Honestly I’ve been using AI for coding like copilot and I’ll ask ChatGPT for things etc… I always felt like I was having a major productivity boost - and sometimes I do! But I swear lately models have just been getting worse and producing incorrect results and just being slow. Either I’m expecting more of them or the are really getting worse
Yeah that’s the problem, because apparently it definitely feels like a productivity boost, but it turns into a 10% productivity decrease in the long term from debugging and fixing. I’m not going to look up the article which was maybe about a year old? so you can take that with as much salt as you like.
Shit straight up lies and is wrong every time I’ve used it.
Solow Paradox
The main difference is that PCs actually worked as advertised, back in the day and the reason for this productivity dent wasn’t a false promise from the start. Before AI the main use of computers was of a deterministic nature, meaning you get a directly reproducible outcome depending on the input. AIs (especially: LLMs) are probabilistic in nature, the output cannot be guaranteed to be correct, and it turns out just bolting on guardrails on top of the system is a band-aid. In practice, instead of getting a general-purpose intelligent machine which is capable of making autonomous decisions, you get a word predictor with an unlimited amount of possible failure modes.
My boss recently specifically requested I create a chart using AI, it took me approximately 10 times as long as it would have in excel, in no small part because I couldn’t convince it it hadn’t added the range values to the y-axis.
I feel your pain. I tried using for work to make a dummy banner image for placeholder. It would never give me the size I requested, ever. Tried different ways of saying the same thing but the image size was always the same.
I love that studies have shown that a 4 day work week boosts productivity AND salvages some of the living in the work life balance, but rich people went with AI because it doesn’t boost productivity AND it consumes exorbitant amounts of water.
You forgot about electricity.
You forgot about PC Hardware
AI is intended to let the wealthy access the benefits of talent, without letting the talented access the benefits of wealth.
Cruelty is the point
This seems more and more true.
There may come a point where employers realize that AI isn’t working out, Gownder said. Some bosses who fired workers in favor of AI agents have already eaten crow and rehired their human grunts. But “AI” may simply be a way of papering over other forms of cost-cutting.
“Outsourcing is a very popular one,” he told The Register. “They’re firing people because of AI, and then three weeks later they hire a team in India because the labor is so much cheaper.”
I’m willing to bet those outsourced teams in India are just vibe coding too.
I’ve seen this so many times, long before AI was even a thing. It always goes like this:
- Let’s outsource department x to India because they are much cheaper
- Oh no, the results are terrible and we are actually paying more money to fix the damage done.
- Outsourcing was a mistake, let’s hire locally instead
What amazes me is that this is still happening to this day. I’ve seen a real world example of this just last week.
On top of that, AI has arrived and it gives the CEOs of the world an opportunity to make the same mistakes again. It’s mindblowingly stupid.
Note: I don’t blame Indian companies for offering their services. The blame entirely goes to greedy companies from the west who try squeeze out profit from income disparity and lower standards.
Also, you get what you pay for. Lots of companies have good quality in India. Same as how lots of factories produce good quality stuff in China.
But it shouldn’t be a surprise to get garbage bin quality if you’re shopping for bottom shelf prices. Going for higher quality wouldn’t be a bad deal but there’s still money to be squeezed by going lower… and lower… and lower
Very good summary of the Corporate shitshow
Idk, impoverished with access to education is quite a mix for hardworking individuals.
No doubt, but the tech firms in India that are bidding on outsourced software projects all have a toxic incentive to produce code very quickly and very cheaply. In an environment like that, I’m sure the pressure to use AI is extremely high.
That assumes the AI can produce acceptable code quickly, which I think is not likely.
I agree, but In my experience tech companies are willing to stretch the definition of “acceptable” far beyond what’s responsible if it gives them a temporary boost on this quarter’s earnings report. Is it sustainable? No. But corp-think has never held sustainability as a virtue.
A cubicle farm in India has no such incentive as a large tech company, they have to push out code quickly as you said.
TBH boosting productivity was always a BS excuse. AI is meant to eventually replace human workers, but it’s also failing to do that.
That said, Forrester’s research does predict that AI and other automation tech, like physical robots, will see a hefty six percent of jobs replaced by 2030, amounting to some 10.4 million roles.
It’s unclear from context who Forrester is or what they studied. But I’d be interested to learn if this supports that AI output replaces the 6 %, or if the economy will contract 6 %.
My cynical guess would be that the study is more based on current employment trends, rather than actual economic viability. Meaning the 6% will be the 2030 size of the bubble of tech bros still trying to find a product-market fit at the expense of VC money.
If anyone manages to figure out what that study is, I’d welcome a link or doi.
Thank you!
Having read it, there is no study. It’s a prediction of undisclosed methodology, and it’s unknown and obfuscated where their number of 6,1 % comes from.
I’d assume the whole report is an educated (futurism) guess, and I don’t have the track record of how good Forrester is at those.
The full report is a $1500 product, so I’m afraid I won’t be reading it.
