alt Hacker News> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.
Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. The most obvious example in my lifetime was during peak blockchain hype, when people who had never worked in finance convinced themselves that blockchain was going to act as the backbone for how money gets moved around. As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database.
The nice thing about AI, at least, is I can always push back and tell people, "Sure, we can do this with AI. I just need you to use Claude or ChatGPT manually to prototype how it would work." This normally results in the requestor realizing that there's human judgment calls involved in the inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence.
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>>fully replaceable by AI
I am trying to fathom a more catastrophic failure in communications than the lab CEO's using this narrative. The reality ends up being closer to Radiology jobs [1], but we're never able to fully realize this because the press is running around like headless chickens and unloading the fear on a public that then reaches for any leverage they can get (see: Datacenter NIMBY-ism).
Any short term FOMO valuation bumps they got from this narrative has to now be liquidated into paying premium for server racks in a warehouse.
Reminder folks: There is no evidence that AI is not normal technology [2]
[1]: https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s...
[2]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
>> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.
> Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either.
That's so true there's a term for it: engineer's disease/engineer's syndrome.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease
https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...
Yeah, ive seen the same thing in construction and agriculture. People take the most strikingly visible part of the job, try to automate it, then wonder why nobody wants to spend $1,000K buying the automation for the easiest and simplest and solved parts of the job.
"You don't got to frame walls anymore!", something that is the most enjoyable part of residential construction, takes like a day of work at most, and can be done while on autopilot. "We can instantly generate wall plans for stud location from top-down blueprints!", oh that thing people do in their head because they just space it all on 16 or 24 inch centers and it doesn't actually matter which side you start on? "We can wirelessly drive your tractors!", the easiest task on the farm which all the weeks of maintenance and planning and setup led up to?
Now don't get me wrong, there are many things that can be improved in those industries certainly, but you aren't going to know what those things are until you actually go on the job site and learn how they currently do it daily. Most all of the low hanging fruits have already been picked one way or another and a fancy step stool is not going to be industry changing.
The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs.
Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?
This ship has sailed, they'll happily "prototype" the entire thing one-shot in 2-3 messages.
The thing they didn’t want to say is that the problem is that Bank of America has legal reporting and compliance obligations.
On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related.
Every time I've done that, the people were so ignorant that they still didn't recognize that expert judgment was required... they just had the LLM make some slop.
> inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence
Yeah but only because a meatbag is going to use the product :)
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Some of my coworkers will complain that management is short-sighted for trying to automate programming work they don't understand then immediately suggest we automate management because nobody knows what they do all day.
Maybe they're right, maybe not, but it is ironic.