My Entire Profession Is Being Automated Away by AI | Hacker News Reader

My Entire Profession Is Being Automated Away by AI

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35 pointsbhartzer12 comments

I went through the process of buying a car recently, and the dealer, before we even begun to negotiate on price, was describing how their pricing system has all 'moved to AI'. I was suspicious, and after querying him about it for a while what he described essentially just boiled down to something a spreadsheet could do.

Now I don't dispute that AI has and will continue to automate jobs away like this. But I do think we are in an era where the lines between 'classic' automation and AI automation are blurred for quite a lot of people and without any concrete details I suspect this case leans more towards the former.

“AI” is often a term used to avoid taking responsibility.

A few years ago it was “the algorithm”. I was literally told it was “the algorithm” at fault in a physical grocery store.

I was speechless at the time, now i’m just angry.

A lot of the "AI automation" videos you see on YouTube are just people creating Zapier or Make workflows connecting different services. Most of it was possible 10 or more years ago, using APIs and a few hundred lines of code.

The difference between 10 years ago and today is now it's cheap to do that. Somehow that makes a lot more people aware of it - even though it could have been done 10 years ago and the ROI would still be positive.

Tbh, while feeling sorry for the OP, I never felt sorry or compassionate to such jobs. They feel like a page of code, but it’s the same page of code every day. You learn it and then just do, over and over again. Expecting a career and retirement out of this is akin to expecting it out of uber driving or food delivery. Try getting a job that isn’t a set of reflexes. The comments are right, the fact that it wasn’t automated away before AI is just an economical accident.

The problem is that most knowledge work is “a page of code” and largely ai-automatable.

We like to think it isn’t, but it is. If not exactly today, it’s going to be in 3-5 years.

Will you hold the same opinion when you’ll get sacked and replaced by some kind of LLM?

The problem is that most knowledge work is “a page of code” and largely ai-automatable.

It is 90% automatable before AI and is not a problem, it’s progress.

Will you hold the same opinion when you’ll get sacked and replaced by some kind of LLM?

I’m not in the job market, but I look forward to be able to offload 90% of what I do to an AI assistant that doesn’t suck or to be replaced completely cause it will mean such transformation of societies and the world that disrupts everything I hate in it fundamentally.

I’m business logic oriented type, for the most part. I only care about software because it’s hard to make. AI takes some technical parts? Good (we are sort of here if you squint). AI takes system design, visual automation, accounting, communication, integration, data analysis? Good, I can just translate client/partner ideas into it and get the results. AI started to understand my clients? Good, it means my own ideas became testable without proper formulation. AI replaced my clients and me by inventing ideas itself?

The latter is a complex sci-fi question. Let’s make AI that doesn’t shit itself at the first step off the beaten html boilerplate path then we’ll talk about the prospects.

Anyway, I think that these “I’m just a gear in a gearbox that has zero value outside of it” jobs were doomed from the beginning if not for AI but for purely socioeconomical reasons and aren’t worth a human attention. Backlog programmers included.

seems like a subtle ad for a company mentioned in the first paragraph. would be funny to know if the whole post is written by a LLM

OP even gave his LinkedIn though.

The account seems legitimate though, long post and comment history with a clear set of specific interests and personal views. Some of which appear to be related to working in video/graphics. If this is astroturfing, it's beyond expert level.

Also this comment seems legit

"In local news there is a booth producer (someone who builds the show in a software like ENPS before the show and who talks in the ears of the talents and queues them during the show) then there is a technical director (the person who uses those huge boards with all the buttons to bring up supers and chyrons and switch between cameras and video channels when packages or soundbites play). Then there’s the audio operator who opens and closes faders in synchronicity with the director so they make sure anchors can talk to each other during sound bites or packages without having their mic on air, play music when we fade to commercials, play franchise music, play stinger sounds, they also do mic checks and work to establish connection with reporters backpacks -which are what we call the antennas they use to signal back to the stations for live coverage. All of these positions are being automated besides the booth producer. Which the booth producer is also just a producer, -which is someone who works in the newsroom writing stories and then booth produces the show. They will be the only one in the control room now and will just be there to speak in the ear of the on air talents and tell reporters in the field when to be ready for their shot. Everything else is being automated with AI."

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1guhsm4/well_this_...

Humans don't even value themselves. The world seems ripe for an AI takeover imo

The company homepage also seems a bit suss. Single page, saying very little.

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