I saw another article today saying how companies are laying off tech workers because AI can do the same job. But no concrete examples… again. I figure they are laying people off so they can pay to chase the AI dream. Just mortgaging tomorrow to pay for today’s stock price increase. Am I wrong?
I think we’re still deeply into the “shove it everywhere we can” hype era of AI and it’ll eventually die down a bit, as it with any new major technological leap. The same fears and thoughts were present when computers came along, then affordable home computers, and affordable Internet access.
AI can be useful it used correctly but right now we’re trying to put it everywhere for rather dubious gains. I’ve seen coworkers mess with AI until it generates the right code for much longer than it would take to hand write it.
I’ve seen it being used quite successfully in the tech support field, because an AI is perfectly good at asking the customer if they’ve tried turning it off and then back on again, and make sure it’s plugged in. People would hate it I’m sure on principle, but the amount of repetitive “the user can’t figure out something super basic” is very common in tech support and would let them focus a lot of their time on actual problems. It’s actually smarter than many T1 techs I’ve worked with, because at least the AI won’t sent the Windows instructions to a Mac user and then accuse them of not wanting to try the troubleshooting steps (yes, I’ve actually seen that happen). But you’ll still need humans for anything that’s not a canned answer or known issue.
One big problem is when the AI won’t work can be somewhat unpredictable especially if you’re not yourself fairly knowledgeable of how the AIs actually work. So something you think would normally take you say 4 hours and you expect done in 2 with AI might end up being an 8h task anyway. It’s the eternal layoff/hires cycle in tech: oh we have React Native now, we can just have the web team do the mobile apps and fire the iOS and Android teams. And then they end up hiring another iOS and Android team because it’s a pain in the ass to maintain and make work anyway and you still need the special knowledge.
We’re still quite some ways out from being able to remove the human pilot in front. It’s easy to miss how much an experienced worker implicitly guides the AI the right direction. “Rewrite this with the XYZ algorithm” still needs the human worker to have experience with it and enough knowledge to know it’s the better solution. Putting inexperienced people at the helm with AI works for a while but eventually it’s gonna be a massive clusterfuck only the best will be able to undo. It’s still just going to be a useful tool to have for a while.