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Culture War appropriate? Okay, I'm hearing everything about how AI is coming for our jerbs/gonna make us so productive, eventually only six humans will be working in the entire economy and the rest of us will be livin' large on that sweet, sweet UBI from all the yuuuuge economic gains.
But what does that mean in actuality if I'm not a software engineer type?
For example, a Substack comedian (literally, that was his day job) has a post up about AI and how this is all hysteria, nobody is going to lose their jobs, it's merely the usual sort of dip in the economy and the sectors most affected are:
Okay. I fall into the "secretaries and administrative assistants" bucket and I know Sweet Fanny Adams about AI. My exposure to it in the workplace is with the free Copilot Microsoft has bundled in with Microsoft 365 and, apart from annoying me with "Do you want me to write that email?" (no thanks, I think I can figure how to say "I got that invoice, thanks" all by my little ownsome), I see no use for it.
But! AI is going to be the wave of the workplace future! So, for all you who know and use the thing and are up on the different models, here's an example of a task I routinely need to do in my job. Can AI (Copilot or whatever) do this, or most of it, for me?
A request from our auditors:
Where this information is located:
How do I use AI to take all this drudgery off my hands? Can I ask/tell it "here's the details of how to log in, now go ahead lil' Copilot and pull out all that info and make a nice, tidy spreadsheet out of it all"? Or do I have to hand-hold it every step of the way, in which case I am just as well off to do it all myself?
The true robot apocalypse where we all lose our jobs will only come when Clippy returns at the head of his AI army. It's a millenarian cult now and I'm going to treat it like one.
I'm sorry but the constant 'but AI is gaining in capabilities' ignores one thing- yes, yes it is, but those capabilities don't actually correspond to anything. Yes, it can reduce secretarial workload, and that will over time drastically reduce the number of secretaries, but mostly through not replacing retirees. Good thing the population's shrinking! In the meantime, I get a raise because AI hardware raises the wages for people that work on cooling systems(and electricians, too). The lower working class, that could theoretically be replaced by trained monkeys(but training the monkeys is not cost-competitive with $15/hr), yeah, a computer that knows how to flip burgers was possible in, like, 1982- still hasn't happened, because hands, you know, Claude doesn't have them. McDonald's uses lots of robots in their kitchen. None of them have hands, they're not a replacement for local teenagers.
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