Comment by observationist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by observationist | Hacker News Reader

I've seen organizations where 300 of 500 people could effectively be replaced by AI, just by having some of the the remaining 200 orchestrate and manage automation workflows that are trivially within the capabilities of current frontier models.

There's a whole lot of bullshit jobs and work that will get increasingly and opaquely automated by AI. You won't see jobs go away unless or until organizations deliberately set out to reduce staff. People will use AI throughout the course of their days to get a couple of "hours" of tasks done in a few minutes, here and there, throughout the week. I've already seen reports and projects and writing that clearly comes from AI in my own workplace. Right now, very few people know how to recognize and assess the difference between human and AI output, and even fewer how to calibrate work assignments.

Spreadsheet AIs are fantastic, reports and charting have just hit their stride, and a whole lot of people are going to appear to be very productive without putting a whole lot of effort into it. And then one day, when sufficiently knowledgable and aware people make it into management, all sorts of jobs are going to go quietly away, until everything is automated, because it doesn't make sense to pay a human 6 figures what an AI can do for 3 figures in a year.

I'd love to see every manager in the world start charting the Pareto curves for their workplaces, in alongside actual hours worked per employee - work output is going to be very wonky, and the lazy, clever, and ambitious people are all going to be using AI very heavily.

Similar to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11850241

https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/tm8m...

Part of the problem is that people don't know how to measure work effectively to begin with, let alone in the context of AI chatbots that can effectively do better work than anyone a significant portion of the adult population of the planet.

The teams that fully embrace it, use the tools openly and transparently, and are able to effectively contrast good and poor use of the tools, will take off.

It seems like we are using AI to automate the unimportant parts of jobs that we shouldn’t have been doing anyway. Things like endless status reports or emails.

But from what I’ve seen it just makes that work output even less meaningful—who wants to read AI generated 10 pages that could have been two bullet points?

And it doesn’t actually improve productivity because that was never the bottleneck of those jobs anyway. If anything, having some easy rote work is a nice way to break up the pace.

Employee has a few bullet-points of updates, they feed it through an LLM to fluff it out into an email to their manager, and then the manager puts the received email through an LLM to summarize it down to a few bullet points... Probably making some mistakes.

There are all these things in writing we used as signals for intelligence, attention to detail, engagement, willingness to accept feedback, etc... but they're now easy to counterfeit at scale.

Hopefully everyone realizes what's going on and cuts out the middleman.

> Spreadsheet AI

If you don't mind, could you please write a few examples of what LLMs do in Spreadsheets? Because that's probably the last place where I would allow LLMs, since they tend to generate random data and spreadsheets being notoriously hard to debug due all the hidden formulas and complex dependencies.

Say you have an accounting workbook with 50 or so sheets with tables depending on each other and they contain very important info like inventory and finances. Just a typical small to medium business setup (big corporations also do it). Now what? Do you allow LLMs to edit files like that directly? Do you verify changes afterwards and how?

Do LLM's generate "random data"? I you give them source data there is virtually no room for hallucination in my experience. Spreadsheets are no different than coding. You can put tests in place to verify results.

> because it doesn't make sense to pay a human 6 figures what an AI can do for 3 figures in a year.

Humans have one bit over "AI": You can't blame and fire "AI" when it inevitably goes wrong.

> I've seen organizations where 300 of 500 people could effectively be replaced by AI, just by having some of the the remaining 200 orchestrate and manage automation workflows that are trivially within the capabilities of current frontier models

Curious, what industries? And what capabilities do LLMs present to automate these positions that previous technologies do not?

'Bullshit jobs' and the potential to automate them are very real, but I think many of them could have been automated long before LLMs, and I don't think the introduction of LLMs is going to solve the bottleneck that prevents jobs like these from being automated.

What do you think is the bottleneck?

The percentage of jobs that are actually bullshit as opposed to the percentage of jobs the person making the claim thinks are bullshit merely because they are not that person's own job.

Which is, of course, conveniently never a bullshit job but a Very Important One.

Which are the best spreadsheet AIs?

AI doing a bullshit job isn't a productivity increase though; it's at best a cost cut. It would be an even bigger cost cut to remove the bullshit job

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