Posted by yegg 11 hours ago
I think we might be facing a cultural reckoning on what being "productive" actually means. Creating more products doesn't mean more production.
Additionally when the finally bubble bursts and the executives wake up from psychosis and look to distance themselves from this because it's become a dirty word, you'll be one of the first to go. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down and all that.
I do think there are real benefits and productivity gains with this technology, but it does not benefit everyone equally. It's great for the programming parts of my job, but useless in the other 40% of the work. I have coworkers for whom generative AI has no obvious practical application, and yet management is trying to find a way to shoehorn it in anyway. No doubt because they've also drank the kool-aid and are eager to reduce headcount.
This attitude of it making everything more productive and anyone who doesn't follow will be left behind is not just false, it's cruel and myopic. You're talking about people's livelihood being taken away because a handful of executives decided this is how things should work despite the MASSIVE number of shortcomings and poor product market fit.
Edit: I also almost missed where you're seemingly celebrating the devaluation of human labor as a result of this. Please stop and reflect on how your position may read to someone who is just trying to put food on the table.
That aside, this piece is interesting and ties together some useful numbers and studies.
I hadn't seen the recent Microsoft paper showing:
> 30 percent of the US working-age population is using AI [...] with at least 90 minutes of usage time in a given month.
I'm honestly impressed at how high that number is! That's a lot of adoption for a technology (LLM chatbots) that didn't exist four years ago.
"Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad?" - subheading: "Either way, let’s not be in denial about it."
It's clearly intended as rhetorical hyperbole - like "everyone's on their phone at the movie theater" or "everyone's fed up with AI hype".
If you read the actual transcript it makes it very clear that it's not claiming "Everyone is using AI" almost immediately:
> ChatGPT is the sixth-biggest website on Earth. Something like 43 percent of Americans in the work force use generative A.I.