The People Do Not Yearn for Automation: “everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why”
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation
The People Do Not Yearn for Automation: “everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why”
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation
28 Comments
Automating everyone out of a job with AI (of anything else) is putting the cart before the horse. If we have no jobs but still live in a capitalist society where you need a full time job (or multiple!) to live, the problem is pretty obvious.
I don’t know what all the C-suite morons think is going to happen when a large percentage of the population is jobless. The only thing keeping the guillotines at bay right now is that people are too busy working to live, so they can’t afford to protest. Remove that barrier and something is going to give.
Then there’s the part where we automate people out of the things they *enjoy* doing, which is also dumb.
With that said, I’m very pro-AI. I think it’s potentially revolutionary in many fields. But you can’t ignore the elephant in the room.
I enjoyed automating routine, repetitive tasks to free up bandwidth, but AI feels like it is being applied for enshittification of quality using automation that doesn’t provide as good of results as previous, manual systems. It’s automating away things better not left up to a busywork script.
Even when you’re using it as a coding helper rather than to replace a system better done without the use of AI, it feels more like delegaton than like automation, and I never really wanted to be a manager.
Can we just let it be the glorified ~~search~~ guess engine that it is and stop the bullshit?
It’s just being used as a front for companies to act on their worst tendencies. Notice you haven’t heard any of these clowns mention “AGI” in a hot minute.
Capital looking to eliminate the last vestiges of labors power.
No thanks. Not all of us were born rich.
At my job, we have to use AI for software development. I’m a dev lead and my experience is that code written by AI is a constant coaching of an intern that simply won’t learn from its mistakes.
An intern or a junior always requires a lot of coaching and guidance to develop them into competent developers. You need to explain their mistakes and explain best practices and best ways to work. There is satisfaction with helping them get better and a sense of fulfilment.
With AI, you don’t have that. It’s a constant stream of (bad) code reviews and retelling AI what I want. No matter the agent, skills I set. It really gives that uncanny valley feeling. This is not fun and syphon all the joy I have doing my work.
People want automation. Who doesn’t want to have to do less? But people also want to keep their jobs so they don’t become homeless and starve to death. Those are not mutually exclusive things.
“What I think they’re missing is why”
JFC, you have to a total shit-for-brains to not understand why people don’t like AI.
It doesn’t seem to answer the central question posed in the headline. I read at least half of this until some damn ad popped up and there was no way to close or skip it. At least that far in there was no explicit statement of the form “regular people don’t like AI because ____”.
The why is the very obvious shortsighted behavior of firing everyone.
It’d be a great augmentation if we just used it as an enhancement tool instead of putting people out of work.
Tech fired all their AI ethics departments in 2022 and 2023 after they all published the same articles that AI advancements needed to slow to the speed of adoption and affordability. They were calling for AI to work in partnership with people not act as a replacement. They were worried about the civil unrest and a blowback against that would really hamper the long-term development. Tech CEOs chose to just barrel through and silence the dissent.
I get where the author is coming from, but I feel like he could go much deeper.
Why DON’T people want to be turned into just “data” and “automation”? Because how the “big data” and “AI” work are actually really lame. The way it works is that it simply analyzes trends from your past data, and assume that it will be like that forever.
So it thinks, “Well, you’ve eaten vanilla ice cream for the past 5 days. Which must mean that you prefer to eat vanilla ice cream next”. Well, no, I could want chocolate ice cream, but there’s no “data” for that. The “AI” literally can’t suggest me a chocolate ice cream, because well, there’s no data.
This whole thing reminds me of MBTI and other “personality theories” that were hit a decade or so ago. And people eventually got sick of that, because people realized that people aren’t just a pattern based on past data and trends.
All they are missing is the why
Wow such journalism.
I can tell you exactly why. We see thousands of jobs lost every week because of ai automation and then they want to install data centers everywhere that will poison everything around them and all of that for a product that when anybody uses it, its subpar at best.
Thats why ai has a bad rep
I don’t think AI has all the world solving potential it’s been sold as. I use AI for image generation for my job as an art director. It’s an infuriating thing to use as the amount of iterations it requires for a usable image. It’s more of an extension for Photoshop as I still need to composite and edit what I’m trying to create, which is mostly mockup type art to sell an idea or design. As image generation it seems if you’re trying to just create an interesting image, if works but it’s rough as a tool.
Turns out clients don’t want a wrapper app that hallucinates 20% of the time. They just wanted a reliable database with a decent UI all along.
It’s not automation that’s the issue. AI isn’t taking over the jobs people don’t want to do, it’s taking the jobs wealthy CEOs don’t want people to have.
Right like I have never once wanted to do anything faster at work. For what purpose? To make the same amount of money?
What the article is sort of getting at, if you zoom out further, is that Silicon Valley epitomizes unexamined progress. You can’t just assume that if is something is done faster or more efficiently by certain metrics that it makes people happier. And it people aren’t happier, why are we doing it?
This is coupled with a lot of myths about scarcity, implying that people will starve or die of illness if we don’t constantly race toward technical advancement. In fact food scarcity, for example, is almost entirely a distribution problem, which is to say one mostly solvable by ending human made problems like embargoes and wealth redistribution (vs inventing new GMOs).
Even if AI could improve quality of life, it’s obvious that rushing it without a plan for social welfare (or just better studying its efficacy) is madness. Sure, let’s gamble everything on the unlikely chance next year we have a utopia where nobody works because Elon Musk decided to rain coins down on us from his derigible. The fuck are we doing?
Stop telling me what I want.
drives me absolutely bonkers
The same people pushing AI, are also putting into power a govt hostile to the working class stripping the country of all it’s social safety nets.
I hate that AI is advertised as the tool for everything. Is shit and it’s stupid.
I also work in tech, on backend stuff. I love having the AI as an assistant to get faster documentation, or help me with the logs, or even fixing stuff or yaml generation. Personally I could never get back working before this AI era.
Just thinking how much time I save now, and how faster I do the things instead of waiting days for a response on stack overflow or searching through 20 posts and doing trial and error…
Like whoever doesn’t see that AI has some advantages is blind.
The problem is idiot managers who fire people thinking it can do solo work or replace people. It cannot, even as a chat customer support is really bad and personally I would stop buying from a store/company if there’s not a real person for support.
The AI slop of image generation, shitty videos and so on…is so bad and using resources for nothing.
But then you have medical use for it, sciene use and so many things where it can help… if you can’t see that it has some good uses, maybe you’re just ignorant.
we’ve lost the plot when you automate away work but people are poor and hungry.
In my line of work, they are shoving AI down our throats to try and automate various parts of different roles. In many cases it is helpful. However, in some cases leaders simply don’t like how long certain processes take or the reality of the roles (such as data modelling), they’re just throwing shit like AI out there pushing for things to get done faster and it’s simply not working.
I genuinely think this technology would be much more accepted had all the CEOs just kept their mouths shut. They are insufferable.
AI is taking jobs, destroying communities and resources, all for big companies to make more money quicker. We really the real life Wall-E
Even if AI worked as well as advertised, there’s this little annoying fact that we’ve made it necessary for not-rich people to work in order to not die.
The majority of rich people will never understand this until they are forced to.
I can not speak to a human at my pharmacy no matter what I say or press. Sometimes my question/ problem does not fit whatever canned answers they choose so now I have to drive to the pharmacy just to ask a question
Weirdly, people actually do enjoy applying their skills and expertise to things. AI is a bunch of snake oil sold under the promise of “efficiency.” We do not need peak efficiency in all things.
We want to automate the shitty things so we can enjoy our lives, not automate our enjoyment so that we can be shittier longer.