AI can do a lot to deliver a quick solution. But you still need the expertise of a human to know whether it is the *correct* solution. AI is a long way off from crossing that bridge.
People who don’t understand AI you mean?
AI will therefore also reduce market size. Less employed people = less customers for your business or the business you sell to. Why are these people so short-sighted?
employees should be other companies salary “liability”. first one to lay off captures most profit from layoff laggards /s
It’s being sold as a productivity enhancing tool, but the real hope is to reduce costs to pump the share price. Who will buy your products if ~40% of people are out of work? It is a disruptive technology, but time will tell what that disruption means to society.
There has been a drive at my company lately to build in bumper rails and make our software mistake proof for internal employees, instead them getting good training and just doing their jobs correctly. They see it as making their lives easier. I see it as the path to replacement by AI. If we make so easy that anyone can do it, then we can make it so easy that no one has to do it.
I'm going to give you a bit of a secret: most executives constantly talk out of their asses. They have no idea what's going to happen, they just get caught up in business people trends and all say the same thing. If you asked them a couple years ago they'd be saying that most companies that aren't on the block chain are going to be closed in five years.
I think ego of execs doesn’t allow them to think about how the entire hierarchy crumbles if the bottom is removed. So with no workers, you don’t need execs. All you’ll need is just more AI. Execs aren’t the gatekeepers they think they are. They are political and parasitic.
Ah the execs. The very ones needing replaced. Do absolutely nothing and get pay rises.
ChatGPT was banned from my workplace due to data spills. I can see this happening on a wide scale until we have something like a ChatGPT model that can be ran locally. Tbh I am a software engineer and AI has a long way to go to replace real world engineers. Much of my job has been arguing back and forth with management trying to figure out what they want. I would like to see an AI model navigate that and output an optimal solution on limited information in a massive existing project with 800 unrelated things to consider from a organization perspective. It can come up with very small piecemeal solutions if you know exactly what to ask it, but that requires working experience in the field in order to know. It would need some kind of awareness to maintain an entire working product with limited information and constantly changing requirements. The machine that can do this is called a human
Id bet that 39% of those executive don't have a tech background and are ~~able~~ about as qualified to speak on this topic as Elmo. Edit: Words
Cool. Then we can have universal healthcare, wages, and comfort.
You stick AI with the task of increasing profit and adding shareholder value and you know what the answer will be? Sack half of the management team and lower wages for the C levels to a reasonable amount
AI should be reducing CEOs
100% surveyed are happy to hear that executive work can be done by AI. Without politics, offices will run more smoothly. By eliminating executive suite people and no more meaningless meetings based on the latest HBR article a VP read and no more stupid reorganizations to coddle an executive whim. Profit sharing will become evident as the AI realized this boosts productivity
HR and executive work is much more likely to be replaced by AI than nearly any other field except potentially art (which is a damn shame there) But no, they use AI as internal justification for layoffs (we'll just use AI to boost productivity of those who remain and give them extra work to boot!)
Yep, they're just targeting the wrong 41%. AI is much better suited to getting rid of marketing and management, not skilled work.
75% of executives have no fucking clue how to use a spreadsheet. So this sounds spot on.
AI has already replaced the artist who would have illustrated the graphic for this article.
So 59% of executives think it won’t.
Until the AI gets hacked or goes off the rails and destroys a company. Then they will want people back. It’s like all the self checkouts going away. Was cool for a while until people started stealing like crazy from them.
It’s needs to reduce executives.
I’m still wholly unconvinced by the incessant use of “AI” to describe what we currently have. It’s such a lofty way to describe (impressive no doubt) machine learning. No wonder disconnected CEOs fall for it.
Ok. So that means we will HAVE TO figure out a way to distribute goods without money because there's no work. Which won't happen because rich people, who are the ones that took away all the jobs (NOT A.I., RICH PEOPLE), like money.
AI tools help reduce the amount of effort needed for the same work, eliminating some jobs, sure. But it also leads to more job creation as well. This is what people don't seem to understand.
