As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done
we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce
Are we done for?
yes, create a legion of angry, unemployed/unemployable people, that will go well for the capitalist system
Don’t worry, they’ve got the army + police at their feet to keep people in line!
unless the public are well organizedunemployed = more free time to organize!
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It takes a special type of shithead to threaten peoples’ jobs to their face without even knowing what the fuck they are talking about.
This is going to be the threat that EVERY employee will hear over the next several years, whenever they ask for any sort of a raise, promotion, etc. “Just be glad we don’t replace you with AI.”
Quick recap for future historians:
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for a really brief part of its history, humanity tried to give kindness a go. A half-hearted attempt at best, but there were things like DEI programs, for instance, attempting to create a gentler, more accepting world for everyone. At the very least, trying to appear human to the people they managed was seen as a good attribute for Leaders.
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some people felt that their God-given right to be assholes to everyone was being taken away (it’s right there in the Bible: be a jerk to your neighbor, take away his job and f##k his wife)
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Assholes came back in full force, with a vengeance. Not that they had ever disappeared, but now they relished the opportunity to be openly mean for no reason again. Once again, True Leaders were judged by their ability to drain every drop of blood from their employees and take their still-beating hearts as an offering to the Almighty Shareholders.
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I get the feeling that simply working at Amazon means your job is at risk.
That’s pretty much how it goes yeah lol
Amazon is currently hemorrhaging executive level and above engineers. Amazon will have to be replacing these jobs with AI cause every one of value has already left/is leaving and filling those jobs with qualified people at that level is actually a lot more difficult than more junior level positions.
Out of all the jobs, the bosses job is the most replaceable
Yet they will never be replaced, sadly.
They get all of the credit and none of the blame.
if you don’t boycott Amazon by now it’s time to start. Don’t buy from them don’t work for them. Let them rot in the dark.
How kind of him to tell his staff to look elsewhere for jobs so far in advance. Polish that resume team!
Yes, a few times before I have thought, “what possible good can come from this?” In response to utterances by petty, nervous tyrannical managers.
Well we know its got good will.
Probably thinks if he replaces his entire staff all at once he will have to shell of very pricing severance packages and wants to trim fat sooner. Or something else money related like stock holders get boners with potential firings coming up. Maybe something legal.
The people who are predicting that AI will replace X% of jobs are usually not qualified to make that determination. They don’t do those jobs, and they don’t have any idea what is involved in those peoples jobs. They are way too high up the corporate ladder to have actually been doing any real work in the last 10 years. They were sold some AI product which promises to lay off thousands of workers, and they seem to have believed it implicitly.
What’s sickening to me is how enthusiastic they seem to be about ruining their employees lives
Ironically, save for specific positions that require facetime and political shrewdness, it is these same prognosticators whose roles can most readily be fulfilled by Ai
Time for the AI teams to suddenly have tech issues.
“Sorry, the whole codebase is just gone! We have no idea what happened!”
“Must have been the S3 storage”
Stupid question but what is stopping the software engineers to poison the well?
Insert malicious code, self destructing functions, have entire batches of code lost or corrupted, hardware damaged, etc?
A company with fuck off amount of legal power?
Small acts of sabotage are easy to write off to causality, if well planned.
Stupid question but what is stopping the software engineers to poison the well?
Great question. I agree with other responses - it happens, and there’s motive to hush it up, so we tend not to hear about it.
It’s also just really hard to tell the difference after the fact between “Dave sabotaged us” and “no one knows how to do what Dave did”.
But I’ll add - there’s currently little need motive sabotage AI implementations. Current generation AI is largely unable to deliver on what is promised, in a business sense. It does cool but useless things, like quickly generating low maturity code, and writing a summary any seven year old could have wtitten.
Current generation AI adds very little business value, while creating substantial risks. Nevermind that no one knows how Dave worked, now no one knows how our AI works, and it’s so eager to please everyone that it lies at critical moments.
Companies playing around with current generation AI to boost next quarter’s stocks will hit plenty of “find out” soon enough, with nothing beyond the natural consequences of ignoring their own engineers advice.
All that to say - if we see what looks like sabotage, it may well just be the natural consequences of stupidity.
It’s not a stupid question. From what I hear, people try stuff like this all the time, stuff like putting a bit of code on your employer’s system that’ll erase important files if you get shit canned and no longer appear on the payroll. It’s why a lot of companies no longer give notice when ppl are fired, just have security walk them out. And unfortunately this stuff is often traceable, which means they’re risking quite serious prosecution.
I don’t like much of what I see, I think it’s becoming clear that some new tech is going to have wide ranging and harmful effects. I’m not sure that doing luddite stuff will help but I can understand why people would think that way.
We could just regulate tech companies and outright ban some practices but since we apparently don’t have time for rational solutions…
Well thought out sabotage can be written off to causality or involuntary human error.
Not giving notice of lay off is an abusive work practice and only shows how far we’ve allowed work conditions to degrade.
And that practice itself can be highly dangerous, if we consider a person can be midway into a complex task that can turn extremely difficult to follow by another: waste of time, resources, energy and money.
Nah, not stupid. But yeah it’s hard to do without leaving a very clear trail. I assume most engineers want to keep their job and their income.
But programmers tend to use some form of a “versioning” system like git. This will record everyone’s changes to the codebase, when a change was made, what was changed, who changed it. And it allows you to go back and revert changes if something important broke. Very convenient for programmers, less convenient for sabotage.
10 years in jail is what’s stopping them.
It’s REALLY hard to create a dead man’s switch that works, but also leaves no trace. Even if you delete the script after it executes, there’s probably backups or logs that show what happened.
Ah yes those famous “Agents”. They will of course write themselves, adapt themselves to changing environment and run on their own without any supervision.
Yes. Exactly. They’ll also deploy upgrades to themselves painlessly. Thankfully that’s never been a huge ongoing pain felt by everyone paying attention.
(I couldn’t resisit adding a “yes, and” to your point.
Edit: And the AI agents will back themselves up correctly, too! We trained them on the activities of all currently living IT engineers, and the average of our work always results in a successful backup…
If that wasn’t true, we would be having a new ransomware crisis every month…
I’m sure glad we live in one of the good timelines, and have plenty of clean correct code and configuration data to train our AI on!
(This is, of course, sarcasm. Companies that shift to AI IT agents today can expect to very quickly reach today’s median IT outcome. There’s not enough popcorn in the world for what is coming.)
And if all that were to happen. You just caused eventual iron man uprising due to lack of supervision on code updates.
Time to head for greener pastures.
Exactly what a good leader would tell their team to motivate them. /s
Between AI and Robotics, we will likely have a permanently unemployed segment of close to 50%, or even more, within the next decade.
Not everyone will be able to be retrained to be a robotics engineer or AI programmer, and many, many jobs that are considered entry-level will disappear. Imagine a world where most fast food and retail workers are unemployed.
When 40% of America is unemployed, the government will be faced with 2 options - Universal Basic Income, or reducing the population by 40%. Which solution will each party embrace, and how will they accomplish their objectives?
Which solution will each party embrace, and how will they accomplish their objectives?
Both American partiesEach party will solve it the way they have solved climate change.Conclusions from a reductionist point of view. Circumstances, problems and solutions are generally complicated.
Moving on.
How’s the view with your head in the sand?
Did someone tell Amazon that some of the staff they will let go will have access to AI as well and will turn around and start competing with them? Someone should as AI is not just for corporations. In fact it is and may continue to benefit individuals and small teams more.
