In-circuit (AI, the next staging of offshoring with chatgpt etc)

[NickK]

What are people’s thoughts on the large scale layoffs in automating with AI?

I ask because (I’m not aure if this is a very bad joke on behalf of my boss) that we will be driving this internally - in to an organisation thay already has cultural issues that lead to a skills shortage and the inability to attract talent to solve the main core business continuity and stability issues.

Anyone elses board under the same delusional AI cloud?

How do you ensure that AI covering such a large portion of the operations us unbiased?
How do you ensure the power economics required by AI doesn’t resilt in the AI company power demand becoming the largest customer of electrical power)? In short big power customers = large lobbying within parliament?
The reliance on AI cloud vendors that are replacing a large portion of workforce is that it presents a ever growing dependance on a foreign country to operate the economy.

 

[peterwalkley]

Has your boss not twigged yet that their job is also under threat Its not just the peasants whose jobs can be automated away.

This post on linkedin came into my feed a couple of days ago and I think puts things quite well.

 

[malachi]

I am not worrying about AI and its massively overblown. BT, IBM etc announcing layoff due to AI its only effecting staff with minor, low end paid work. AI wont be replacing the field engineers out on the road fixing, upgrading the phone exchanges and laying down new cables. You still need physical people to do those jobs and robotics havent got a point yet they can move like humans. We are still far from it.

Throughout history we have always developed methods to assist (not replace) us in life. Yes, jobs have been lost during that process but they also create new problem we need people solve. On top of the millions of problems we current have yet to solve.

The problem isnt AI taking jobs, the problem is retraining people to take on new skills instead of sticking to the ones which are no longer required. As by default most people dont want to or cant adapt to change. Thats more of an problem than AI itself.

 

[Dup]

The cynical part of me doesn't think "AI" is replacing jobs. It's just an excuse for well-known companies to cut some roles with an excuse that fits within current affairs. It's just a way to justify it to the media.

It is worrying that management who are already naive to tech will think it's the next big thing and push to over-depend on yet another fragile "next big thing" but at least it will look good for their social media & SEO blogs for 5 mins.

 

[chrismscotland]

I can see a short term knee jerk where some businesses decide AI is everything and either lay folk off or slow recruitment but then realise that its great for generating images and answering questions but still years away from fully replacing a person.
Before realising that they need people for now!

 

[HangTime]

How do you ensure that AI covering such a large portion of the operations us unbiased?
How do you ensure the power economics required by AI doesn’t resilt in the AI company power demand becoming the largest customer of electrical power)?

I don't think you necessarily have to, Operations are currently biased due to human input. Having unbiased Operations might actually lead to worse outcomes for the organisation. But you might need to elaborate on this more so we can go deeper i.e. do you mean external biases etc.
Presumably if lots of people are laid off then power demands drop in other areas. AI is happy to work in cold, dark places and also doesn't need to charge a car to travel to and from the office. If there are fewer workers that means fewer electrical devices such as workstations being utilised. AI power consumption could also be dynamic e.g. a nice way of balancing the power grid, you turn up the dial overnight when human power consumption is lower, and then ramp down at the peak. The nice thing about AI is it doesn't need to sleep.

 

[swillsy]

It will 100% take away a lot of the office based jobs we have today eventually as the financial benefits are huge however not for a few years. Most companies need to work out how to sell the tools to other companies first

 

[mattx4]

I've been speaking to some clients on this and the medium term view is ai is a tool to increase productivity not a replacement for humans however there probably will be some job displacement due to efficiency gains and some new roles created as well.

Humans plus ai is the future state model not replace humans with ai. For example in chess the best human can't beat the best ai but a very good human player plus ai can win

Council Post: Why Computer-Assisted Humans Are The Best Chess Players And What That Means For Technology Operations

The progress of automation in chess has many lessons for technology operations.

www.forbes.com

 

[Hagar]

AI wont be replacing the field engineers out on the road fixing, upgrading the phone exchanges and laying down new cables. You still need physical people to do those jobs and robotics havent got a point yet they can move like humans. We are still far from it.

Tomorrow's USS Enterprise won't be needing a Scotty to fix it's engines. Of course we will have machines that diagnose and fix themselves and if cabling is problematic then a system of carrying power or information between two points will be along shortly.

 

[malachi]

Tomorrow's USS Enterprise won't be needing a Scotty to fix it's engines. Of course we will have machines that diagnose and fix themselves and if cabling is problematic then a system of carrying power or information between two points will be along shortly.

As I said, we are no where near to point we can build machines that walk like humans. Until then, humans will never be hands off.

Im sure plenty are waiting for the day we can sit back and relax while AI does the work

 

[Hagar]

As I said, we are no where near to point we can build machines that walk like humans. Until then, humans will never be hands off.

