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?
Well, some jobs are probably being replaced. Like, I can imagine someone being paid to describe in detail what’s in a picture and writing it down would be replaced pretty quickly.
But if the article means programmers, devops, sysadmins etc., then hell no, there’s no way the current iteration of AI can replace them and instead of spreading misinformation, the article authors should focus on real reasons the layoffs happen.
But that doesn’t bring as many interactions as doom news of companies replacing us with a smart text predict software, does it?
Is the job you describe in your first paragraph really a job, though?
Performing mathematical calculations used to be a dedicated job. They called those people computers.
Yes. That’s exactly how we got the first image generating AIs - people took a huge amount of pictures and described in detail what’s in there. That’s how AI knows how to generate “a cat in a space suit standing on a moon” - there were a lot of pictures described “cat”, “space suit”, “standing”, “moon” etc. and the AI distilled the common part of each image matching the description.
And there are plenty use-cases to have a description of what’s on an image. For example for searching through images based on what’s in there.