With the lastest news of AI layoffs, I’m struggling to understand how the idea of a career still holds. If careers themselves effectively become gambles like lottery tickets, how do we maintain drive and hopes in the longterm endgame of our struggles?
I know AI as an honest utility is itself a lie to some extent, but this only aids my argument further. People’s career struggles are panning out to be valueless because of a nothing-fad that no one could have predicted.
Saying AI is a nothing fad makes you sound like a boomer in the late 90’s and early 00’s talking about the internet. It is definitely not a fad. It will affect 80% of all jobs on the planet over the next 10 years.
“AI”
Is it possible that I miss out on valuable insights by immediately dismissing the opinions of anyone who refers to machine learning as AI?
Sure.
Will I stop doing it?
Sure as hell not.
Indeed. Though that’s only my surface level complaint.
On a deeper level; LLMs just fuckin’ suck ass. They aren’t people, stop assuming they can do things that people can do.
I don’t think they suck ass as long as you understand their limitations, but everyone seems to expect them to be able to fully replace human thought and uh, yeah they’re pretty bad if that’s your goal.
You’ll be dismissing the vast majority of experts in the fields. The only people who refuse to call it AI are those who think AI refers to the stuff you see in sci-fi movies. The ones doing the work and who actually know what they’re talking about use AI to mean even the simplest thing like a bunch of if statements that make up a hard-coded decisions tree.
Artificial intelligence. There’s nothing intelligent going on in an LLM model. There’s learning, but not intelligence.
The people objecting to the use of the term AI to describe computerized parrots are the people who think intelligence still matters as a concept.
Right, so if that’s the discussion you care about, that’s totally fair. Most researchers I know couldn’t give a rat’s ass what you call it as long as there’s something to call it. I think we’ve all long accepted that no two person will have the same idea of what intelligence means.
Many of those boomers retired comfortably without ever learning the slightest bit of computer literacy. Even now, plenty of jobs require little-to-none.
Furthermore, we are in the “dotcom bubble” stage of “AI”. The people least knowledgeable about it are the ones throwing billions of dollars at whoever claims to “use AI” for literally anything. We are on, (or maybe for those of us who are paying attention, right after), the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
Remember when 5-ish years ago all anyone would talk about in the tech space is how being a truck driver would be an obsolete job in the near future? I remember.
I do hope we hit the trough of disillusionment and stay there for a good long while, because we don’t have any safety nets in place for the billions of people who will be impacted, but who knows. Business owners certainly don’t give a fuck.