[lambdasquirrel]

Yup, if you haven’t heard first-hand (i.e. from the source) at least one story where some exec was at least using AI to intimidate his employees, or outright terminating them in some triumphant way (whether or not this was a sound business decision), then you’ve gotta be living in a bubble. AI might not be the problem but the way it’s being used is.

[SL61]

This has been the message at the F100 that one of my relatives works at. The CEO's increasingly aggressive message to their hundreds of thousands of employees is that they should figure out how to get 10x faster with AI or their job is on the line. The average non-technical white collar employee doesn't know the details of how LLMs work or any of the day-to-day changes in tooling that we see in the tech industry. All they see is elites pouring all their resources into a machine that will result in Great Depression 2 if it succeeds. Millions of people whose lives depend on their $50k office job in Middle America are hoping and praying that it fails.

I live in an area that's not a tech hub and lots of people get confrontational when they find out I work in tech. First they want to know if I'm working on AI, and once they're satisfied that the answer is no, they start interrogating me about it. Which companies are behind it, who their CEOs are, who's funding them, etc. All easily Googleable, but I'm seen as the AI expert because I work in tech.

[heraldgeezer]

I do love that.

My career is built on people not knowing how to Google lmao (IT)

To most people, AI is chatGTP. Maybe Gemini.

Claude? No idea.

VS Code, Cursor, Antigraivity, Claude Code? Blank stares.

Same as when the computer came, some will fall behind. Excel monkeys copy pasting numbers will go, copywriters, written word jobs = already gone. Art for simple images = AI now all done by one person.

Unless you want a Soviet system where jobs are kept to keep people busy.

[csa]

> Unless you want a Soviet system where jobs are kept to keep people busy.

In $big_corp, everyone seems to have penis envy over “head count”, constantly checking whose is bigger.

If you want to see an executive have an existential crisis, ask them how many of those folks are necessary for the org to run.

[heraldgeezer]

Damn you are right... everything equally bad... Poland and the Baltics actually secretly want soviet back...

[notpachet]

> Unless you want a Soviet system where jobs are kept to keep people busy.

There's an argument that even under capitalism, a lot of jobs still only exist in order to keep people busy.

[heraldgeezer]

Damn you are right... everything equally bad... Poland and the Baltics actually secretly want soviet back...

[NoGravitas]

Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber.