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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Ya, AI is very good at generating number, be that code for software, images for ads, or banal prose for company blogs. AI not so good at growing corn, cooking eggs, biulding houses, running fiber, treating disease, changing brake pads, loading a truck... or any of the other millions of physical-world jobs on which the economy is biult.

If you company is all about creating things that go on the internet, sure, AI is your thing. But for most companies the internet is a communications tool rather than a product. Those companies are not seeing the claimed productivity gains.

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They sure are though; they have many processes to automate as well: big corn farmers/factories also have admin, erp, crm, departments with processes etc. There are companies doing billions in revenue with departments of people just copy/pasting PDFs who do real life things like you state who have immediate gains. But they won't do it alone yet and luckily need us. They still benefit though vs the large consultant businesses or even their own IT deps though.

They do and there are certainly some mid-level management jobs at risk, but ask any farmer/electrician/millright about the claimed impact of AI and they will laugh. They have yet to see an AI capable of reliably replacing a fuse let alone doing a solid day's work.

Yes, agree with that, but that's usually not the sort of work we talk about here. But sure, robots are close there. All those admin jobs on the other hands...

Literally everyone I know in a large enough company who talks about AI talks about increasingly panicky mandates to use more Copilot coming from above, like you'll lose your job if you don't use it more. I heard exactly this story from my neighbour just three days ago. Literally a call from head office demanding they use Copilot more — to do a task Copilot can't do.

Everyone in smaller companies describes various efforts to get AI to do more that ultimately end up involving lots of corrections or nurse-maiding ChatGPT to get it to do exactly what they need, when what they need is often so formulaic they should already have a process.

Nobody I talk to describes it in terms of massive productivity gains. Everyone describes it as a puzzle they feel variously compelled to solve.

I can add a data point for you: At my job they have made "amount of AI usage" a criteria for performance reviews, advancement and promotions. Mandate from the top: Use as much AI as you can. They even have a leaderboard (accessible to managers) showing who is using the most and least AI. It feels as though nobody even cares how good or bad a job I do, as long as I do it using AI.

That sounds completely miserable and Kafkaesque.

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