Most jobs are a complicated bundle of tasks. The complex part is that humans are needed / used to suffer through the complication that often borders on chaos and orgs don't want to have to work on that part.
Really enjoyed this and found your willingness to engage with the political economy of the world in which AI is actually being developed (rather than assuming technology will make it irrelevant) refreshing!
#25 – I've worked with folks/orgs to help them navigate complex systems since 2009, and this is the first time I've heard "unruly" used. May have to start using that. 😉 Thank you!
With GPS, or alfalfa, or a Photoshop spot brush, the benefit is clear and the drawbacks less obvious. With what's currently being presented as AI, many of the advertised use cases seem actively bad to me (I don't want a film or a picture generated from datasets; I don't want a computer to write my emails for me; I don't think responsibility should be obfuscated behind a machine). Nor does it seem like it will replace the existing environmental impacts of tools we already use - it will add to them, despite the urgent need to reduce our emissions.
Yet as you say, the economic incentives mean many of us have little or no say in how, where, and how fast this tech is rolled out. That's our reality, but it isn't a law of the universe; it's the result of political choices to disempower organised labour and insulate many corporate actors from democratic control. It's notable that two major challenges have come from industries where labour power still exists. I don't think, personally, that generative AI is important enough to be either our saviour or our doom. But it's one more technology that seems to be rolled out without thought for the consequences by a small number of people whose priorities, to put it mildly, are not necessarily aligned with the rest of the world. When it comes to getting humans out of machine-shaped jobs - a sentiment I agree with - Silicon Valley's track record is not good.
Maybe GPS isn't the best example, and Spotify/Youtube would've been more effective, but I just disagree that LLMs aren't useful to people. A lot of people benefit from AI helping write emails (I've spoken to several ESL speakers / immigrants who use it to navigate legal, corporate, small business marketing, etc); I use it as an accompaniment to dense books on topics I don't fully understand; etc.
I'm not saying there aren't negative aspects too, and I agree we need to empower labor more (e.g. I am much more interested in how AI can improve work vs. surveil/substitute) + that the corporate labs are not to be fully entrusted with determining our destiny. But I don't think critics will succeed by denying the utility of AI.
I appreciate the reply! I didn't mean to say LLMs have no uses whatsoever; I take your point that there are situations where they might be genuinely useful. I'd be interested to know how much (and if) it improves learning for e.g. ESL speakers navigating bureaucracy, or guiding readers through dense books. I'd worry about it missing something, but then humans miss things all the time. Whatever my personal feelings, it strikes me as a fairly benign use of the tech.
But Spotify is an interesting example. It's helped me discover many artists, and I've bought albums I wouldn't otherwise know about as a result. At the same time, one of its biggest successes is figuring out how to not pay musicians. I see the same thing happening with LLMs: the use cases that I've seen promoted (and presumably get investment) are things like making movies or being your friend/partner, rather than less sexy ones like digitising old documents. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I'm less concerned about LLMs in themselves, and far more concerned about tech companies once again being allowed to use "miracle tech" as a smokescreen to devalue labour. The ability to pay one's bills *is* a social justice issue.
My gut is that 94% of the problems with LLMs are problems with American-style capitalism and our massively frustrating fixation on "protect jobs!" vs. "how might we structure a society so people don't *have* to work 40+ hours a week AND folks aren't wrapping up most of their identity in their job?"!
Great article. I do not like jagged upheaval which is happening with AI adoption in tech. The C Suite has an oversimplified view of how change should be implemented. They envision earthquakes and the Jetsons, without realizing Bladerunner is a more likely outcome. The way they seem to indiscriminately lay off workers, I think it’s mostly budget implementation with a dash of greed thrown in, severely slow down new hires and heap more tasks into existing employees, could be done so much better. Alas this cycle is not new. As a Gen Xer the same thing happened to new grads in the late 1980’s, the Millenials in the early 2000’s and now to Gen Z. All these economic upheavals happened with revolutionary tech. It was a huge leap from typewriters to PCs at every desk. It takes the government investing in new types of infrastructure, from the Cotton Gin, to huge factories, to PCs, to AI. Perhaps along with adding civics, logic, critical thinking and problem solving and resilience to the K-12 curriculum, we could get some innovation. My hope is to get through this new tech innovation and end up better. Maybe start with creating computers and server farms that use less energy and water.
> I roll my eyes when people demand we build AI to “augment and not replace” us. This is a platitude, wishful thinking; it is not a reality most workers can choose. If the tech is good and cheap enough to replace us, it will. Economic incentives are a [heck] of a drug.
