"We're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job." (Pl

mozz@mbin.grits.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 1007 points –
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I just hired an employee who managed things as I was on a leave of absence and things went fine without me. Getting a little pushback from MY boss now because you know, this cheaper employee just did my job.

Of course, he did it for a portion of the year after I managed to complete 3 major projects early so he didn't have to deal with them and I left a month-by-month explanation of how to do everything he had to do. And the one problem that popped up went unresolved until I returned.

That is basically the situation with AI too. You still need someone knowledgeable in the loop to describe the things it needs to do, and handle exceptions.

still need someone knowledgeable in the loop to describe the things it needs to do, and handle exceptions

And any engineer or technician will tell you, exceptions are 80% of their job.

I had to rewrite our entire scheduling system at work to use Outlook instead of Google Calendar. The guy who wrote the Google Calendar scheduling system made it so unmaintainable that it was faster to just rewrite the entire thing from scratch (1000+ line lambda function with almost 0 abstraction).

At least 90% of what I wrote is just exception handling. There's ~15 different 4xx/5xx errors that can be returned for each endpoint, but only 1 or 2 200 responses.

I bet in the future someone who will see your code will also think of the same. Just the nature of things.

This is fair, but it's at least broken up so they can selectively gut the parts of it they don't like instead of having to figure out what a 300 line method named "process" does.

"You're 100% right, you should promote me so I can train more people to be able to run things. Things falling apart whenever someone goes away is a key sign of a bad leader, not a good one. I think I've demonstrated that I've managed this department into where it can function smoothly without me needing to put full time into it and I'd do well with an opportunity to move some other things in the company forward."

"Hey, unrelated question, what's your boss's contact info?"

The issue is that one specialist can oversee how many AI job holders? How many jobs are we getting rid of that will supposedly be bolstered by the new jobs created in the fields of manufacturing and AI hosting/training?

Now how many of those jobs have or will actually materialize?

That's my issue, it'll just get placed on IT's shoulders without any additional support.

Sounds like the issue is you did their job for them.