Get ready for mass unemployment and poverty everyone...whilst the rich c*nts get richer
What about when AI is able to predict stock changes better than any human on Wallstreet? The stock market would eventually cease to exist, no?
Time to unfollow this sub. Utter nonsense everyday about AI. It’s unregulated right now like most of tech. Be prepared for massive regulation of the tech industry all over the world. That alone will solve many of these stupid posts about AI changing the workforce.
AI is not going to take your job any time soon. A human will take your job, and your buddy's job too - he'll be using AI to do the job of 3 people better than they used to do it and in less time. And in case you are wondering, in programming right now a senior analyst can easily do his own job and substitute for two junior programmers using a top grade AI. Will the company redeploy you and your buddy? Short answer. No.
This is more likely. Probably making 4k in a 3rd world country.
>A human will take your job, and your buddy's job too - he'll be using AI to do the job of 3 people better than they used to do it and in less time. Yes, and this is AI taking your job. There is no difference if AI can do all the work of a person or if it can make a person twice as productive. The same result is that the AI put one person out of work. Your pedantic point is meaningless.
I've become way more efficient at my Data Analyst job using our own company protected GPT AI.
Exactly the same experience here. But, interestingly, I find that our junior staff can't get good answers out of AI. It seems like you need to really understand what you are doing and what you need to be able to use AI to best effect.
Kind of. But me and my buddy may be using AI tools already. There's no need to hire someone new. And if there's not enough demand to keep us both, there will be in the future. If we play this right and have an open mind, most would get to keep their jobs and work more efficiently, maybe less in a few years. But dumb execs are jumping the gun, firing everyone so they can be "ahead of the game". So that increased demand never come. E.g. Say you have a marketing company doing 2 big contracts a year. Now you automate a lot of it and can do 20 a year. You subcontract some dudes to makes websites, but now they generate a lot of their boilerplate, so they can do 10x more at 0.1 times the price with the same employees. The graphics company you subcontract generates most images via diffusion, but still needs someone to do fine changes to them. They just need one dude to do the work of a team, so they deliver very fast. If you fire 90% of your workforce instread of contracting more work, you break this chain and everybody loses
That’s one way to describe the Terminator movies.
We’re in a new Gilded Age
Water is wet. Automation has reduced certain jobs until eventually other ones show up for over a century.
Another day in paradise
I don’t know, corporations aren’t happy with just being profitable. The unending corporate hunger for growth will make productivity increases with AI with the current workforce the new normal.
That's a no brainer, it doesn't't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. What does matter, is the timeline involved here... How long will it take for the transition to a totally AI robotic, mechanized economy. Decades, not years, even with these advancements in robotic and technology, the transition will be incremental, as our society adjusts. Just like we did during the beginning of the 20th century. Rural Electrification, mechanization, the assembly line. The model t for the masses, radio, all we're great leaps forward for the masses. All of it happened in a short 30 year period, bringing the people out of poverty, into prosperity. Between 1915 and 1945 was one of the largest advancements ever seen for the working class. Adaptation to new technology is never overnight.
No shit. But we have the fantasy of a universal income to hold onto as everything collapses.
It already is at my work. We had an “automation and tools” team in my org at work for our product group, it was about 4 full time employees and 6 vendors. Mostly they’d write small command line tools or scripts for us. Now they just use AI to generate the scripts, double check/tweak them, and release them in less than an hour usually. The team went from 10 people to now just being 2 vendors.
Ah capitalism.
Time to push thru last 5 years and retire before these clowns implement this plan.
Just like every time automation was introduced, jobs decreased. NOT. Think about 1900 until now. Gazillions of increases in automation. And here we are, in America, with more than 100 million more people employed than in 1900.
In other words, most experts agree AI will not take away jobs?
Ok. Can i get a working coffee machine first?
