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Comment by mythrwy | Hacker News Reader

I don't broadly disagree and see AI opening up opportunities that didn't exist before but with respect to companies hiring large numbers of people I wonder what the people will be doing?

Come to think of it, I sort of wonder what many people with office jobs now are doing.

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The same thing they are already doing? Being a companion for someone who doesn't want to be alone.

The human touch, if you will, is hard to replicate. Even where AI can convincingly act human, that often isn't enough to satisfy what people feel. Just look at the HN guidelines as a perfect example. "HN is for conversation between humans." If it were about the content then any suitable content would be welcome, regardless of the origin, but people are here under the belief that they are making a connection with other people.

Maybe someday AI will replace the business owners and managers too, but so as long as humans control the resources, they will choose to surround themselves with other humans by expending some of those resources towards those other humans.

So the tendency to hire friends and "cool looking" people instead of smart talented people will get even worse?

Maybe, but the friend list is already exhausted and "cool looking" people tend to not like the idea of you hiring them just because they look cool. Hence diversity hiring: It became understood that attractive women would get the "ick" if you told them that you were hiring them only because they were attractive women, so there had to be cover for as to why they were suddenly getting hired where they previously weren't as we transitioned into a companion-based economy. Its hard to say if that can be replicated again now that we're all in on the ruse. Possible, but no guarantee. We may have already reached the peak.

trying to reify the proposed efficiency gains they have been told are just out of reach

One sickening idea I had is even more bureaucracy. You know how any big infra project now has tens of thousand of pages of impact reports, studies and so on. With AI it can be easily scaled to millions if not more. Lots of words that then will be ingested by other AIs. All happily burning electricity in the process.

So more documentation that no one will ever read... Both generated and summarised multiple times by AI...

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