Comment by baazaa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baazaa | Hacker News Reader

When people think AI is going to lead to rapid automation I genuinely don't understand what mental model of the economy they must have.

I'm trying to pivot out of data which IMO is a scam industry and thought I'd consider automating white-collar work. After all, there's a huge amount of excel-monkey work that can be trivially automated with scripts and I've done stuff like that before. But then I realise there's not even a job title for this sort of work, nor are there any firms in my country doing stuff like this. There's simply no demand whatsoever for process automation (I'm expressly not talking about automation engineers in manufacturing etc.)

It's not hard to see why. No-one's going to automate themselves out of a job, nor are managers going to automate all the people they manage out of a job because then they're also redundant. Often labour-saving innovations are brought-in by upstarts but business dynamism is low so there's not a lot of that happening. I can almost guarantee that a bank circa 2050 will look a lot like a bank now, short of some runaway superintelligence completely reconfiguring society.

> I'm trying to pivot out of data which IMO is a scam industry

Would you be open to writing more about this? I work in data, and I find it valuable to hear criticisms of the fundamentals of the field from people with enough context to actually articulate meaningful criticism.

I saw this video a few months ago, and I thought it was pretty sloppy, but it made a few pretty good points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOuBCk8XMC8

My experience precisely mirrors that described in various posts here: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/get-me-out-of-data-hell/

I live in Melbourne like the author and I certainly don't speak for the entire industry. But here's it's mostly government and banks and other enterprise where data is just a cost-centre so middle-management could say they were big on data science, which has since transformed into being big on AI.

There's no end-use for most of the work, there's no stakeholders, often the product being delivered will be a 'platform' of some sort and everyone outside the data area is afraid of sounding stupid by asking what that means (it doesn't mean anything). The result is entire services can go down for months at a time and no-one notices (and then when someone does realise management covers up the fact no-one noticed because it's embarrassing).

Having worked in data in Melbourne and also met the author of the post you link, I think saying the entire industry is a scam is an overgeneralization. There's some especially bad stuff going on in parts of the industry (e.g Melbourne government or government-adjacent parts) but in others parts of the industry data engineering and analysis is hugely valuable.

Thank you! This definitely makes sense. The "emperor has no clothes"-ism around enterprise data platforms is definitely real. So is the trend of orgs building big, expensive platforms without thinking about who their end users are even supposed to be.

I actually think these are expressions of organizational dysfunction rather than something inherently wrong with data. It's the same way dysfunctional orgs might spend millions on SAFe adoption or prematurely spinning up a global sales motion - incentives and perceptions become misaligned with the reality of what the organization needs to do to succeed, the decisionmakers make bad capital outlays, and the implementers are left feeling like garbage working on a project that's doomed to fail.

I would assume that we'll see much faster change via appearance of new smaller and nimbler competitors, rather than adoption by current companies. I expect a lot of rapid trial and error, similar to what we saw in the 90s with the advent of web startups. And who knows which (if any of them) will become the next Amazon and Google.

As for banks in particular, seeing the success of the likes of Revolut, I think we'll see more disruption in this space too.

It's potentially also a skill issue. Owner /person doesn't know how to do something and hires.

Now with chatgpt they might be able to do it themselves.

Also when big corps sell you an ai hr Person and the only thing needed is a Microsoft account you might buy this.

They continue to either make it generally good or add continuous new specific skills to it. I think the effort to teach one 'ai' something is very soon a lot cheaper than teaching someone new constantly.

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