No need to walk like a human to be a field engineer. Not when a field robot has diagnosed the problem and switched over to the backup system already in place, contacted the stores robot to arrange a pickup and replace item which the robot van delivers back to the field robot to install and test.

Basic intelligent systems and ability to manipulate tools.

 

[malachi]

No need to walk like a human to be a field engineer. Not when a field robot has diagnosed the problem and switched over to the backup system already in place, contacted the stores robot to arrange a pickup and replace item which the robot van delivers back to the field robot to install and test.

Basic intelligent systems and ability to manipulate tools.

I wasn't specifically talking about field engineers, I was talking about in general for areas of work.

 

[dowie]

How do you ensure that AI covering such a large portion of the operations us unbiased?

Depends on what you're asking tbh... being biased isn't necessarily an issue in stats/ML if you're aware of it and say robustness is needed too. Though if you're talking about ethics etc.. then that's another matter, again that's not necessarily an issue and can be addressed.

How do you ensure the power economics required by AI doesn’t resilt in the AI company power demand becoming the largest customer of electrical power)? In short big power customers = large lobbying within parliament?

This is really unclear? What power demand are you talking about? Your company (or indeed most) aren't going to be concerning themselves with training base models from scratch (unless you're in the process of poaching top researchers and ML Engineers from google, OpenAI etc..and have a special deal with AWS, Azure etc. for a big supercomputer cluster of GPUs) at least as far as the latest LLMS are concerned, very few organisations outside of the likes of Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI etc.. will be doing that at the moment. Rather your company is at best going to be fine-tuning, doing inference using existing base models (in the case of the open source ones) or perhaps just having to access them via API in the case of OpenAI's offerings.

The reliance on AI cloud vendors that are replacing a large portion of workforce is that it presents a ever growing dependance on a foreign country to operate the economy.

Which is why this won't be a suitable solution for some organisations and open models will be needed which they'll then want to use on their private datasets - if you can't train one from scratch (few can) and you can't rely on a third party then... that's where those come in over the next couple of years.

 

[dlockers]

No need to walk like a human to be a field engineer. Not when a field robot has diagnosed the problem and switched over to the backup system already in place, contacted the stores robot to arrange a pickup and replace item which the robot van delivers back to the field robot to install and test.

Basic intelligent systems and ability to manipulate tools.

It basically mandates a rewrite of the capitalist system imho. These systems are incentivised because of shareholder profits. But there will be so few actual shareholders, it defeats the point of existence.

 

[Hagar]

It basically mandates a rewrite of the capitalist system imho. These systems are incentivised because of shareholder profits. But there will be so few actual shareholders, it defeats the point of existence.

If they were obedient enough, we would have been using chimps for decades. They have the motor skills and intelligence however they would discover something else nearby and go to investigate or get into a fight ot sit scratching their bum. Humans are much more compliant.

 

[dlockers]

If they were obedient enough, we would have been using chimps for decades. They have the motor skills and intelligence however they would discover something else nearby and go to investigate or get into a fight ot sit scratching their bum. Humans are much more compliant.

Conjecture

 

[dowie]

It basically mandates a rewrite of the capitalist system imho. These systems are incentivised because of shareholder profits. But there will be so few actual shareholders, it defeats the point of existence.

Eh? Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft etc.. have plenty of shareholders, lots of people's pension funds are invested in these companies for a start.

 

[dlockers]

Eh? Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft etc.. have plenty of shareholders, lots of people's pension funds are invested in these companies for a start.

The point you're making is that there are 'plenty' of shareholders? Don't waste the bandwidth next time.

 

[OspreyO]

What are people’s thoughts on the large scale layoffs in automating with AI?

I ask because (I’m not aure if this is a very bad joke on behalf of my boss) that we will be driving this internally - in to an organisation thay already has cultural issues that lead to a skills shortage and the inability to attract talent to solve the main core business continuity and stability issues.

Anyone elses board under the same delusional AI cloud?

How do you ensure that AI covering such a large portion of the operations us unbiased?
How do you ensure the power economics required by AI doesn’t resilt in the AI company power demand becoming the largest customer of electrical power)? In short big power customers = large lobbying within parliament?
The reliance on AI cloud vendors that are replacing a large portion of workforce is that it presents a ever growing dependance on a foreign country to operate the economy.

No sooner than you automate something in our place, they invent a new convoluted manual process to break it, requiring loads of manual work.

I reckon there are a lot of places like that.

 

[NickK]

No sooner than you automate something in our place, they invent a new convoluted manual process to break it, requiring loads of manual work.

I reckon there are a lot of places like that.

Well they say that AI will replace automation first, so AI paperclip in excel spreadsheets filled in by manual people and then actioned by manual processes - I can see that really causing issues.