Well, employee morale is going to be great at whichever company they hand to an AI to run. But who cares about employees?
Their shared bet is that companies will automate individual jobs piece by piece until humans oversee the work rather than perform it.
For CEOs maybe this sounds great, but for anyone with a skilled job who knows the satisfaction of practising and improving your skills every day, it sounds hellish. All humans will become middle managers for the foreseeable future, possibly the least rewarding job there is.
It reminds me of when that CEO of an AI music company claimed musicians don’t enjoy making music. It gives you a little glimpse of how joyless these techbros’ lives really are, and they want to bring that to the rest of us.
When I was a senior software engineer, I was offered a management position… I said no, because I knew I would hate it and do a terrible job. I actually like programming, and I absolutely hate asking an A.I. to do it for me.
Actually funny story. Or maybe unfunny. I was doing a web project a while ago, and the host site I was trying out asked me to describe my project. I naïvely did so, thinking it was like a description or something. When I hit next, the site A.I. automatically did my entire project for me. All the code, folder structures, API calls, everything.
I just sat there feeling bad feelings for a while. I think it actually made me a bit depressed. Took all the joy out of the project and I never touched it again.
I had the same experience. I was doing a little home project to improve my Rust programming skills and my understanding of a couple of algorithms. I asked the AI to wire up the command line arguments so I could move on to the more interesting bits. It got carried away, rewrote my code, fixed the bugs and finished the whole project. I just sat there feeling disappointed. It was like someone telling you how a movie turns out just as you’re settling in with your popcorn.
Well, employee morale is going to be great at whichever company they hand to an AI to run. But who cares about employees?
For CEOs maybe this sounds great, but for anyone with a skilled job who knows the satisfaction of practising and improving your skills every day, it sounds hellish. All humans will become middle managers for the foreseeable future, possibly the least rewarding job there is.
It reminds me of when that CEO of an AI music company claimed musicians don’t enjoy making music. It gives you a little glimpse of how joyless these techbros’ lives really are, and they want to bring that to the rest of us.
When I was a senior software engineer, I was offered a management position… I said no, because I knew I would hate it and do a terrible job. I actually like programming, and I absolutely hate asking an A.I. to do it for me.
Actually funny story. Or maybe unfunny. I was doing a web project a while ago, and the host site I was trying out asked me to describe my project. I naïvely did so, thinking it was like a description or something. When I hit next, the site A.I. automatically did my entire project for me. All the code, folder structures, API calls, everything.
I just sat there feeling bad feelings for a while. I think it actually made me a bit depressed. Took all the joy out of the project and I never touched it again.
I had the same experience. I was doing a little home project to improve my Rust programming skills and my understanding of a couple of algorithms. I asked the AI to wire up the command line arguments so I could move on to the more interesting bits. It got carried away, rewrote my code, fixed the bugs and finished the whole project. I just sat there feeling disappointed. It was like someone telling you how a movie turns out just as you’re settling in with your popcorn.
That sounds awful