We can’t really say what this means. Maybe heavy AI use caused companies to perform better and grow. Or maybe the type of company that went big into AI was the type of company that was getting investments and growing because of it?
No doubt, but the issue I think they keep running into is they don't understand how useful those "human tools" are, so they keep trying to replace the functions humans provide with AI, without realizing all the other functions that the humans also provided.
My partner had booked a table for lunch for us and our friends. Six adults and six children. One of the couples had forgotten a party earlier that morning, so we tried to move the booking a couple of hours later.
Unfortunately the only phone line was answered by an AI bot who stubbornly refused to move the booking, simply telling us there was no availability within an hour of our booking.
Fortunately my partner was passing so was able to go in and speak to someone is person who was happy to move our booking back 2 hours. Lunch and drinks for our party must have come to several hundred pounds.
I'd estimate our party was between a third or maybe half of all the customers there. Had we chosen to book elsewhere I bet someone would still be patting themselves on the back about how clever they were to save a few minutes a day on actually answering the phone to actual customers.
Marx had a way to think about that. He would distinguish between labour as in generalized socially necessafy labour, and specific skilled labour.
Value is measure in generalized labour, since that the universal measure of human effort. The genealized amount of time a human being must spend to produce something from its parts. Generalized labour is also what's bought from labourers. You don't pay them to do something specific, you pay them to labour in general.
This contrasts against specific labour, which is whats actually required in the moment. Generalized labour power must be the right kind of specific labour to actually produce anything of value.
The AI leaders have been told that AI is labour. To the extent that it currently is, which I believe is only the case because the market hasn't adjusted, it's not the right specific labour to male anything valuable.
I find this comment, on it's face, very hard to understand. An apparent abundance of qualifiers without definition. Is this an example of circular reasoning?
It seems to me that the text is saying that generalised labour produces value, but then only specific labour produces actual value. What is the difference between actual value and value in general? Is some value somehow more valuable that other? Are we even speaking the same language? Is this just making shit up as you go along and hope nobody notices because the general idea is appealing?
It's the conceit of capitalism. We've structured our entire society around giving the boardroom class most of the rewards from our societal output, so they've taken that to mean they create most of the value. They are job creators, deliverers of technology, builders of nations, and how it gets done at the low level is an fungible implementation detail. Whether it's slaves or workers or robots down in the fields / mines / factories, the board are the ones driving the ship and therefore doing the real, important work.
And yes, this does mean they view us workers as somewhere between slaves and robots, replicable by a token predictor.
I wish I could work somewhere where I’m _marginally_ less subject to the whims of the Boardroom class.
I’m sure they’re having a great time, and getting filthy rich doing it, but I don’t enjoy having my livelihood attached to the consequences of their repeatedly-stupid-behaviour.
Yep. I don't see 500 million being even close to enough to develop broad-spectrum preventatives that would be easy enough and safe enough to administer, to get over 67% of the population to take them.
I think it’s also just that there’s not that much it makes sense to automate in the home. I run Home Assistant, and I do not have much of the typical home stuff on it. Why would I want to automate lights? My cat feeder has a timer already. I’m not about to get a smart lock and can’t imagine why I would want to automate one.
The useful things I do use it for are:
-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)
-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost
-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer
-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.
That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
There are some really nice things that home automation enables that was previously impossible.
I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.
I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.
I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.
I have all kinds of lights automated. Lights that turn themselves off with a software timer. Lights that turn off when nobody is home. Lights that turn themselves on when I get home. Lights that do things in response to the status of other lights. Lights that fade on slowly every evening beginning at sunset and reaching 100% brightness at civil twilight, and do the opposite every morning.
I suppose that it does make some things less frustrating.
The days when I'd come home from work and see that the porch light got left on all day or find that the pantry light has been left on for hours are all behind me. That's not as important (money-wise) with LEDs as it was with incandescents, but it's good.
It's also fun -- for me, at least -- to think of ways to automate things.
Like: I have a bedroom that tends to get hot on sunny days and overlooks a busy road, and I don't like feeling like I'm on display. So I'd like those blinds closed at night, and open during the day. Sounds simple. I can do that the old fashioned way by opening and closing the blinds with my hands.
Except: If it's hot in there, then maybe they can just stay closed during the day.
Except: Maybe I can let ambient daylight in, and only close the blinds during the day during times when the position of the sun allows for direct sunlight to pour in.
Except: If it's cold in the room and it's during the heating season, then that sunlight is useful energy that saves me money and they should stay open.
Perhaps I could manage all that myself manually every day (and maybe I'll remember to try to get it right, or maybe I won't bother trying at all), or I can code something up one time that does it for me. The latter might not actually be less work, but it's more fun and it's probably going to be more reliable than I am myself.
I automate lights because we have a bunch of then to manipulate: four switches for the living room. Shades are worse, we have 10 windows so automating them so they open and close at once on demand is a win (I told my wife we should always keep them open and she was really against that, so automated was a marriage saver).
I have some security stuff setup to turn on a siren when tweakers poke around my open garage and doorway after 11 PM. It doesn’t do anything else, this is just a way to scare them off a bit and to let me know something is up. H the light will also turn red if detects a person at the door (again to ward tweakers off or make them feel watched at least).
I’ve been recently discovering the joy of robovacs, except we have three floors and so I found we need three of them, ugh.
Wait until you're disabled and there are days you can't get out of bed.
Having your bedroom lights fade in at low brightness a few minutes before your alarm goes off is also really nice.
If you live in an area that's not great time wise there are also a lot of arguments to be made for making it look like your home is occupied when you're away.
I have some lights on mechanical timers so the living room has a minimal amount of light in the evening, and they turn off automatically at midnight. That's useful to me, and it was cheap and simple. Haven't had to touch it in 10 years, except to adjust the timers to the seasons. The mechanical timers (Ikea) predate Alexa, and it's cheaper to just keep using them.
I also have a porch light that used to have a light sensor, but those sensors keep failing after a few years, and it's a hassle. Instead, Alexa has a schedule for that porch light switch, and you can specify "turn on at sunset" and "turn off at sunrise", and it's perfect.
And I have an Alexa rule for turning off the other lights that it controls (living room, dining room, family room, hallways, but not the porch light) at midnight. Simple and useful in case I forget to turn the lights off.
You can be completely right in a bad way, and it's what I suspect is going to happen.
Three years ago I mentioned to co-workers I was most concerned about juniors not being able to build skills to become mid-level or senior. In the past year others have started talking about the same. But also I had thought people who were already mid-level or senior could resist and control themselves enough to use it well - but in the past six months two different co-workers have independently said they've noticed their own skills atrophying. And with those skills atrophied, they'll have less and less input/direction for the AI tools.
My suspicion is that for everyone who has gone all-in, a few years from now, they will still see a productivity increase from their own baseline - but their baseline will have dropped from where it is now as they "get used to it".
As soon as you quantify something (lines of code, tickets closed, tokens spent, whatever) it starts to be gamed and therefore ceases to be a reasonable measure of work.
Same experience, I thought using chatGPT to find some fairly specific things to buy would be a slam dunk, but it couldn’t provide links half the time and also failed to hold to criteria like shipping region etc. I would tell it to give direct links and it would mostly just say ”go on Amazon and search for X”.
There’s a special type of frustration when an LLM is close to being useful but just… isn’t.
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