Once again, the point of Ai is to punish labor, not to increase productivity. It’s profitable by decreasing cost of labor through lowered wages, not by decreasing amount of labor. Every article fighting about efficiency to do the work in terms of hours only misses this.
Plus, class consciousness of the bourgeois makes it to where lost profit in exchange for long term containment of labor through this punishment is a positive
This is what I tell people at work. Bosses have been extremely honest about it. In their telling, we are “unlocking value” by being to replace a highly paid data scientist and a senior analyst with a single junior analyst. The whole point is to deskill the roles so they can pay fewer people less money. This is on top of the usual offshoring and outsourcing.
I’m under the impression that the opposite is happening. It’s not the senior positions that are getting eliminated, instead, they’re eliminating the entry-level positions because they can just have AI do it. The senior positions are then forced to troubleshoot the AI on top of all their other responsibilities. The end result means less gets done overall and they deplete their talent pool.
That’s also true.
I was trying to remember how my boss said it in a meeting when he was salivating at the potential savings. It was a 2-for-1 deal where at least one technical expert role got eliminated. So in his mind the remaining employee supervises (or is supervised by) an AI that performs what they call the “non-value add” work like data aggregation, formatting, etc so that the person can focus on “analysis”.
Of course this is just their intention and flies in the face of reality once you begin losing institutional knowledge from layoffs and natural attrition and the technical debt starts accumulating so you need people to clean it up. In my experience they’ve preferred to outsource some of this shit work because it looks good to have lower payroll expense even if your operating expenses increase from paying contractors and consultants.
I still think that ultimately at the aggregate level there is a deskilling because the leftover people are no longer required to be SMEs per their department function and rather become AI supervisors with enough knowledge to troubleshoot problems. Like in finance you wouldn’t need CPAs to do accounting, you just need some staff accountants who themselves are being squeezed.
Of course this is just their intention and flies in the face of reality once you begin losing institutional knowledge from layoffs and natural attrition and the technical debt starts accumulating so you need people to clean it up.
I’m the only developer at my job and we have mountains of technical debt that come just from me. The one time I tried using AI, it just made that debt accumulation exponentially worse and I’ve just finished a 4 month long brain melting re-write of out entire system by hand.
I can’t imagine being somewhere that I had to take on the technical debt of other experienced developers leaving, and my own, and and AIs…
But also, I feel like it’s a false promise! LLMs are wrong in subtle ways, ways that are not obvious on first glance, especially to a less skilled worker. You kind of need an actual expert to double check stuff if you’re trying to leverage LLMs. So like, all this “de-skilling”, which I agree is happening, is going to cause serious issues in the future, when the errors the LLMs cause can no longer be ignored and are obvious to everyone, not just the technically skilled workers who have already been laid off!
I don’t even think you have to go this far, its really just that wages of even specialists cns be lowered because they first use Ai as a stick to fire (some of) them, then rehire labor at lower costs for the same work. They will expect the same skill, just lower wages because of the magic ‘there’s AI’ button they theorize to have
From a leadership perspective they will absolutely see that AIs can somewhat competently write emails and extrapolate that it can do so much more resulting in workers getting shafted with salaries and workloads.
I agree, but I don’t think this is the driving force. It’s just a way that this driving force is visible and concreyely comes into existence. The driving force is the need to punish labor to drive down wages, and Ai is just an excuse (and it has multiple forms).
What you’re stating is 1 concrete way that this systemic force acts
That’s absolutely the macro goal. On the smaller middle management scale it manifests as rapid adoption of crap because that crap is actually really good at doing fake work which is all they know.
These numbnuts have usually drunk the Kool aid and think their job is the most difficult thing in the world, so when a skinner box can make them happy, they’ll gladly say that it’s ready to do the thing they’re literally trained to do, which is punish labor.
Would also encourage you to try to not use ableist language. There was recently a good post on the disabled channel about words that can be harmful and some handy replacements. https://hexbear.net/post/7401697
I like calling them dipshits :)
Fixed
Management is correct if they think ‘it’s ready to do the thing they’re literally trained to do, which is punish labor’.
That’s exactly my point. I don’t think they’re just bumbling and tripping into this. Regardless of the competence of the manager, the result is the same. I know managers who know exactly how shitty the slop toasters do the work of their people, and they also know that the hard work is actually done by those under them. But AI is useful to say ‘but AI means I don’t have to pay you as much, and if you don’t believe me, try the next company.’