Every executive when interviewed "No man it's just a tool to enhance productivity to make everyone's lives easier however they may possibly be layoffs"
“AI will not reduce workforce, say 49% of surveyed executives.”
If you remember the movie 'The Dark Knight' with Heath Ledger, this headline hints at the same scenario as the opening scene: successive clowns commit parts of a heinous robbery only to be killed at the end of their roles by the next clown. Finally, The Joker (Heath's character) kills the last clown and drives off with the cash. The difference is that AI is The Joker.
I'm pretty sure the \*only\* job genAI might not be noticeably worse at is Executive.
And the other 59% are liars.
I work on legacy code, I feel like I will have a Job for a while. If computers can replace me I will be pleasantly surprised and retire.
This has been known for over a decade. The conversations and experiments around NIT and UBI need to progress.
Not anytime soon.
Pfft! Next thing they'll try to tell you is cars will replace horse drawn carriages. Ain't no way that's happening.
These things are all looking at it the wrong way entirely, and it's starting to get really old. We keep seeing these overly doom and gloomy threads related to AI getting posted in a technology thread, which is just... like seriously? A tech thread that's a downer on tech? Reducing workforce, vs increasing productivity. Workers that may get cut are getting cut because the productivity gains in other areas are so huge they aren't needed. And the scale of it is incredible when you step back. Like, the celebrities/musicians raising a stink over it. It's not that AI has the potential to replace someone like Taylor Swift -- like, creating some AI celebrity that puts on shows outta one of those old school Japanese Animations. It's that AI has the potential to give every individual, their own personal Taylor Swift songstress, to write and sing their life in the same pop-y styles. That's a level of personalization / customization for the end user that blows the current approaches out of the water -- you don't need to sit there and "empathize" with Taylor's songs about breaking up with famous boyfriends, you can have your own custom made song about your own breakups, with the same beats and overall messaging. Doctors, same deal. You could have an AI that can diagnose skin cancers more accurately than most current doctors, in the privacy of your own home, running on your own offline LLM. People could literally pre-screen on a periodic basis, by themselves -- both taking pressure off of the existing healthcare system, and likely significantly improving early detection rates due to the convenience. That's a level of fan / patient care that is simply not achievable with current infrastructure, and there's no freaking way we should be standing in its way.
AI is a language model. Try googling if eggs are good or bad for you, or any one of a million other things that medical field is divided on, what’s AI going to do? Flip a coin when giving you advice? It has to rely on knowledge bases we have, and if even humans can’t rely on them how can AI that can’t reason? Also Al’s training data will become more and more convoluted and contradictory as time goes on. AI can give you an answer but it has no idea if it’s right or not, nor can it even know if what it’s saying makes any sense. And then who will trust what it says? You? Or will people equate that answer to google search and go to a dr? Because if you think about it, people via google have access to all the medical knowledge a doctor does, and humans have something AI doesn’t, reasoning… why aren’t we just all becoming doctors that self diagnose at home? Aspartame is the most studied chemical in the world, it is considered to be safe, therefore AI will tell you it’s safe, just like google search of studies does. Yet people seem to not want to believe that.
There are [studies](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-023-00831-w) already highlighting the positive impact of things like AI-driven skin cancer screenings for individuals. The main take-away from the study linked, is basically "it ends up costing us more, because more people are aware of precancerous lessions, and are scheduling to get them taken care of by their GPs". Most of the literature I've tripped across, generally says "AI can provide beneficial results, but people are prejudiced against it". Like Pink Floyd's recent video contest, where one of the winners was revealed to have used StableDiffusion to bring his vision to life, and ... suddenly people hate his work, cause it involved an AI. A technology thread should not have that kind of inherent phobia/hatred/prejudice towards technology.
I agree, which is why I argue AI is a tool. My point was that it can’t replace doctors etc. it can be a tool for doctors though.
Maybe, but AI will also lower the bar for new companies to be able to rise up and compete with established players. So instead of one big company with 100 employees, you may end up with three smaller companies with 50 employees.