I see this one so much. Example of reality: coders were hoping for an AI coding assistant to help them auto-complete, they got that and more. Vibe coders trying to replace them (it is not that easy, AI can create a mess), companies are trying to only retain senior developers and ignoring how junior developers need to be trained to become senior developers. It is like what Ikea did to the carpentry industry.
I'm normally not a fan of lists like this, in part because too often the observations are just annoyingly banal. But I gotta hand it to you, Jasmine; this list was insightful, sometimes funny, and genuinely thoughtful!
I really enjoyed this. Numbers 16 and 29 and 30 harmonized for me, probably because I'd just read the Daoist tale of the wheelmaker (gratitude to Ken Liu for the adaptation below).
'One day, as Duke Huan read in the great hall of his palace, he nodded and exclaimed by turns.
An old wheelwright named Bian was carving wheels in the yard outside the hall. His curiosity piqued by the duke’s excited cries, the old man put down his mallet and chisel and climbed the steps into the hall.
“Sire, what are you reading?” he asked.
“The words of sages,” replied the duke.
“Are these sages still alive?”
“No. They died a long time ago.”
The wheelwright was disappointed. “Then what you’re reading is nothing more than ancient dregs.”
“How dare you!” the duke roared. “I’m conversing with the greatest minds in history, but you, a mere maker of wheels, think that you can judge the worth of far nobler minds. Explain!”
The wheelwright bowed to the angry duke but answered without fear. “I speak only from my low station and ordinary experience. Sire, do you know how to carve a wheel?”
The duke gazed through the portico into the yard, where the wheelwright had left his tools and half-finished wheels. The idea of fashioning a wheel out of wood seemed clear enough.
The wheelwright went on, “If you hew slowly and broadly, the cuts will be smooth but the wheel won’t be sturdy. But if you carve quickly in small steps, then the chisel won’t bite true and the wheel will be too rough. To make a proper wheel, you have to study the tendency of the lumber and feel the flow in the grain, know the purposes of different vehicles and the variations in their construction, understand how a wheel rim wears down differently in summer versus winter, against mud versus sand.
“Above all, you have to learn to wield the tools as though they were extensions of your mind and to chip at a steady pace, neither too fast nor too slow, neither too heavy nor too light.”
The duke considered the wheelwright’s words, nodding slowly.
The wheelwright continued, “But all this I learned through my hands. My knowledge cannot be captured in words, even though there is a lifetime of art in each swing of the mallet, a career of practice in each placement of the chisel. I cannot teach my son what I know no matter how long I talk, and he cannot learn the soul of my craft no matter how hard he listens. That is why, even though I’m already seventy, I’m still here making wheels myself.”
The duke looked from the wheelwright to the book in his hand, then from the book in his hand back to the wheelwright.
The wheelwright nodded. “The ancients died along with their wisdom, wisdom that also cannot be caught by mere words. The shadows on that page are just that, shadows.'
Will LLMs be able to learn beyond the shadows of language? How will they be merged with perceptive bodies? I'm curious (and a bit apprehensive, if I'm being honest) to see.
Thanks for a sweet, dense listicle, dear Jasmine! I enjoy how complicated this all is, while it also seems very simple.
Signed, a former (I guess?) translator who embraced machine translation post-editing (MTPE) years ago (2018 seems loooong ago) and has now sadly been replaced 100% by AI translators – ehhh, ... by entity-free "AI translations", rather.
It seems that the whole process, the activity, the doing of my profession has been erased; there are only source texts and target texts, nothing in between, certainly no juicy delicious in-betweens, and definitely just a precarious kind of certainty, actually. No more versatile verbs, but stiff leftover nouns. As a linguist and writer, that's bad style, imtellingya.
Also, there's so much non-translating involved in translating, I don't even know where to start – but of course, there's a Germanism for it, called "Sprachgefühl verdammt nochmal". Hope that helps.
You can't get it quick, cheap, AND good. You can only pick two. Goes for tattoos, translations, and "tech stuff", I herewith claim.
Please let it be over soon, I really want a new human-shaped job!
Theyre bought in and on AI’s side for at least this administration in the US.
#9
And the populace which voted in our current admin is likely the least affected by AI in the immediate short term. Blue collar is safe until robotics hit.
#12
100% agree
#15
Dont know what you mean. Theyre generally getting better at everything over time. You could pause LLMs today and we’d still see 20% job loss.
#17
This feels like a lowbrow hit that means nothing.
#18
Is this supposed to relate to the IMO? Those are not calculator problems.
