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Comment by ndjshe3838 | Hacker News Reader

I hate the whole attitude the industry has towards AI models, it just seems so sloppy compared to software of the past

It’s like “yeah we don’t really know what it’s going to do and it might screw up but whatever just launch it”

Really surprised me that so many companies are willing to jump into LLMs without any guarantee that the output won’t be something completely insane

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The purpose of AI, and the entire drive of investment in it, is to eliminate labor costs. There's no other purpose. It is not to advance science or make a better world, it is to make money. That money comes by the expense of the many and the gain of a few. And there will not be new jobs to replace the ones lost. There's no more "learn to code!". They're there to replace all jobs possible, make a more unequal society, and nothing more.

You'd best understand this today.

I agree with everything except "there will not be new jobs". There will most definitely be new jobs.

Like what?

AI is cool, but the spoils are going to go to staggeringly few people and in most of the West there are no real safety nets for people to fall on.

If I lost my job tomorrow to AI then any desk job I aim for might be gone in another 2-3 years, before I even finish retraining.

Any content creation is going to be flooded out and most creators don't even make any money even today. It's a marketing role with strong Pareto distributions.

That mainly leaves physical labor and person to person jobs.

I would say great, freedom from labour, except that's not how it works.

> AI is cool, but the spoils are going to go to staggeringly few people

They appear to mainly be going to Nvidia investors, which is basically anyone with a retirement account.

Can you define what you mean by "AI" here? I strongly disagree with your sentiment, but perhaps you and me have different ideas of what counts as AI.

Automation improvements increase employment/wages by increasing productivity. Conversely not doing it reduces them, because you become less competitive vs other countries that are doing it.

Its because the stakes have fallen just that low. Its a chat bot we are talking about. Those have been terrible since forever. Retooling your junk tool with the new popular junk tool at least signals to your shareholders you are willing to keep up with the joneses on the latest stupid thing, without much risk to your actual product at least not yet.

Our company is on the way to ‘ease’ the work for the customer by having them write a whole story to replace 4 buttons. We’ll have the AI figure out which of the four buttons need to be pressed based on the text.

I keep wondering how this could possibly be superior to just showing the 4 buttons…

Too much money on the line to bother with due diligence

This is the part I never got.

How does using a computer suddenly wash away any responsibility? Like if Air Canada's desk agents were all a separate company and they told the guy the wrong information isn't Air Canada still on the hook for training their sub-contractors?

At the end of the day humans make these screwups too (even in my own anecdotal experiences with dealing with airlines), and it doesn’t matter because there is no hook to be on in the first place. If they tell me x and come to find out the policy is actually y, I’m the one thats shit out of luck and should have done the due dilligence of thoroughly reading whatever legalese this is scrawled in. These ais are at least highlighting there are many segments of customer facing interactions where it just doesn’t affect the bottom line how poorly you treat these people. Flights especially are a captive audience, considering how airlines lord over their schedules and gate positions, where especially outside major airports there might not be any redundant options for you beyond one flight.

> If they tell me x and come to find out the policy is actually y, I’m the one thats shit out of luck and should have done the due dilligence of thoroughly reading whatever legalese this is scrawled in.

Why are you saying this as a comment to an article where literally the opposite thing happened?

>it just seems so sloppy compared to software of the past

Corporate software has always been sloppy especially if said corporation isn't centered around said software (true for Air Canada)) and the technology is in an early adopter stage (true for LLM chatbots).

The decision makers aren't well-versed in these technologies themselves, because getting to where they are did not require knowing how to properly use those technologies.

It's just proof companies don't care. The quicker they can turn their customers into little autonomous compute nodes, the better from their perspective.

I have also noticed an increase in automated call systems just flat out hanging up on me. As in: "We're experiencing higher than normal call volumes and cannot accept your call. Please call at a different time. Goodbye. <click>" How am I supposed to get help in such cases?

We've allowed companies to scale beyond their means, and they're getting away with more and more.

UPS destroyed a suitcase of ours and basically told us to go f ourselves. We could have sued in small claims court, but that's what they're betting on, that most people just give up.

And the chatbots are just terrible. And these days, the human representatives available have even less information than what the chatbots are provided with.

They are salivating at the idea of being able to get humans off their payroll.

The future is mass unemployment with all resources being split between a handful of trillionaires who control the AIs.

That wouldn't make sense though - once a sizable portion of the customer base is too poor to buy the services, there's no source of income anymore and the whole system collapses.

"The system" for you and me, not the system for those at the top. They'll maintain their wealth.

You're presuming the rich care about "the system". That they have morals or ethics. They do not.

>You're presuming the rich care about "the system". That they have morals or ethics. They do not.

Of course they have. You're parroting some low quality extreme left talking points. Rich people are people just like you and me, with their own motivations, goals and internal values. Dehumanizing them won't solve society's problems.

They don't have any wealth in the system you're projecting.

Wealth is the ability to trade with people. If there were somehow only 10 "employed" people in the world, then the economy is 10 people big, which means none of them are wealthy.

One way to see that this scenario is absurd is that it's literally the plot of Atlas Shrugged.

Well yeah that’s common sense but it hasn’t prevented that exact reason being behind all economic collapse (bleeding the host too fast, too greedily).

The key word is “once.” The doom of american society will not be in the timespan of a single business quarter. And on top of that the short position improves the whole way down. People at the top of the economy aren’t concerned about the rag being wrung dry because they will be the ones doing it, which will give them such a lopsided resource advantage it hardly will matter to them what happens next for the rest of us.

Economies aren't about "resources" or "wringing things dry", they are about trading. If you're not trading you don't have an economy and you aren't rich.

That only potentially makes sense at a societal level, not at an individual company level.

And the money saved with staff will end up in the stockholder's pockets, who will consume more.

It’s because despite what people are afraid of, these systems are very good at not screwing up with just a few minor controls layered on top of them.

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