It’s bigger than incompetent managers, and it’s led by a competent system that we need to confront. I don’t like acting like our enemies are incompetent when they are either very competent at this or exist in a system that acts as if it is competent.
Acting like managers are just incompetent can make workers angry, and that has its uses. But I think it’s much more valuable to act like they’re very competent but evil.
Some are competent, but generally they’re only competent as a subclass of class traitor. In terms of competence as workers, they’re almost always significantly lacking. Though are meant to pretend to be.
The AI thing it’s, on a whole, a drive to break up labor. But on an individual level, as workers interact with that system, it’s largely managers that are adopting it due to their incompetence and fear of their staff.
I think the current drive is meant to be wholly threat based, if they were acting properly, they wouldn’t do me layoffs. They’d instead slow hiring and put the monster next to everyone. When they play their hand and actually try and replace people with it, it breaks everything and ruins the illusion.
It’s ultimately a Sadist project where MBAs have people dig their own graves by training AI using their labour.
It makes you feel more productive if you’re never doing any actual work
One of my bosses cooked his brain on AI hype and slop. Every time I walked by his office for the last several months if he wasn’t in a meeting he was watching some AI slop training.
He once yelled at all of us for not making an AI video since it was the future.
He got laid off last month.
You spend eight hours digging a ditch or getting a computer to put the button in the right place, then your boss gets an email saying you did that, and judges your usefulness on that email. The boss is not going out to look at the ditch or button, only the email. The AI can write longer, grander, more sycophantic, more frequent emails. It must be better at the job than you are.
It’s so real…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)?wprov=sfla1
Ironically there’s a concept in Marxism with the same name
I wonder about using the mandated “AI” tools to write lots of emails that are just gushing about how productive you are being and if that would be useful.
The truth is the bosses aren’t technologically literate (certainly not to the extent of those in the trenches), it’s all just magic to them. And if the magic comes from a magician or golem created by magicians, it’s all the same to them.
At least until you realize the golem is stupid after it accidentally destroys your village because you instructed it wrong.
Annoyingly, my boss was an engineer until about two or three years ago and he’s somehow got AI brain now.
Many companies, especially those that don’t specialize in tech, don’t realize that tech managers need to be intimately involved in the latest technologies by actually working with them, even if only a little.
You can make up lost ground pretty quick if you started from active development, but so many companies pull tech managers away from technical contact so entirely that they lose touch and can’t relate to workers anymore, falling into upper management groupthink.
Some are true believers but a lot of it is the C-suite culture of adopting the latest and greatest so you can go to the same meetings and be seen as “with it” and be a very acquirable company. These are people who were already throwing piles of cash at contractors and software that didn’t really solve productivity problems but were very hip among others in their class and among the class they hope to be in - higher echelons of bourgeois. “Oh you’re not on Salesforce? You’ve gotta get it! Everyone’s doing so much better using it.” Then moving to Salesforce ends up making nothing particularly better but does eat up literally an entire year’s worth of wages and opportunity cost. The person who made that decision only fails upwards because everyone that will make any decisions about their career believes they made the company more marketable.
AI is just that plus you can treat it like a manager treats a worker: ask for the thing to be done without providing any real guidance or metrics by which it would be considered complete. Then “AI” presents some garbage and lies about how great it is and the manager can’t tell you it’s wrong because (1) they don’t understand it anyways and (2) they see their own career value increase if the bullshitting machine is perceived as working. To management, this is no different from incompetently running a failing department that can’t produce anything worthwhile: spin it as wildly successful because delivering the product barely matters in most situations.
my employer just had a big convention thing where they all get together and jerk off each other about wealth management(yes it’s difficult working there as a commie lol) and they talk about how AI can do all this shit supposedly. Im tooooooooooootally sure it won’t be used as an excuse to hire less or reduce headcount. Hell it’s already happening in my IT department. We have some “digital worker” think that supposedly will automate a bunch of tickets. We’ve need to hire more people for years, and now they dont have to! im sure ill get a huge raise! Trickle your piss all over me.
number go up though! Can you see? The guy whose job is dependent telling us number go up said that the number go up! Is the complete lack of outside influence causing the entire U.S. economy to be supported entirely by a single lie (instead of many lies like usual)? The guy whose job depends on telling me that’s not true literally just told me that’s not true!
![I like to think (and the sooner the better!)of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think(right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think(it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of [struck through] loving grace. [superimposed text] boundless incompetence.](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/372469fd-e05a-4de7-ad4b-662fe00ccdeb.png)