#22
Radiology is probably the first fucked in medicine.
#24
But a massive competitive pressure is changing that day by day.
#30
See palantir technology’s current valuation
#31
More like your company getting forward deployed unto by “AI engineers” who brain drain you and run the evals to do your job for you.
#35
Its more like a shitton of specific knowledge extraction, just in time data into prompt insertion, and a chain of prompts
#39
I think about this daily and I don’t know what remains.
I think what bugs me the most about nearly all of the discourse around AI is that it's talked about in the same terms as the word "life." But there's no such thing as "life" -- there are only living things, you know?
I am starting to see some really interesting uses of AI in my own work; I saw one this week, in fact, that blew me away. But the examples I'm seeing that strike me as actually useful applications are all pretty narrow; they're for clear -- but limited -- uses, with pretty strict guardrails.
Publicly, though, I see the opposite. AI gets talked about as an everything machine -- how do you even get your arms around that, mentally?
And, conversational interfaces aren't necessarily the best interaction layer for all tasks at all times, you know? You'd never guess that, though, from the way it gets talked about right now. (Mostly, anyway.)
Re: #7, I remain less pessimistic. Covid was a natural experiment in what happens when everyone is sent home, largely stuck inside and therefore online, and given a one time cash infusion that doesn't re-anchor long run expectations.
I believe (1) culture is downstream of material conditions, (2) absolute freedom from severe material deprivation (or the fear thereof) would allow culture to develop in largely positive directions, and (3) the covid checks did no constitute 2. (ofc I could be wrong, but I don't think our experience with covid relief provides signal on that question either way)
That's fair, Covid obv had a ton of other confounding stuff going on! But given the stats about how much Gen Z stays indoors/online, I'm not that optimistic that UBI sans an equally robust effort at social/community infra will do a ton
You mention it--"taste". I'd love to see you share your notes on how "taste" has recently become the au current concept that will save us humans from those damn, tasteless machines!
No gatekeeper saying we don't do plane-ride aphorisms, no SEO expert demanding h2 headlines. Just dense, stimulating text. More of that, please!
:)
Most jobs are a complicated bundle of tasks. The complex part is that humans are needed / used to suffer through the complication that often borders on chaos and orgs don't want to have to work on that part.
Really enjoyed this and found your willingness to engage with the political economy of the world in which AI is actually being developed (rather than assuming technology will make it irrelevant) refreshing!
thanks! I think the political economy matters a lot!
Thanks. Sharing this with my educator circle. Appreciate your look into the markets
#25 – I've worked with folks/orgs to help them navigate complex systems since 2009, and this is the first time I've heard "unruly" used. May have to start using that. 😉 Thank you!
With GPS, or alfalfa, or a Photoshop spot brush, the benefit is clear and the drawbacks less obvious. With what's currently being presented as AI, many of the advertised use cases seem actively bad to me (I don't want a film or a picture generated from datasets; I don't want a computer to write my emails for me; I don't think responsibility should be obfuscated behind a machine). Nor does it seem like it will replace the existing environmental impacts of tools we already use - it will add to them, despite the urgent need to reduce our emissions.
Yet as you say, the economic incentives mean many of us have little or no say in how, where, and how fast this tech is rolled out. That's our reality, but it isn't a law of the universe; it's the result of political choices to disempower organised labour and insulate many corporate actors from democratic control. It's notable that two major challenges have come from industries where labour power still exists. I don't think, personally, that generative AI is important enough to be either our saviour or our doom. But it's one more technology that seems to be rolled out without thought for the consequences by a small number of people whose priorities, to put it mildly, are not necessarily aligned with the rest of the world. When it comes to getting humans out of machine-shaped jobs - a sentiment I agree with - Silicon Valley's track record is not good.
Maybe GPS isn't the best example, and Spotify/Youtube would've been more effective, but I just disagree that LLMs aren't useful to people. A lot of people benefit from AI helping write emails (I've spoken to several ESL speakers / immigrants who use it to navigate legal, corporate, small business marketing, etc); I use it as an accompaniment to dense books on topics I don't fully understand; etc.
I'm not saying there aren't negative aspects too, and I agree we need to empower labor more (e.g. I am much more interested in how AI can improve work vs. surveil/substitute) + that the corporate labs are not to be fully entrusted with determining our destiny. But I don't think critics will succeed by denying the utility of AI.
I appreciate the reply! I didn't mean to say LLMs have no uses whatsoever; I take your point that there are situations where they might be genuinely useful. I'd be interested to know how much (and if) it improves learning for e.g. ESL speakers navigating bureaucracy, or guiding readers through dense books. I'd worry about it missing something, but then humans miss things all the time. Whatever my personal feelings, it strikes me as a fairly benign use of the tech.
But Spotify is an interesting example. It's helped me discover many artists, and I've bought albums I wouldn't otherwise know about as a result. At the same time, one of its biggest successes is figuring out how to not pay musicians. I see the same thing happening with LLMs: the use cases that I've seen promoted (and presumably get investment) are things like making movies or being your friend/partner, rather than less sexy ones like digitising old documents. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I'm less concerned about LLMs in themselves, and far more concerned about tech companies once again being allowed to use "miracle tech" as a smokescreen to devalue labour. The ability to pay one's bills *is* a social justice issue.
My gut is that 94% of the problems with LLMs are problems with American-style capitalism and our massively frustrating fixation on "protect jobs!" vs. "how might we structure a society so people don't *have* to work 40+ hours a week AND folks aren't wrapping up most of their identity in their job?"!
Great article. I do not like jagged upheaval which is happening with AI adoption in tech. The C Suite has an oversimplified view of how change should be implemented. They envision earthquakes and the Jetsons, without realizing Bladerunner is a more likely outcome. The way they seem to indiscriminately lay off workers, I think it’s mostly budget implementation with a dash of greed thrown in, severely slow down new hires and heap more tasks into existing employees, could be done so much better. Alas this cycle is not new. As a Gen Xer the same thing happened to new grads in the late 1980’s, the Millenials in the early 2000’s and now to Gen Z. All these economic upheavals happened with revolutionary tech. It was a huge leap from typewriters to PCs at every desk. It takes the government investing in new types of infrastructure, from the Cotton Gin, to huge factories, to PCs, to AI. Perhaps along with adding civics, logic, critical thinking and problem solving and resilience to the K-12 curriculum, we could get some innovation. My hope is to get through this new tech innovation and end up better. Maybe start with creating computers and server farms that use less energy and water.
> 42. Both human and machine intelligence seem infinite to me.
Also add forgetting on the human side (both for good and not so good) and the need for machine intelligence to incorporate this.
> I roll my eyes when people demand we build AI to “augment and not replace” us. This is a platitude, wishful thinking; it is not a reality most workers can choose. If the tech is good and cheap enough to replace us, it will. Economic incentives are a [heck] of a drug.
I see this one so much. Example of reality: coders were hoping for an AI coding assistant to help them auto-complete, they got that and more. Vibe coders trying to replace them (it is not that easy, AI can create a mess), companies are trying to only retain senior developers and ignoring how junior developers need to be trained to become senior developers. It is like what Ikea did to the carpentry industry.
I'm normally not a fan of lists like this, in part because too often the observations are just annoyingly banal. But I gotta hand it to you, Jasmine; this list was insightful, sometimes funny, and genuinely thoughtful!
I really enjoyed this. Numbers 16 and 29 and 30 harmonized for me, probably because I'd just read the Daoist tale of the wheelmaker (gratitude to Ken Liu for the adaptation below).
'One day, as Duke Huan read in the great hall of his palace, he nodded and exclaimed by turns.
An old wheelwright named Bian was carving wheels in the yard outside the hall. His curiosity piqued by the duke’s excited cries, the old man put down his mallet and chisel and climbed the steps into the hall.
“Sire, what are you reading?” he asked.
“The words of sages,” replied the duke.
“Are these sages still alive?”
“No. They died a long time ago.”
The wheelwright was disappointed. “Then what you’re reading is nothing more than ancient dregs.”
“How dare you!” the duke roared. “I’m conversing with the greatest minds in history, but you, a mere maker of wheels, think that you can judge the worth of far nobler minds. Explain!”
The wheelwright bowed to the angry duke but answered without fear. “I speak only from my low station and ordinary experience. Sire, do you know how to carve a wheel?”
The duke gazed through the portico into the yard, where the wheelwright had left his tools and half-finished wheels. The idea of fashioning a wheel out of wood seemed clear enough.
The wheelwright went on, “If you hew slowly and broadly, the cuts will be smooth but the wheel won’t be sturdy. But if you carve quickly in small steps, then the chisel won’t bite true and the wheel will be too rough. To make a proper wheel, you have to study the tendency of the lumber and feel the flow in the grain, know the purposes of different vehicles and the variations in their construction, understand how a wheel rim wears down differently in summer versus winter, against mud versus sand.
“Above all, you have to learn to wield the tools as though they were extensions of your mind and to chip at a steady pace, neither too fast nor too slow, neither too heavy nor too light.”
The duke considered the wheelwright’s words, nodding slowly.
The wheelwright continued, “But all this I learned through my hands. My knowledge cannot be captured in words, even though there is a lifetime of art in each swing of the mallet, a career of practice in each placement of the chisel. I cannot teach my son what I know no matter how long I talk, and he cannot learn the soul of my craft no matter how hard he listens. That is why, even though I’m already seventy, I’m still here making wheels myself.”
The duke looked from the wheelwright to the book in his hand, then from the book in his hand back to the wheelwright.
The wheelwright nodded. “The ancients died along with their wisdom, wisdom that also cannot be caught by mere words. The shadows on that page are just that, shadows.'
Will LLMs be able to learn beyond the shadows of language? How will they be merged with perceptive bodies? I'm curious (and a bit apprehensive, if I'm being honest) to see.
Thanks for a sweet, dense listicle, dear Jasmine! I enjoy how complicated this all is, while it also seems very simple.
Signed, a former (I guess?) translator who embraced machine translation post-editing (MTPE) years ago (2018 seems loooong ago) and has now sadly been replaced 100% by AI translators – ehhh, ... by entity-free "AI translations", rather.
It seems that the whole process, the activity, the doing of my profession has been erased; there are only source texts and target texts, nothing in between, certainly no juicy delicious in-betweens, and definitely just a precarious kind of certainty, actually. No more versatile verbs, but stiff leftover nouns. As a linguist and writer, that's bad style, imtellingya.
Also, there's so much non-translating involved in translating, I don't even know where to start – but of course, there's a Germanism for it, called "Sprachgefühl verdammt nochmal". Hope that helps.
You can't get it quick, cheap, AND good. You can only pick two. Goes for tattoos, translations, and "tech stuff", I herewith claim.
Please let it be over soon, I really want a new human-shaped job!
#8
Theyre bought in and on AI’s side for at least this administration in the US.
#9
And the populace which voted in our current admin is likely the least affected by AI in the immediate short term. Blue collar is safe until robotics hit.
#12
100% agree
#15
Dont know what you mean. Theyre generally getting better at everything over time. You could pause LLMs today and we’d still see 20% job loss.
#17
This feels like a lowbrow hit that means nothing.
#18
Is this supposed to relate to the IMO? Those are not calculator problems.
#22
Radiology is probably the first fucked in medicine.
#24
But a massive competitive pressure is changing that day by day.
#30
See palantir technology’s current valuation
#31
More like your company getting forward deployed unto by “AI engineers” who brain drain you and run the evals to do your job for you.
#35
Its more like a shitton of specific knowledge extraction, just in time data into prompt insertion, and a chain of prompts
#39
I think about this daily and I don’t know what remains.
I think what bugs me the most about nearly all of the discourse around AI is that it's talked about in the same terms as the word "life." But there's no such thing as "life" -- there are only living things, you know?
I am starting to see some really interesting uses of AI in my own work; I saw one this week, in fact, that blew me away. But the examples I'm seeing that strike me as actually useful applications are all pretty narrow; they're for clear -- but limited -- uses, with pretty strict guardrails.
Publicly, though, I see the opposite. AI gets talked about as an everything machine -- how do you even get your arms around that, mentally?
And, conversational interfaces aren't necessarily the best interaction layer for all tasks at all times, you know? You'd never guess that, though, from the way it gets talked about right now. (Mostly, anyway.)
Re: #7, I remain less pessimistic. Covid was a natural experiment in what happens when everyone is sent home, largely stuck inside and therefore online, and given a one time cash infusion that doesn't re-anchor long run expectations.
I believe (1) culture is downstream of material conditions, (2) absolute freedom from severe material deprivation (or the fear thereof) would allow culture to develop in largely positive directions, and (3) the covid checks did no constitute 2. (ofc I could be wrong, but I don't think our experience with covid relief provides signal on that question either way)
That's fair, Covid obv had a ton of other confounding stuff going on! But given the stats about how much Gen Z stays indoors/online, I'm not that optimistic that UBI sans an equally robust effort at social/community infra will do a ton
You mention it--"taste". I'd love to see you share your notes on how "taste" has recently become the au current concept that will save us humans from those damn, tasteless machines!
Not about AI, and actually kinda contra taste-mania, but I wrote a blog post on taste a bit ago here: https://jasmi.news/p/taste?utm_source=publication-search
Thanks. Will go read that right now! I should have known you would have anticipated me. Enjoy your trip.